Basketball is Scottish! Someone tell the tea towel people it needs an update

According to the famous tea towel – which, as we all know, is as definitive a repository of totally true information as you could find – people from Scotland pretty much invented everything. Now we can add basketball to the list. Apparently.

No one disagrees that Dr James Naismith created the game in 1891, but some people quite mistakenly claim that he was Canadian, on the clearly spurious grounds that he was born in Canada. However, new research by Stirling University academic Dr Ross Walker has highlighted Naismith’s Scottishness.

He considered himself a Scot, spoke with a Scottish accent and lived in a community of Scottish migrants in Lanark County, Ontario. And, crucially, he based basketball on a game his Scottish father learned in Glasgow called “duck-on-the-rock”.

Nikola Jokic of Serbia and Lebron James of the US jostle for a rebound during an Olympic match at last year's games in France (pool picture) | Getty Images

“Scotland influenced the creation of basketball because Scotland influenced the creator of basketball who instilled elements of Scottishness into the sport,” Dr Walker said.

So next time you happen to see towering basketball stars skilfully bouncing the ball around the court and then slam-dunking it into the net, see how many “elements of Scottishness” you can spot. And let no one doubt their existence.