Spinning the Globe (31 page)

The only remaining problem was how to get the Trotters to Berlin. Their last game in Germany was scheduled for Hamburg on Tuesday night, August 21, and they had to play in Paris two days later, before flying home to the States. That left Wednesday, August 22, as the only possible date for a game in Berlin. But it seemed impossible for the Trotters to finish playing in Hamburg late Tuesday night and get themselves, the Boston Whirlwinds (their opposition team), and,
most challenging of all, their portable basketball floor to Berlin, 175 miles away, in time for an afternoon game.

The United States Air Force came to the rescue. Commissioner McCloy arranged for three C-119 “Flying Boxcars” to airlift the two teams and their floor to Berlin on Wednesday morning, where they would have a few hours to set up before the game.

On August 20, McCloy put out a press release, announcing that the Trotters would play a special exhibition in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium and that Jesse Owens would be accompanying them, returning for the first time to the site where he had won four gold medals fifteen years earlier. Originally, Abe had been worried about taking Owens into the racially charged atmosphere of Berlin, but McCloy’s announcement made Owens the centerpiece of the entire event. As an added incentive, McCloy announced that Abe was offering free admission to the game and was inviting “each and every resident of the Berlin area, particularly the youth of that outpost city.”

The World Youth Festival had officially ended on August 19, with a peace parade, street dancing, and a huge fireworks demonstration, but thousands of young people were still roaming around West Berlin. Local radio stations and newspapers had run McCloy’s announcement, but with only thirty-six hours to publicize the game, no one expected a big crowd. Basketball was not a popular game in Germany to begin with, and German teams were the worst in Europe. McCloy told Abe he’d be happy if 10,000 people showed up.

The Globetrotters flew into Berlin on the morning of the game and were bused to the stadium with a U.S. Army escort. About a mile away, a crowd of young Germans surrounded the bus, blocking the road. Some tried to climb through the windows to get at the players. Abe was convinced that a riot was about to erupt, and was wondering when “the G.I.s would get us the hell out of there before we were lynched.” He was also kicking himself for being so stupid, to have brought Jesse Owens back to Berlin. Before long, however, it became clear that what the young Germans were trying to do was
touch
the players, not hurt them. It was the first clue that the day might hold something special.

The bus could hardly move the rest of the way to Olympic Stadium, but when the Trotters finally arrived, a shocking sight awaited
them. The crowd had begun filing into the stadium before noon, and by game time, at two-fifteen, instead of the 10,000 people McCloy had been hoping for, the stands were nearly filled. An estimated 75,000 Germans were sitting in the great Olympic Stadium that Adolf Hitler had built as a monument to Aryan superiority; it was the largest crowd ever to watch a basketball game. As one commentator noted: “The largest crowd ever to see a basketball game in the world was drawn in the former Nazi capital by a group of Negroes coached by a Jew.”

When the Trotters and Boston Whirlwinds began the game, the crowd cheered every shot, every pass, every basket. Some fans even tried to break through the police barricades to shake hands with the players. But the moment everyone was waiting for was yet to come.

At halftime, a U.S. Army helicopter appeared over the stadium, circled it three times, then slowly descended into the middle of the field. The cockpit door opened and Jesse Owens climbed out, wearing a stylish cream-colored suit. The crowd rose and gave him a standing ovation. Owens bowed and waved, and the cheers grew even louder. Then, with the Globetrotters shielding him from view, Owens did a quick change, slipping out of the business suit, and emerged onto the track wearing his original Olympic track uniform. The crowd went wild.

Owens began jogging around the track, taking a final victory lap at the scene of his greatest triumph, and as he approached each section of the stands, the people gave him a thunderous ovation, each section louder than the one before, until the cheers all merged together into a mighty wave of sound that rolled across the great bowl of the stadium and echoed back again, a primal roar of redemption from the ghosts of Germany’s past. Jesse Owens ended his victory lap with a symbolic broad jump and then was escorted off the field by the Globetrotter players.
*

A microphone had been set up on the track, directly below
Der Führer
’s box, where Hitler had made the opening speech of the 1936 Olympics. Owens approached the mike and began speaking in meas
ured tones, obviously moved by the crowd’s reception. “Words often fail on occasions like this,” he began. “But I remember the good that happened here. I remember the fighting spirit and sportsmanship shown by German athletes on this field, especially by Lutz Long of Germany, the man I managed to beat in the broad jump on my last jump.”

Lutz Long had been Owens’s main competition in the broad jump. When Owens beat him, with a record jump of 26 feet 55/16 inches, Long had come over and shaken his hand, then he draped his arm around Owens and hugged him, and the two men had walked off together, laughing and joking—the blond, blue-eyed Aryan and the American Negro. All of this happened under Hitler’s baleful stare, as he paced impatiently in his box, waiting to shake Long’s hand—but not Owens’s. Lutz Long, a national hero, had been killed in World War II, and when the Globetrotters played in Munich earlier in August, Jesse Owens had met Long’s widow and visited with her.

Continuing, Owens pointed above him to
Der Führer’
s old box. “Hitler stood right up there in the box,” he said. “But I believe the real spirit of Germany, a great nation, was exemplified down here on the field by athletes like Long. I want to say to the young people here to be like those athletes. I want to say to all of you to stand fast with us and let us all work together to stay free and God Almighty will help us in our struggle. That is what the United States stands for and I know you are with us. God bless you all.” By the time he finished, Owens was overcome with emotion. At that point, the acting mayor of West Berlin, Walter Schreiber, spontaneously came out of the stands and walked over to Owens. Leaning into the microphone, he said, in German, “Fifteen years ago on this field, Hitler refused to offer you his hand. Now I give you both of mine.” He turned to Owens with outstretched hands, and they embraced. The crowd roared again, even louder than before. Some fans jumped out of the stands and rushed up to Owens, wanting to shake his hand, too. More people came, completely surrounding him, to the point that the police had to rescue him from the crowd.

By the time it was over, there were few dry eyes in Olympic Stadium. The Globetrotter players didn’t understand German, so they didn’t know until later what Schreiber had said, but the message
came through clearly. “I think everybody was teary-eyed,” Marques Haynes would say years later, in a
Sports Illustrated
interview. “And the longer you live, the more you know that you will never see anything like that again…. If they had had cameras like we have now, they would have had something that people could cherish till the end of time.”

The second half of the game was completed with the Trotters winning, as expected, but everyone knew that the real winner that day had been Jesse Owens. After the game, the crowd poured onto the field, wanting just to touch the players, to shake their hands. The Trotters had to hole up under the stands for an hour, waiting for the crowd to disperse, and then slipped out through a side exit, trying to reach their bus. But the crowd was waiting for them, and it took another hour to make their way through the masses of people to the bus, even with U.S. Army MPs leading the way. When the team was finally able to board the bus, Jesse Owens was the only person missing. They looked out and saw him, still standing in the sea of German people, signing autographs until the end.

The U.S. State Department could not have been more pleased with what had occurred in Berlin. The Berlin office wired Dean Acheson, reporting: “Appearance Harlem Globetrotters with Jesse Owens in Olympic Stadium August 22 even more successful than anticipated.” In appreciation, the State Department sent a letter to Abe, declaring: “The Globetrotters have proven themselves ambassadors of extraordinary good will wherever they have gone. On any future tours please call on the State Department of the United States for any help we can give.”

When the Globetrotters returned to New York, they were given a rousing welcome at Idlewild Airport and presented with the keys to the city. Jesse Owens told the assembled press, “We did a great job in selling America.”

Indeed, they had. The Globetrotters, and Owens, had done a great job of selling America as a land of freedom, equality, and opportunity for all. Unfortunately, some Americans were still not buying. At the very moment that Owens was being lauded in Berlin and the Globe-
trotters were being promoted as examples of America’s treatment of its Negro citizens, their hometown was engulfed in a horrifying episode that painted a very different picture of America and of the festering race hatred that would explode in another few years.

In the Chicago suburb of Cicero, an African American bus driver attempted to move his family into an apartment he had legally rented, but a mob of 4,000 angry whites began rioting in protest. During three nights of violence, the mob destroyed the family’s furniture, smashed windows, set the apartment complex on fire, attacked policemen and firefighters called to the scene, and eventually forced Illinois’ governor Adlai Stevenson to call out the National Guard to restore order.

The Cicero riot was front-page news around the world, even though New York’s governor Thomas E. Dewey insisted that it was a Communist “distortion of life in America” to claim that such a “rare incident of ruffianism represents anything basic in our country.”

The
New York Times
was not so sure. While rejoicing over Jesse Owens’s glorious return to Berlin, the
Times
cautioned that “we cannot forget that here at home the Hitlerite attitude toward Negroes as ‘inferior beings’ is still not entirely eradicated,” and pointed to the Cicero riots as an example. “It is good that Jesse Owens has received his due as an individual; it will be infinitely better when his people, our Negro fellow citizens, receive everywhere and at all times their due as equal citizens of our Republic.”

The Globetrotters and Jesse Owens might have been treated like royalty in Berlin and in the rest of Europe and South America, but they still could not live where they wanted in their own hometown.

Into the middle years of the “quiet fifties,” the achievements and successes of the Harlem Globetrotters kept piling up, almost too numerous to record.

By 1951, basketball had become a year-round operation for the Trotters, and so had their marketing and merchandising. Fans could now purchase Globetrotter neckties, T-shirts, pennants, autographed photos, 45 rpm records of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and even a Globetrotter Lucky Rabbit’s Foot.

That year, after returning from Berlin, Abe came up with another marketing innovation to make money during the slow period in late summer: the baseball park tours. In late August, the Trotters played a series of night games in baseball parks around the country, including Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., and Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Their opposition was the United States Stars, a pickup team headlined by George Mikan, who served as player-coach, and a short, dead-eye shooter named Red Klotz.

The outdoor tour was so successful that Abe expanded it over the next few summers, eventually sending out two different teams—one playing in the South and the other in the North and Midwest (and as far north as Montreal). They played in every size ballpark, from minor league parks in Tallahassee, Birmingham, and Galveston to the most famous parks in America, including the Polo Grounds, Connie Mack Stadium, Fenway Park, and Wrigley Field. They even played a doubleheader with a major league club, the St. Louis Browns, on the final day of baseball’s regular season. Bill Veeck, Abe’s longtime friend, had bought the hapless Browns earlier that year, with Abe as a partner. The combination of the two most creative promoters in sports—Abe Saperstein and Bill Veeck—would create a synergy that was good for both organizations. Abe arranged for Veeck to sign Satchel Paige, Luke Easter, and other black ballplayers. And Veeck, who would go to his grave known as the “man who sent a midget to the plate,” would help with Globetrotter publicity, particularly during the College All-Star tours.

When the Harlem Globetrotters had first formed in the late 1920s, basketball was a fourth-rate sport that couldn’t begin to compete with major league baseball, but now Abe was going right into baseball’s most hallowed shrines, in the middle of the baseball season, and drawing the crowds.

On October 24, 1951, Columbia Pictures released
The Harlem Globetrotters
in theaters across the country. Columbia had been so impressed with the final cut that it gave the film a “double A” rating, meaning it would be promoted as if it were a million-dollar film, although it had cost only $250,000.

“Those Champs—Those Scamps—in a Full-Length Fun Hit!”—the movie posters read. “The Miracle Men of Sports…All Their Arena Razzle Dazzle in a Rousing Big Drama!”

The movie opened to favorable reviews and even better crowds, playing opposite such films as
Death of a Salesman
and
High Noon.
It would enjoy a long shelf life, particularly in drive-in theaters, where it would still be showing late in 1952. Since Abe was getting a percentage of the gross, he was delighted with the film’s success, but he was proudest of a letter from a G.I. stationed in Japan, who wrote: “I have just seen your movie. I liked it much better than ‘Death of a Salesman.’”