Spinning the Globe (30 page)

In 1950, the NBA was already lagging far behind major league baseball and the National Football League in integrating. Jackie Robinson was starting his fourth season with the Brooklyn Dodgers, and Marion Motley, Kenny Washington, and Woody Strode were starring in the National Football League. In his 2002 book
They Cleared the Lane,
author Ron Thomas argues persuasively that the number one stumbling block to integrating the NBA was Abe
Saperstein, as team owners “feared the wrath” of Abe and were afraid they would lose their Globetrotter doubleheaders. Given the NBA’s financial woes and its dependence on those games, that could have been a death knell for the league. The integration of the NBA had been forced by Ned Irish, owner of the New York Knicks, who had been openly coveting Sweetwater Clifton for over a year, to fill the Knicks’ dire need for a center. In an owners’ meeting prior to the 1950 NBA draft, Irish reportedly pounded the table and threatened to quit the league if the other owners did not support his efforts to sign Clifton. The owners eventually agreed to integrate, and the Celtics moved first on Cooper.

The drafting of Cooper, Lloyd, and Hunter did nothing to help Irish sign Sweetwater Clifton, however. But ten days after the draft, Abe and the Knicks held a secret meeting to talk about Clifton. Abe may have been angry about losing Cooper and Lloyd, but he was smart enough to realize that his world had just changed, and he was better off bargaining over Clifton from a position of strength. As Ron Thomas has documented, on May 3, 1950, the same day the Trotters left for Portugal, Abe had lunch with NBA commissioner Maurice Podoloff and Knicks’ business agent Freddie Podestra. They met in a restaurant in the Empire State Building, where the offices of the Globetrotters and the NBA were only two floors apart.

Clifton was increasingly dissatisfied playing with the Trotters. He was tired of the constant travel and upset because he had learned that Abe was paying the College All-Stars more money than the Trotters. He had another year on his contract, but had already told Abe that he wasn’t coming back in the fall of 1950. As Clifton was notorious for “jumping contracts” (in the course of one season, 1947–48, he had jumped to at least four different teams, earning a reputation as the “Satchel Paige of basketball”), Abe apparently decided to get what he could for him right away.

Over lunch, a deal was struck, and a memorandum agreement was drafted and signed that day by Abe and Podestra, with Podoloff as a witness. Clifton’s remaining one-year contract was assigned to the Knicks for $12,500, with Clifton to receive the same $1,250 salary per month he had been receiving from the Trotters. Abe told Podestra that he planned to give Clifton $4,000 of the purchase price
(even though he had no obligation to do so). They agreed to keep the deal a secret until a mutually agreed-upon time—hopefully, to generate the most publicity. Sweetwater Clifton had just become an NBA player, although he didn’t know it at the time.

Abe left that day for Lisbon, and the secret deal was leaked to the press three weeks later. When Clifton heard about it, he gave an interview to the
New York Post,
in which he questioned Abe’s right to sell him to the Knicks without his permission, and asked for a fifty-fifty split of the purchase price. “I don’t think he had the right to deal me off like that,” he complained. “I’ve been trying to go with the Knickerbockers for two years. He wouldn’t sell me…I didn’t cost him much. I think I should get a split.” Typically, no owner of any pro team who sells a player to another team splits the purchase price with the player; that money is compensation for the team that’s giving up the player. Abe had told Podestra that he was going to give Clifton $4,000, but after Clifton’s complaints appeared in the
Post,
Abe reportedly gave him only $2,500.

In any case, Sweetwater Clifton was now officially a New York Knick. On May 23, Abe received a check from the Knicks for $12,500, as agreed. Clifton, who was already popular in New York because of being a Trotter, went on to have a solid career in the NBA, playing seven years with the Knicks and one with the Detroit Pistons. Chuck Cooper, the first black player drafted, played six years in the NBA; Earl Lloyd, the first African American to actually play in an NBA game (the Washington Capitols opened their season on October 31, 1950—one day before Cooper’s Celtics), played nine seasons in the league. Harold Hunter, who was actually the first black player to sign an NBA contract (on April 26, 1950), was cut by the Washington Capitols in training camp.

Abe Saperstein’s role in ending, or impeding, the integration of the NBA—like most racial issues involving him—is a complex question that has been written about, and debated, for years. Some have argued that Abe’s threatened boycott of Boston and Washington was racially motivated (to maintain his stranglehold on black talent), but one could just as readily assert that it was all about business. He had a signed contract with Chuck Cooper, and the Celtics were raiding his player. If NBA owners were going to draft players under contract
to him, he would use the main weapon at his disposal: the doubleheaders. Abe’s angry outburst, two days after the draft, was typical. He would often blow his top, threaten to fire a coach or player—and sometimes do it—only to turn around and hire them back the next week, after he had calmed down. That appears to be exactly what happened with the NBA. There is no evidence that he boycotted the Boston or Washington clubs. To the contrary, the next season the Trotters played a doubleheader with the Celtics in Boston Garden on March 1, 1951; then played Washington’s Uline Arena on March 16, 1951; and returned to the Garden with the College All-Stars on April 19, 1951. The Trotters would continue to keep the NBA afloat for another five or six years, until the emergence of Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics’ dynasty.

To fully understand Abe’s reaction to the NBA’s drafting of black players, one must also consider an additional factor. For years, he had been coveting an NBA franchise, and in April 1950, when the draft occurred, he was close to finally getting one. The Chicago Stags were losing so much money they were about to collapse, and the NBA had loaned them $40,000, with a stipulation that by June 1 the club post a $15,000 performance bond. When the Stags were unable to post the bond, the NBA sold the franchise to Abe for $40,000—including $20,000 cash up front. Throughout the summer, he was dickering over player contracts and pursuing possible trades with other teams, but in September, he backed out of the deal, accusing the NBA of “total failure…to deliver the franchise and the players in accordance with the promises made by its representatives when I offered to purchase.”

However upset Abe may have been about the NBA’s drafting of Cooper and Lloyd, and the Knicks’ signing of Clifton, he was extremely cordial and supportive toward the players themselves. On May 4, 1950, he sent a congratulatory telegram to Cooper and released him from his Trotter contract, saying: “Considered carefully circumstances surrounding draft considering opportunity initial colored performer NBA. Agreed if satisfactory to you to relinquish my claims your services to Boston Celtics…. To me you were you are and you always will be a Harlem Globetrotter. Cordially, Abe Saperstein.” As for Clifton, Abe would later tell Wendell Smith, “Frankly, I
didn’t want to let him go. He was one of our key men. But I let him [go]. After all, the New York team had never used a Negro player. Clifton thought he’d like to be the first, so I told him to go ahead. I agreed with him, it would be a good thing for everyone concerned.”

Abe still maintained good relations with Clifton and Cooper after they went to the NBA. Cooper returned to the Trotters in subsequent years, after the NBA season had ended, to play against the College All-Americans, and Clifton would come back for years to make both the All-American and European tours.
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When the glorious 1950 season finally ended, Sweetwater Clifton was gone and the best starting five in Globetrotter history was no more. There have been many great ballplayers on the Trotters, before and after, but the greatest team of all time was the 1948–50 combination of Marques Haynes, Sweetwater Clifton, Ermer Robinson, Babe Pressley, and Goose Tatum.

The Trotters had lost their best big man, and the effects were apparent right away. After their first two landmark wins against the Minneapolis Lakers, the Trotters would never beat them again. By 1950, the Lakers had added six-foot-seven Vern Mikkelsen to complement George Mikan and Jim Pollard, giving them the tallest front line in basketball, and against the much shorter Trotters it was like playing volleyball on one side of the net. The Lakers dominated the remainder of the series, winning five straight games between 1949 and 1952 (including two when Clifton was still with the Trotters), and a final game in 1958, when the series ended.
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The Harlem Globetrotters were unquestionably the most popular basketball team in the world, but by 1951, they were no longer the best.

I
n October 1951, filming began in Hollywood on the
The Harlem Globetrotters,
a full-length feature produced by Columbia Pictures. The film was the brainchild of Alfred Palca, a New York publicist for Twentieth Century-Fox who made his living writing flack for other people’s movies but had never written a script himself. In January 1950, he was sitting in a screening room with other publicists when Paramount News’ “The Eyes and Ears of the World” came on, featuring the Globetrotters’ debut at Madison Square Garden. He and his fellow publicists started laughing, spontaneously, at the Trotters’ antics, and a lightbulb went on in Palca’s head. To find out if regular audiences would react the same way, he made the rounds of four different movie theaters where the newsreel was showing: the Roxy, Radio City Music Hall, the Paramount, and the Capitol. Everywhere he went, audiences were howling.

Palca moved quickly, contacting Abe and sewing up the movie rights to the Trotters’ story (the arrangement called for Abe to get 10 percent of any movie receipts). Working nights, weekends, and on his vacations, Palca crafted his first screenplay and pitched it to five Hollywood studios. Columbia Pictures bought it and budgeted $250,000 to shoot the film.

Palca’s storyline revolved around a fictional player, Billy Townsend, a talented but egotistical college star who signs to play with the Trotters, then gets taken down a few notches by his own hubris, before Abe and the Trotters and his long-suffering girlfriend bring him back to his senses—just in time for the inevitable happy ending. The lead
ing role was played by an actual Globetrotter, Bill “Rookie” Brown, a handsome, articulate player from Philadelphia. Abe’s role was played by Thomas Gomez, a longtime Broadway and Hollywood character actor who had appeared in
Key Largo
with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and had been nominated for an Oscar, in 1947, for his role in
Ride the Pink Horse.
Gomez had the portly build for the part, and captured Abe’s gravelly voiced, “Now hear this, boys”—which in real life, as in the movie, began nearly every speech. Billy Townsend’s girlfriend was played by the beautiful Dorothy Dandridge, in one of her first screen roles (Abe reportedly tried to entice Chuck Cooper to stay with the Trotters, instead of signing with the Boston Celtics, by offering him the lead in the movie opposite Dandridge).

The true stars of the movie, however, were the Harlem Globetrotters, ten of whom played themselves in the film: Goose Tatum, Marques Haynes, Frank Washington, Ermer Robinson, Duke Cumberland, Pop Gates, Babe Pressley, Clarence Wilson, Ted Strong, and Inman Jackson. The studio scenes in the film were shot in a record ten days; then a film crew went on the road with the Trotters in late October, shooting game footage for the next three weeks. It would take a year to cut and edit the film, which Columbia scheduled for release in the fall of 1951, when the Trotters opened their season.

In 1951, the Trotters would set three world records for attendance at a basketball game, successively breaking their own mark each time. During the second World Series of Basketball, 31, 684 people filled the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, including 200 movie stars, producers, directors, and film industry executives. Three weeks later, in Rio de Janeiro’s Maracana Estadia, official attendance at a Trotters’ game was listed as 50, 041, although former Trotter Frank Washington believes there were many more. Maracana had been built to host the 1950 World Cup soccer championship and, with seating for 200,000, was the largest stadium in the world. “I know there were at least 125,000 people in Rio,” Washington insists today. That August, in Berlin, the Trotters would set a third world record with 75,000 in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium—a mark that lasted until 2004.

In the summer of 1951, the east unit, with Goose and Marques, made a second pilgrimage to Europe, playing fifty-seven games in forty-seven cities, while the west unit made the Trotters’ first tour of South America, playing forty-six games in eight countries. By the time those tours were over, it was evident that no matter how popular the Trotters were in America, they were even more so abroad.

In many countries, the Globetrotters introduced basketball for the first time. There were times when they would arrive to play a local team, only to find that the locals had no court and, in some cases, no basketballs, but were using soccer balls instead. On several occasions Abe had to have basketballs shipped over from the States, and usable courts were so scarce that he had three portable floors constructed, which he shipped all over the world, as needed. Even in countries where basketball was played, the players’ skills were so rudimentary that the Trotters would often put on exhibitions and clinics for national teams. Ironically, fifty years later, some of those same national teams, which learned to play ball by watching the Harlem Globetrotters, would be defeating the U.S. Olympic “Dream Team” at the 2004 Olympics.

South American fans were so fanatical about the Globetrotters that they were willing to go to extreme lengths to see them, sometimes even resorting to violence. In Ecuador, the army had to escort the Trotters into and out of the arena because crowds had blocked the exits, and soldiers on horseback fired tear gas bombs to prevent a mob from tearing down the walls to get in. In Caracas, Venezuela, the Trotters played in a driving rainstorm. In Brazil, a torrential downpour flooded the arena, but the promoter drilled holes in the floor to drain the water, and 14,000 fans stayed to watch.

The South American tours were epic adventures filled with mystery and political intrigue. In Lima, Peru, the Trotters played in the Plaza de Toros bullring, where the players ran out through the tunnels used by the bulls, and 30,000 people turned out—more than for any bullfight. Before going to Argentina, in 1951, the American embassy warned of civil unrest against President Juan Perón, and said it could not guarantee the Trotters’ safety. The Trotters went anyway, and Perón and his wife, Eva, showed up at one game. Perón invited the team to his palace the next morning, where he told them,
“America is a land of many laws that don’t mean anything. Here, I don’t have many laws, but they
mean something.
I want you to enjoy yourself—go where you want and do what you want to do—and if anybody gives you any trouble, you come back to this office and I will deal with it.” Perón gave the players autographed photos of Eva and himself, then sent them on their way. “We had a ball in Argentina,” Frank Washington recalls. The Trotters put on two clinics for the Argentine national basketball team, and Eva Perón was so impressed she decreed that “Sweet Georgia Brown” would be played at all Argentine international basketball games.

One year in La Paz, Bolivia, the local promoter absconded with the gate receipts, and the Trotters were thrown in jail, their plane was impounded, and Abe had to get the State Department to bail them out.

Wherever they went, the Globetrotters seemed to have a calming effect on political or labor strife. In Paris, the city’s transit system was shut down by a general strike, so 8,200 people walked to see the Trotters play. During a 1956 visit to Argentina, after Perón had been overthrown by a military junta, the country was embroiled in a bloody civil war, yet both sides declared a moratorium to let the Globetrotters play in Buenos Aires. In Honduras, rioting students suspended their demonstrations while the Trotters were in town. In Lima, Peru, the city was paralyzed by a transit strike, with buses and streetcars being burned, yet the unions called off the strike for three days, until the Trotters left town.

By the early 1950s, Globetrotter games had become a magnet for American celebrities vacationing abroad. Art Buchwald and Issac Stern were guest scorekeepers in Paris and Spain, respectively; Clare Boothe Luce, U.S. ambassador to Italy, tossed up the ball for the opening tip in Rome, and Danny Thomas did the honors in London; Walt Disney and celebrity columnist Earl Wilson sat courtside in Rome; and Sugar Ray Robinson donned a Globetrotters’ uniform in Paris to warm up with the team.

In many countries, the Globetrotters’ arrival was handled like an official state visit. In Japan, they were welcomed at the airport like foreign dignitaries, and an estimated 2 million people lined the motorcade route to their hotel, where a four-story-high poster of Goose
Tatum greeted them. Over the years, the Trotters played before numerous heads of state. In Brazil, they gave a command performance for President Getúlio Vargas. In Monte Carlo, Prince Rainier III presented medallions to Abe and the players. In Athens, twelve-year-old Crown Prince Constantine of Greece tossed up the opening tip and sat on the Trotters’ bench. In Cairo, Abe had a two-hour conference with Egyptian president Mohammed Naguib.

The Globetrotters’ most celebrated visit with any dignitary, however, was with Pope Pius XII, who granted the team a private audience in 1951. To everyone’s surprise, the pope received them again the following year, this time at his summer home, Castel Gandolfo. After the pope blessed them, Abe presented him with an autographed basketball. Curious about the game, which he had never seen, the pontiff asked for a demonstration. In the history of the Roman Catholic Church, it is safe to say that what happened next has never been repeated: the Trotters performed the Magic Circle for an audience of one. No record player was available, so Abe and the rest of the entourage whistled and clapped out “Sweet Georgia Brown,” while the pope watched in amazement. Beneath his white cassock, his feet were seen tapping to the music. “My, how clever these men are,” the pontiff exclaimed when it was over. “If I had not seen this with my own eyes, I would not have believed it could be done.”

In more than seventy-five years of Harlem Globetrotter history, there have been so many memorable events that it is difficult to single out one that stands above all the others. Yet there is one such event, for those who witnessed it, that stands alone. Abe Saperstein and Marques Haynes, for instance, would say that what occurred in Berlin, Germany, in August 1951, was the most electrifying moment in their lives.

On their second tour of Europe, in the summer of 1951, the Globetrotters were not scheduled to play in Berlin—and for good reason. In June, a riot had occurred in Berlin during a boxing match between middleweight champ Sugar Ray Robinson and German challenger Gerhard Hecht. After Robinson was disqualified for a kid
ney punch,
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the German fans became so angry that they pelted the ring with beer bottles, forcing Robinson to seek cover under the ring, and a phalanx of West German police had to “battle their way out of the angry throng to deliver Robinson to his dressing room.” The melee took on ugly racial overtones when Robinson’s wife was kicked by one German spectator, while others confronted some black American soldiers who were present, and the crowd began chanting, “Just like Schmeling!”—a reference to Max Schmeling’s claim that Joe Louis had fouled him in their second fight. In the aftermath of the riot, the German press decried both the rowdyism of the fans (it was the second riot in a week at a sporting event) and Robinson’s foul punches; nonetheless, former heavyweight champ Joe Louis promptly canceled a scheduled August 8 fight in Berlin.

Berlin had been a cauldron of cold war hostilities since its partition into East and West sectors at the end of World War II, but in the summer of 1951, it was heating up even more. And without realizing it, the Harlem Globetrotters were about to be pulled down into the fire.

The first week of August, the Communist-sponsored Third World Festival of Youth and Students was scheduled to begin in East Berlin, and as many as 2 million young people from fifty countries, including 300 Americans, were expected to descend on East Berlin. The two-week-long festival, with the theme of “For Peace and Friendship—against Nuclear Weapons,” would include daily concerts, dance performances, art exhibits, and sporting events, mostly featuring Soviet bloc performers. There would also be a major dose of rhetoric condemning Western rearmament, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and “imperialist warmongers.” In preparation for the festival, East Berlin was bedecked with flags of many countries and with posters of Uncle Sam, depicted as an old man dripping with blood.

West Berlin was mounting its own counterfestival, of sorts, to attract the tens of thousands of Youth Festival delegates who were expected to wander across the demarcation line into West Berlin. There were planned educational activities, music, films, television programs, and hundreds of thousands of specially printed brochures—all designed to counter the poisonous anti-Western propaganda from the other side. To the West Berlin authorities and the U.S. State Department, the Harlem Globetrotters, who were already playing in Europe, seemed like the perfect antidote.

On July 18, the U.S. embassy in Berlin sent a confidential wire to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, asking his assistance in “securing Harlem Globetrotters for Berlin” during the Youth Festival. The request was supported by the West Berlin Senate and sports council “in belief Globetrotters excellent antidote to unfavorable reactions recent Robinson-Hecht fight.” Acheson was urged to use his “fullest and immediate best efforts” to arrange the game.

Dean Acheson immediately wired the U.S. high commissioner for Germany, John McCloy, who was located in Frankfurt, saying that the department “endorses recommendation on Globetrotters for this occasion.” Serendipitously, the Trotters were playing in Frankfurt on August 15, so McCloy attended the game and made his pitch to Abe. Acheson and McCloy could have looked far and wide before finding anyone more patriotic, and anti-Communist, than Abe Saperstein, but he was reluctant to go to Berlin. As in previous years, Jesse Owens was traveling with the Trotters and performing at halftime, and Abe was apprehensive about taking Owens to Berlin in the wake of the Sugar Ray Robinson debacle. Fearing that Owens would be subjected to similar abuse, Abe at first refused. But McCloy argued persuasively that “this was a job for all free peoples and Americans particularly,” and, eventually, Abe agreed to play.