Spinning the Globe (15 page)

To further legitimize the tournament, Harry Hannin invited George Halas, owner and coach of the Chicago Bears football team and the Chicago Bruins basketball team, to serve as the tournament commissioner, and Nat Holman, legendary star of the Original Celtics, who was now coaching at City College of New York, to be “honorary referee.” For the actual game referee, the promoters had hired the most flamboyant official in basketball, Pat Kennedy, who was famous for his histrionic calls. “No-no-no-NO-NO!” he would yell, “You can’t DO that!”

Even with the support of the Hearst empire, however, this inaugural tournament had a difficult time getting press coverage. The
Chicago Tribune
and
Chicago Daily News,
for instance, were understandably reluctant to promote an event organized by their biggest competitors and didn’t even mention the tournament until the day before it started. In addition, basketball was still lagging in popularity behind baseball, boxing, football, horse racing, and perhaps hockey; and
professional
basketball was the lowest rung on the ladder, below college and high school hoops.

The top sports stories that weekend were about the Chicago Cubs’ and White Sox’s final spring training games, a Golden Gloves boxing tournament in Chicago, the upcoming Masters golf tournament, and the national
collegiate
basketball championship—the forerunner of today’s NCAA “March Madness”—which would be decided in Chicago on Monday night, when Ohio State and Oregon battled for the national crown. Indeed, the promoters could not have selected a worse weekend for the tournament, given the competition.

There was a deeper reason why the
Chicago Tribune
and the
Chicago Daily News
ignored the tournament: two black teams were playing. And one of them—the New York Rens—was the favorite to win. The rivalry between the Trotters and Rens might have been a hot story in the black press, but the white papers treated it like so many other issues in the African American community: they ignored it completely. Even when the
Chicago Tribune
got around to mentioning the pro tournament, the
Trib’
s sports editors couldn’t bring themselves to face the race issue head-on. They reported that the
“lone Chicago representative” in the tournament was the Chicago Harmons, completely ignoring the fact that the Globe Trotters were from Chicago, too. The Trotters had been in business for over a decade, yet through either ignorance or intent, the
Tribune
still couldn’t accept them as a hometown team.

Despite the poor timing for the tournament, at least the weather had cooperated. It had been a glorious week in Chicago, as a warm front brought an early hint of spring. Friday’s temperature had reached nearly eighty degrees, and Lincoln Park had been filled with young couples in love and with mothers pushing “freshly starched” babies in strollers. Thousands of office workers in the Loop had taken a half-day holiday, and there was a run on gasoline to fill up for drives in the country. By Sunday afternoon, however, winter was settling back in: a Canadian front was pushing in from the north, bringing showers and colder temperatures. By Monday morning, it would be freezing again.

Teams had begun arriving for the tournament on Saturday, March 25. The Rens checked into the Hotel Grand on South Parkway, where they always stayed in Chicago. “We could look out our windows and see people riding horses up and down the median of South Parkway,” recalls John Isaacs, now ninety years old and the lone surviving member of that Rens’ squad.

Naturally, the players, coaches, and owners of every team wanted to win. The $1,000 top prize would be insulting by today’s standards, but it was decent money in Depression dollars. The real prize, however, was the title—“world professional champions”—which would be worth ten times more than the prize money in future bookings.

Of all the people involved in the tournament, however, the person who had the most at stake was Abe Saperstein. He had spent the past five years promoting the Globe Trotters as the equal of the Rens, with all of his bravado about being the “colored world champions,” and now he had to back it up. Publicity and marketing could go only so far; the Trotters had to prove themselves on the court.

With the world championship at stake, Abe went looking for some additional firepower. The Globe Trotters had three solid veterans—Harry Rusan, Ted Strong, and Bill Ford—and three up-and-
coming stars—rookies Babe Pressley, Bernie Price, and Hilary Brown, a six-foot-three defensive specialist. And there was Inman Jackson, of course, but he could be counted on for only a few minutes at a time. So, like George Steinbrenner trading for a fireballing closer to help the New York Yankees in their September stretch run, Abe went looking for a closer. Not surprisingly, he looked to Detroit, his most reliable pipeline for new talent (more Globe Trotters have come from Detroit than any other city), and ended up signing Larry Bleach, the best basketball player in the city. A former two-sport star at the University of Detroit and the first black captain of its basketball team, Bleach was a prolific scorer. He signed with Abe just before the tournament and arrived in Chicago in time for the first game.

Sunday’s opening round was scheduled at the Madison Street Armory, with a tripleheader in the afternoon and another tripleheader that night. The semifinals for each bracket would be played Monday night, and the championship game was set for Tuesday. The Celtics and Rens, as the presumptive favorites, had been given byes in the opening round, so they would have to win only one game to make it to the semifinals. But the Globe Trotters would have to win twice on Sunday to even have a shot at the Rens.

The Trotters opened their run for the world title in the second game of the afternoon tripleheader, in front of 2,500 fans. Their opponent was the Fort Wayne Harvesters, a team of former Indiana, Butler, and Purdue University players. Three minutes into the game, the score was tied at 7 all, but then Larry Bleach paid his first dividend, hitting a “long looping shot” to start a 6–0 run. The Trotters’ switching man-to-man defense completely “bewildered” the Harvesters, who were held scoreless for four and half minutes. At halftime, the Trotters went into the dressing room with a 21–15 lead.

In the second half, the Globe Trotters completely dominated the Harvesters. They opened up a comfortable lead in the final quarter and then, to the delight of their fans, put on the show. The game ended with the Trotters leading 41–33 and the crowd “screaming for more.” This may have been the world series of professional basketball, but the Trotters were still going to put on the show if they got the chance.

One down, one to go.

That evening, the Trotters were scheduled to play the nightcap at 10:30
P
.
M
., so they had a chance to watch the Rens’ opening game against the New York Yankees. The Trotters had been hearing about the Rens for years, but they were even more formidable in person. This was a team with no weaknesses. There was a cadre of gifted veterans, led by team captain “Fat” Jenkins, known as the “Babe Ruth of basketball,” who in his prime was regarded as the quickest player in the game; Eyre Saitch, a long-range gunner who moonlighted as the second-ranked tennis player in the country; Zach Clayton, a former Globe Trotter who had gone over to the Rens this season; and the Rens’ twin big men, Tarzan Cooper, a six-foot-four low-post specialist, and “Wee Willie” Smith, a six-foot-five behemoth who could play outside as well as underneath, and could shoot the ball like a guard. If the veterans weren’t scary enough, the Rens had a trio of “young bloods” who would have been marquee stars on any other team: John Isaacs, a star point guard from Textile High in New York and the first player Bob Douglas had ever recruited out of high school; Pop Gates, a six-foot-two former all-city pick from Ben Franklin High in New York, who would eventually be elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame; and Puggy Bell, a twenty-three-year-old star from the Harlem YMCA.

The Yankees were not expected to give the Rens much trouble, but they did have one ace in the hole: future Hall of Famer John “Honey” Russell, their player-coach. In his day, Russell had been the best defensive player in basketball, leading the Cleveland Rosenblums to three American Basketball League titles, but he was now thirty-seven and past his prime. “Oh, but Honey Russell could still play,” John Isaacs says, admiringly. “Like most of those fellows from that time, they played with their head.”

Honey Russell, who would later coach Seton Hall and the Boston Celtics, knew that his team couldn’t compete with the Rens’ speed or talent, so his game plan was to employ a ball-control offense and a physical defense to keep the Rens out of their rhythm. To everyone’s surprise, it worked. The Yankees took an early lead and then sat on the ball, stalling time off the clock. On the rare occasion when the Rens got the ball, the Yankees’ suffocating defense kept them from getting “a peek at the basket.” The Yankees were
challenging every shot and fouling often, but the Rens were missing badly at the free-throw line. Pop Gates alone missed six free throws, and the team missed a total of twelve. At halftime, the Rens were behind 11–7, and the fans were sensing an upset.

Rens manager Eric Illidge felt he had to gamble to get back in the game, so he pulled two of his aging veterans, Eyre Saitch and Fat Jenkins, and inserted two of his younger stars, John Isaacs and Puggy Bell. With fresh legs in the game, the Rens started forcing the tempo, and the momentum began to swing. In the end, it was the “young bloods” who saved the day. The Rens had scored only 7 points in the entire first half, but they outscored the Yankees 23–10 in the second, and came from behind to win 30–21.

The Rens were in the semifinals. Now it was up to the Trotters to do their part.

Their opponent in the nightcap, the Chicago Harmons, was expected to provide more of a test. They had three former DePaul University stars who had played on the 1936 Olympic team, and their owner, Frankie Harmon, had brought in his own closer: Mike Novak, a six-foot-nine All-American center from Loyola University. Novak had just completed his college career Wednesday night in Madison Square Garden, where Loyola lost to Long Island University in the finals of the Basketball Writers Association tournament (now known as the NIT). Immediately after that game, a bidding war for Novak had erupted among the Harmons, Kate Smith’s Celtics, and the New York Yankees, but he ended up signing with the hometown Harmons just in time to suit up for the tournament. His specialty was goaltending, which was legal at the time, and Novak had perfected the technique of leaping up and swatting an opponent’s shot away just before it hit the rim—a tactic that so infuriated some coaches that they were advocating a goaltending rule, which would eventually be passed. Given that the Trotters’ tallest men were six-foot-three (Ted Strong and Hilary Brown), the towering Novak could be an intimidating presence in the lane.

And that’s exactly how the game began. Novak batted away a number of the Trotters’ shots and, on the offensive end, scored 9 points. But the Globe Trotters shut down the rest of his teammates, who tallied only three baskets among them. The Trotters built a
22–13 halftime lead and won 31–25. Again, Abe’s Detroit investment paid dividends, as Larry Bleach led the scoring with 11 points.

At long last, the much anticipated showdown between the Rens and Trotters was going to happen. They would play Monday night in the semifinals of the World Professional Tournament, on the largest stage that professional basketball had ever seen. Whether Abe had really wanted to play the Rens or had just been challenging them as a publicity stunt, he was going to get a chance to make his greatest boast come true. And if the Trotters could, in fact, beat the Rens, then maybe all of his other blarney would be accepted as well. Perhaps the wandering Jew, the boy who slept on the living room couch until he was thirty, would at last find a home. The young man who couldn’t figure out what to do with his life would be at the top of his profession—an unqualified success.

If Abe had a lot riding on this game, so did his players, particularly Inman Jackson. One game could not wipe away all the memories from ten years of hard traveling—the two-hundred-mile hops between games and the frigid nights sleeping in a Model T, the stale doughnuts and inedible hamburgers, or the indignities and insults from white people who thought themselves too good to let these tired and hungry men sleep in their flea-ridden motels or eat their greasy slophouse food. One game could not make up for the thousands of hostile glances from Midwestern farmers who had never seen a black face in their town or the bug-eyed stares of their children, who reached out to touch the players’ skin to see if the black would rub off.

No, not even a win over the Rens could erase those memories, but it might consign them forever to the past and lead to a brighter future of playing in big towns and big arenas, sleeping in respectable hotels and eating in decent restaurants, creating a life unlike any they had imagined before. A victory could ensure them a future of playing the game they loved and not destroying themselves in the process.

Monday dawned cloudy and gray, with rain showers in the forecast. The balmy springlike temperatures still lingered, but Old Man Winter would be making a return visit that evening, with the mercury
dropping back into the thirties. Rens owner Bob Douglas, who seldom traveled with his team, had arrived in Chicago for the big game. In anticipation of larger crowds, the semifinals and finals had been moved from the Madison Street Armory to the more spacious Coliseum. By this point, even the white press had picked up on the importance of the Trotters-Rens showdown and was finally giving the teams their due. “If the pro tournament doesn’t do anything else, it at least has finally brought together two teams that fans have been waiting for years to see clash—the New York Renaissance and the Harlem Globe Trotters,” columnist Leo Fisher wrote in the
Chicago American.
“These two great Negro quintets are the most adept ball-handlers who have ever stepped on a floor, as far as we’re concerned, and when they start their intricate maneuvers against each other at the Coliseum tonight it will be something wonderful to behold.”