Spinning the Globe (3 page)

In 1908, Abe and his sister Leah enrolled in the Ravenswood Elementary School, where they were the only Jews in their class. “We did have problems, especially at the time that we were going to school,” says Leah, who is now 100 years old. As an undersized Jew in a Gentile school, Abe was a walking target with a bull’s-eye on his back. He and Leah were called “dirty Jews” and “Christ killers,” and little Abe had so many fights that he snuck into a boxing gym to pick up some pugilistic pointers.

Eventually, however, he discovered the one safe haven where his size and religion didn’t matter: the playing field. Sports would become his refuge for the rest of his life. In 1912, he began playing basketball at the Wilson Avenue YMCA, or he’d walk two miles to Welles Park, to play basketball or baseball. He even played second base for a parochial school, although he was a Jewish kid from the public schools. “Abe was crazy about sports,” says his youngest sister, Fay. “He lived for sports.” The Saperstein living room became the headquarters for Abe’s teammates, whom he would invite home to his mother’s dinner table. Often he would go to Louis’s tailor shop to practice his dribbling in front of the floor-length mirrors.

For many immigrant children, sports were a ticket to assimilation into America, and this was particularly important for Jews, to refute their prevalent image as physically weak “people of the book.” Such stereotypes were espoused by prominent anti-Semites like Henry Ford, who proclaimed, “Jews are not sportsmen…whether this is due to their physical lethargy, their dislike of unnecessary physical action or their serious cast of mind…. It may be a defect in their character.”

In Chicago, local settlement houses (such as Jane Addams’s Hull House) and the Chicago Hebrew Institute sponsored athletic teams and “physical culture” programs to speed up the assimilation of
immigrant children and prove, in the words of Chicago’s
Daily Jewish Courier,
that “while we are proud to emphasize our interests in matters intellectual, we must not brand ourselves as physical weaklings.” In no time, young Jewish boys from Maxwell Street were rooting for Shoeless Joe Jackson, just like other Chicago youths.

Baseball was the national pastime and, by far, the most popular sport in America. Boxing was a distant second, followed by football and horse racing, with basketball bringing up the rear. Boys from the North Side like Abe rooted for the pennant-winning Chicago Cubs, who began playing in their new Cubs Park (now Wrigley Field) in 1916. At night, they dreamed of following in the footsteps of Cubs stars like Grover Cleveland Alexander and the legendary triple-play combination of Tinkers to Evers to Chance—and they mourned for weeks when the Cubs lost the 1918 World Series to the Boston Red Sox and their sensational left-handed pitcher, Babe Ruth.

Abe Saperstein was quick on his feet and a good fielder at shortstop and second base, but he was “all field and no hit”—at 110 pounds, dripping wet, he wasn’t big enough to pound the ball. Although his love for baseball never waned, he eventually gravitated to basketball, where his quickness made up for his short stature.

The baseball diamond was rooted in America’s pastoral ethos, but basketball was a game made for the city, requiring only a ball and a makeshift hoop. By the turn of the century it was thriving in inner-city school yards and settlement houses. Jewish children, in particular, embraced the game so passionately that it became known as “the sport of Jews.” Basketball put a premium on “the characteristics inherent in the Jew: mental agility, perception…imagination and subtlety,” wrote Stanley Frank. “If the Jew had set out deliberately to invent a game which incorporates those traits indigenous in him…he could not have had a happier inspiration than basketball.”

Abe Saperstein had found his sport.

As he entered adolescence, the outer edges of his personality became clear. What stood out most was his facility with words and his ability to make people like him. The boy could flat out talk. The words poured out of him in a ceaseless, irresistible stream. And people liked him.

When he was about twelve, the Clark Street movie theater spon
sored a contest to elect the most popular kid in Ravenswood. Each patron entering the theater would write a child’s name on his or her ticket stub and drop it in a ballot box. First prize was a two-week tryout at Chicago’s Essanay Studios, a prominent silent movie studio and the onetime home of Gloria Swanson, Wallace Beery, Francis X. Bushman, Ben Turpin, and the up-and-coming Charlie Chaplin. The winner of the contest would have a legitimate shot at a movie career. On the last night, Abe was one of five finalists, each of whom had to make a speech, explaining why he should be chosen. His sister Leah wrote his speech and rehearsed him on it, but when Abe stood up in front of the crowd in the theater he was struck by a paralyzing stage fright. It may have been the only time in his life he had nothing to say. Finally, he recovered and delivered the speech perfectly. Some in the audience may have voted for him because they felt sorry for him, but when the votes were tallied he had won.

This was his chance to break free of the immigrant’s shackles and live out the American dream. Who knows, with Abe’s personality, he might have become a movie star. The first day of the tryouts, he rode his bike to Essanay, where he caught a glimpse of Gloria Swanson. On the second day, however, as he was crossing the Ravenswood railroad tracks, he lost control, crashed, and broke his arm. His acting career was over before it began. Still, he had learned a lesson that would serve him well throughout life: his charm and persuasive powers could open doors to the world.

In 1916, Abe entered Lake View High School, the oldest public high school in Chicago, which was close enough to Ravenswood Avenue to see it from the street. Here, he continued his love affair with sports, playing intramural basketball and baseball his first three years, then making the varsity in both sports his senior year. In baseball, he still couldn’t hit his weight, but he was so small that no pitcher could find the strike zone when he went into his batting crouch. Years later, Abe would joke that he hit .500 for the season—he went one for two, with twenty-three walks.

During basketball season, he never made it off the bench in some early-season games, but eventually became the starting left guard on Lake View’s bantamweight team. Chicago high school teams were divided into three weight classes—heavyweight, lightweight, and
bantamweight (with a 115-pound limit)—so that boys like Abe didn’t have to compete against bruisers twice their size.

Basketball in that era was a very different game—one that today’s players and fans would hardly recognize. There was a center jump after every basket, players could dribble with two hands, and there was no rule against goaltending, no ten-second limit to bring the ball across half court, no time limit to shoot, and no three-second rule for offensive players standing in the foul lane. The standard offense consisted of slowly working the ball up the court, with players often bulling their way through the defense, as in a rugby scrum, then playing keep-away, passing the ball for long periods of time, until a teammate came open for an easy shot. If one team got ahead by two or three points, it would often go into a full-court stall to eat up the rest of the clock. Scoring was typically in the teens or low twenties; a “real barn-burner” would be if a team reached thirty points.

In March 1920, Abe’s Lake View bantamweights captured the northern division of the Chicago high school league, which put them in the playoffs for the city championship. They made it to the semifinals, but lost 15–10 to the eventual champs, Lane Tech. It was the end of his high school basketball career.

At Lake View, he also got his first taste of business and promoting, as he joined the Junior Chamber of Commerce and the Boosters Club. When he graduated in June 1920, Louis and Anna and the other eight children came to the commencement exercise. The principal asked the audience to hold its applause until all of the graduates had been presented, but when Abe marched across the stage to receive his diploma, people clapped anyway. Of course, he had his own rooting section just with his family. He was the first Saperstein to graduate from high school; now he had to figure out what to do with his life.

The same month Abe graduated, his father bought the first house he had ever owned—and not by choice. The Sapersteins had been living right on Ravenswood Avenue, where rents were cheaper because few people could tolerate the noise from the trains that ran down the middle of the street. But then the inevitable eviction notice appeared on their door, and Louis could find no other place to rent in the area. They were about to be kicked out on the street,
when Leah, then sixteen, found a house for sale at 3828 Hermitage Avenue, one block away. The asking price was $4,500, with a $500 down payment, which seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. “Papa had never had $500 to his name,” Harry Saperstein recalls. But Louis managed to borrow the money from friends and relatives, and the house was theirs.

After fourteen years of wandering, they finally had their own home. It was also the first time they had electricity, as the house had just been converted from gas. Still, it was hardly a mansion: the house was forty years old and had four tiny bedrooms, some barely bigger than a walk-in closet. Louis and Anna claimed the downstairs bedroom, and eight children shared the three rooms upstairs. Harry, Rocky, and Morris slept together in a full-size bed. “I was the ‘middle man,’” Harry recalls, with a laugh, “so I never had to worry about the covers.” As for Abe, the eldest son, he ended up with no room and no bed, and was forced to sleep on the living room sofa or the enclosed front porch. For some eighteen-year-olds, not even having a bed would have been reason enough to move away from home, but Abe would live with his parents for at least another ten years.

Now that Abe had his diploma, Louis wanted him to come into the tailor shop with him, but Abe was not interested. “He was not cut out at all to be a tailor,” Leah Saperstein says. “He wanted nothing to do with the tailor shop.” Instead, he took a job at Schiller’s Florist, delivering flower arrangements and trying to save enough money to go to the University of Illinois.
*

But his heart was still in sports. That was the one thing that gnawed at him, and his dream was to be involved in sports and somehow make a living at the same time. After work, he played on an amateur basketball team, the Chicago Reds, at Welles Park, and eventually convinced the owner of Schiller’s Florist to sponsor a basketball team in the Chicago industrial league, for which Abe served as player-coach. Over the next few years, he changed jobs at least two times—moving from Schiller’s Florist to the Victor Adding Machine Company and then to the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad—
and at each job he used his powers of persuasion to convince the bosses to sponsor basketball or baseball teams. The jobs were just an excuse to keep playing sports. And although the Saperstein family had finally put down roots, Abe seemed to have rambling in his blood, and the call of the road lured him away from home for the first time. He did some tramping around the country, hitchhiking to Washington and Oregon to pick apples and harvest wheat.

By 1926, however, he was back in Chicago, sleeping on the sofa again, and still trying to find himself. In truth, he was floundering. At twenty-four, he still had no real purpose or direction in his life, and hadn’t really accomplished anything, considering all his energy and ambition. Then, he was offered a job at Welles Park, his old playground haunt. It was a city job, on the public payroll, that would include coaching the Chicago Reds, the amateur basketball team he had once played on himself. Although his dream of
playing
sports still burned as brightly as ever, by then he must have come to terms with the fact that his playing days were winding down. He had rejected his father’s trade, but had no trade of his own. His hopes for going to the University of Illinois were fading fast. Since his birth in London, he had journeyed five thousand miles, had moved a dozen times around the North Side—and was it all for this? To keep beating around in dead-end jobs, playing baseball and basketball in his spare time, but getting nowhere?

He had already done some coaching, and liked it. So he decided to take the city job at Welles Park. Finally, he had settled on a vocation. Now he needed a team.

The city of Chicago began as a way station and rose to greatness on the strength of two massive waves of immigration: the arrival of hundreds of thousands of European immigrants, beginning in the late nineteenth century, and the Great Migration of 200,000 African Americans from the Deep South. The Harlem Globetrotters would be born at the confluence of those two great streams.

In the beginning, Chicago was no welcoming refuge for African Americans; in fact, the 1848 Illinois constitution specifically prohibited “Negro immigration” into the state. Freedmen escaping the
South avoided Chicago, settling farther west. At the turn of the century, African Americans comprised a mere 2 percent of the city’s population. The first active recruitment of blacks to Chicago was as strikebreakers, to crush a meatpacking strike in 1904 and teamsters’ strike the following year. For black workers, this was their only opportunity to enter the skilled trades, but their importation as scabs fostered deep resentment among other ethnic groups.

By 1910, Robert Abbott, founder of the
Chicago Defender,
the most popular black newspaper in the country, was actively promoting Chicago as the “promised land” for black southerners to escape the poverty, repression, and lynchings in the Deep South. America’s entry into World War I, in 1917, fueled a massive expansion of Chicago’s industries and, inversely, a terrible shortage of labor, as European immigration was sharply curtailed (from 1, 218, 480 in 1914 to 110, 618 in 1918). If fear of the Ku Klux Klan and the promise of northern jobs weren’t reasons enough for blacks to leave the South, the Mexican boll weevil provided another, as it cut a swath of devastation across the Mississippi Delta, forcing thousands of black sharecroppers off the land.