Spinning the Globe (35 page)

Having outbid and upstaged the NBA, Abe now felt that he could get any player in the country he wanted.

Except one.

In April 1955, he lost Goose Tatum. On April 20, Abe announced that he was giving Goose his unconditional release and would not
renew the option on his annual contract. It might have been the worst day in Harlem Globetrotter history.

“The ‘Goose’ who lays the golden eggs for the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team has flown away,” Wendell Smith lamented in the
Courier.
And that pretty well summed up the feelings of the fans. A month earlier, when Goose was serving a thirty-day suspension, the Trotters had opened the 1954 College All-Star tour with a doubleheader at Madison Square Garden, and the fans had started chanting, “We want Tatum! We want Tatum!” Even Abe, who had never previously acknowledged
any
negative impact from losing
any
player, was forced to admit that his team was “hurting for laughs” without basketball’s Clown Prince.

Now, in an eighteen-month period, Abe had lost his two most famous players, Marques and Goose. How it could have come to that is one of the most provocative questions in the Globetrotters’ story.

For fourteen glorious years, Abe and Goose had formed a synergistic partnership that created a form of entertainment the world had never seen, and each man made the other greater than he ever could have been alone. Abe’s vision merged with Goose’s talent to carry them both to worldwide fame and popularity, and, at least in Abe’s case, to great wealth. In some respects, it is surprising they stayed together as long as they did. On the other hand, it is almost unfathomable that Abe would let Goose get away.

Goose and Abe’s relationship was complicated by their personal histories. Both men had languished in obscurity for decades, only to be catapulted to fame in a few short years, swelling their egos even faster than their pocketbooks. From the beginning, it was a tempestuous marriage, with cycles of betrayal and forgiveness, rage and affection that finally disintegrated in a bitter divorce.

There were symptoms of problems early on. Goose had a wanderlust that could not be assuaged or controlled, especially in the early years. This deeply quiet man, a true loner, who could flip a switch when a ball game began and become the world’s greatest showman, had a habit of just disappearing. Perhaps it was a release valve for those conflicting forces in his own personality—the loner and the clown—but whatever was driving him, he would just leave. It happened over and over again.

On March 21, 1948, the Trotters played a game in Chicago Stadium, defeating the New York Celtics, then boarded the Chicago Northwestern train heading for Omaha, Nebraska, where they had a game the next night. About a hundred and fifty miles out of Chicago, the traveling secretary, Winfield Welch, suddenly noticed that Goose was gone. He hadn’t told anybody but had apparently gotten off the train at the previous stop, in Clinton, Iowa. Ten days later, he still hadn’t been heard from (Welch suspected he was playing baseball). Three thousand “disgruntled fans” showed up to see him in Creighton, Nebraska, where Jesse Owens told the crowd, “The Trotters don’t think so much of Goose anymore.” Abe fined him $200 and suspended him without pay. Goose didn’t play the rest of the season, and he missed the Trotters’ Hawaiian tour.

The next season, Abe and Goose’s problems got worse, to the point that the relationship nearly ended. On December 7, Goose scored 26 points in a game in Tulsa, then told Abe he needed a “few days off” because his wife, Nona, was about to deliver a baby. Abe gave him a week off, with pay. Two weeks later, he was still gone, and sent Abe a note, claiming he couldn’t leave home (Gary, Indiana) because his wife was in the hospital. Abe wrote back, sympathizing with his desire to be home for the “blessed event,” but chiding him for missing advertised games and forcing Jesse Owens and Marques Haynes to apologize to the fans. “There is a trouper’s axiom ‘The show must go on,’” Abe said, and suspended him without pay for the prior week.

Goose was furious. He rejoined the team a week later, then fired off an angry, three-page letter, insisting that his wife had been hospitalized and that he had been forced to work at the local Bendix plant over the Christmas holidays to make enough money to pay her bill. He also contended that he’d been playing for weeks on a “broken ankle” and needed time to recuperate. Finally, he poured out his resentment about the “unfair” suspension:

Then, as always, no matter how angry he was, he signed the letter:

Abe was equally passionate in his reply:

Three weeks later, Goose disappeared in Denver. Abe suspended him for two more weeks and demoted him to a farm team for another month. That seemed to get the point across, because Goose became more reliable for the next few years. He still had the wanderlust, but controlled it enough not to miss so many games.

Still, one could never tell when he might take off. In 1950, on the Trotters’ first overseas tour, Goose disappeared before a game in Casablanca and nobody could find him. Fearing that he might have been kidnapped or killed, Abe and the Trotters organized a search party in the middle of the night. Around 4
A
.
M
., Abe was about to give up when he heard a yell, “Hey, Boss!” and turned around to find Goose driving a horse-drawn taxi full of Moroccans. A few nights later, in Algiers, Goose disappeared into the notorious Casbah and was gone for a week. Most of the Trotters were terrified to set foot in the place, with its narrow streets and reputation for banditry, but Goose found some kind of solace in the mysterious alleyways. “I just
wanted to see what it was like, so I took off,” he said later. “I must have roamed around there for a week. It was very dirty and nasty there but I thought the people were nice.”

He was as unpredictable off the court as he was on it. Once, the Trotters were driving through Indiana, and Goose told the bus driver to pull over at a drugstore; he wanted to buy something. Twenty minutes later, one of the players went in to check on him and he was gone. They didn’t see him again for six nights, until they walked into their locker room in White Plains, New York, and there he was.

Why he disappeared, no one really knew, and even Goose struggled to explain it. “I just used to get a notion I wanted to go some place, so I went,” he said. His doctor attributed one such disappearance to “nerves,” as Goose reported to Abe: “Doctor said I was working too hard playing both winter and summer and it kept my nerves on edge.”

Whatever urges were driving him to leave, there is a clearer picture of why he came back, and why this shy, lonely man became the Clown Prince of Basketball: he loved making people happy. In the angry letter to Abe about his injured ankle, there’s a revealing passage where he talks about what it meant to perform for the crowds. “[I] put on a great show,” he wrote. “The people thought it was great anyway and they are the ones that count…. I hobbled out on a broken ankle and made them love it.”

There it is. Goose Tatum may not have shown up for every game, but when he did, he “made them love it.” He played with a “broken” ankle, with a broken hand in a cast, in a back brace, and once, in Paris, with a 102-degree fever, against doctor’s orders.

By 1950, Abe and Goose had reached a détente of sorts, and Abe rewarded Goose for his new dependability with dramatic salary increases. He went from making $600 a month in 1949, to $1,500 in 1950, $2,000 in 1951, and $2,500 in 1952. His last three years, he was earning $3,500 a month, at a time when the average American worker made approximately $3,000 a year. Abe enjoyed bragging about how much he paid Goose and, at various times, told the papers that Goose was the highest-paid basketball player in the country, made $50,000 a year, and made “twice as much as George Mikan.” He was exaggerating again, but not by much. Mikan’s top
salary, reportedly, was $35,000 a year, but that was for a five-month, sixty-eight-game season, whereas Goose was playing year-round and nearly every night. Still, Goose was one of the highest paid, if not
the
highest paid, players in the game.

The problem was, he didn’t know how to handle it. He’d grown up with nothing and didn’t understand money. He wasn’t a boozer (at least while he was with the Trotters) or a gambler, but he did love to spend money. “He spent it faster than he could make it,” Marie Linehan would say years later, and she was the one keeping the tab. He bought a beautiful new home in Gary for Nona and his stepdaughter, Marjorie, and young son, Reece Jr. With his travel schedule, he might only make it home a half dozen times a year, but he sent Nona money regularly, asking Abe to deduct it from his check. He bought new carpets and jewelry on layaway. He bought thirty acres of land in Chihuahua, Mexico, on which he planned to build a vacation home. Sometimes, if he was in a good mood, he’d drop a fifty-dollar tip on a headwaiter, and once bought Easter dresses and bonnets for some little girls who couldn’t afford them. When pan-handlers hit him up for money on the street, he would refuse to give them cash but would take them into a diner and buy them a meal.

Living up to being the fabulous Goose Tatum, and maintaining the image that went with that, cost a lot of dough. He developed his own style in clothes, wearing black jackets and a black beret, like Art Tatum or other jazzmen he loved. He wasn’t a flagrant womanizer, but the women were always available, and he would show up sometimes with beautiful women on his arm.

By 1953, Goose was one of the highest-paid black men in America, not just in sports, yet he never seemed to have enough money. After one of his suspensions, he wrote to Abe, pleading to be reinstated: “Will have to get back with team or starve, heavily in debt.” To this day, some former Trotters insist that Goose couldn’t have made more than $1,500 a month (although he was actually making twice that by 1953), because he was always living from paycheck to paycheck. And eventually, he started falling behind. He sent a note to Abe, listing the monthly payments he wanted deducted from his check—to a savings and loan, rug company, and car dealership—again signing the note, “Your friend, ‘Goose’ Tatum.” By 1952, the
dunning notices from creditors and collection agencies started arriving at the Globetrotters’ office: $75.52 to Block Brothers Jewelers, $41.97 to Tobertson Brothers Department Store, $25.21 to Horwich and Haller for a rug. Sometimes Abe turned the bills over to Goose; other times he paid them himself.

Because he was the “Golden Goose,” Abe let Goose get away with things that no one else could. Abe had a hang-up about his players driving Cadillacs, and would harangue them about not buying Cadillacs. He didn’t even want them to be seen
riding
in one, so the players would park their Caddys blocks away, so he couldn’t see them. But Goose flaunted his in Abe’s face. He bought himself a new white Cadillac and drove it everywhere he went.

Abe even let Goose take his Cadillac on the road, instead of riding the team bus, with one of the other Trotters as his driver. Goose would often arrive late for games, brushing off the anxious road secretary by saying, “They can’t start without me.” Once the game began, however, he demanded perfection from the other players. If a player messed up a ream, Goose would holler, “I can’t play with this dummy!”—and it didn’t matter if 18,000 people in Madison Square Garden heard him.

Off the court, he pulled stunts that would have gotten other players fired. He couldn’t stand Abe’s brother Rocky, the business manager for one of the Trotter units, and had numerous run-ins with him. Rocky was a retired army sergeant who used to march up and down hotel hallways in the morning, blowing a whistle to wake up the players, then make them line up in formation as he checked their names off on a clipboard. One morning, Goose was late getting to the bus, and Rocky said something about it that Goose didn’t like. “Goose slapped him to his knees!” Vertes Zeigler recalls, laughing. “And we were all making bets on who was gonna go home—Goose or Rocky.” Winfield Welch, who had worked for Abe a long time, predicted confidently, “Naw, Rocky’s going home. If Goose slapped Abe’s mama, he ain’t gonna fire him.” Sure enough, Abe sent Rocky to a different unit.

Another time, Goose told Rocky that he wanted ten tickets for a game. Rocky told him, “I can’t give you ten tickets.” Goose responded, “You little son of a bitch, now I want a hundred!” Rocky
bowed up and still refused, so Goose said, “I ain’t stopping till I get to a thousand.” Finally, Rocky got on the phone and called Abe in Chicago, and Abe said, “Give him the hundred.” Goose took the hundred tickets and tore them up.

In 1951, Goose and Rocky had one final altercation, in Colorado Springs, when Goose asked Rocky for an advance. Rocky said he’d have to check with Abe first, and Goose punched him so hard he broke his hand.
*

Goose and Abe’s uneasy alliance still seemed to be holding during the 1953–54 season. After the regular season and the College All-Star tour, Goose played in Europe, then spent five weeks on the summer baseball park tour, making $650 a week. On August 21, Abe even honored him with “Goose Tatum Night” at Wrigley Field, in the final game of the ballpark tour, and presented Goose with the keys to a new Cadillac as a “gift from his fans.”
†

Goose began the 1954–55 season in spectacular form. He was thirty-seven years old (although he claimed to be much younger) and the grind of playing almost every night, all year round, had punished his body beyond its years. Yet he was playing like a twenty-year-old, scoring more points than ever before, having the greatest season of his career. He hit for 28 points in Omaha, 21 in San Francisco, 25 in Sacramento, and an amazing 56 points on a return visit to San Francisco, the most points he’d ever scored. Through the first four months, he was
averaging
25 points a game.