Spinning the Globe (32 page)

The film’s producer was Buddy Adler, who had just made
Woman of Distinction
with Rosalind Russell, and would later produce such classics as
From Here to Eternity
and
South Pacific.
It was directed by Phil Brown, a veteran actor but first-time director, who would soon get swept up in the hysteria of the McCarthy hearings and, at the urging of Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), be placed on the Hollywood blacklist in 1952. Unable to work in America, Brown moved to London. Years later, he would be known to later generations for playing Uncle Owen Lars in
Star Wars.

The Globetrotters’ film was so successful in the United States that it was distributed overseas, with the encouragement of the United States Information Service (USIS), which saw it as effective propaganda. In October 1953, a USIS public affairs officer in Martinique, where the film was showing, sent a memo to his Washington headquarters entitled “Commercially Distributed Film Advances USIS Objectives,” urging that the film be distributed widely around the world to “enlighten members of the local populace who have been led astray by Communist depiction of the U.S. Negro as a downtrodden, persecuted, ‘second-class’ citizen.” In a glowing review, he described particular scenes that showed Billy Townsend being welcomed in an American university, allowed to “frequent acceptable hotels,” live in a modern apartment, and be offered over $1,000 per month to play basketball.

In the kind of supreme irony that Hollywood could appreciate, by the time that memo was written, both the producer and director of this effective weapon in the battle of Americanism versus
Communism had been blacklisted, their film careers destroyed, and the African American stars of the movie—the Globetrotter players, including Bill “Rookie” Brown, who played the part of Billy Townsend—had received only two weeks’ salary for the ten days of shooting.
*
In Brown’s case, Abe paid him a total of $275 for the two weeks, but while enjoying himself in Hollywood, Brown asked for $330 in advances, which was deducted against his salary. In the final accounting, the star of the film ended up
owing
Abe $55 for making the movie. And despite the favorable depiction of the “U.S. Negro” on the screen, during the shooting of the film Brown and the other Trotters were forced to stay in a “colored” hotel in Los Angeles, and Brown himself would not have been allowed to enroll in many universities, frequent many “acceptable hotels,” or live in many “modern apartments” in America (certainly not in Cicero)—and he would never make $1,000 a month playing basketball for the Harlem Globetrotters.

What mattered most, however, was that it all looked good on the silver screen.

The Harlem Globetrotters were now so popular that it was becoming difficult to top their past exploits. In 1952, however, Abe came up with the grandest scheme of all: an around-the-world tour, spanning 50,000 miles, thirty-three countries, and four continents. He had been intrigued by the idea since the Trotters’ first visit to Europe, and by the fall of 1951, he was ready to make it happen. And after the success of the Berlin game, he figured the U.S. State Department would eagerly sign on as a cosponsor.

For twenty-five years, Abe had been selling the Trotters to promoters and sportswriters in every hick town in America, and he had no trouble closing the deal with the U.S. State Department. In November, he first broached the idea of a world tour in a letter to Assistant Secretary of State Jack K. McFall. In December, Abe met in Washington with officials from the State Department and the Inter
national Information and Educational Exchange Program. Soon thereafter, Secretary of State Dean Acheson sent a circular airgram to diplomatic and consular officers around the world, saying that the department was backing the Globetrotters’ world tour as “ambassadors of good will, particularly in countries that are critical of U.S. treatment of Negroes.” Acheson was optimistic that the Trotters would be “an effective answer to Communist charges of racial prejudice in the U.S.A.”

By February 4, 1952, the State Department sent out a schedule to sixty-nine foreign service posts, listing every date and city on the tour. American consulates in Belgrade and Bangkok wrote back, begging to have Yugoslavia and Thailand added to the list.

The scale of what Abe was attempting to do was enormous. The Trotters would leave New York on April 19 for the Panama Canal, play their way across South America, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Okinawa, Guam, and end up in Hawaii on October 15. Only two years earlier, they had managed the first transcontinental College All-Star tour, with 18 games in 17 cities, but now they were increasing that exponentially to 141 games in 168 days!

Marie Linehan and the front office staff in Chicago had developed a basic template that could be extrapolated to any tour, but this was taxing their capabilities to the limit. Marie started cranking out letters to everybody making the tour, detailing the requirements for passport applications, passport photos, birth certificates, smallpox inoculations, and visa applications for every country. Abe pulled in other people to help with the logistics, including his sister Fay and Walter Kennedy, who ran the New York office; Harry Hannin, who handled much of the advance work before the Trotters would arrive; Eddie Gottlieb, owner of the Philadelphia Warriors; and Bob Karstens, still playing on the opposition team, who also built the portable wooden floors, weighing seven tons apiece, that would be shipped to venues without basketball courts. In the middle of the night, Abe telephoned Dave Zinkoff, a noted Philadelphia sports announcer (who had gone on both European tours), and browbeat him into taking a job as the “general manager–traveling secretary–announcer–transportation manager–room reservation clerk–treasurer.” Also, he wanted Zinkoff
to keep a running diary, which eventually would be turned into a book,
Around the World with the Harlem Globetrotters.

“This is going to be the greatest tour in sports history,” Abe declared, and who could possibly disagree? On April 19, 1952, one unit of Trotters flew to Panama and played the next five weeks in Latin America. On May 30, the main entourage—twenty-nine people, including eleven Trotters, the New York Celtics (led by Red Klotz and Tony Lavelli, who also played accordion at halftime), two referees, four halftime acts, plus Abe, Gottlieb, Kennedy, and Zinkoff—left New York for the European leg of the tour. Goose Tatum and Sweetwater Clifton would be joining up with them later, due to family illness. Abe had bought two buses and had them shipped over ahead of time, along with his red Cadillac—“To add a touch of class,” he would say—which would draw crowds wherever they went.

They landed at Shannon Airport, in Ireland, and the only Irishman on the plane, Walter Kennedy, kneeled down and kissed the Auld Sod. The tour had officially begun. They would be gone for four months, playing nearly every night in another city. Airfare alone would cost nearly $200,000. In each country, they had to deal with monetary exchange rates, not just to live but to figure out how to take their gate receipts out of the country when they left.

They played in a driving rainstorm in Reims, France, with the players wearing vinyl rain hats and jackets and holding umbrellas. They played before fans in Egypt, who, as Zinkoff put it, “didn’t know a dribble from a Dodge.” They played midnight games in Spain, following the afternoon siesta and dinners that began at 9
P
.
M
. They went for camel rides in Egypt, visited General George Patton’s grave in Luxembourg, and had their luggage stolen in Madrid. In addition to their basketball games, Abe and the Trotters held press conferences, did interviews on local radio, appeared at schools and factories, and were hosted at receptions in many countries.

All along the way, U.S. foreign service posts were sending back enthusiastic reports to Foggy Bottom about the fantastic publicity the Trotters were generating, often attaching newspaper clippings to prove it. “The visit of the Globetrotters thus pointed out a brighter picture of the negroes’ place in American life,” wrote the U.S. consul in Asunción, Paraguay. The Algerian consulate wired for permission
to spend $300 on a reception for the Globetrotters, in order to counteract “local Commie output on U.S. race relations.”

Local press coverage was equally impressive. In Beirut, for instance,
L’Orient
reported that nearly 8,000 spectators “were unanimous in describing the visitors as artists rather than players”
Le Soir’
s report even bordered on the supernatural:

In Malaysia, even the usually anti-American
Straits Times
admitted: “Whoever thought of sending the Harlem Globetrotters, those very likeable gentlemen, to Asia certainly hit upon a splendid propaganda stunt. Here was living proof that the American Negro was no downtrodden wretch though, apparently, it’s a bit harder for a coloured man to buy a cup of coffee in certain U.S. cafes than it is to make good at basketball.”

By the time the Globetrotters played their final game in Honolulu, on October 5, and flew back to San Francisco on a Pan Am Stratocruiser, passing the Golden Gate Bridge, they had traveled 51,000 miles and played before an estimated 1.5 million people. “I’ll be lucky to break even on the whole thing, but who cares,” Abe said, although he predicted that he’d never try it again. “A trip like this is too hard on everyone who makes it. But it has been the supreme thrill of my lifetime.” Recalling how people had laughed at him for naming his team the Globetrotters, he added, “Now I’ve done it.”

Two months after returning, the Globetrotters got a shocking reminder that America had not changed in their absence: they were banned from playing at Louisiana State University by Troy H. Middleton, the university president. Middleton, a retired U.S. Army
general and the hero of the 1943 Sicily campaign, refused to allow a black team to play in the LSU gymnasium for fear it would destroy “our way of life.” The Trotters had been invited to LSU by the Baton Rouge Kids’ Baseball Clinic, a nonprofit group, and the LSU letter-man’s club. Newspapers in France and elsewhere around the world gave big play to LSU’s snub of the Globetrotters, but most American papers, including the
New York Times,
ignored it completely.

“Welcome home, Ambassadors of Goodwill.”

I
n an organization as old and storied as the Harlem Globetrotters, it is difficult to single out one defining moment when everything changed—when the organization changed course and began heading in a different direction. Moments like that are sometimes too subtle to detect, or they are obscured by the passage of time, fading memories, or the deaths of those who were there. But there is one such moment in the history of the Harlem Globetrotters. It is the point, if one were graphing the nine decades of Globetrotters’ history, where the line would turn downward. Not permanently, because there would be later points when the line would turn upward again, but nonetheless, a slow, gradual descent would begin at this moment in time.

That point occurred on October 31, 1953, when Marques Haynes quit the team. There would be no official announcement for another ten days, but it was over long before that. On October 8, when fifty-seven Trotter vets and rookies had reported to training camp at St. Anselm’s gym on the South Side, most of the buzz was about two rookies: seven-foot-one All-American center Walter Dukes, whom Abe had managed to sign after a bidding war with the NBA, and Junius Kellogg, from Manhattan College, who had blown the whistle on the 1951 point-shaving scandal that had nearly destroyed the college game. Marques Haynes was mentioned, in passing, as being the captain of the team. One would never suspect that there were any problems. In another few days, however, he would be gone.

Abe had every reason to keep quiet about Marques’s departure. For one thing, a new Hollywood movie on the Globetrotters was in the works, with most of the footage having already been shot the previous spring, and, like the first film, it was
supposed
to feature Goose and Marques. Telling the studio that Marques was gone might queer the deal, yet a film about the Globetrotters
without
Marques Haynes seemed inconceivable. Second, the preseason publicity packets were already in the mail, and Abe had been advertising Goose and Marques all over the country, and doing it so cleverly that it sometimes appeared as if they would be playing in two or three cities on the same night. If those weren’t reasons enough to keep the bad news under his hat, Abe was an eternal optimist, and was still hoping that Marques would change his mind and return.

But in his heart, Abe had to know better. Marques Haynes was a man of conviction, and he had told Abe, flat out, as Abe was walking out of their one and only contract discussion, “You’ll never have to worry about me again.”

Which led to the most important reason for keeping the news quiet: if Marques had truly quit the team, then Abe was hoping to get something for him. To trade him or sell him to another team, as he had done with Sweetwater Clifton in 1950, when it became clear that Clifton was dissatisfied and was going to leave when his contract expired.

When the word finally did get out, Abe would claim that his problems with Marques had begun last spring, after the College All-Star tour, when Marques refused to go on the European tour.
*
But in reality, their problems started long before that. One could go back to the time when Abe told Marques, “A Negro doesn’t need as much money as a white man”—a comment that Marques would never forgive or forget. Or to the time Abe sold Clifton to the New York Knicks, and Clifton complained that he didn’t think Abe had “the right to deal me off like that” without his sanction. Or the time when Abe
refused
to sell Marques to an NBA team, when he could have been the first black player in the league. Or even to the times when
Abe had come in the locker room after a big win and, in a generous moment, tried to give Marques a bonus—stuffed a twenty-dollar bill, or maybe even a fifty, in his hand, and said, “Great game, Marques, have yourself some fun tonight”—and Marques, instead of saying, “Thanks, Skip,” like the other players, had handed back the cash and said coolly, “No, Abe, just put it on my salary.”

Marques Haynes was a different breed of cat. When he signed on in 1946, he was the first college graduate ever to play for Abe, and he had not lost his perspective—or his business sense—in the intervening years. He was a star, he had a singular talent, he could have played for any team in the country, and he knew it.

In the end, Abe waited until the season was nearly three weeks old to announce, in a tiny one-paragraph release, that Marques Haynes was no longer a Harlem Globetrotter and had been sold to the NBA’s Philadelphia Warriors. It was no coincidence that the Warriors were owned by Abe’s good friend Eddie Gottlieb, and that Abe was a major stockholder in the team. No selling price was announced, although a figure of $30,000 was later reported.

That could have been the end of it. But when a reporter called Marques the next day at his home in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, he declared, unequivocally, that he would not report to the Warriors and, furthermore, might even start his own team.

This was getting messy.

Eager to tell his side of the story, Abe sought out his most loyal black sportswriters, including the
Chicago Defender
’s Fay Young, who was on Abe’s payroll as a talent scout, and Wendell Smith and Rollo Wilson of the
Pittsburgh Courier.
Abe’s explanation was that a “new form of contract” had been devised that season, and forty out of forty-one players had signed it. Marques was the lone holdout. According to Abe, Marques had one year left on a three-year contract and the new contract would have included a substantial raise for Marques, for the fourth year in a row. Given Marques’s refusal to sign, Abe had dealt him to the Warriors, who needed a point guard. “If he refuses to report, I will suspend him,” Abe said. “And I hope he will change his mind.”

A week went by with no word from Marques, so Abe turned up the heat. Speaking to reporters at a press luncheon in Chicago, he
insisted that the “new form of contract” had been necessitated by a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling, and included a clause whereby Marques could be traded or sold to any other team at Abe’s discretion. “He is legally bound to go through with the deal,” he said. “If he refuses to play with [the Warriors], he won’t play with any team.” Afterward, Wendell Smith relayed Abe’s threat in a sensational headline: “Report to Philly Warriors or You Won’t Play at All!”

The Supreme Court ruling that Abe referred to had upheld major league baseball’s standard player contract, including its controversial “reserve clause,” which bound a player to his original team owner for life. The court also upheld the legality of the “ineligible list,” which blacklisted players who refused to report to clubs to whom they had been sold or traded.

There are inconsistencies in Abe’s argument, however, even on its face. First of all, the Supreme Court ruling had been handed down only the day before Marques was traded, on November 9, and he had quit ten days prior to that. So any “new form of contract” must have been designed prior to the ruling. Further, the ruling applied to baseball’s major
leagues,
whereas the Globetrotters were an independent organization, further weakening Abe’s claim that this had anything to do with the Supreme Court. More likely, Abe wanted to make it explicit in all player contracts that he had the right to trade or sell any player at any time.
*
Finally, Marques’s contract was an
individual
agreement with Abe Saperstein, not with any league. Unlike the NBA and major league baseball, which had standard player contracts, Abe did not have draft rights or territorial rights over his players, or any kind of reserve clause. The idea that he could sell Marques Haynes to another team would be like him “selling” Marie Linehan to Phil Wrigley, the owner of the Cubs, or the owner of a hometown grocery store selling his employees to a tire dealer. Aside from the legal restrictions of his contract, Marques Haynes was a free agent.

The controversy continued to simmer for several weeks, with still no word from Marques, although Wendell Smith did report, quoting “reliable sources,” that Marques had “objected to that particular part of the contract” and had “warned Saperstein that he would
balk if he was sold elsewhere.” For his part, Abe kept throwing fuel on the fire, telling the
Defender:

In the fifty years that have transpired, Marques Haynes has never told his side of the story—and still refuses to discuss some details—but based on what he will say, his position becomes fairly clear. To begin with, he disputes nearly everything Abe said, and every word Fay Young or Wendell Smith wrote about the situation (neither reporter ever interviewed him about what happened, and Marques didn’t trust them anyway, given their relationship with Abe). According to Marques, he did not have another year left on his contract, but had already fulfilled the terms of his previous multiyear deal. His “refusal” to go on the 1953 European tour had nothing to do with his contract negotiations; in fact, he hadn’t gone to Europe in 1952, either, during the “around the world” tour, because he wanted a break from the daily grind. He finds the idea that Abe offered him a “substantial raise” laughable. “Abe Saperstein never gave anybody a substantial raise,” he says, and denies that his salary quadrupled in four years, although “that wouldn’t have been hard to do.”

“I started out [in 1946] only making $250 a month, and even in 1950 I was only making $350 or $400 a month,” he says. However, his decision to quit had nothing to do with his salary or with any “new” clause giving Abe the right to sell or trade him. He never saw any such clause, although he would have refused to sign any contract that contained it. “It may have been in there, but we never got that far,” he says.

What actually happened, according to Marques, was that he came to training camp in October without a contract, as his previous one
had expired. He and Abe were supposed to sit down and discuss a new deal, but the meeting didn’t happen until after the season began. Finally, after a game in Wilmette, Illinois—just outside Chicago—they sat down in Abe’s office to talk. The entire meeting lasted ten minutes. Abe handed Marques a new, multiyear contract to sign, but there were a couple of clauses that Marques wanted to discuss. Abe refused. “He wouldn’t even talk about them,” Marques says. “It was ‘take it or leave it.’” Exactly what those clauses were, Marques has never said, but he did complain later about “fringe issues,” such as appearance fees, endorsements, and movie deals. By 1953, Marques’s and Goose’s photos were being used in newspaper ads and on posters for various products (they appeared together on a Coca-Cola ad, Marques also endorsed a hair-straightening cream, and Goose endorsed Beechnut gum), but Abe was allegedly getting most, if not all, of the income. In addition, some former Trotters believe that Abe had promised to sell Marques and Goose a percentage of the team, but then refused.

Whatever the issues were, Marques refused to sign the contract. Abe got mad, stood up, and started to walk out. As he was leaving, Marques told him, “Once I leave this office and that door closes, you’ll never have to worry about me again.”

Abe kept right on walking. And so did Marques. He went back to the hotel, packed his stuff, and caught a flight to Tulsa, where his wife picked him up at the airport and drove him home to Sand Springs. “It was time for me to leave,” he says today.

Marques spent a few weeks at home, considering his options, and decided to put together his own team. He had only $252 to his name, and bankers in Sand Springs and Tulsa wouldn’t loan him any money, but his wife’s teaching job was enough for them to live on, so he decided to take the gamble. He pulled together some of his old friends from Oklahoma, guys he had played with in high school and college, and named his team the Marques Haynes All-Stars. Within a month, he was back on the road again, playing ball, as he would be doing for another forty years.

As for Abe, Inman Jackson reportedly tried to convince him that Marques’s issues were legitimate and he should negotiate, but Abe wouldn’t budge. He had been through this so many times before,
with Runt Pullins, Sonny Boswell, and other players who had quit him over the years, that he knew the drill by heart. And he used the same approach this time as in the past: find a replacement, tell the world he was the best ever, and sell the hell out of it! He already had a replacement dribbler in the pipeline named Leon Hillard, who had signed right out of high school, and had been understudying Marques for two years. By early December, Abe’s loyalists at the
Defender
and the
Courier
were already trumpeting Hillard as the second coming. “Replacing Haynes for the Trotters was a new Chicago dribbling marvel, Leon Hillard…. Although he has not attained the professional finesse of Haynes, Hillard was quite a sensation,” the
Defender
wrote.

Hillard was a fine dribbler, but he was no Marques Haynes. In fact, he didn’t try to be. From that point on, Globetrotter dribblers relied on a standardized, choreographed seventeen-second routine that borrowed a few of Marques’s slides and his one-knee action, but it was the same every night. They would never again attempt the spontaneous, improvisational style that Marques had invented. They didn’t have the creativity or the freedom to break out of that formulaic mold. It was entertaining to the fans, but it was no longer true artistry.

In public, Abe acted as if he didn’t miss Marques at all, but behind the scenes he spent months trying to convince him to return. “He wasn’t man enough to contact me himself,” says Marques, “but he did it through other people.” Abe dispatched various emissaries, including road secretary Winfield Welch; his lawyer, Allan Bloch; and his brother Morry Saperstein to contact Marques. They sent letters and telegrams and, when the Trotters played Tulsa in early 1954, Morry Saperstein even tried in person. “But the reason I left was because of Abe—not anybody else,” Marques says. “Abe’s mind was too small to make those attempts himself.”