Spinning the Globe (23 page)

On May 8, 1945, the war ended in Europe, with Germany’s surrender. Three more savage months of fighting still lay ahead in the Pacific, but an Allied victory was now assured. World War II had fundamentally changed the balance of power in the world, with the old guard in Europe—England, France, and Germany—giving way to two emerging superpowers, the United States and the USSR.

The war years had also changed the face of professional basketball in America. Gas rationing, military enlistments, and the draft had forced some teams to disband completely (including the Cleveland Buckeyes, Chicago Stags, and Detroit Eagles) and had restricted many others (such as the New York Rens) to playing limited schedules on their home turf. Undoubtedly, the war had also hindered the Harlem Globe Trotters, slowing the momentum they had built after the 1940 world championship and the College All-Star game. Yet Abe’s determination to keep them on the road, even with a makeshift crew, had allowed the Trotters to emerge from the war relatively unscathed. They had entered the 1940s still playing in the backwoods shadows of the New York Rens, but by 1945 they had emerged into the bright sunlight of postwar America as the most dominant team in the land. In the process, Abe Saperstein had become a successful sports mogul and a wealthy man.

O
n March 6, 1946, the finest all-around basketball player in the history of the Harlem Globe Trotters, and the most influential on the sport, was revealed in the person of Marques Haynes, a college senior from tiny Langston University in Oklahoma, who led his college teammates to a 74–70 victory over the Globe Trotters in Oklahoma City. Haynes didn’t just beat the Trotters, which was surprising enough, he destroyed them, scoring 26 points—the second greatest performance by an opposition player in Globe Trotter history.
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None of the great players from the New York Rens had ever scored that many points against them—not Pop Gates, Tarzan Cooper, John Isaacs, or Wee Willie Smith. None of the former college All-Americans in the World Pro Tournament had ever had a game like that—not Cowboy Edwards, Mike Novak, or Wibs Kautz. No player on any team in the “modern era” (since the elimination of the center jump) had ever done that kind of damage to the proud Globe Trotter defense.

So who was this formidable giant-killer who had wreaked such havoc? He was a twenty-one-year-old college boy who appeared too young to shave, and although he was listed at five-foot-eleven and 160 pounds, he was small-boned and so slight that he looked as if he might break in half from a Ted Strong elbow or a hard pick from Bernie Price.

This remarkable performance occurred during a monumental week in American history. Two days earlier, Jack Roosevelt Robinson had reported to spring training with the Montreal Royals, the International League AAA farm club of the Brooklyn Dodgers, after Dodger owner Branch Rickey had shown the courage to sign him to a Dodger contract. Robinson’s breaking the color line in major league baseball was symptomatic of changes that were slowly coming in America. The war had been over for six months, and the one million African Americans who had served in the United States military came home with high expectations that their sacrifices on the fields of battle would be rewarded at home. The world had been transformed, and they expected America to follow suit.

As it had so often before, however, America let them down. Only five weeks after V-J Day, Jesse James Payne, a thirty-year-old black sharecropper in Madison, Florida, was lynched by a mob of angry whites, who snatched him out of the county jail in the middle of the night (with a convenient assist from the local sheriff, who left the keys in his unlocked car), hauled him to a lonely stretch of highway, and riddled his body with bullets. Payne’s only crime was that he had allegedly threatened to report the owner of the land that he farmed for overplanting his federal tobacco allotment, and the white man then accused him of raping his daughter. Despite the efforts of Thurgood Marshall and Florida NAACP leader Harry T. Moore, the murder of Jesse James Payne was never solved. The Payne killing exploded in the national press, serving as a stark reminder that race hatred in America was as deep-seated as ever. And despite the contributions of black veterans in the war, they returned to find that discrimination in housing, employment, education, and even in the U.S. military had not been eradicated. Still, African Americans were thankful for small signs of progress, including Jackie Robinson’s signing with the Dodgers.

The basketball game between Langston University and the Globe Trotters was not supposed to happen. The Trotters were scheduled to play a team called the Professional All-Stars, who canceled at the last minute. In desperation, Abe telegrammed Langston coach Zip Gayles and begged him to substitute for the no-show All-Stars. Gayles, a legendary figure who coached football and basketball at
Langston for thirty-one years, obliged. If Abe had known what the Trotters were in for, he might never have sent that wire.

Abe had no idea how good Marques Haynes and the Langston Lions were, but some of the Trotter players might have had an inkling. The previous year, Langston had played on a twin bill with the Trotters in Oklahoma City, where they had upset Satchel Paige’s Kansas City Stars, one of Abe’s farm teams. That night, Marques had been virtually unstoppable, scoring 23 points on what the
Daily Oklahoman
called a “barrage” of “cross country shots.”

But that had been a farm team, and this was the Trotters’ first unit, the big team, which was nearly back to full strength after the war. Ted Strong had returned from the Seabees and was reunited with veterans Duke Cumberland, Bernie Price, Zach Clayton, Roosevelt Hudson, Ziggy Marcel, and Tony Peyton. Only Goose Tatum was still in the service, but he would be rejoining the team in a few days.

Over 4,000 fans were packed into the Oklahoma City Auditorium for the big game, including many high school basketball players, who were in town for the state prep championships. The auditorium wasn’t designed for basketball, but a full-size court had been laid out on the stage, and fans filled the regular auditorium seats and portable bleachers erected on the stage.

During pregame warm-ups, Duke Cumberland, the Trotter captain, moseyed over to Zip Gayles and said jovially, “You want us to take it easy on your boys, Coach? We don’t want to show ’em up.”

“Hell, no!” barked Gayles, who was a fierce disciplinarian. “Go ahead and play us like you would anybody else. My boys know how to play the game.”

That was an understatement. During Marques Haynes’s four years at Langston, the Lions had won 112 of 115 games—a .974 winning percentage that was better than that of any team in the country, including the Globe Trotters’. They went two and half years without losing a game, ran off one 54-game win streak, and came into the Trotters game having won 76 of their last 77. Furthermore, Zip Gayles knew full well what Marques was capable of, whether the Trotters remembered him or not.

Gayles was an early pioneer of the fast-break offense, which he described as getting to the basket “first and most.” The Lions went
full out the entire game, pushing the ball up the court on every possession, in what the
Oklahoman
called their “hell-for-leather 2-points-a-minute style.” The Lions’ front line of Frank Luster, Lee Blair, and future Globe Trotter Willie Malone was somewhat undersized (Luster was the tallest at six-foot-one), but they were excellent rebounders who whipped outlet passes to a streaking Marques Haynes or the Cudjoe twins, Lawrence and Lance, an identical pair of five-foot-four speed demons. On defense, Gayles mounted a full-court press, with a switching man-to-man defense that yielded turnovers and easy baskets by the dozens. Coming into the game, Marques was averaging over 16 points per game, and Lawrence Cudjoe was right behind him, with a 12-point average.

It took the Globe Trotters only about three minutes to realize that they were in a fight for their lives. Langston came out running, jumping out to a 9–1 lead, and the Lions’ swarming defense held the Trotters without a field goal until nearly five minutes had elapsed. Zip Gayles’s entire system was built on speed, and although the Globe Trotters were renowned for their speed—indeed, they were known as the “lightning-quick casaba cagers”—they had never encountered any team as fast as Langston. Younger Globe Trotters like Cumberland and Hudson could still get up and down the court, but some of the veterans, especially Ted Strong and Zach Clayton, were starting to show their age. Langston had a bench full of college boys with young legs, and when one got tired, Gayles would send in another. None of the Trotters could stay with Marques Haynes, yet he wasn’t even the fastest player on the Langston team. That honor belonged to the Cudjoe twins, who were like angry wasps swarming around the Trotters’ legs.

The Globe Trotters had a huge height advantage, however, and they started feeding the ball inside to Cumberland, Strong, and Price, who got the Trotters back in the game. Cumberland, who ended up scoring 22 points, started the comeback with a dunk in the low pivot, and the Trotters muscled their way to a 19–18 lead at the end of the first period. They extended their lead in the second period, and even put on the show a little before halftime, hoping to catch a breather. Since the early 1930s, the Globe Trotters had always relied on the show to rest their weary legs, but every time they tried one
of their trick plays against the college boys, Zip Gayles had two Langston players in their face, slapping at the ball. The Globe Trotters weren’t used to playing full-out for an entire game, especially at Langston’s hell-for-leather pace.

At halftime, the Trotters still managed to hold a 4-point lead, 37–33, but they knew they were in trouble. They were out of breath and feeling their age. Meanwhile, in the Langston dressing room, the college boys weren’t even winded, and Zip Gayles was urging on his troops. “This is the last game of the year,” he told them. “Let’s open it up. If you’ve got an outside shot, take it.” He instructed his charges to turn up the pressure on both ends, knowing that their “firebrand style” would eventually take its toll on the Trotters, like a heavyweight fighter in the tenth round whose legs have gone rubbery. But he also devised a strategy to counter the Trotters’ height advantage. “You’re faster than they are,” he told them. “Beat them into position and box them out.”

Langston came roaring out after halftime, going on a 15–7 run to take a 48–44 lead. Marques Haynes was on fire, hitting three straight buckets in the space of fifty seconds. He was pouring in shots from all over the court, stealing passes and converting them into easy layups, fearlessly driving the lane and challenging Ted Strong and Bernie Price, scoring right over them. He and the Cudjoes seemed to be playing at a different speed from anybody else. The Cudjoes were faster than Marques in a footrace, but
nobody
was quicker. He could take one step and be past his defender—and gone! When Marques wasn’t flying past the Trotters for layups, he was launching running one-hand shots from the top of the key—“fling shots” he called them, that were impossible to block. He was in perpetual motion, pausing just long enough to aim a two-hand set shot from the corner.

In the second half, the score was deadlocked twelve times, and there were eight lead changes. The Trotters had no choice but to play at Langston’s pace, trying to keep up, and the third quarter became a scoring fest. In the first four minutes, the two teams scored 28 points between them. Duke Cumberland, who was keeping the Trotters in the game, fouled out midway through the period, but Bernie Price
picked up the slack, scoring 8 points to give the Trotters a slim 58–56 lead at the end of the third quarter.

In the final period, the score was tied at 60 and again at 68, but with two minutes left, Langston started to pull away. The Trotters fought gamely, using their experience and court savvy to keep the Lions from running away, but they were out of gas. With a minute left, Lawrence Cudjoe stole the ball from an exhausted Zach Clayton and went in for a clinching layup. When the final gun sounded, Langston had a 74–70 victory. It was the highest-scoring game ever played, to that point, in the Oklahoma City Auditorium.

Marques had scored his phenomenal 26 points, and Lawrence Cudjoe, whom the
Oklahoman
called “the fly in the Trotters’ soup all night,” added 21. The most telling statistic, perhaps, was that Langston had managed to outrebound the taller Trotters.

The most humiliating part of the loss for the Trotters was that Langston seemed to take the victory for granted. Marques Haynes, in particular, took it all in stride. “We had the better team,” he recalls matter-of-factly. It was just another win. He had such confidence in himself, he believed that every time he stepped on the court he was the best player on the floor. And he expected to win.

After the game, Winfield Welch, the Trotters’ traveling secretary, sought out Marques in the Langston dressing room. Welch had apparently called Abe and told him about this remarkable player, because he offered Marques a job on the spot. “You can leave with us tonight,” Welch said. “We’re going to Dallas.”

Any other African American ballplayer in the country would have leaped at the chance to play with the Trotters, but Marques turned him down cold. He would be graduating from Langston in May—the first person in his family to earn a college degree. “My mother would kill me if I quit school,” he said. Welch told him he had a standing invitation to join the team after graduation or, if he preferred, to come to training camp in Chicago in the fall. Marques thanked him for the offer and said he would consider it.

That encounter in the dressing room was symbolic of Marques Haynes’s entire history with the Globe Trotters. While other players would have done anything to be a Harlem Globe Trotter—accept
any salary, put up with any indignities—Marques always kept his options open. “I think I was the first college graduate who ever played for Abe,” he says today. “I always knew I could do something else besides play basketball.”

He went back to Langston, finished his degree, and spent the summer weighing his options. He had been offered teaching and coaching jobs in Arkansas, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma, and seriously entertained one offer from Enid, Oklahoma, to teach history and industrial education and to coach basketball. Trying to make a living playing professional basketball seemed like an insecure future, especially compared to teaching. Basketball was still the fourth, or even fifth, most popular sport in America. “I almost took the job in Enid,” he recalls.

Eventually, he decided to give the Globe Trotters a chance. He thought traveling around the United States playing ball might be enjoyable. He would give it a year or two and see how it went. Forty-six years, 4 million miles, and over 12,000 games later, he would still be playing ball.

Marques Haynes was born in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, outside of Tulsa, around October 1924 (in the tradition of Goose Tatum and Satchel Paige, he is secretive about his exact age, saying only, “I’ve been holding at thirty-seven and a half for a long time”). Sand Springs had originally been settled by Cherokee Indians at the end of the Trail of Tears, but by the time Marques was born, the town had 6,000 residents and was one of the leading industrial cities in Oklahoma. There were oil and gas refineries; glass, lamp, chimney, dog food, and box factories; and it was famous for the Sand Springs Home for Widows and Orphans, the Salvation Army Maternity Home, and a school for the deaf.