Spinning the Globe (33 page)

What happened with Marques Haynes was symbolic of a larger metamorphosis that was occurring with Abe. Beginning around this same time, he began to change as a person. The Trotters were on top of the world—they were packing Madison Square Garden, they were
in the movies, appearing on Ed Sullivan’s
Toast of the Town,
playing command performances before kings and popes—and Abe was making more money than he ever had in his life. After all the years of struggling to survive, that newfound wealth may have gone to his head.

To the outside world, or at least to the white people around him, the change may not have been noticeable. He was still the same jovial, generous, hardworking little guy with the big ideas. Still the same old Abe. But some of his players noticed the difference.

“When I first went out [with the Trotters], Abe was a great person,” recalls Frank Washington. “He used to take the guys to dinner, buy us steaks anytime…. But he changed after he started making money. He wouldn’t do anything for you, and didn’t have respect for us.”

At the beginning of every season, Abe would still have the players over to his house for dinner, but at other times he seemed colder, more distant, and more concerned with the trappings of money and power. And clearly, the gap between his lifestyle and that of his players was growing wider. In the old days, he had eaten the same lousy food and had even stayed in “colored” hotels with them on a few occasions, but now he was staying at the swankiest hotels in every city. In Los Angeles, he always booked a room at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, the fabulous “Hotel of the Stars,” while the players were at the Watkins Hotel in South Central.
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He was driving his bright red Cadillac down the Champs-Elysées in Paris, with beautiful singers on his arm, and traffic backed up, gawking at the little man in the fancy car, while the players were still riding in converted school buses with seats too cramped to stretch their legs. He was eating his favorite chopped liver at Isow’s in London’s Soho district, wild strawberries in the Rotisserie Perigourdine in Paris, or roast beef at Toots Shor’s in New York, while they were still picking up greasy burgers from the back door of slophouses in Mobile and Des Moines, and spending their own money to boot (the players got no meal money in the United States, except on the College All-Star tour). He had
traded in his rumpled black suit and high-water pants for sharkskin suits, alligator shoes, and a Globetrotter tie, while they were still forced to wear the same stinking uniforms night after night, which they rinsed in hotel sinks or doused with French colognes when the uniforms became calcified with sweat and funk. He was hanging out with celebrities and movie stars, syndicated columnists and senators, getting his picture snapped with dignitaries from around the world. In fact,
he
was a celebrity himself, or desperately wanted to be, and spent a lot of time and money pursuing it. He cultivated celebrities with the same doggedness that he cultivated sportswriters and promoters. Every time he met a famous person, a photographer was always handy to take the requisite publicity still, which was then autographed and hung on the wall of his office. He wrote repeated letters to the celebrities he met, whether they responded or not; sent Christmas gifts, thank-you notes, and postcards from his travels.

And slowly it all began to go to his head. A cult of personality began to develop in the Globetrotter organization. It even showed up in the Globetrotter yearbooks, the programs that were sold at every game. The players each got a one-paragraph bio in eight-point type and a thumbnail photo in the centerfold, but Abe got a two-page spread with slick Madison Avenue photos, fawning testimonials, biographical profiles, even articles on his favorite foods and restaurants. The yearbooks had started out being about the Globetrotters, but increasingly they were about Abe. His picture was plastered everywhere, usually hanging out with someone famous. There was even a regular feature called “Abe and His Friends,” which showcased him with Bob Hope, Joe Louis, Steve Allen, Hank Greenberg, and assorted pretty women. Abe was always beaming, with the same winning smile he’d had since childhood, but sadly, more and more, it looked staged and frozen, almost robotic, as if the smile were held on with Scotch tape. Abe had always had an ego, which was part of his drive and ambition, but in the old days he had promoted himself as a way to promote the team, as a means to an end—but now
he
was the end.

The players noticed it because they were around him in unguarded moments, when the cameras weren’t there. Abe liked the players to call him Skip (as in Skipper), but they called him “Little
Caesar” behind his back and joked about his Napoleon complex. He was the boss, however, so they catered to his ego. Players let him win at gin rummy or whist. They laughed too hard at his jokes. When he came to the gym and tried to show off his basketball skills—taunting some six-foot-eight newcomer, “See if you can block my shot”—the old-timers would have already warned the rookies, “Don’t you dare, or you’ll be going home.” The players pretended to pay attention to his coaching instructions, but ignored them when he left.

One problem was that the organization was now so large, and Abe was so busy, that he didn’t really get to know the players as he had in the past. They might not see him for weeks, and then he’d show up for one game, in a big city, and be gone again. Also, he was now much older than his players. In the beginning, he and Inman Jackson, Kid Oliver, Toots Wright and the original Trotters had been from the same generation, but, other than Inman, all those guys were long gone. Even most of the veterans from the 1940s were gone. Ted Strong and Bernie Price had retired, and Babe Pressley, Duke Cumberland, Ermer Robinson, and Pop Gates were Trotter coaches.

With as many as four units operating year-round, plus the farm teams, there had been a huge influx of new players in the past few years. And these players were from a different generation. They were young black men who had come of age
after
World War II, with higher expectations about what the world owed them and what life should be like. They were unwilling to put up with restrictions and barriers that their fathers had accepted in the past, whether from American society at large or from their boss. More and more of the players had gone to college, and were more educated and sophisticated than the players Abe was used to. After signing with the Trotters, they had traveled to Bangkok and Buenos Aires, had experienced the night life of Amsterdam and Copenhagen, had seen Gay Paree—and were not inclined to be kept down on
anybody’s
farm. These ballplayers had other options now: the NBA was out there, just beyond the horizon, and although the league had an unwritten quota system, allowing only one or two black players per team, every ballplayer believed that he was that one.

This new generation of players included: J. C. Gibson, a six-foot-eight baby-faced giant from Los Angeles, who signed with the Trot
ters out of high school; Bob “Showboat” Hall, another Detroit player, only six-foot-two but built like a Sherman tank, who was the showman on the western unit and was developing his own legions of fans; “Tex” Harrison, one of the first black players selected for the College All-Star team, who had averaged 25 points a game in college and had immediately hit it off with Abe; Bobby Milton, from Fort Wayne; Alvin Clinkscales, from the University of Bridgeport; Willie Gardner, one of the most highly regarded players ever to come out of Indianapolis; Chuck Holton, a bright college grad who would be made a player-coach after his second year; Harry Sykes, from Kentucky State; Andy Johnson, a six-foot-six bulldozer from the University of Portland (who later played in the NBA); two New Yorkers, Carl Green and Stanley “Chico” Burrell; and “the Big Three,” a trio of stars from Wayne State University, including “Jumping Johnny” Kline, an Olympic-class high jumper who could, according to legend, pick a quarter off the top of the backboard, and backcourt mates Charlie Primus and Ernest Wagner.

During the war, Abe had been paying his
top
players, including Pressley, Strong, and Bernie Price, less than $200 a month, and by the early 1950s, the average player salary was $400 a month. In 1952, Ducky Moore, starting his eighth season, was still stuck at $400. (Goose Tatum was making five times that, but he was the exception.) But this new generation wanted more. In 1953, when Abe offered Johnny Kline a $400 starting salary, he turned it down. “I was making more than that working in my family’s business in Detroit,” Kline recalls. “He raised it to $500, so I decided to try it for a year.”

In some ways, Abe was losing touch not only with his ballplayers, but with the game of basketball. As late as 1951, he was calling for a return to the center jump after every basket, arguing that the game was being ruined without it. And he still wanted his players shooting the traditional two-hand set shot, instead of the jump shot that was revolutionizing basketball. Even in the 1960s, Trotter players reportedly were still afraid to shoot jumpers if Abe was at the game. “The thing about Abe you gotta remember, basketball had changed,” says Kline, now a Ph.D. and the director of the Black Legends of Professional Basketball foundation in Detroit. “Abe came from an era where two-hand set shots were the main weapon, but now guys were
shooting jump shots on the run. Even when we were running the weave, Abe wanted you to come to a full stop and shoot a set shot. But now guys were playing
above
the rim. Black players had a lot of rhythm to their game, they wanted to be moving.”

As the players became more demanding and the game more complicated, Abe seemed to wall himself off, to become more hard-shelled, more of a tycoon. He could still reach out, at times, and form close relationships with some of the new players, such as Tex Harrison. And he still had tight bonds with some of the old-timers, particularly Inman Jackson, Ermer Robinson, and Pop Gates, guys who were still on his payroll and beholden to him, yet who shared a loyalty and mutual respect that transcended their paychecks. With the younger guys, however, it was a different story. Abe could still turn on the old charm, but it was increasingly reserved for the spotlights and the stars, while his players retreated ever further into the background, standing in his shadow.

In January 1954, Abe’s ego got another huge boost when
Go, Man, Go
opened in 11,000 theaters across the country. It was the second full-length motion picture about the Globetrotters in three years. After the success of
The Harlem Globetrotters,
screenwriter Alfred Palca had written a second script, formed an independent production company, and raised $175,000 to shoot the film. He managed to line up Dane Clark, a well-known Hollywood actor, to play the part of Abe Saperstein, and distinguished cinematographer James Wong Howe to direct his first film. Looking for a black actor to play Inman Jackson, Palca hired a relative unknown, Sidney Poitier, who owned a rib joint in Harlem. Once again, the Harlem Globetrotters played themselves. The film was shot in New York in May 1953, with the game footage taken in New Jersey, Boston, and Madison Square Garden (including footage cobbled together from the College All-Star tour).

One morning, as Palca was leaving for the set, two strangers were waiting for him in the lobby of his Manhattan apartment building. They were FBI agents, who accused him of being a communist. Among their charges was that he had hired a black man, Poitier. In the 1940s, Palca had joined several left-wing groups, signed various
petitions, and contributed money to Russian war relief, but he was no communist. It didn’t matter. With McCarthyism sweeping the country, several studios refused to distribute the film. Finally, United Artists agreed, provided Palca take his name off the film. He reluctantly agreed. When the film was released, Palca’s brother-in-law was credited as the producer, and his cousin, a Connecticut pediatrician, was listed as the screenwriter. Palca’s movie career was over, but forty-three years later, in 1997, his screenplay credit would finally be restored. He died a year later.

Go, Man, Go
was very different from the first film.
The Harlem Globetrotters
had been about the team and fictional player Billy Townsend, but
Go, Man, Go
was the Abe Saperstein story, or at least a Hollywood version of it. The emphasis was clear from the opening crawl: “This is the story of a sports wonder of our time. More exactly, it’s the story of the man who made it so—one of those fellows with a stubborn idea, who never knows when he’s licked—a combination hard to stop.”

The film was a box office hit and received favorable reviews, including in the
New York Times,
which described it as “the story of the faith and tenacity of one man.” In another ironic twist that only Hollywood could imagine, the film ends with Marques Haynes making a game-winning shot; then he and Abe walk slowly off the court together, their arms around each other. Of course, by the time the film was released, Marques was no longer on the team, and he and Abe were engaged in a bitter court battle (the first of many), as Abe had sued him for using the word “Globetrotters” in his advertising and for copying the Trotters’ uniforms.
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But Hollywood loves a happy ending.

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the landmark
Brown v. Board of Education
decision that sounded the death knell for segregation in public schools, although it would take
decades to actually end it. A year later, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus and the Montgomery bus boycott was launched, bringing a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to national prominence.

The world was changing. There was a sense of anticipation, a quickening of the spirit and the mind, as a
movement
began to take shape. A great seismic shift was under way, still mostly indiscernible, but the underground plates were grinding against each other, the pressure building toward a quake that would shake the foundations of American society.