Spinning the Globe (20 page)

On another occasion, Hal Straight of the
Vancouver
[B.C.]
Sun
asked Abe, “What is there about a Negro that makes him such a great athlete?” Flashing a smile, Abe replied, “I can answer this one by heart.” He suggested that white athletes were too soft, because of their pampered upbringing. “But the Negro is the son of a hard worker,” Abe said. “Take Joe Louis. Dumb as all get out…. Even today he can’t think for himself. But he had a beautiful body…developed…built up…and could do anything he was asked…and he had to be asked.” Within five years, Abe predicted, “the Negro will dominate sport in North America. Then after that he’ll flatten out to the same level as the white man.” After delivering this lesson in cultural anthropology, Abe turned to employee relations. Hal Straight asked if Negroes were hard to manage. “They are temperamental,” Abe replied. “You have to watch yourself…. But with a Negro you either have to be boss or nothing and I’m boss and we get along swell.”

Abe’s condescending attitude toward his players crept into other conversations. In January 1941, he was giving one Seattle sportswriter a detailed breakdown of the Trotters’ expenses, and explained that he paid for transportation, but the players paid for their meals. “This, as you might imagine, isn’t very popular with the boys,” Abe
said. “They’d be tempted to scrimp if it wasn’t for the tonic I make ’em take.” He claimed that his mystery tonic, combined with daily doses of haliver oil and viosterol, prevented the players from catching colds, but added, “that tonic gives them such an appetite they sort of forget they’re spending their own money and eat everything they can lay their hands on.”

He was even more patronizing in front of a Canadian writer, to whom Abe complained that although modern basketball called for “intricate plays and systems,” the Trotters had none. Abe’s explanation was that “Negroes are anything but bright so he can’t teach them plays. They depend entirely on ball handling, which they do better than anybody else because of their enormous paws.”

Most damning of all, he once allowed sportswriter Pete Sallaway, from Victoria, British Columbia, to visit the Trotters’ dressing room at halftime while Abe was chewing out the players for sloppy play. “What’s the matter with you fellows out there?” Abe barked. When the Globe Trotter players returned to the floor, Abe turned to Sallaway and asked, “Pete, why is it such fine athletes are so dumb? They just can’t think for themselves. I wonder just how far they would get if they didn’t have me around to figure out such situations. It was the same in the Chicago tournament. I’m certainly not boasting but I can truthfully say that is one championship that was won from the bench.”

If Abe believed that his players were too dumb to learn plays, think for themselves, or realize that they were spending their own meal money, and so temperamental that he either had to be “boss or nothing,” he was certainly not alone. In fact, the racial stereotyping of the Globe Trotters seemed to become more explicit as they became more popular. In January 1941, for instance, the
Lynden
[Wash.]
Tribune
carried an ad for an upcoming Trotters game with the headline: “Hi, Rastus!” Below the caption, the Globe Trotters were described as “those side-splitting rascals and championship basketball clowns.”

In fairness, Abe Saperstein would have been considered enlightened on the race question compared with many whites at that time. Indeed, he thought of himself as a champion for black ballplayers. And there were times when he defended the Globe Trotters’ courage and character. In a 1941
Collier’s
article, he told writer Stanley Frank:

Abe described to Frank how the Trotters had fought back from an 8-point deficit against the Chicago Bruins to win the world title. “If they were going to quit like dogs, that was the time,” he said. “But they won the title…. On the whole, colored boys are just as loyal and courageous as white players. Basketball ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Still, Abe was a product of his environment and carried some of the same prejudices—whether implicit or explicit—that permeated American society. He was certainly not an overt racist like Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi or a demagogue like Father Coughlin, and he would have never called his players “niggers.” But by his paternalistic, patronizing, and contemptuous remarks to his cronies in the press, he made it plain that the Globe Trotter players were not his equal. After the 1934 split with Runt Pullins, the Harlem Globe Trotters had crossed a first great threshold, and now they were crossing a second. Abe had made it clear in 1934 that he was the owner and the players were employees, not partners; and now he was making it equally clear that he was not just their boss but their superior.

One thing that winning the world championship did
not
change, at least in the short term, was the Trotters’ schedule. Abe had already booked most of the games for the 1940–41 season, so the team was still playing such remote hamlets as Sedro-Woolley, Mossyrock, Hoquiam, Enumclaw, Ilwaco, and Wenatchee (all in the state of Washington). To his credit, Abe went out of his way to reassure his faithful promoters that the Trotters would not forget them. “Now that we’re world champions we’re not going to pass up our annual visits to those places where we feel we are at home,” he said.

Abe understood that the foundation of the Trotters’ success lay in the great heartland of America—not in the big cities—and he did not intend to abandon the tank town circuit that had sustained them through the hard times. As he told Stanley Frank of
Collier’s
magazine:

While he would not abandon the heartland, Abe was already envisioning the biggest prize of all: New York City. “Give us a crack at…Madison Square Garden and we’ll really jam the joint,” he pleaded in January 1941. It would be almost another decade before he would get his wish, but as the Trotters’ fame spread, they began to receive booking requests from larger cities. In 1941, they made their first extensive probe into California, then initiated their first major eastern swing, looping through Ohio, Rochester, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C.; Baltimore, Charleston, West Virginia, Richmond, and finally circled back to New York City (although not to the Garden), where they played the New York Jewels in the Royal Windsor Palace (also known as St. Nick’s).

By late March, as they worked their way back to Chicago to defend their title in the 1941 World Pro Tournament, the Globe Trotters were on top of the world, and more popular than any professional basketball team in the country. It seemed like nothing could go wrong.

And then it all came crashing down.

After winning their first game in the tournament against the Newark Elks, the Trotters were upset by the Detroit Eagles, 37–36.
The Trotters played listlessly, particularly in the fourth quarter when the game was on the line, and the
Defender
blasted the Trotters for having “disappointed many of their followers by their poor performance.” The paper blamed the loss on late-night partying by some Globe Trotter players, who were seen at Bronzeville night spots “until the rays of the morning sun were breaking over Lake Michigan.” The Detroit Eagles went on to defeat the Rens and win the title, but that didn’t soften the blow of the Trotters’ defeat. It would be the Eagles who would meet the College All-Stars in November. The Trotters’ reign as world champs was over.

And then it got worse. On Easter Sunday, the Globe Trotters were scheduled to meet the Midwestern All-Stars in a benefit for Chicago’s Provident Hospital. But just before the game, Sonny Boswell, Duke Cumberland, and Hilary Brown got in a dispute with Abe over money and quit the team. Boswell and Cumberland walked out before the game, and Brown quit immediately after.

That was the final game of the season, so there was plenty of time to resolve the differences between Abe and the players, but, instead, the grievances festered all summer long. Rumors circulated through Bronzeville that Boswell was going to form his own team, just like Runt Pullins. In October, the story hit the papers, and the
Courier
reported that the three players were “severing relations” with Abe Saperstein and that many South Side fans, including some prominent businessmen, were siding with the players. According to Nugie Watkins, the players even tried to convince Inman Jackson to join the uprising. “They wanted Inman to quit Abe and come with them,” says Watkins. “And when he wouldn’t, the guys called him an Uncle Tom and ‘Abe’s nigger’ and all that kind of stuff. But Inman stayed with Abe all the way.”

As it turned out, Boswell and the other “outlaws,” as the
Defender
labeled them, didn’t start their own team but did something far worse: they signed with the Rens. And Bob Douglas, being no fool, welcomed them with open arms. What a disaster! The Trotters’ top players had quit Abe and gone over to the enemy. It was 1934 all over again. The Trotters’ headliner, Sonny Boswell, had left and taken two of the team’s best players with him. And, once again, it was all about money.

But Abe had been through this once before, and he handled this crisis in exactly the same way he had in 1934. He invited a new crop of players to training camp and announced smugly, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the Trotters would be “better than ever.” By now, he believed that the Globe Trotters were bigger than any player, even Sonny Boswell. That belief was sustained by the knowledge that hundreds of black players around the country were clamoring to play pro ball, and since Abe had a virtual monopoly on the market (except for the Rens), he knew that they would be thrilled to play for whatever money he offered. “Abe could always find guys who would play for nothing,” recalls Vertes Zeigler, a Trotter in the mid-1940s. “Hell, what other choice did they have?”

Among the rookies who reported to camp in November 1941, by far the
least
promising of the lot was a rawboned country boy from El Dorado, Arkansas, named Goose Tatum. He talked slow, walked funny, and looked like a circus freak, with arms so long that they nearly reached his knees. This was the man who was supposed to replace Sonny Boswell, the smoothest ballplayer in the game? The idea was laughable.

The Trotters broke training camp in Sheboygan (it was their second annual visit), then promptly lost eight games in the first month. This makeshift “replacement” team was shaping up as a disaster. Still, Abe kept telling reporters confidently that the Trotters would start clicking and soon be on their way to even greater fame and renown. Unbeknownst to Abe, six thousand miles from Chicago, Japanese dive-bomber pilots were completing their final practice runs, preparing for a rendezvous with destiny.

R
eece “Goose” Tatum did not look like an athlete. His body seemed all out of proportion, with arms so long (he had an eighty-four-inch wingspan) that, while standing up straight, he could touch his kneecaps. His arms actually got in his way; they were like twin anchors weighing him down. He was six foot three, but until his frame filled out he was all arms and legs—a graceless, gawky man-child. And he was pure country—a “handkerchief head,” the Bronzeville hipsters called him—whose Arkansas drawl oozed like red clay. He walked with a loping shuffle, those ridiculous arms flapping in front of him, and his big feet splayed out to either side.

As soon as he showed up in training camp, the other Trotter players started laughing at him. They laughed just watching him walk across the court. They laughed when he talked. And they laughed most of all when he tried to play ball—he was a
baseball player
, for Chrissakes, a first baseman for the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro Leagues, who Abe somehow thought could be turned into a basketball player. But he was so unpolished, so lacking in basketball fundamentals, that the players couldn’t help themselves—they had to laugh. And once they started laughing, they never stopped.

This was his gift: Goose Tatum could make people laugh. They laughed at him when he wasn’t even trying, and once he figured out how to merge his physical attributes with an intuitive sense of comic timing, no one could stop. Hidden beneath the awkward, gangly frame was a creative spark waiting to emerge, and it was to Abe
Saperstein’s credit that he recognized that spark and provided the stage on which Goose would light up the world.

Goose Tatum was symbolic of a new generation of Harlem Globe Trotters. In the early years, the team had been made up of the first generation of the Great Migration, the sons of sharecroppers who had left the Deep South searching for the promised land on the South Side of Chicago. But Goose’s family had never left the South. And in the wake of the Sonny Boswell–led revolt, Abe would begin looking more and more to rural areas for his players, recruiting country boys, like Goose, who lacked the sophistication of their big-city cousins. “Chicago boys were pretty slick,” says Nugie Watkins, a Chicago native himself. “But after that group quit Abe, he never recruited many city boys after that. Most of the guys came from little rural towns—like Goose.”

Indeed, Goose Tatum brought with him the naiveté of the country, but he also had an authenticity that had not been dulled by years in the North. He was raw, unrefined, and totally original. At first, some called him a rube. Soon, they would call him a genius.

Until the day he died, Goose Tatum was elusive about his age, and, like his contemporary Satchel Paige, his actual birth date was always shrouded in mystery. The most commonly accepted date has been May 3, 1921—which is even listed on his death certificate—but the 1920 U.S. Census shows him as a nineteen-month-old toddler, which would put his actual date of birth in 1918.

He was born in Bradley County, Arkansas, about a hundred miles from Little Rock, near the Louisiana and Texas borders. Prior to the Civil War, Bradley County had been part of the cotton belt, and although King Cotton had been deposed by the boll weevil and the big plantations were gone, this was still very much the Old South. A majority of Bradley County’s 15,000 residents were African Americans, many of them descendants of slaves, and the blacks and poor whites were still tied irrevocably to the land. Prior to World War I, the virgin pine flats and hardwood hammocks had been discovered by northern lumber companies, such as Weyerhaeuser, and were now being decimated as ruthlessly as the weevil had annihilated the cot
ton crop (in 1928, for instance, the Arkansas Lumber Company clear-cut its entire holdings of 85,000 acres in Bradley County, then went out of business). Most black families were either farming or working in the local sawmills and logging camps.

The Tatum family had been living in Bradley County for at least a hundred years. Goose’s great-grandfather Adam Tatum, born in slavery in 1818, had farmed a small parcel of land just a few miles from where Goose was born. In 1920, the Tatums were living near Sumpter township, which was too tiny to even be listed on maps of the day. It was just a crossroads, with fewer than 500 people scattered through the piney woods. Goose’s father, Benjamin Franklin Tatum (called Frank), was a farmer and an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) preacher. Goose was the fifth of seven children born to Mary Alice Tatum (although she would lose her eldest son in a drowning).

When Goose was about five, the Tatums moved twenty miles south to Calion, in adjoining Union County, where his father and older brother, Booker T., found jobs in a sawmill. But Calion was flooded by the Ouachita River, so the Tatums moved again, to Norphlet, eight miles farther west, where Goose and his siblings enrolled in the Burnt Mill Negro School. There were no organized sports teams for blacks, but Goose played sandlot baseball and rigged up his own makeshift basketball hoop, nailing a rusty barrel hoop to a tree and using a Pet milk can for a ball.

The Burnt Mill Negro School only went through the ninth grade, so most black children had no choice but to quit school and take their place in the fields or logging camps. But Frank and Mary Tatum wanted more for their children, so they made one final move, to the county seat of El Dorado, twelve miles away. Theirs was not a triumphant entry into El Dorado: the Tatums arrived in a mule-drawn wagon, with Frank, Mary, six children, and all of their belongings. Elvie Walker, now eighty-six, was there to witness their arrival. “They had some good-looking ol’ mules,” recalls Walker.

El Dorado was named after the fabled Spanish city of gold, and the name proved to be prescient, as “black gold” was discovered in 1921, when a gusher spouted one hundred feet in the air. The discovery of oil set off a frenzy that turned the sleepy town into a tent-city boomtown overnight. Over 460 wells were drilled in the first
ten months; the population multiplied sixfold, from 4,000 to 25,000; and local residents erected food stands in their front yards to feed the treasure-seekers. El Dorado became the hub of Arkansas’ most productive oil and gas field, and oil money funded the construction of new hotels, opulent homes, a Gothic-inspired courthouse, and a half dozen banks. Most of that money bypassed the black community, but oil fever did attract many African Americans to El Dorado, including doctors, dentists, barbers, and businessmen.

By the mid-1930s, however, when the Tatums arrived, the boom had long since faded, and the Great Depression was pummeling El Dorado as harshly as any place in the country. Inevitably, the black community suffered most of all. A few black men still worked for the Lion Oil refinery, but many more had been forced onto the relief rolls. The lucky ones hooked on with the WPA or CCC, or found jobs as porters, cooks, or dishwashers in El Dorado’s hotels. Black women were relegated to domestic work or taking in laundry. In the fall, flatbed trucks would arrive from Mississippi and recruit young black men to work the cotton harvest in the Delta.

The Tatums moved into a house on Arkansas Street, in the heart of El Dorado’s most thriving, and infamous, neighborhood, which was known as “St. Louis” because of the nightclubs, juke joints, pool rooms, barber shops, barbeque joints, and even a few houses of ill repute that lined Liberty Street. On Saturday nights, African Americans from every town in a fifty-mile radius would pour into St. Louis for dances at the Plaza and the St. Louis Inn. They would come from the logging camps in Magnolia, Mount Holly, and Three Creeks; the oil fields in Mackover; and even from Bernice and Junction City, Louisiana. By ten
P
.
M
., Liberty Street would be impassable, as zoot-suited men and women in their Saturday night finery clogged the street.

This was the world that young Goose Tatum was thrust into, after spending his entire life in the sticks of Sumpter, Calion, and Norphlet. He was extremely shy and a loner, the kind of boy who would barely speak, even when spoken to. Surrounded by the cacophony of Liberty Street, he was more inclined to hang out by himself, or with one close friend, rather than in the crowd. In El Dorado, that one friend became John Willie Banks, nicknamed “Dean,” and the two
boys made an odd couple. Tatum was tall and gangly and hardly said a word, while Dean was barely five feet and a nonstop talker. Inevitably, their friends in St. Louis nicknamed them “Mutt and Jeff.”

The origin of Goose Tatum’s famous nickname is as mysterious as his age. There are three contradictory stories, each with its advocates: his sister Thelma, who passed away in 2003, always insisted that it was because goose liver was his favorite food; Elvie Walker claims that his best friend, Dean, hung the moniker on him because he “strutted around like an old goose” on the baseball diamond; and Tatum himself told reporters, in later years, that he got the name after leaping to catch a football, and somebody said he looked like a goose. In any case, he would be Goose forevermore.

That fall, the Tatum children entered Booker T. Washington High School, which actually included grades one through twelve.
*
Goose performed well in school when he put his mind to it, but that was not very often. As he would later say, “School was not for me.” None of his classmates would have ever predicted that he would become a world-renowned comedian, as he barely spoke, responding only when teachers called on him, and was reticent even around his peers. He showed only a passing interest in girls, avoided the temptations of Liberty Street, cared nothing about fishing or hunting, and had an aversion to physical labor. “I never knew Goose to work at all,” says Walker. In fact, Tatum and Dean—Mutt and Jeff—came up with an ingenious scheme to make money: before daylight, they would steal milk bottles off people’s front stoops and redeem them for the ten-cent deposit. Tatum was especially adept at this gambit. “Goose always had a great big old black coat on, so he could hide those bottles,” Walker recalls. “He’d grab a bottle and be gone.”

One thing was clear: he did not envision his future in the logging camps or oil fields. The only thing he really loved to do was play ball. Baseball was his first love. He would play sandlot games with other boys from St. Louis—and sometimes, despite Jim Crow covenants against it, they would even face off against local white
boys. The ball field was the one place where all of the restrictions and institutionalized inequalities fell away. It was just two teams going at each other, and may the best one win. Seven decades later, Elvie Walker still remembers those fierce battles. “Them was some ball games,” he says. “Just get out there and play.”

When it was too cold for baseball, Goose and his friends switched to basketball, although they lacked both a court and a ball. Instead, they played in the living room of an old abandoned house on North West Avenue with ten-foot ceilings and hardwood floors. The boys nailed an empty lard can to the wall and, using a tennis ball, played for hours.

Playing sports was the one place in which this shy, awkward boy came alive. By the time he was in high school, Goose would hitchhike twenty or thirty miles away—to Damascus, Magnolia, or Stevenson—to play in a baseball game. He went alone, usually, or with his friend Dean. “If there was going to be a game, Goose would somehow find a way to get there,” says Walker. Once, Goose and Dean hitchhiked all the way to Louisiana for a game, and didn’t return home for many days. Their families began to worry about their safety, but the boys finally straggled back to El Dorado, their clothes torn and dirty. Dean told a harrowing tale about a white farmer who had captured them and forced them to work on his sweet potato farm. They finally escaped in the middle of the night, running through the swamps with sweet potatoes stuffed in their shirts for sustenance on the journey home. “We were enslaved down there,” Dean said. Years later, Goose would repeat the story to his young son Reece III.

One fall, Tatum tried out for the Washington High football team, which was quarterbacked by Elvie Walker, but he didn’t like the contact and quit. When basketball season rolled around, however, he made the varsity squad. Washington High didn’t have a gym, so home games were played on the dance floor of the Plaza, a club in St. Louis.

By 1936, Goose had grown tired of school and dropped out of Washington High after only two years. That summer, he made his first money as an athlete. El Dorado had a white minor league baseball team, the El Dorado Lions, sponsored by Lion Oil Company. It was a Cincinnati Reds farm team in the Class D Cotton States
League. Inspired by the white Lions, Goose, Dean, Elvie Walker, and other players organized a black equivalent, the El Dorado Black Lions (although they received no funding from Lion Oil). Their first season, they stayed close to home, playing black teams in nearby towns. The white Lions let them use their ballpark, Rowland Field, for home games, and they traveled to away games in Walker’s Model A Ford. The two teams would split the gate receipts “after the nut” (after paying expenses for gas, food, baseballs, umpire, and rent for the ballpark), with 60 percent to the winners and 40 percent to the losers. A player’s share might only be fifty cents or a dollar, but Goose was just happy to be paid for playing ball. He was now a professional.

The next season, some local black businessmen sponsored the team, and the Black Lions began traveling as far as Little Rock, Pine Bluff, and Shreveport, Louisiana. They played Saturday night games under the lights at Rowland Field, and their ball games became a popular prelude to the dances at the Plaza and the St. Louis Inn. “It was a hot time in the old town,” recalls Newt Ellis, ninety, who was the team’s player-manager. Even the white players from the El Dorado Lions came out to watch their games, and the black players reciprocated (they were admitted free to the white games). The players’ shares of the gate receipts grew to $15 or $20—good money for a two-hour game in the Depression.

Tatum was a decent hitter, spraying the ball to all fields, but he was struggling in the field. He played outfield, but his long arms seemed to interfere with his fielding and coordination. He was not particularly fast, and he was so gangly that it took him a while to get up to speed chasing down fly balls. Then, inspiration struck. Newt Ellis, the Black Lions’ player-manager, who was a college student at Arkansas A and M, decided to try Tatum at first base. “Goose couldn’t get around too well in the outfield, because of his build,” recalls Ellis. “But with his long arms and long legs, he made a hell of a first baseman.”