Spinning the Globe (14 page)

This was hitting Abe in his most vulnerable spot. The question was percolating through the black community: were the Globe Trotters sensational ballplayers or Stepin Fetchit clowns? Clearly, Illidge was speaking for Douglas, who would later make the same criticisms himself. Douglas felt that Abe’s brand of showmanship was demeaning to African Americans and the equivalent of a minstrel show in shorts. Douglas didn’t like the Trotters’ clowning and he apparently didn’t like Abe.

In truth, this debate over the Globe Trotters was becoming more polarizing, and not just between Abe and Douglas. By 1939, the Globe Trotters’ clowning had become even more stylized, and relied heavily on racial stereotypes. The Trotters were still performing their traditional ball-handling tricks, and had now added a slow-motion football pantomime and a baseball routine, in which one player would pitch the basketball to another, striking him out. These gags were fairly neutral in terms of racial imagery, but their “craps-shooting” gag had palpable racial overtones—which is exactly how audiences and sportswriters interpreted it. “The boys stopped shooting after piling up a 24–0 lead,” one reporter wrote. “After that someone produced some dice and the job of playing was left to one man while the other four busied themselves getting some new shoes for junior.” Another writer described it this way: “They went through football formations, baseball antics, and finally tossed out a pair of ‘bones’ and rolled for each other’s knee guards.”

In addition to the craps shooting, Abe had added another troubling bit to the show: Ted Strong spent the entire game chattering in a high-pitched, childlike, almost unintelligible voice—what one reporter described as “forty minutes of vociferous squealing by big Ted Strong, the gigantic guard, [who] drew gales of laughter with his moans of ‘foul, foul.’”

Was this innocent slapstick comedy or an insidious effort to make African American ballplayers look like buffoons? At least one reporter interpreted it as the latter: “This writer has seen the
Harlems in action and—‘Fo’ goodness sakes, they sho can toss those buckets.’” Even when complimenting the players, sportswriters’ own racial stereotypes leaked into the language. “You have seen a cyclone; you have heard a symphony; you have rubbed shoulders with aristocrats,” one wrote. “Now step forward and meet the star spangled black rosebuds of Harlem…. Anyone who saw Papa Saperstein’s dusky darlings last year knows just what can be done with the big brown melon for which those gentlemen of Georgia have such an affinity—and how easy it can be made to look.”

In fairness, while some audiences may have been laughing
at
the Trotters, they were usually laughing even harder at the Trotters’ white opponents—who were, in most cases, the fans’ hometown heroes. During one game in New Westminster, British Columbia, the local team put all nine of its men on the court at the end of the game, trying to stop the Trotters from scoring. As the paper reported: “The Adanacs were really and truly stooges and were so intent on stopping the invaders that they had nine men on the floor for five minutes. It only added to the hilarity.”

A decade later, Ralph Ellison would write in
Invisible Man:
“I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me…. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything but me.” The Globe Trotters’ white audiences didn’t see the humor as demeaning because it was how they
imagined
blacks really were. But Bob Douglas saw it—and didn’t like it. And he wasn’t the only black businessman who recognized the racial subtext of Abe’s humor. In February 1939, the
Courier
ran a cartoon showing five Harlem Globe Trotter players and their team manager (a black man) standing beside the referee. One of the Globe Trotters is barefoot, and the referee is pointing at his feet and warning, “All right, but if he’s gonna play like that, he’s gotta cut his toenails!”

Ultimately, however, to a marketing virtuoso like Abe, all publicity was good publicity, and despite the Rens’ dismissive reaction, Abe had to be thrilled that, after years of futile pursuit, the battle was finally engaged. To Abe, playing the Rens was almost more important than beating them; at least the Trotters would be validated as being in the same league.

Now that the Rens had responded to the challenge, the black press quickly embraced the idea. The
Pittsburgh Courier
began pushing for a showdown: “With such a great court duel brewing, one which the public would surely support, the
Courier
sports department suggests that the rival managers book the teams in a two out of three game series for the sepia court title. The games would be played in three large cities, with each team’s share of the proceeds being donated to charity.”

Once the Rens put their prestige on the line, they were determined to keep the heat on Abe. The next week, they issued their own challenge in the
Courier,
which was headlined “Globe Trotters Afraid?”

Suddenly, after five years of nonstop boasting, Abe fell strangely silent. For the next month, there was not a word from anybody in the Globe Trotters organization about the Rens. The main Trotter unit was playing out west, on a monthlong trek through British Columbia and Washington, which might have partially explained the silence, but it was also a shrewd move on Abe’s part to let the Rens dangle.

Eric Illidge now got a taste of what it was like to be ignored, and he didn’t like it. The first week of February 1939, he made a special trip to the
Courier
’s office, cornered sports editor Wendell Smith, and delivered a vitriolic tirade against the Trotters:

Smith was a Rens loyalist, but even he felt that Illidge “doth protest too much,” and prodded him about the Trotters’ challenge:

This was too much for Illidge, who began shouting and gesticulating so wildly that Smith called him “Eric the Red face.”

“I brand that story about us not wanting to play them in the same terms that President Roosevelt branded the stories about him getting us entangled with them Europeans,” Illidge exclaimed, suddenly elevating the Trotters-Rens rivalry to the looming war in Europe. But Illidge was just warming up. “We will play the Harlem Globe Trotters anytime, anywhere,” he said. “They’ve been going around telling folks how good they are, and how they will beat us, but we issued them a public challenge and they’re afraid to answer it.”

Obviously relishing his role at the nexus of the controversy, Wendell Smith attempted to broker a game:

Abe remained silent. In truth, he could afford to let the controversy with the Rens simmer because it appeared that it would resolve it
self: both teams had been invited to the first World Professional Invitational Basketball Tournament in Chicago, scheduled for late March, where they would likely meet. And Abe didn’t need to say a word about the rivalry because Eric Illidge couldn’t
stop
talking about it. The Trotters’ impudence had so outraged him that he was nearly out of control, and had become the Trotters’ best marketing agent. Unwittingly, he was doing what Abe had been unable to do himself: build national interest in the black press about a showdown between the two teams.

On March 12, in their final tuneup before the World Professional Tournament, the Globe Trotters staged a rematch in Chicago with Kate Smith’s New York Celtics, with whom they had had the controversial tie the previous year. Thanks, no doubt, to Eric Illidge’s meltdown a month earlier, the
Pittsburgh Courier,
which had typically ignored the Trotters, did something it had never done before: it sent a reporter to cover a Trotters game.

The Celtics were an aging, over-the-hill quintet, and this time the Trotters left no doubts about their superiority, winning going away, 37–24. The
Courier
’s Chester L. Washington Jr. came away impressed, to say the least. He called the Trotters “one of the greatest colored cage combines of all times,” and described how they had “swept the Celts off their feet” with their “dazzling” ballhandling. Washington also reported on a postgame “verbal jam session” with some prestigious black coaches and former players, who had been arguing over which team was better, the Trotters or the Rens. The consensus was that the Rens still held a “majority of superiority,” but the Trotters might beat them on an “off night.”

This was too much for Illidge, who sent two telegrams to Washington, bragging that the Rens had already beaten the Celtics twice, then added a little jab at Abe. “Globe Trotters take notice,” he said with a smirk.

“Thanks for the wires, Eric,” Washington wrote. “And until something happens to disprove this contention, that [Rens] quintuplet circus deserves the ranking of the top court combination in the country.”

When the pairings were announced for the upcoming World Professional Tournament in Chicago, the Trotters and Rens were placed in the same bracket, meaning they would meet in the semifinals (if they won their first two games). The bottom line was that they would have to go through each other to win the world championship. The rivalry was as hot as it could get. The two teams had been dissected, analyzed, and critiqued. The only thing left was to play the game.

By the end of March 1939, all hell was breaking loose in the rest of the world, and America was deeply divided about how to respond. On March 15, Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers had seized Czechoslovakia and dared Great Britain and France to do anything about it. The next day, in a driving snowstorm, the Reichsführer himself paraded into the ancient capital of Prague, unfurled his personal banner over Hradcany Castle, the presidential palace, and declared the fallen nation a German protectorate. The Nazis immediately dissolved the Czech parliament, banned elections, and launched an anti-Jewish campaign, which set off a panic among Prague’s Jews, who jammed the railway stations, attempting to flee.

Hitler had then taken aim on Poland, and threatened that if anti-German protests in that country didn’t stop immediately, Germany would be “compelled to take other measures.” Six months earlier, at the Munich Conference, Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain had conceded large portions of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, then flown home and announced that he had achieved “peace in our time.” By March, however, it was clear that Hitler interpreted that agreement to mean a piece of Czechoslovakia, a piece of Poland, and all of Europe. Chamberlain was now frantically trying to cobble together an international stop-Hitler drive.

Hitler wasn’t the only one causing problems. Armies were mobilizing across Europe, Asia, and Africa. In Rome, cheered on by throngs of delirious Black Shirts. Benito Mussolini endorsed Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia and threatened to move himself against the French colonies of Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco. In China, Japanese troops were driving deeper into the central provinces, bringing the
fighting almost to the doorstep of Shanghai. And in Spain, Generalissimo Francisco Franco had finally crushed Republican insurgents after the three-year Spanish Civil War and was preparing to accept their unconditional surrender.

In the face of this worldwide turmoil, President Roosevelt was pleading with Congress to amend the Neutrality Act to allow him to sell more arms to Britain and France. Isolationist hawks in the Senate were having none of it, however, and attacked Roosevelt for leading the nation toward “entangling alliances” to defend French and British colonialism. “I would send no money to European war chests, no munitions to any nation engaged in war, and above all, no American boy to be sacrificed to the machinations of European imperialism,” roared Idaho’s senator William E. Borah.

Perhaps the most fervent isolationist and FDR-hater in the country was newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, who owned two Chicago papers, the
American
and the
Herald-Examiner.
*
The
last
thing Hearst wanted was more attention paid to the saber rattling abroad, and so, coincidentally or not, his Chicago papers had organized a wonderful distraction for the sporting public: the first-ever World Professional Invitational Basketball Tournament, scheduled for the last weekend in March.

Backed by Hearst’s money, the
American
and the
Herald-Examiner
put up $10,000 in prize money and promoted the tourney as the “world series” of professional hoops. Co-promoters Harry Hannin and Harry Wilson invited the top twelve professional teams in the country, and predicted the “greatest array of cage talent ever assembled in one place.” It didn’t quite work out that way, however, as a number of the invitees declined to participate, and the final slots were still being filled four days before the tournament began. Nonetheless, it was an impressive lineup. The best-known teams were the Rens, Globe Trotters, and New York Celtics. Also in the mix were the Sheboygan Redskins and Oshkosh All-Stars, two of the better teams from the fledgling National Basketball League (
not
the NBA, which had yet to be formed); the bearded House of David; Chicago All-American Harmons; Fort Wayne Harvesters; Cleveland White
Horses; New York Yankees; Illinois Grads; and Clarksburg (W.V.) Oilers.