Spinning the Globe (22 page)

The emergence of Goose Tatum was the most promising development of an otherwise turbulent 1942–43 season. As his draft number had not yet been called, Goose would play full-time for the Trotters that year. He had started the year as a reserve, coming off the bench, and was still a work in progress on the court. But as the season progressed, he began to come into his own. He scored in double figures in several games, including a 20-point effort in Vancouver. In March, the Trotters were eliminated from the Third Annual World Pro Tournament by the Dayton Bombers, but Goose led the scoring with 17 points in a losing cause.
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It was Goose’s leaping ability that first caught the attention of the press. “It can safely be said…that Abe Saperstein has found someone who is destined to comet to fame,” one writer predicted. “[Tatum] can jump like a kangaroo and is as deadly as a bren gun in the key. He gets up about 11 feet and easily blocks balls dropping into the hoop.” In fact, Abe offered to cover all bets that Tatum could
jump higher than any basketball player in the country. But it was his freakish wingspan that made him a celebrity. Abe capitalized on the marketing potential of Goose’s incredible arms, boasting that they were “the longest in the world” and arranging numerous photo opportunities—often with Abe in the picture, comparing wingspans.

Goose had started the season playing guard, but as he grew more comfortable on the court he began showing off the clowning talents he had honed on the baseball diamond, and soon took on a featured role in the Trotters’ show. Inman Jackson, who had recognized Goose’s potential right away (he called Goose “one of the finest players” he had ever seen), taught the younger man his signature trick of jumping up and knocking an opponent’s shot out of the basket. But Goose added his own spectacular variation: he would leap above the rim and grab the ball in midair with one hand. He took over other of Inman’s tricks, such as hiding the ball under his shirt or perching it on the head of a bewildered opponent, and was awarded the coveted role of the “batter” in the Globe Trotters’ baseball routine. By late season, he was being described as a “phenom” and the Trotters’ “newest sensation,” and reporters were gushing over his “screwball antics.”

What set Goose apart from Inman Jackson, Ted Strong, Bernie Price, or other previous Trotter showmen was his improvisational ability. No one—including Abe, Inman, or the Trotter players—quite knew what Goose might pull on any given night. Traditionally, the Trotters’ show was a well-rehearsed act that had stayed pretty much the same for years. It was always the same, which was part of its appeal—the fans knew what was coming yet it still cracked them up. But Goose did something different every night.

“I should have paid myself to get in,” said teammate Ziggy Marcell, marveling at Goose’s act. As one reporter said: “He is liable to surprise his teammates any time. Last night he pulled stunts that his pals had never seen before, and that is where Saperstein starts tearing his hair. The players forget all about the game and get as much enjoyment as the fans from watching the Goose.” If Abe was already “tearing his hair” over Goose’s spontaneity in his first year as showman, he had no idea of what a wild ride it was going to be.

In March 1943, Goose hit the big time, when
Time
ran a story
on the Trotters that focused primarily on his showmanship. Again, it was his physical appearance that drew most of the attention, and
Time’
s description strayed close to the line of racial stereotyping:

But just as Goose was becoming a superstar, drawing press notices in every city the Trotters visited, he received a notice of a different kind: “Greetings from the President of the United States.” The Goose had been drafted.

He joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, and would spend the next three years stationed at Lincoln Air Field in Lincoln, Nebraska, and MacDill Field in Tampa, Florida. In Nebraska, he played center on the base’s Negro team, the Lincoln Wings, which competed in the Negro Servicemen’s League (segregation was maintained in the military, even in sporting events). Also stationed at Lincoln was Jake Ahearn, a veteran white player from the Detroit Eagles and House of David, who became Goose’s mentor, tutoring him on the basketball fundamentals he had never learned. Goose worked on his basketball skills and also spent hours practicing his clowning. The combination was deadly: he became a prolific scorer in the service league, averaging 15.8 points per game, and was sometimes invited to tournaments, even if his team wasn’t playing, just to perform his ball-handling and comedy routines.

Goose would improve so much as a ballplayer during his years in the service that he even defeated the Trotters, which could not have sat well with Abe. In December 1944, he would score 18 points to lead the Lincoln Army Air Field Wings to a 41–39 win over the Globe Trotters, in front of 8,000 screaming fans in the University of Nebraska gym.

And despite his isolation in the cornfields of eastern Nebraska, he would still garner national attention, when Robert Ripley, of
Ripley’s Believe It or Not,
featured him in his cartoon, declaring that “Pfc. Reece [
sic
]” can “reach eleven feet and drop the ball down into the basket.” In his three years away from the Trotters, the legend of the golden Goose would continue to grow.

The departure of Goose Tatum was nearly a death knell to an already crippled Globe Trotters team. More and more of Abe’s players had enlisted or had been drafted. Ted Strong was a Navy Seabee in the South Pacific, Hilary Brown was stationed in England, and other former Trotters were serving on the front lines in France and Italy. Abe was so short-handed that he was down to six players, and was forced to do something truly unprecedented: he hired a white ballplayer to take Goose’s place. Bob Karstens, a rugged six-foot-three center from Davenport, Iowa, who had been playing pro ball since he was seventeen, signed on with the Trotters in 1943.
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Karstens had spent the previous three seasons playing with the House of David, so he had often tangled with the Trotters.

Karstens was no stooge merely filling in for Tatum. He was a gifted ball handler in his own right and is credited with introducing many of the ball-handling tricks that evolved into the “Magic Circle.” He would twirl the ball on his fingers, roll it up one arm and down the other arm, or toss it up between his legs and catch it on the back of his neck. Karstens also invented the “wobbly ball”—a basketball with a weight inside that would wobble crazily when it was rolled or thrown. “I was a trickster to start with,” Karstens says with a laugh. At ninety, he is the oldest surviving Globe Trotter and still practices his ball-handling tricks for school groups and civic clubs.

After Karstens joined the team, sports reporters began referring to him as the Trotters’ “white hope” and raved about his ball-handling. “Karstens, only white member of the team, nearly made the old casaba do a ‘Charlie McCarthy’ and talk,” one wrote. “Seeing is believing and Karstens had fans talking to themselves as he handled the basketball with the ease and grace of a sensational juggler.” He also played a leading role in the Trotters’ show. If a questionable foul was called on him, Karstens would draw an eye chart on his jersey and hand the referee a pair of glasses, or he’d pull a horn out of his waistband and blow a “Bronx cheer” in the ref’s face. At halftime, he would invite several young boys out of the stands for a game of “Twenty-one.” And at the end of every game, he launched his “signature shot”—a blind, over-the-head heave from the free throw line with his back to the basket—which usually went in. “That was my best shot,” he says. Today, reflecting on his experience as the “only” white Globe Trotter, Karstens recalls it as surprisingly uneventful. “We were all sportsmen,” he says. “It was no big deal.”

With Goose Tatum plying his trade in the army air corps and with increasingly restrictive gasoline rationing limiting their travel (their mileage dropped from 35,000 to 20,000 per year), the Globe Trotters limped through the next two seasons with a makeshift crew of players. Some of the veterans were able to rejoin the team sporadically, if they could get off from their defense jobs. Babe Pressley, Roosevelt Hudson, and Duke Cumberland, for instance, played some of the 1943–44 season, and even the great Sonny Boswell and Zack Clayton returned to the Trotters for portions of that season.
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Despite the wartime restrictions, however, the Globe Trotters still managed to achieve several new milestones. In 1943 and ’44, they made two extended tours of Mexico, and captured the Mexico City Invitational tournament both years. The most startling impact of the Mexico trips was on the Trotter players themselves, who, for the first
time in their lives, were not aware of being black. The Mexican fans greeted them as heroes, without any apparent racial prejudice. It was a phenomenon that would be repeated many times in other countries, where the Trotters would receive better treatment than in their homeland. Wendell Smith, who traveled with the team at Abe’s invitation and filed accounts in the
Courier,
wrote: “The Harlem Globe Trotters…are getting their first real taste of democracy…the Mexicans have adopted the sepia court wizards from the states as their very own…. and the treatment they have been accorded since their arrival has never been equaled in the states. These Americano basketeers are idols to the personable, gracious and unprejudiced Mexicans.”

If the Mexican tours gave the players a glimpse of life without race discrimination, the Trotters’ first venture into the Deep South showed just the opposite. In December 1943, Abe scheduled a series of games in Nashville, Atlanta, Birmingham, and New Orleans, but Jim Crow laws prohibited black and white teams from playing each other, so the Trotters had to play black college teams. In Alabama, segregation was so extreme that black and white fans were not even permitted to attend the same game, so the Trotters had to play one game for whites, then empty the auditorium and play a second for blacks.

In addition to Mexico and the Deep South, during the war years Abe was able to expand the Trotters’ U.S. tour to some of the larger cities in the country. In California, for instance, he opened up huge new markets in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, San Diego, Long Beach, and Los Angeles.

The Trotters continued to play nearly half of their games against military teams, sometimes playing double-or tripleheaders on the same day. Many of those games were benefits for hospitals, base recreation funds, the Infantile Paralysis Fund, or the March of Dimes. During a two-month stretch on the West Coast, Abe contributed over $10,000 to various charities and service funds, which earned plaudits for him in many circles. Wendell Smith, who had become a Saperstein devotee, anointed the Trotters as “the greatest Negro professional basketball team in the world,” and said that the Globe Trotters had “gone farther out of their way to put a little ‘umph’ in
morale in army camps than other cage companies from the ranks of professionals…. This is a record no team in the nation can manage.”

Not everyone was so impressed with the Globe Trotters’ contribution to the war effort, however. In early 1945, James F. Byrnes, FDR’s director of the Office of War Mobilization (whom Harry Truman would soon appoint as secretary of state after FDR’s death), complained publicly that men who were fit enough to play professional sports were fit enough to serve on the front lines. Abe protested (perhaps too much), insisting that all of his players were 4-F and that he was “only carrying on” with the Trotters’ schedule because of his two brothers, Harry and Rocky, who were stationed overseas and had convinced him that sports were essential to keep up morale. “
They
believe in sports,” he said, somewhat melodramatically, “and therefore so do I.”

Abe’s pleadings may have convinced Wendell Smith, but there were some critics who did not believe that Abe’s motives were purely patriotic or humanitarian. In January 1944, Harry Borba, sports editor of the
San Francisco Herald-Examiner,
ripped Abe after one of his so-called benefit games at the Alameda Coast Guard station, at which Abe made a grand gesture of donating $876 to the Service Athletic Fund. However, Borba claimed that donation was less than half of Abe’s share of gate receipts and that he had walked away with nearly $2,000 in profits. “The Globe Trotters maintain that they build up basketball,” Borba said caustically. “They have yet to prove it around here.”

The truth was, benefits notwithstanding, the Trotters were raking in big bucks during the war years, and Abe’s attempts to portray himself as a self-sacrificing patriot were often negated by his compulsive braggadocio about the money he was making. Around his legions of fawning sportswriters, he simply could not control the urge to impress them with his success. As one reporter for the
Rochester Democrat Chronicle
wrote: “Round as a basketball and high as celery stalk, Abe is known as the Billy Rose of basketball, and not without good reason, for by his own admission he has made more money out of basketball and baseball ‘Than I know what to do with.’”

The Trotters were making record profits, and Abe was pulling in even more from Negro League baseball. By 1944, he owned two
teams, had a piece of several others, and was still promoting the hugely popular East-West All-Star game (although he was temporarily fired in 1941). “Colored baseball has done so well this summer, has made so much money, that it scares me,” he told a Vancouver sportswriter in 1944. “The colored man, coming from cotton picking and menial tasks in the south to work in defense plants, now has money. All he knows is baseball, and he can afford the best seats.”