I Never Said I Invented the Jump Shot

by Kenny Sailors

February 2012

A lot of people have said I invented the jump shot. I don’t know where they got that, but it wasn’t from me.

I doubt if anyone really knows who was the first to jump in the air and shoot a basketball. I’ve always believed that someone probably did it before I did that day on the farm near Hillsdale, Wyoming in 1934 when I jumped so I could shoot over my taller brother.

Once we define a jump shot we can begin to talk. A jump shot could be just leaving the floor to shoot. In that case a layup and a dunk are jump shots. But we know better, don’t we?

The Hall of Fame credits Glenn Roberts with the first jump shot. [See Photo Below] That’s fine with me. Roberts was several years ahead of me. I never saw him play. From what I’m told his shot was different than mine, but I’ll let the experts sort that out.

On my website I describe my jump shot. There are photographs which show it.

The earliest come from February 1943 vs. BYU [as in the photo above, and below].

In 1946 LIFE magazine photographer Eric Schaal took a picture of my jump shot vs. Long Island University in Madison Square Garden. [See Photo Below of Eric Schaal]

By then I had pretty much perfected it. [See LIFE Magazine Photo Below]

I had the good fortune of playing basketball many times in Madison Square Garden [See Image Below of Madison Square Garden in the 1940s] and in other arenas in the Midwest, South and East as a college, AAU and professional player. I was lucky to get a lot of visibility in big media markets and probably a whole lot more than Roberts ever got. That might be why some people say I started the jump shot. They were not aware of anyone else. Nevertheless, many coaches, players, writers and fans saw my shot and talked and wrote about it. So, it’s probably fair to say my shot was unique in the 1940s even if someone else had jumped in the air in some way to shoot before I did.

There were a few others in my era who are sometimes credited with starting the jump shot. I saw some of them play, played with them, or against them. So my observations of their shots are first-hand. Their shots were different than mine. The first player I saw who had a shot like mine was Bud Palmer of the New York Knicks. I asked him where he got that shot. He answered, ‘From watching you.’ [See Image Below of Bud Palmer]

A friend once used the expression – ‘The 3 Ps’ - about my shot. He said I had Pioneered, Perfected and Popularized the modern jump shot.

But I’m sure I wasn’t the first to shoot some kind of jumper. I don’t think anyone can be 100% sure who that was.

As to the origin of the jump shot used today, and my place in basketball history, I’ll rest on quotations from two Hall of Fame coaches who saw me play in the 1940s - Joe Lapchick and Ray Meyer. [See Images Below]

I’ve got a newspaper story about Joe Lapchick when he retired. In it he said, ‘Still, Luisetti and Kenny Sailors of Wyoming have to be the two who most influenced the game in my time . . . . Sailors started the one-hand jumper which is probably the shot of the present and future’ (New York Sunday News, March 14, 1965).

Also, I have a personal letter Ray Meyer wrote to me while I was living in Alaska. He wrote, ‘Kenny, you were the first one I saw who really had a one handed jump shot. There were variations, but I never saw one who actually used the true one handed shot . . . . Kenny, I don’t speak or write as an authority, but you were the first I saw with the true jump shot as we know it today’.”

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Typed by Bill Schrage, an archivist for Kenny Sailors