Spinning the Globe (37 page)

Abe and Wilt needed no introduction. Abe had first tried to sign Wilt right out of high school, reportedly offering him $12,000, and had been keeping tabs on him ever since. In May 1957, at the end of his sophomore year, rumors started flying that Wilt might leave Kansas two years early. Retired Kansas basketball coach Phog Allen told the press that Wilt was definitely leaving to sign with the Trotters. Wilt denied it and said he would be staying at Kansas to “secure
a degree,” but in truth, Abe was actively pursuing him. In June 1957, they had a meeting in Abe’s New York office. Afterward, Abe enlisted the aid of former Trotter Zach Clayton, a lieutenant in the Philadelphia fire department,
*
to reach out to Wilt. On Abe’s behalf, Marie Linehan wrote to Clayton, asking him to approach “this big boy, Chamberlain” about what the Trotters “might mean to him prestige-wise…not only in active playing days…but in the future.”

Now, a year later, with Chamberlain definitely leaving school, Abe was pulling out all the stops. If he could sign Wilt, it would be the biggest coup of his career, and could return the Trotters to the glory days of Goose and Marques. In May 1958, Abe called Wilt and suggested that they meet again in New York.

When classes ended at Kansas, Wilt and Elzie Lewis, a friend from Kansas City, drove cross country to Philadelphia, and then to New York, for the meeting with Abe. Wilt asked Lewis and Vince Miller, an old Philly friend, to accompany him to the Trotters office in the Empire State Building. The two friends waited in the outer office while Wilt went in to see Abe.

In late May, Wilt had announced that he was forming his own barnstorming team made up of former college players; he had already asked Elzie Lewis to join it. Abe’s first goal was to dissuade Wilt from that plan. “Why would you want to have to worry about booking dates, paying players, finding guys to play against?” Abe asked. “Just come play with me. I’ll pay you a good salary and you won’t have to worry about any of that.” Wilt was listening. From their initial contacts, Abe knew that Wilt was going to cost him more money than any player he’d ever had, including Goose. But Abe had done his homework. He had prepared a detailed chart listing a range of salaries, from $42,000 to $65,000, and breaking down how much income tax Wilt would have to pay and the net amount he’d receive. It was all rather convoluted, so he added simplistic column headings: “Abe Pays,” “Government Gets,” “Wilt Gets.” Abe argued that the
more money Wilt made, the higher tax bracket he would be in, so he was better off making less money and paying less tax.
*

They ended up splitting the difference. Wilt agreed to a base salary of $46,000, but with side agreements and bonuses he would still end up with $65,000. To seal the deal, Abe handed Wilt a fat roll of bills. It was $10,000 in cash. “I’d never seen ten thousand dollars in my life!” Elzie Lewis recalls. “In 1958, that was a
lot
of money.”

Now it got tricky. Wilt had signed a contract, but he had a deal with
Look
magazine for an exclusive story on his decision to leave Kansas. The next issue of
Look
wasn’t scheduled to come out until June 10, so Wilt and Abe had to keep the story quiet for almost two weeks. The editors didn’t want Wilt to say anything to the newspapers about his plans, and wanted him to hide out until the magazine was published. Hiding Wilt Chamberlain in New York City was easier said than done.
Look
put him up in a hotel and, once again, he invited Elzie Lewis along. They spent their days playing basketball around the city, then returned to the hotel, took a shower, and ordered room service. After about six days of this, the manager of the hotel came to see them. “You know, you guys are allowed to come downstairs and eat in the restaurant,” he said.

Wilt and Lewis played ball all day and hung out with Wilt’s friends at night. The $10,000 was burning a hole in Wilt’s pocket, but he resisted the urge to spend it. “I bet he brought $9,900 of that back to his mother and father,” says Lewis, who later married Wilt’s sister.

Finally, on June 18, the big announcement was made at a press conference in Toots Shor’s. “Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce the newest member of the Harlem Globetrotters,” Abe said. Wilt emerged from behind a curtain wearing a Globetrotters warm-up suit. Abe climbed up on a chair, with a tape measure, to show that Wilt was still taller than he was. After Abe’s debacle with Bill Russell, some had questioned whether he was still a major player in the basketball world, but he had just proved the skeptics wrong. The Big Dipper was now a Globetrotter.

The big question now was where to play him? In July, Wilt flew to Italy and joined up with the Trotters in Milan, where he made a successful debut. It would seem only natural that a seven-foot-one player would play center, which was the only position Wilt had ever played. But there was one problem with putting Wilt in the pivot: Meadowlark Lemon.

Lemon was the new Clown Prince of the Globetrotters, and he didn’t want to share the spotlight with Wilt the Stilt or anybody else. So Abe came up with a novel solution: to play Wilt at point guard. He was the first, and only, seven-foot-one point guard in history. It was actually an inspired move because it showcased Wilt’s range of talents. Instead of just standing in the lane and making easy dunks, he was bringing the ball up the court, dribbling behind his back, dishing off passes, shooting a soft jumper, and running the weave.

But the problem with Meadowlark was bigger than Wilt.

George Meadow Lemon was born April 25, 1932, and raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, where he played high school basketball and football. When he was eighteen, he watched the Paramount newsreel about the Globetrotters playing in Madison Square Garden and reportedly decided, at that moment, that becoming a Harlem Globetrotter was his life’s ambition. He wrote a letter to Abe, begging for a tryout. After high school, he was drafted into the army and stationed in Austria, where he ended up playing a few games with the Trotters on their European tour. He did well enough that Abe offered him a tryout when he got out of the army, and he made the cut. He was assigned to the Kansas City Stars, and then to the Trotters’ southern unit, where he began to apprentice as a showman.

When Goose Tatum quit in March 1955, Abe began auditioning players to take his place on the eastern unit. Sam “Boom Boom” Wheeler had the most experience but was past his prime. The heir apparent was Bob “Showboat” Hall, who had joined the Trotters in 1948, coming out of Detroit’s famed Brewster Center. Showboat Hall was a better pure basketball player than Goose and perhaps a better ball handler, but he was a crotchety, bad-tempered guy. Nobody could ever get too comfortable around him, even his friends.
“He’s mean as a snake,” says one former Trotter. “He was the most arrogant son of a bitch alive,” says another. Goose was also notoriously moody, but Goose was Goose. Showboat had his own unique style as a showman, and would win thousands of loyal fans on the West Coast and in Canada, but nobody was ever going to mistake him for Goose Tatum. Abe even paid some of Hall’s friends to try to keep him in line, but it didn’t work. “If Showboat hadn’t been such a prick, he could have been the top showman,” said one Globetrotter expert.

In 1956, Abe was still casting about for the lead clown. Meadow Lemon, who had been nicknamed Meadowlark by veteran Josh Grider, started getting noticed. He had many admirable qualities to recommend him. He was a hard worker and dedicated to his craft. At night in his hotel room, he would practice ball-handling skills and facial expressions, to the point of exasperating his roommate, Alvin Clinkscales. He was also extremely ambitious, and made no secret of his plans to be a star. “When he was a raw rookie, he had a desire to be exactly what he got to be,” Clinkscales recalls. “He wanted to be the man. I used to kid him, ‘You ain’t gonna get up there with Goose,’ and he’d say, ‘Yes, I am.’” Also, Lemon was a perfectionist, who would rehearse a ream until it was exactly right, and he was dependable—the antithesis of Goose—and could be counted on every night to show up and perform.

His most important attribute, however, was that he could imitate Goose Tatum. He even looked like Goose. He was dark-skinned, with long arms (not as long as Goose’s, but no one’s were), a lanky frame, a huge grin, and sad, hooded eyes. To put it bluntly, he fit the image of the stereotypical Negro: black skin, thick lips, wide nose, and a shambling gait. Some Trotters believed that Abe required all his showmen to look that way, because that’s what white people wanted to laugh at. “Meadowlark had the appearance of a clown,” says Charlie Primus, who played with him. “The public wanted a clown to be real black. Abe knew that. The showmen were all dark-complexioned.” Even today, that belief still persists among current Globetrotters. “You look at all the showmen that have ever been,” says one current player, “and you don’t see any light-skinned, thin-lipped guys.”

This belief strikes at the heart of the most complex issue in the Globetrotter saga, which would come to the fore in the heat of the
civil rights movement: are the Globetrotters a minstrel show for white people? And is the showman the “interlocutor” of the minstrels, the Stepin Fetchit of the hardwood? Those issues were not yet being raised, however, when Abe promoted Meadowlark Lemon to the top showman job on the eastern unit at the start of the 1956–57 season, introducing him as the new “Rajah of Comedy.”

What was certain then was that Meadowlark had an uncanny ability to copy Goose’s moves and reams. Lemon worked on them constantly: the strut, the smile, the hook shot over the head. He practiced until he could do them
almost
as well as Goose. As early as December 1955, his first year as a showman on the southern unit, he was being compared favorably with Goose. “[The Globetrotters were] sparked by one Meadow Lemon…whose act and actions closely parallel those of ex-Trotter star ‘Goose’ Tatum,” the
Dixon
[Ill.]
Telegraph
wrote. “The 6-2, 180-pound Lemon, only in his second season with the famed clowning troupers, performed all the Tatum tricks from the pivot and was also the pivotal man in the Globetrotter comedy routine.”

His copycat act was good enough for Abe. “Meadow Lemon is coming along and is proving sensational,” Abe reported in June 1956. It was good enough for Abe and for audiences that didn’t know the difference. But that was exactly what the players
did
notice: the
difference
between Goose and Meadowlark. The most glaring one, which mattered most to the players, was that Meadowlark couldn’t play ball. “Oh, he couldn’t play—not even a little bit!” exclaims one former Trotter, repeating the phrase over and over for emphasis. “Not even a little bit! Oh, he couldn’t play! Not even a little bit! Yeah, he was athletic and could run a little, but he could
not
play basketball. He could not have made a good high school team. He could not play at all.”

Meadowlark would gradually improve as a player, particularly with his hook shot, but Abe and the coaching staff recognized his shortcomings and covered for him. He might score 15 or 20 points in a regular season game against the Washington Generals, but when the Trotters had to play straight basketball, Meadowlark was on the bench. It was most noticeable on the College All-Star tours, which were straight-up ball against the best college players in the country.
Goose had often been the Trotters’ leading scorer against the All-Stars, but Meadowlark was played sparingly, and usually only in the last few minutes if the Trotters were far enough ahead to put on the show. In Seattle, for instance, during the 1957 tour, the Trotters beat the All-Stars 81–68, and the local paper reported: “Meadowlark Lemon was inserted for the final three minutes and ran through a series of comedic hi-jinx.” For the entire tour, Meadowlark averaged a paltry 1.8 points per game. Today, there are still debates about just how good a ballplayer Goose Tatum was, but there is no debate about the basic premise: he could play and Meadowlark couldn’t.

The other difference, which was even more profound, was in creativity. Goose was a comic genius, an original, while Meadowlark was a clone. Meadowlark was a great technician and a talented imitator, but he had little spontaneity or improvisational feel. It was all purely derivative from Goose’s legacy. If Goose was a jazz soloist, like Bird or Coltrane, creating new riffs and progressions every night, Meadowlark was a trombone player in the high school marching band, who had to flip the sheet music over to know what note to play next. He was an actor reading his lines, and doing it very well, but it was the same script, the same dialogue, the same show every night. It was timed and choreographed down to the second. As Frank Deford once described him in
Sports Illustrated,
Meadowlark was a “contrived character.”

Goose cracked up his own teammates because they never knew what he was going to do, but Meadowlark’s teammates knew
exactly
what he was going to do, at exactly the same point. And as he became more popular, heaven help the player who didn’t deliver
his
line or
his
move at just the right moment.

Again, the typical audience could not tell the difference. If they saw the Globetrotters play only every couple of years, how would they know that Lemon’s show was an endless repeat, night after night? But the players recognized the difference between an original and an actor, and described it in eloquent, forceful terms. Leon Hillard, who died tragically in 1977,
*
may have summed it up best: “Meadowlark couldn’t carry Goose’s jockstrap to the Laundromat.”

When Abe signed Wilt Chamberlain to a one-year contract in May 1958, there is no indication that he ever talked to Wilt about the “social advantages” of being a Trotter, as he reportedly had to Bill Russell. It was unnecessary. There was nothing Abe, or anyone else, needed to say to encourage Wilt’s pursuit of sexual conquests. Long before his death in 1999, Wilt’s name would forevermore be linked with two all-time scoring records: the 100 points he scored in an NBA game, and the 20,000 women he claimed to have bedded. When Wilt first made the latter claim, in a controversial memoir, some critics disputed his math or railed against the objectification of women, but no one challenged the fundamental assumption: Wilt Chamberlain slept with an extraordinary number of women.