Spinning the Globe (24 page)

Although Oklahoma was not a southern state, it might as well have been when it came to race relations. Segregation in Sand Springs was rigid and unquestioned. The African American community was confined to a four-square-block area that was separated from the white section of town by the Sand Springs Railway tracks. Blacks were able to find jobs in the glass, chimney, and dog food fac
tories, but not at the Standard Oil refinery or the Commander textile mill. The two local movie theaters refused to sell tickets to blacks, even to let them sit in the balcony, so African American families had to go into Tulsa to watch a movie.

Marques Haynes was the youngest of four children (he had two brothers and a sister). When he was three, his father abandoned the family and moved to Kansas and, eventually, to Texas; Marques would never know the man until he was grown. His mother supported the family by taking in laundry and working as a domestic in white people’s homes. They lived in a house with no running water or electricity, and with a dirt yard that Marques swept with a broom. They nailed cardboard boxes inside the stud walls for insulation and papered the walls with copies of the
Tulsa World.

What the family lacked in modern conveniences, they made up for in closeness. As the baby, Marques was favored by his mother and his siblings, and that nurturing helped him develop a rock-solid identity and a self-confidence that would sustain him throughout his life. He was outgoing, respectful, and dependable. He had a quick smile and a hello for everyone he met, and the next time he saw them he would remember their name, greeting them with a genuineness and warmth that made people feel at ease. He could have been a wonderful politician or salesman, as he had a way of drawing people in, of making them feel special.
Everyone
liked Marques Haynes.

His lifelong infatuation with basketball began when he was five years old. His sister, Cecil, played on the girls’ team at Booker T. Washington High School, and since their mother worked late, Cecil would babysit Marques in the afternoons. She would carry him with her to basketball practice, put him in the corner of the gym to keep him from getting trampled, and hand him a ball. He entertained himself the only way he could: bouncing the ball until Cecil was through.

That bouncing ball would become the primary metaphor for Marques Haynes’s life.

When he got older, Marques and two friends invented a game in which they would bounce a tennis ball as they walked the railroad tracks that divided Sand Springs’ black and white neighborhoods. The winner was the one who could keep the ball bouncing the longest on the narrow steel rails. It was nearly impossible, at first, but
they kept practicing until they could bounce it a dozen times, then twenty, then for five minutes at a stretch. It was just a boyhood game to pass the time, but Marques was developing a heightened sense of touch and feel for controlling a bouncing ball, no matter what size.

Growing up, basketball was all around him. His sister Cecil and his brother Wendell, both of whom played for Booker T. Washington, taught him to shoot on a homemade basket they had constructed by nailing an economy-size food can to the outhouse wall, with a gunnysack for a net and a ball made of rolled-up rags. Marques would sit and watch Wendell and the older boys in the neighborhood play pickup games on a dirt court. If one team built a comfortable lead, the players would start showboating, dribbling between their legs and whipping behind-the-back passes, showing up the other team. Marques studied Wendell’s moves and practiced them by himself. He started by mimicking his brother’s moves but eventually developed his own dribbling tricks, which he unveiled in pickup games with his peers.

In 1938, he entered Booker T. Washington High School, where he played clarinet in the marching band and tried out for the basketball team. He was the eleventh player chosen, barely making the cut. Booker T. Washington was a basketball powerhouse, and the skinny freshman was riding the bench. When the band director moved band practice to the same time as basketball, Marques had to make a choice. “He made it easy for me,” Marques says, laughing. He quit the band to concentrate on basketball, but he was still warming the bench. The fancy dribbling he had practiced for so many hours did him no good at all, as the high school coach was a stickler for fundamentals and would not permit any hint of showboating.

In 1941, his junior year, Washington High qualified for the national Negro high school championship tournament in Tuskegee, Alabama. “We had some terrific ballplayers,” Marques recalls. “I wasn’t the best player on the team—by far.” In fact, the coaches could fit only eight players in the two cars that would make the trip to Tuskegee, and Marques was not chosen. On the morning of the trip, however, one of the eight players got sick, so the coach woke Marques up at home and told him to get ready. In the national tournament, Washington High rolled through its bracket, reaching the
finals. Because of the missing player, Marques got his first significant playing time, and he performed magnificently, particularly as a defensive stopper. In the championship game, Washington was matched against the team from Seminole, Oklahoma (it was the first time two teams from the same state had ever played in the finals), which was led, ironically, by Lawrence and Lance Cudjoe. In a low-scoring, defensive game, Sand Springs prevailed, 38–24, giving them the Negro national championship. And Marques Haynes, who wasn’t even supposed to make the trip, was named a second-team All-American. He had come into his own in the biggest games of his life.

The next year, his senior season, he finally broke into the starting lineup and made the all-conference team. After graduation, his mother was insistent on his going to college. There was only one option. Langston University was, and still is, the only historically black college or university in Oklahoma. His church took up a collection, raising $25 to help with his tuition. In September 1942, he hitchhiked to Langston, ninety miles away. Wartime gas rationing was keeping many people off the road, so it took him sixteen rides to make the trip, and he rode the last few miles with an old white farmer in a mule-drawn wagon.

Langston, located forty-three miles northeast of Oklahoma City, was a dusty village with no paved streets and only 514 residents, which included the entire student body of Langston University, 300-strong. Founded in 1887, Langston’s original mission—inspired by Booker T. Washington—was to train teachers in agriculture and mechanical or industrial arts; in the 1920s, however, the curriculum had been expanded to include the arts and sciences.

When Marques Haynes arrived in 1942, the war had taken away many of Langston’s male students. He played quarterback on the football team and won a starting job on the basketball team. Just as in Sand Springs, his natural warmth drew people to him. “Everybody was crazy about him,” recalled Frank Luster, a teammate who became a lifelong friend. Under Zip Gayles’s strict tutelage, Marques’s basketball skills flourished. He was the team’s MVP and leading scorer four years in a row, the MVP of the Southwestern Conference three years in a row, and led the Langston Lions to two straight Southwestern Conference titles.

And yet, in his first three years at Langston, as in his previous four years at Booker T. Washington High, he never once revealed the kind of fancy dribbling he had been practicing since childhood. Zip Gayles was a pioneer of fast-break basketball, but he was strictly “old school” when it came to basketball fundamentals. One behind-the-back pass or between-the-legs dribble was enough to bring down the wrath of Coach Gayles, and he only had to get on a player one time to impress the point. He would have been apoplectic if Marques had unveiled any of the tricks he had developed on his own. Thus, at the end of three years of a celebrated college career, no one still had any idea what Marques could do with a ball.

They might never have known if not for an insult.

In February 1945, Langston traveled to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to defend its title in the Southwestern Conference tournament. During an early-round game, Marques watched from the stands as Southern University, the host team, demolished an outmatched squad from Samuel Huston College by a score of 55–21. Samuel Huston College, a tiny United Methodist school in Austin, Texas (not to be confused with Sam Houston State University in Huntsville), had only one claim to fame: its coach that year was Jackie Robinson, who had taken the job after being discharged from the army. Robinson had not yet signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers, but he was still one of the most famous black athletes in the country, from his college days at UCLA.

Marques got to meet Robinson before the Southern game, and was rooting for his team. But the lowly Samuel Huston Dragons never had a chance. Southern ran away with the game, more than doubling Samuel Huston’s point total, and in the last quarter began rubbing it in: they were throwing behind-the-back passes, running a weave at the top of the key, and generally lording it over the Samuel Huston players. Marques felt sorry for Robinson and his players, who were being humiliated by Southern’s antics. “They made fools out of them,” he recalls. Marques felt it was poor sportsmanship, to the point of being disrespectful, and vowed that if Langston and Southern met in the championship game, he would give Southern a taste of its own medicine.

Langston roared through the first two rounds, drubbing Arkansas State 66–31 and Prairie View 70–50. Southern was their opponent in
the semifinals, and they destroyed the Jaguar Cats by a score of 55–27, beating them almost as badly as Southern had defeated Samuel Huston. It was a double elimination tournament, however, so Southern could still make it to the championship game through the loser’s bracket. Marques bided his time; he did not want to provoke Zip Gayles until the last game.

The scenario unfolded just as he had hoped. Southern defeated Wiley University by one point, setting up a rematch with Langston in the title game on Saturday night, February 17. Marques told none of his teammates what he was planning, and certainly didn’t mention it to Coach Gayles. At halftime, Langston had only a 4-point lead, but in the second half Southern “wilted under the scorching pace and superior marksmanship of the Oklahomans,” the
Chicago Defender
reported. Led by Marques’s scoring, Langston built an insurmountable 19-point lead.

As the clock wound down, Marques began plotting his revenge. He was going to unveil a phenomenon that no one had ever seen, to that point, but that millions of fans in 106 countries, on seven continents, would witness over the next six decades.

And so, with less than three minutes left, he started doing his fancy dribbling. He dribbled behind his back and between his legs, dribbled the ball two inches off the floor and higher than his head. Two Southern players chased him, but he dribbled right through them. He circled around the key in one direction, then back the other way, weaving in and out of the Southern players. Just when they seemed to have him boxed in, he would feint in one direction and slam on the brakes so suddenly that they’d slide right past him, falling over themselves. The fans rose to their feet and began cheering. Marques kept making circles around the key, juking the Southern players off their feet. He slid down on one knee, hopped back up, and kept dribbling, never missing a beat.

Out of the corner of his eye, Marques saw the one person in the gym who was not pleased with his exhibition. “Haynes, what in the hell are you doing?!” Zip Gayles bellowed. Marques ignored his coach and kept dribbling.

There was a minute left in the game, and by now the whole Southern team was chasing him. The crowd was going wild. Twenty-
five hundred people were hollering and stamping their feet on the wooden bleachers, making a deafening racket. But that wasn’t enough. People felt they had to do something more to show their appreciation for the improvisational artistry being displayed before their eyes. They started tossing programs on the floor, then coins—pennies, dimes, and nickels—showering the court in tribute. They threw their hats, and even their shirts. No one had ever seen anything like this before on a basketball court. And, in truth, there had never been anything like this on any basketball court. Not on any court, anywhere, since Dr. Naismith had invented the game. What Marques Haynes was doing with a ball had never been done.

Marques kept dribbling. This was the payoff for all the hours he had spent in the corner of the Booker T. Washington gym, a five-year-old kid bouncing a ball to entertain himself, and for all the steamy afternoons he’d spent walking the railroad tracks, bouncing a tennis ball on the rails.

The more exuberant the fans got, however, the madder Zip Gayles became. “Zip, he had a fit,” Clarence Hawkins, a Langston teammate, would later recall. Gayles jumped off the bench and chased Marques down the sidelines, hollering at him to stop. Marques kept dribbling, but with fifteen seconds left, a Langston teammate yelled, “Marques, here comes Zip!” The old coach had completely lost his composure and, violating one of the sacred rules of the game, rushed onto the court and started chasing Marques, right along with the Southern players.

Marques faked out his coach with the same deftness he had used on the Southern players and streaked for the Langston goal. Just before the gun sounded, he tossed in a layup and kept right on running for the dressing room, with Zip Gayles on his tail. “You’ll never play another game at Langston University!” Gayles bellowed in the dressing room. Marques politely reminded him that it was the last game of the season. A few hours later, after Gayles calmed down, they both had a big laugh about it, and the next year Marques was back on the team.

He did no more fancy dribbling at Langston, however. Zip Gayles made it clear that he would not tolerate it. And Marques stuck to that deal when Langston defeated the Globe Trotters in Oklahoma
City. “I didn’t want to take any chances,” he says today, and the listener is uncertain whether he is referring to losing the game or setting off Zip Gayles again.

So, when Winfield Welch offered him a Globe Trotter contract in the locker room after the game, he had no idea of Marques’s dribbling skills. All he knew was that this college kid had decimated the best pro team in the country. It would be another year before anyone in the Globe Trotter organization had a clue.