The unexpected origin of the cradle of Catalan basketball

BadalonaA playground, a bar or an English language school. The Ernest Lluch square in Badalona, ​​where the first basketball match ever documented in the courtyard of the Ateneu Obrer was played a hundred years ago, gives no clue to its origins, but on Saturday a group of people gathered to remember the legacy of the great pioneers of the birthplace of basketball.

That legendary match on 1 March 1925 was promoted by the Ateneu Sports League and the Catalan Basketball Federation. "The match between two teams from Barcelona was supposed to have been played a few days earlier, but it was postponed due to rain. In the end, it was played on 1 March 1925 at 11am," says Pep Solà-Niubó, a researcher in sports history and member of the Centre for Historical Studies in Badalona.

The Centre for Historical Studies in Badalona organised a walk on Saturday to explain the events of that duel. The route passed through some of the first basketball venues in Badalona. "The event took place at the same time as that match. The route passed through different places where there had once been courts, social centres or gyms where basketball had been played. In addition, it included the participation of different descendants of the original players," he explains.

The walk on Saturday will continue. "We are going to organise an information day before the summer and the Badalona Museum is already preparing a photography exhibition, which can be seen between the months of July and September," he says. The exhibition will bring back images that will correspond from its origins to the end of the Civil War.

For many years it was mistakenly thought that the first basketball game had been played in Badalona in 1927. "That information became a kind of mantra, but we asked ourselves the question of when it had actually been played. The research led us to discover a story that we did not know." The first clue was found on page 94 of the book Basketball in Catalonia, a volume written by Lluís Puyalto and published by the Catalan Basketball Foundation (FCB). "We followed the thread and went through many historical newspaper archives. The event had a great echo and appeared in the press of the time," he sums up.

The match was played by two teams of six players on a field of much larger dimensions than today. The pioneers were Camps, Mateu, Pich, Julià, Ribes and De Rique (white team) and Escanet, Adrià, Moles, Llorch, Cusí and Alonso (blue team). The success of that day in 1925 was not immediate, but it marked a starting point that continued in 1928 when the Sociedad Gimnasia (1926-1932) incorporated basketball into its practices. Two years later, already immersed in the Catalan championships organised by the Catalan Federation, gymnastics promoted a basketball tournament for beginners "in order to promote this beautiful sport" in the city.

Thanks to this initiative, a group of friends founded the Peña Spirit of Badalona on March 30, 1930, a project that would end up becoming the current Juventud. The name was a tribute to the airplaneSpirit of Saint LouisThe first non-stop flight between New York and Paris was made by Charles Lindbergh, the aviator who made the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris that same year. The initial excuse was to practice different sports, such as cycling or table tennis, but the club soon opted for basketball. One of the first problems was finding teams to play matches against, because with the war and the distance between the rivals some clubs disappeared.