Spinning the Globe
Read Spinning the Globe Online
Authors: Ben Green
The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters
For Daddy,
always my number-one fan,
whom I still miss every day.
And for Goose Tatum,
the greatest Trotter of them all.
The Garden
Chicago
Abe
Runt
Inman
The Rens
Sonny
Goose
Marques
The Lakers
All-Stars
Ambassadors
“Freedom Now!”
Wilt
“Show’s Over”
Meadowlark
Mannie
Final Circle
by Bill Cosby
I
was eleven years old when the Harlem Globetrotters defeated the NBA’s Minneapolis Lakers for the first time, in 1948. As a budding basketball fan growing up in Philadelphia, I remember the result being exciting news, yet I could not yet grasp the great cultural ramifications this unexpected victory of an all-black basketball team over an all-white, World Championship team would create in the years that followed. While mainstream, professional sports were still predominantly a foreign land to African Americans in the 1940s, holes were beginning to appear in the dike. The Globetrotters’ win over the Lakers, combined with Jackie Robinson’s headfirst slide over the color barrier in baseball, gave blacks a solid one-two punch against the cultural restraints that had previously bound them in the sports world. The Globetrotters showed the world that blacks could compete with whites on the basketball court, and do so in a way that entertained as well as inspired. The NBA was paying attention. Soon thereafter, Globetrotter Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton became the first African American to sign an NBA contract, joining the New York Knicks in 1950, with many others soon to follow.
Since that landmark day in 1948, the Globetrotters and I have crossed paths several times. I am very proud to have had a role in breaking another color barrier that had existed in prime-time network television. Despite uneasiness by NBC executives, and threats of boycotts by a few southern affiliates, I was chosen to costar in the weekly television series
I Spy
in 1966. Thanks to the Globetrotters and forward-thinking television producers like
I Spy
’s Sheldon
Leonard, America now had examples in both sports and entertainment that African Americans had a place and could prosper in either realm.
The Globetrotters and I also share a love of entertaining people of all ages, making the decision to join the team on the basketball court a no-brainer. I fancied myself a decent athlete, playing football and running track at Temple. Basketball was never my strongest sport, so I was relieved to be selected to play for the Globetrotters rather than perhaps a more suitable position with the Washington Generals. I signed a lifetime contract with the team in 1972, which allowed me to join the team whenever our respective schedules would allow. My salary at the time—one dollar a year—made me perhaps one of the few athletes in history to be paid what he was actually worth. But following the lead of many contemporary athletes, I held out for the big money in 1986, refusing to play for anything less than $1.05. Reluctantly, but wisely, my demands were met by the Globetrotter organization, paving the way fora beautiful relationship that culminated in July 2004, with my induction as an honorary member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. The Globetrotters helped design a commemorative locker for the occasion, complete with my old jersey, photos and other mementos of my Globetrotter career. I have been blessed to win many awards during my career, but to be recognized by my peers in another field that I enjoyed, but was never considered quite as proficient in, was a great feeling.
The Harlem Globetrotters have given millions of people around the world those same good feelings over their seventy-nine-year history. They are a true American success story that embodies everything positive about American culture—a true “rags to riches” example of a team overcoming the racial, economic, and logistical obstacles that stood in their way, solely because of their love of basketball and a desire to make people smile. Even today, after conquering all that stood in their way, the Globetrotters are working harder than ever to play more games, visit more countries, and bring their message of peace, tolerance, and goodwill to more and more people around the world. They capture everything positive that sports
can
be. A Globetrotters game is not a place to boo, curse at the referee, or
demean your opponent with taunts and threats, but it is where positive values are demonstrated and taught, where laughter and applause fill the air as the Globetrotters demonstrate that sports are about having fun and enjoying yourself—whether on the court or off.
While the Harlem Globetrotters are legendary performers, known in every corner of the globe as the greatest entertainers in sports, the story of how the team came to be is just as entertaining and important as the way they play the game. In
Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters
, author Ben Green takes us on a journey on which few have ever embarked. This book stands as the first definitive tale of the history of the Harlem Globetrotters. From touring the Midwest in Abe Saperstein’s Model T in the 1920s to becoming a global phenomenon, to the brink of bankruptcy, to a rebirth under the guidance of Mannie Jackson, Green tells a story through the eyes of those involved that will entertain you, shock you at times, and, of course, make you laugh out loud.
I treasure my relationship with the Harlem Globetrotters and team owner, Mannie Jackson. I am sincerely grateful for all the work they have done for the betterment of people around the world. They have earned their title of Global Ambassadors of Goodwill many times over. This is their story.
The Garden
T
his story begins with a song.
A pure sound of joy. One person, sotto voce, whistling a simple little melody: twelve notes in all, repeating rhythmically up and down the scale. And behind the whistle, carrying the beat, a lone, mysterious percussionist—it could be fingers snapping or rhythm sticks, but it’s actually
bones,
a pair of flat rib bones from a cow or a hog, clacking together, driving the tune.
The song wafts across the arena where we are sitting, waiting eagerly for what we know will come. This scene could be happening in any of a hundred arenas in a hundred different towns, from a high school gym in Sheboygan or the Boilermakers Union hall in Yakima to the Cow Palace in San Francisco, but we are actually in Madison Square Garden—the
old
Garden at Fiftieth Street and Eighth Avenue—in New York City.
It could also be any year of the past seventy-five, but tonight is January 1, 1950. New Year’s Day. The beginning of the postwar decade and the halfway point of the century. It’s a Sunday night, just before seven
P.M
. Eighteen hours earlier, 750,000 people thronged Times Square to ring in the New Year, clogging the streets between Forty-second and Forty-seventh Streets with the largest crowd in local memory, attributed partly to the bearably chilly temperatures. The city—indeed, the entire country—is in a celebratory mood, having finally sloughed off the lingering shortages of the war years, and the economy is ramping up toward a decade of unprecedented prosperity. It was a wild, joyous New Year’s Eve. Midnight revelers
cheered as the white ball on the Times Tower descended down its flagpole, Manhattan nightclubs reported a brisk business, the ever-alert news photographers with their Speed Graphic cameras snapped the duke and duchess of Windsor dancing at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, and those seeking a more solemn beginning to the year had pilgrimaged to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Francis Cardinal Spellman led a midnight pontifical Mass.
This evening, the Garden is packed with nearly 19,000 people, the largest crowd ever to watch a professional basketball game in the city. A standing-room-only sellout. Earlier this afternoon, there was a near riot at the box office after the standing-room-only tickets sold out in fifteen minutes and 7,000 disappointed fans were turned away; a special detail of New York’s Finest had to be called out to calm the angry crowd.
Fans that come to see the New York Knicks are habitually late, often straggling in halfway through the first quarter, but
this
crowd was here thirty minutes early, knowing that the best part of the evening will happen
before
the game. It’s a family crowd: Mom and Dad and the whole nuclear gaggle of kids, and three generations in some cases, with Grandma and Grandpa along for the night, and all of them scrubbed squeaky clean and dressed in their Sunday best. The men are in suits and ties, the women in the calf-length skirts that are the fashion of the day. There’s an air of giddy anticipation, much as there was in Times Square last night, and a murmur of excitement ripples through the stands as everyone waits for what they know is coming.
And then it begins—the whistle and the bones.
The lights come up and five tall, graceful men jog out onto the floor, dressed in white silk warm-up jackets that every boy in the arena covets as soon as they see them. The men are led onto the court by the two most acclaimed basketball players in the world: Marques Haynes, who does things with a basketball that no one has ever done, and Goose Tatum, the Clown Prince of Basketball, a talented and temperamental comic genius. The players are introduced one at a time, to thunderous applause, then form a circle around the foul line and start passing a ball, whipping it behind their backs, between their legs, faster and more expertly than these fans have ever seen. They roll
it up one arm and down the other, spin it off their fingertips, feint one way and flick it the other, bounce it off their heads, their behinds, their chests. And the song is driving it all, that whistle and the bones.
By now, the spectators can’t help themselves, it’s physically impossible—their feet are tapping. Entire families tapping in unison. Dad’s spit-shined brogans, perhaps almost imperceptibly, but tapping nonetheless; Mom’s black pumps, with quiet decorum; and Junior’s stinking Converse All-Stars, which should have been thrown out with the trash weeks ago. All tapping. Some in the crowd are humming, too. They have no idea of the words to the song. There may not even
be
any words to this song, except for the only three that matter, and they sing them under their breath at the end of each line:
“Sweeeet Georgia Brown”
This song can mean only one thing: the Harlem Globetrotters
*
are in town and we are going to have the time of our lives. The song is like a Rorschach test for American culture. There is no two-headed dog in the picture, no repressed sexual memories, no oedipal urges. There is only one message: the Harlem Globetrotters make people happy.
The crowd is mesmerized, their eyes riveted on the court, as the players weave a spell of enchantment over the Garden. The one person
not
watching the Magic Circle is the team’s owner, Abe Saperstein, who is standing in front of the Globetrotters’ bench and, by force of habit, scanning the stands, expertly counting the house. It is a skill honed over twenty-five years—a necessity in leaner days as protection against disreputable promoters and vanishing gate receipts, but even now, when he no longer has to worry about the gate, a habit that refuses to die.
Abe Saperstein is the most incongruous figure that one could conjure up to be the owner of this team. He and his players are a juxtaposition of opposites, as different as any human beings could be. It goes far beyond the obvious, that the players are black and Abe is white—a London-born son of Polish Jews who immigrated to
America when he was five. Where the players are lithe and tall (most are well over six feet), Abe is embarrassingly short, barely five foot three, and so squat and round that he looks like a bowling ball in a suit. In his youth, Abe was something of an athlete himself, and until the mid-1930s served as the Trotters’ lone substitute, wearing a basketball uniform under his suit, but his athletic days are long behind him and no artifacts remain. While his players are the epitome of style and grace, whether in their uniforms or in their off-duty tailored suits and fedoras, Abe is perpetually dressed in high-water pants held up by suspenders
and
a belt, in a rumpled black suit that some players suspect is the only one he owns.
Yet Abe Saperstein has overcome his physical limitations with boundless drive and ambition, a ferocious work ethic, uncanny relationship skills, and an all-encompassing marketing vision constrained only by the boundaries of space and time. His promotional genius is an impregnable force of nature that will not be limited by geography, national borders, riots and revolutions, a Babel of foreign tongues and dialects, monetary exchange rates, rain, wind, blizzards, or acts of God. Whether indoors or out, day or night, in a desert or a deluge, traveling by car, rail, plane, or camel, he will find a way to put on a game. If space travel to the moon were available, Abe Saperstein would have the Harlem Globetrotters on the first ship. He is a complicated, multilayered personality—a pioneering humanist to some (the Abe Lincoln of basketball) and a racist huckster to others, the purveyor of a demeaning minstrel show for whites.
Nonetheless, this much is indisputable: from their humble beginnings in the late 1920s, the Harlem Globetrotters have risen to become the most successful basketball team in America. In the beginning, it was just five black players and a stumpy Jewish guy in a rattletrap Model T, barnstorming across the American heartland, playing obscure whistle-stops and tank towns that no one else would play—Owatonna, Wahpeton, Cut Bank, and Plentywood—where no hotels would house them, no restaurants would feed them, and service stations wouldn’t let them use the bathroom or the phone, playing seven nights a week and twice on Sundays, taking on all comers, from the local brake factory team to the smart-aleck college kids, and kicking the white boys’ asses—not just beating them, but making fools of
them in the process, leaving the crowd laughing in their wake—traveling 40,000 miles a year in the dead of winter, in Montana, Minnesota, and the Dakotas, winning 95 percent of their games and still barely getting by, going hungry on many nights, driving 200 miles to find a black-owned boardinghouse or a family that would take them in. The Harlem Globetrotters were not just a great barnstorming team; they were a sociology class on wheels, bringing black hoops and black culture to a hundred Midwestern towns that had seen neither, and in the process transforming Dr. James Naismith’s stodgy, wearisome game—which was still sometimes played in chicken-wire cages by roughneck immigrants with flailing elbows and bloodied skulls, a sport more resembling rugby—into an orchestration of speed, fluidity, motion, dazzling skill, and, most improbably, inspired comedy.
Tonight is a landmark in that slow rise to glory. This is the Globetrotters’ first game in Madison Square Garden, the Mecca of American sports. For a decade, Abe has been begging to play the Garden, but has been relegated to smaller venues around the city—the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory or the Westchester County Center in White Plains. But tonight, as “Sweet Georgia Brown” and the Magic Circle transport the crowd to heights of wonder and delight, Abe Saperstein can bask in the knowledge that he has finally reached the mountaintop, the “Broadway of sports”—the Garden. And after the box office mayhem that occurred this afternoon, the Garden will now be begging
him
to return. What’s more, this game marks another milestone: it’s being filmed by Paramount News for its weekly newsreel—“The Eyes and Ears of the World”—which will be seen by millions of moviegoers around the country.
It goes without saying that the Globetrotters are the most popular basketball team in the United States; that is the
least
of their accomplishments. No other basketball team at any level, amateur or professional, even comes close. The owners of the fledgling National Basketball Association are constantly pleading with Abe to play doubleheaders with NBA teams, just to draw a crowd. Tonight, in fact, the New York Knicks will play the “feature game” against the Philadelphia Warriors but, as Dick Young will make clear in tomorrow’s
Daily News,
“Nineteen thousand fans certainly weren’t there to see the Knickerbockers and Warriors.”
No, the Globetrotters have transcended basketball; they are now, arguably, the most popular American sports franchise of any kind, rivaled only by the New York Yankees. But it goes deeper than that: “Sweet Georgia Brown,” the Magic Circle, Goose Tatum’s hook shot, and Marques Haynes’s dribbling are embedded in American sports imagery, right alongside Joe DiMaggio’s silky swing, Jackie Robinson’s stealing home, or Joe Louis dropping Max Schmeling with a stiff right. By tomorrow morning, kids on school-yard courts all over the city will be throwing blind hooks from the foul line, dribbling on one knee, and tossing behind-the-back passes to their friends as they imitate the Trotters’ famous weave, inevitably drawing screams of protest from their coaches. In truth, the Globetrotters are more accessible to the average fan than other sports heroes. None of us can hit a fastball like DiMaggio, steal home like Jackie Robinson, or throw a right with the power of Joe Louis, but every kid in America who has ever picked up a basketball has tried to dribble like Marques and shoot Goose’s hook. We have
all
been Globetrotters.
But there is more. The Globetrotters are not just the most popular basketball team in America, and certainly the most entertaining; they also may be the best. In the past two years they have staked their claim to that title, beating the NBA’s best team, the Minneapolis Lakers, twice in a row in head-to-head showdowns. Prior to the first game, in February 1948, the conventional wisdom among the nation’s sportswriters, not to mention the cold cash laid down with America’s bookies, was that the Trotters didn’t stand a chance. No bunch of “sepia clowns” could stand up to the Lakers’ six-foot, ten-inch center, George Mikan, the most dominating big man in the game. But the Globetrotters played the Lakers straight-up, ran them off their feet in the second half, and won on a last-second shot. That win was dismissed as a fluke, but the Trotters did it again the following year, winning by four points, and this time even “put on the show”—beating Mikan and then dancing on his grave. All over America, black families raised up the Trotters as heroes to the race.
When the Magic Circle ends, the Trotters and their opponents, the New York Celtics (descendants of the Original Celtics, a storied franchise), go through a
standard
warm-up, shooting layups and set shots, and then the game begins. After what we’ve just witnessed, the
game itself feels almost anticlimactic, but not for long. This Globetrotter team is more than just Goose and Marques, as Abe Saperstein still has a monopoly on the best African American players in the country. There’s Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, a six-foot-seven giant who snatches opposing shots out of the air with one hand, and whom the Knicks have been coveting for years; Ermer Robinson, a remarkable outside shooter, whose last-second bomb beat the Lakers; player-coach Babe Pressley, the “Blue Ox,” a fierce defenseman and rebounder; and behind them fresh young talents like Frank Washington, Vertes Zeigler, Bobby Milton, and Wilbert King. Abe Saperstein is an inveterate salesman who has been telling sportswriters for twenty years that every year’s squad is “the best team I’ve ever had,” but this year it may be true.
For the first few minutes, the Trotters play it straight and race out to an early lead. Then it’s time for the show, and Goose takes center stage. From his spot “in the hole” he directs the Trotters’ weave, kicking the ball out to shooters on the wings or backdoor cutters on their way to the hoop. Despite his Jekyll and Hyde personality, Tatum is a true genius on the court and has originated most of the Trotters’ gags, or reams. Lanky, loose-limbed, with an eighty-four-inch wingspan, he can crack up his own teammates just by walking across the floor. He has impeccable timing and an inventive streak that allows him to come up with new gags nearly every night. No one, including his teammates, knows what Goose might do. He hides the ball under his jersey, bounces it off a defender’s head, then throws up that hook, without looking, and is already strutting down the court when it drops through the net. There will be other great showmen in the Globetrotters’ pantheon, but Goose is the greatest of them all.