A graduate of Hopkinsville High School was the first college basketball player to develop a jump shot in his game.
He was John Miller Cooper, who in his senior year transferred to Hopkinsville from the old Corydon High School in Henderson. Born in Henderson County in 1912, he was the oldest of six children.
In a New York Times story that ran a year after Cooper’s death, in 2010, his family said he described the first time he executed the jump shot in a college game. It was 1931 at the University of Missouri.
The coach immediately took him out of the game and said, “Don’t ever do that again,” Cooper’s son Jack said.
Basketball, in those days, was played pretty much as it had been since James Naismith invented the game in 1891. Players kept their feet planted unless they were rebounding or shooting a layup.
Although several players would eventually claim to have invented the jump shot, the NCAA has credited Cooper with the innovation, the New York Times reported.
In a 2002 story for the Indiana University student newspaper, Cooper said he first saw someone execute a jump shot when he was practicing on his own one day in Corydon. A college player from Chicago happened to also be in the gym that day, and Cooper saw him catch a rebound in mid-air and shot the ball back into the basket before his feet hit the floor again.
“Having tried the jumper to no avail in his high school days at Corydon High School as well as Hopkinsville High School, where he transferred his senior year, Cooper brought the shot and the future of basketball with him to Missouri,” Indiana paper reported.
After college, Cooper became a professor. He taught kinesiology, the study of human and non-human movement, at the University of Southern California and then Indiana.
In his obituary published in the Los Angeles Times, it is noted that the three-second rule in basketball was introduced because Cooper “would plant himself in the free-throw lane and wait to shoot a jump shot over the defense.”
Cooper was 98 when he died.
This story has been updated to include photos from Cooper’s senior season at Hopkinsville High School.
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. She spent 30 years as a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition.
