LEAGUE'S ORIGINS WORTH STUDYING.

Byline: KEVIN MODESTI

One hundred years ago this month, the lords of basketball, in a shocking lapse of foresight, made a big mistake. They started paying the players.

History doesn't tell us how long it was before a player demanded to renegotiate, or how long it was before somebody in the league office complained that high salaries ($100? It's an outrage!) would ruin the sport.

What is known, because I have the box score right here, is that on Dec. 1, 1898, at Textile Hall in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, a team known as the Trenton Nationals used a second-half rally to defeat a team called the Kensington Hancocks 22-18 in front of 950 fans.

It was the debut of the sport's first ``major league,'' the National League of Professional Basketball, a circuit of six Pennsylvania- and New Jersey-based teams that modeled itself on the National League of baseball.

And there's been major-league basketball ever since - or there was until this season.

To be sure, the game then bore little resemblance to the game today, even if you set aside the fact there is no game today.

The promoters were Philadelphia-area sports editors and other businessmen, and the league was formed only to legitimize ``professional'' basketball after barnstorming players were accused of accepting money, angering the gym owners from the YMCA and Amateur Athletic Union.

The players' pay was maybe $15 a game - there were no season-long contracts - and it would be as much as a decade before the Michael Jordans and Shaquille O'Neals of the day broke the $50 barrier.

The players were strictly part-time - moonlighting bank tellers, public-works employees and postal workers (one of whom must have been the original Mailman, no doubt inspiring the first ``Mailman Delivers'' headline).

They were all white, and the star player and coach of the Trenton Nationals, brothers Al and Fred Cooper, were Englishmen who adapted the earliest basketball tactics from soccer.

We wouldn't have recognized it: Forwards, generally 5-foot-7 to 5-foot-11, were the smallest players on the floor, shifty scoring machines all. Guards, who went 5-foot-10 to 6-foot-1, were back-line defensive specialists, which is why the position got that name. Centers, a few of whom were 6-foot-4 giants, were considered Renaissance men if they could do much more than win jump balls, which occurred after every basket.

The constant jump balls were only one difference from the game we know. The court was enclosed in a wire or rope cage in those days, with no out-of-bounds, and the action got roller-derby rough, with hip checks and bloody lips.

When an opponent drove the lane for a layup, a defensive player was obligated to level him, perhaps break his nose, just to teach him a lesson. Violence against referees was not uncommon, usually punishable by a $10 fine; and you thought Nick Van Exel got off easy.

The roughness of the game, not to mention the lack of a 24-second clock for another half-century, accounted for the low score of that first game in Philadelphia. Eighteen of the 40 points were accounted for by free throws.

Al Cooper was the league's leading scorer with 8.8 points a game that season and Trenton finished first with an 18-2 record.

You might wonder where all these details came from. The answer: from a couple of sports historians who, for much of the past year, have been trying to promote a commemoration of the pro basketball centennial.

``I thought it was too important (to overlook),'' said Bill Himmelman, a 60-year-old New Jersey native who was president of a company that manufactured welding torches before he dived into the sports-nostalgia business.

Himmelman said he faxed and mailed 2,000 press releases, trying to draw attention to the centennial, and got little response outside the Philly-New Jersey area.

Sadder still is the response he got more than a year ago when he invited the NBA to join the celebration.

``They just weren't interested,'' Himmelman said.

The NBA has been trying to refute the charge that it doesn't care about its - and its sport's - history.

The league made a festival of its 50th anniversary in 1997; that was nice. The on-hold audio on the league office's phone system brings you Chick Hearn's and Johnny Most's play-by-play of old NBA Finals; that's educational. The league's rookie orientation program includes a section on NBA history; maybe Atlanta Hawks coach Lenny Wilkens won't be asked again, ``You used to play?''

And NBA spokesman Chris Brienza said that although the centennial buffs shouldn't have expected anything like the 50th anniversary bash, under ordinary circumstances ``we would not have let it pass without some sort of tip of the cap.''

Of course, the NBA lockout means these are not ordinary circumstances. It's hard to hold a halftime ceremony when there's no halftime, or when there's nothing but halftime.

But that shouldn't have prevented the NBA doing something to show it cares.

Unless the truth is the NBA really doesn't care much about the various ABAs, ABLs, PBLAs, BAAs, NBLs and EBLs that helped to create pro basketball as we know it. Or about the NLPB.

``They're in business to promote the NBA,'' Himmelman said. ``And when you get right down to it they're not interested in promoting leagues that opposed them (or) preceded them.

``Baseball is right. They say, `We, the National and American leagues, are the survivors, and we're the caretakers of the history of the leagues that came before us.' ''

For the NBA, Himmelman said, the all-important bottom line is, ``History doesn't make money.''

What should the NBA have done? It could have put out a press release of its own. It could have designed a centennial logo, just a tiny patch for its players to wear on their uniforms, on the off chance its players wear uniforms this season.

Or: It could honor pro basketball's pioneers by settling its differences - the illogical extension of that fateful decision a century ago - and guaranteeing the game a second hundred years.