Spinning the Globe (25 page)

When Marques Haynes arrived in Chicago for the Globe Trotters’ 1946 training camp, Inman Jackson took him downtown to meet his future boss. They got off the El and walked to the offices of A. M. Saperstein Enterprises, located in Suite 504 at 192 North Clark Street. This was the headquarters of perhaps the most successful sports entrepreneur in the country, who either owned or booked a half dozen basketball teams, a handful of Negro League baseball teams (including a Harlem Globe Trotters
baseball
team), prizefighters, even a lounge singer.
*

What Marques saw when he walked in was shocking. The so-called Suite 504 consisted of two cubbyholes, which, taken together, would have made a good-sized bedroom. Abe was crammed into the tiny front room, perched behind a desk that was stacked high with publicity photos, road maps, and press releases. Adjoining his “executive office” was an even smaller cubicle where two secretaries and a bookkeeper were sitting almost on top of each other, surrounded by file cabinets. Their desks were backed up to the windows, with barely enough room to walk, much less turn around, in the slot between the file cabinets and the desks. It looked like an office designed for Lilliputians—or by a five-foot, three-inch man who had lived his life on a miniature scale. The most successful sports promoter in the country was working out of a closet. But for Abe, who had slept on a couch in his parents’ house or in the back of a Model T Ford for much of his life, it was all he needed.

A. M. Saperstein Enterprises compensated for its spartan accommodations with hard work and efficiency. Abe had a knack for hiring smart, talented people who were as committed to the organization as he was. And he never asked anyone to work harder than he did. After twenty years in the business, he was still as driven and energetic as ever. No one could keep up with him; that was a given.

Shortly after the war, he had hired a number of key people who would stay with him for decades. These included Marian Polito, his bookkeeper; Phil Brownstein, a longtime coach at Hyde Park High School who became his chief scout; and Wyonella Smith, a young African American secretary who was married to Wendell Smith.
*
Abe’s brothers Morry and Rocky also began working for him, with Morry helping out in the front office with scheduling and Rocky working as a business manager for one of the Trotter units.

But the most important new hire—indeed, the most significant hire of his entire business career—was Marie Linehan, who began working in December 1945 as Abe’s executive secretary. She would spend the next forty-four years with the Globe Trotters—more years than even Abe himself—and would ultimately have a greater influence on the organization than any other person, including Abe.

Marie Linehan (née Grass) was born in Chicago in 1910, the only child of an Irish mother and German American father, and was raised in a strong Irish-Catholic clan. Her mother died when she was a teenager, and she and her father barely scraped by, living with relatives. Marie was extremely bright but had to quit high school to work and help support the family. When she was in her early twenties, she began having lung problems and was sent to a tuberculosis sanatorium. There, she fell in love with another patient, Bart Edward Linehan. After they were released from the sanatorium, they got married, despite her father’s opposition. In 1936, Marie gave birth to a baby boy, Tom, but within a year her happy life was shattered when her husband had a relapse of TB and was forced to return to the sanatorium. He never recovered, and died in the sanatorium when
Marie’s baby was barely a year old. She was on her own, a grieving young widow with an infant son, lacking even a high school degree. What she did have, however, was a supportive network of Irish cousins, her sustaining Catholic faith, and a fierce determination to make something of herself.

In 1941, she took a job as a clerk at Kelwyn Park High School and worked there for the next three years. Phil Brownstein, a mutual acquaintance, told Abe about her. “I think she could really help you out in the office,” Brownstein suggested.

Lord knows, Abe needed it. He may have been a marketing genius and world-class promoter, but he was still running the organization out of his hat and desperately needed someone to organize the front office. Marie began working for him on weekends, but he soon offered her a full-time job. Like Marques Haynes, she was skeptical about the security of a traveling basketball team, and only agreed to take a one-year leave of absence from her school job. After that first year, she was hooked. She would be working for the Globe Trotters, in one capacity or another, almost until the day she died.

Marie’s effect on the Globe Trotter front office was immediate and profound. She had a computer-like mind for details, a photographic memory, and enough organizational skills to have planned the Normandy invasion. She established a filing system, in which onionskin copies of Abe’s massive correspondence were neatly preserved; she emptied his coat pockets—figuratively, and perhaps literally—converting the scraps of paper with names and phone numbers into an alphabetized contact list.

Abe and Marie were a perfect fit. He was the idea man with the grand vision and charismatic personality to put those ideas into action, while she was the nuts-and-bolts administrator who handled the logistics, made sure the paychecks were cut, the press releases were mailed, and the train tickets were waiting at the station. Marie’s thoroughness and dependability freed up Abe to do what he did best—working the hustings, pressing the flesh with sportswriters and promoters, and expanding the tour ever farther, to Mexico, Alaska, and Hawaii—knowing that Marie could run the office in his absence. They talked daily on the phone when he was gone, she wrote many of his letters, perfectly capturing his style and language, and
they combined their talents to turn the Globe Trotter organization into a model of industrial efficiency. The front office may have been working out of a hovel, but Abe and Marie created a professional spirit and élan among the staff.

Abe had finally found someone who worked as hard as he did. Marie had no real social life outside of the office. She was an intelligent, attractive woman, yet she never dated after her husband’s death, which led to rumors among some of the players that she was a lesbian, and suspicions among others (and even among Abe’s family, allegedly) that she and Abe were having an affair. The truth was, she admired Abe, even revered him, and they had tremendous mutual respect for each other, but there is no indication they ever had a romantic relationship. Marie’s life was as triangulated as the Holy Trinity: she went to work, she went home to her son, and she went to Mass. Her social network consisted of her close-knit Irish cousins, with whom she played cards and visited on holidays. In her spare time, she worked at making herself into a refined, educated woman. She loved classical music and jazz, kept meticulous lists of new vocabulary words, bought season tickets to the Chicago Symphony, visited van Gogh and Rembrandt exhibits, attended performances of
South Pacific
and other favorite Broadway shows, and taught her son to appreciate the finer aspects of culture and learning. When she got home late from the office, as she often did, she would relax with a Scotch on ice, put on a favorite Virgil Fox or Erroll Garner album, and curl up with a Raymond Chandler or P. D. James novel. Mostly, however, the Globe Trotters were her life.

Marie Linehan had arrived just in time. The organization was growing so fast that Abe had to have a right-hand person to keep it moving. In the 1946–47 season, in addition to the main unit of the Trotters, Abe was fielding the Kansas City Stars, who often played doubleheaders on the same card as the Trotters, but on other nights would don Trotter uniforms and play
as
the Trotters, usually in smaller towns. (This team was sometimes listed as Satchel Paige’s All-Stars, if Paige was traveling with them, or as Jesse Owens’s Kansas City Stars.) Abe was also keeping three opposition teams in business: the House of David (led by Bob Karstens), the San Francisco All-Nations (made up mainly of Bay Area players), and the All-Hawaii Stars.

This was also the season that Abe initiated a ritual that would become a Globe Trotter tradition: a vaudeville-like halftime show, with Ping-Pong champions, hula dancers, unicyclists, jugglers, and entertainers of every ilk. He had been booking halftime entertainment since the early 1930s, such as Bunny Leavitt shooting free throws, but now the halftime show took on a life of its own. “I remain convinced that what saved Abe more than anything was his addition of the halftime vaudeville shows,” says J Michael Kenyon. “On the 1946 Hawaii tour, when he saw the Hawaiian dancing girls and the ‘little grass shack’ routines, it wasn’t long before he was signing up his own halftime entertainers.”

When basketball season ended, Abe’s baseball promotions were just gearing up; and by the time baseball ended, the Trotters were reporting to training camp. A. M. Saperstein Enterprises had become a year-round operation.

In October 1946, Marques Haynes was one of approximately two dozen ballplayers who reported to the Globe Trotters’ training camp at St. Anselm’s gym on the South Side. Among them was Boid Buie, an amazing one-armed player who had lost his left arm in an auto accident, yet somehow compensated well enough to have been a star at Tennessee State; and Ermer Robinson, a smooth, skinny-legged army vet from San Diego with a deadly one-hand push shot. Inman Jackson and Babe Pressley, the Trotters’ captain, ran the training camp and did most of the coaching; by this time, Abe was only peripherally involved on the court.

Marques, Buie, and Robinson were among the few rookies to make the final cut. Abe told Marques that he would eventually bring him up to the Trotters’ main unit—with Goose Tatum, Ted Strong, Babe Pressley, Duke Cumberland, and Ducky Moore—but wanted him to start off with the Kansas City Stars, who needed a dribbler. Ironically, no one in the Globe Trotter organization had yet seen what kind of dribbler Marques was.

Marques was thrilled to be joining the Stars, because they were scheduled to tour Mexico right after training camp. For the second year in a row, Jesse Owens had been employed by Abe as the
traveling secretary of the Stars. He handled the gate receipts, served as a backup announcer, and was the emcee for the halftime show, but his primary value was his name. The four-time Olympic gold medalist was still one of the most popular athletes in the world, although it had been a decade since his triumphs at the 1936 Munich Olympics.

At halftime of the Stars’ games, Owens would often give exhibitions of sprinting, hurdling, and broad jumping, then make a brief talk about “problems facing the country today.” Abe’s relationship with Owens, like most racial questions involving Abe, was a complicated matter. On one hand, Owens needed money and Abe provided an opportunity for him to make an honest living off his fame; on the other hand, Abe was criticized by some, particularly in the black press, for demeaning Owens by staging spectacles in which he raced against a horse and, once, against heavyweight champion Joe Louis (Louis ran backward and Owens on his hands and knees).

Marques Haynes, who drew the honor of rooming with Owens on the road, leans toward the latter view. “Jesse was one of the classiest people I ever knew,” he says. “He was very intelligent, very personable, and a good speaker…. [But] I thought it would have beenbetter if Jesse just made his speech about his experience at the Olympics and how he won those medals. I really didn’t think it was necessary for him to be out there running—because that was about ten years after Munich.”

When the Kansas City Stars got to Mexico, it didn’t take Marques Haynes very long to show what kind of exceptional player he was. The Stars carried only six players on the trip, including Marques, Vertes Zeigler, Sam Wheeler, John Scott, Greene Farmer, and Bob Karstens, the white “trickster” who had returned from the House of David. When they got to Mexico City, they discovered that their opponents, the Chihuahua State Teachers College, had pulled in the best players from the region, from Chihuahua to Guadalajara, and had nearly twenty players dressed out. Once the game began, the Chihuahua coach started substituting five new players at a time, always keeping fresh legs in the game. Adding to the Stars’ woes, Mexico City sits at seventy-four hundred feet, and the high altitude was taking a toll on their stamina. “In that rarefied air, we couldn’t breathe,” Vertes Zeigler recalls. At the start of the fourth quarter, they
were clinging to a one-point lead but were completely exhausted. Even worse, two of their six players had fouled out, leaving only four players on the floor. It was only a matter of time before the fresh Chihuahua players overwhelmed them.

That’s when Marques took over.

“Some of us wanted to take a time-out,” Zeigler recalls, “but Marques said, ‘Give me the ball; y’all take a rest.’”

Then, while the players and fans watched in amazement, Marques went into his dribbling routine. The Chihuahua players gave chase, but no one could catch him. He dribbled half-circles around the key, slid down on one knee, actually sat on the floor—and the ball never stopped. He bounced it so low (only two or three inches off the floor) and so fast that the ball sounded like a machine gun. And whether he was running, standing still, kneeling, or lying flat, no one could take the ball. It wasn’t just how fast he was dribbling that made it so remarkable, it was how fast he was
moving.
He would start and stop, change directions, fake one way and go the other, as if his knee joints were made of rubber, instead of tendon and cartilage. When he had pulled this routine on Southern University, he had done it only for the last three minutes of the game, but now he just kept dribbling—five, six, seven minutes. He was still going.

“The rest of us was just laying on the floor, pretending we were shooting dice,” says Zeigler. “And the Chihuahua players was all trying to catch Marques, but they couldn’t. So then we got up and started acting like
we
were gonna chase him, diving at the ball…all nine of us now. But you couldn’t stop Marques from dribbling that ball.”