Wealth & Money Quote by James Naismith

He’s quietly bragging, but in the most disarming way possible: Naismith frames his greatest “wealth” as a humble sight most people would drive past. The line is built on a swap. Money and power are the standard currencies of satisfaction; he replaces them with infrastructure so minimal it’s almost comic in its austerity: two goals, “out of the way,” far from prestige and spectatorship. That contrast is the engine. It makes the joy feel both principled and slightly provocative, a rebuke to the idea that legacy must look like property or office.

The specific intent is to redefine success in terms of diffusion, not domination. Naismith isn’t celebrating personal glory; he’s celebrating replication. A basketball goal in a remote place is proof that the game has escaped him, traveled without permission, and taken root in ordinary life. That’s the inventor’s dream: the creation no longer needs its creator.

The subtext is also a moral argument about sport as social technology. Basketball was designed in a late-19th-century climate obsessed with “muscular Christianity,” discipline, and constructive recreation. “Out of the way” hints at missions, schools, YMCAs, small towns - places where a simple game could organize bodies, time, and community. He’s not naïve about pleasure; he admits he likes it “more” than money or power. He just locates the thrill in evidence of collective adoption: a modest apparatus signaling a whole culture now in motion.