New York (CNN) -- The first 13 rules of basketball sold Friday for more than $4 million, setting a record for the highest sales price for sports memorabilia, according to Sotheby's, which conducted the auction.
The auction house had estimated that Dr. James Naismith's two-page "Founding Rules of Basketball" would bring less than half the $4,338,500 that David and Suzanne Booth bid for the 119-year-old document.
"This is the birth certificate. It started here," said Selby Kiffer, Sotheby's vice president for manuscripts and books department.
Naismith, a Canadian physical education instructor working at a New England YMCA, created the game of "Basket Ball" so students could play a sport indoors in winter. Naismith had no idea his invention would catch on so rapidly after the YMCA movement introduced it on an international level.
But the game has changed considerably since Naismith's days.
Naismith wanted the game to have no physical contact between players and to encourage sportsmanship. How far it's come: After a recent pickup game, President Barack Obama received 12 stitches on his lip, proving that the contemporary game of basketball is tougher than it was in 1891.
The first game was played with nine players on each team and a soccer ball they lobbed into peach baskets secured about 10 feet off the floor on either end of a gymnasium. Players could only pass the ball, no dribbling. A foul was called for carrying the ball, holding it against the body or hitting it with a fist or for any physical contact with an opposing player. And contact with an opposing player with "evident intent to injure the person" resulted in the offending player being "disqualified" for the rest of the game, with no substitution.
The Booths hope to bring Naismith's rules to the University of Kansas, inspired, they said, by lifelong Jayhawk basketball fan Josh Swade and his campaign to return the rules the university, where Naismith spent the last 41 years of his life and is buried. CNN
