Spinning the Globe (44 page)

Why would he agree to come back after twenty years? “Well, for one thing, Abe wasn’t there,” Marques says today. “I dealt directly with Gillette.” He was nearly fifty, but he could still play. And nobody, including Curly Neal, could dribble like Marques. He would spend the next seven years with the team, inspiring new generations of young ballplayers, including Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson, with his dribbling wizardry.

Stan Greeson came on board as president in May 1972, and named Marques the player-coach of the International Unit and Meadowlark the player-coach of the National Unit. That summer, a handpicked group of players (“the [ones] we wanted to build around,” Meadowlark would later write) was selected to go on the European tour. While overseas, they formed a new “company union,” with Marques elected as president and Meadowlark as vice president. The remaining strikers, including Hunter and Stephens, were left out in the cold, and players now had to make a choice: do we go with Marques or against him?

To this day, there are hard feelings toward Marques from some of
the players. “We did exactly what Marques did [with Abe],” says Stephens, “and instead of supporting us, he stabbed us
not
in the back, but in the chest—looking us in the face.” Bobby Hunter also felt betrayed, but has reconciled with Marques. “It took us a couple of years to come to grips with each other,” he says, “but I can understand why Marques came back, because it was owed to him—as one of the greatest Globetrotters of all time. And you have to move on. It wasn’t worth killing anybody over, although at the time it seemed like one of the options.”

As for Marques himself, he denies that he came back to break the union, and says he got involved with the union only to try to make things better. “As far as a good strong union contract, what they had was about as weak as water,” he says. “They
elected
me president of the union. I really didn’t want it.”

Marques Haynes was not the only former Trotter to return. In the fall of 1972, Greeson and Meadowlark brought back a whole squad of old-timers, including Tex Harrison and Andy Johnson, who were both forty, and Joe Cunningham, who hadn’t played in twelve years. “They brought back all these old fat broken-down men who couldn’t play dead,” says Stephens. “We needed two benches just to sit everybody.” To the strikers, it was clear that Greeson wanted a backup team—“scabs,” they called them—if another strike occurred.

With its new company union and cast of players, the Harlem Globetrotters unveiled their new season—and it was a huge success.
The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine
debuted in December,
ABC’s Wide World of Sports
debuted in January 1973, and dozens of new attendance records were established. To the world, at least, the laughter had returned to the Globetrotters.

The labor struggles did not go away, however. Over the next few years, the players’ union continued to win concessions on salaries, per diem, life insurance, and better travel conditions. By 1974, the average player salary was up to $30,000 (although Meadowlark’s $85,000 salary skewed that number). Stan Greeson and George Gillette made it clear, however, that they would not tolerate a
real
union. In 1974, Bobby Hunter had been elected union president and started bringing more militant proposals to the bargaining table, including full pension benefits at age forty-five, $30 per diem for meals, residual
payments from
The Harlem Globetrotters
cartoon and the
Popcorn Machine,
a percentage of endorsement revenue, and pay for TV appearances. Finally, the union’s most radical proposal was to set aside one game a year that belonged to the players (they would get the entire gate, to split among themselves). On May 31, 1974, Hunter held a press conference in New York to announce that the players’ union was affiliating with Local 189 of the Service Employees International Union (AFL-CIO), which would be negotiating their new contract.

That fall, at training camp, Hunter, Stephens, and Pablo Robertson, another union activist, were all released. “Stan Greeson called me in and said I did not make the team,” says Stephens. “I laughed. I knew what the ploy was. He told me one time, ‘We could go find a black face in any ghetto in the country and put that uniform on, and nobody would know the difference.’ But I was ready to go, I’d had enough. I told him, ‘Just give me my ticket.’”

In addition to the three union leaders, Bob “Showboat” Hall was not invited back to camp, after twenty-six years as an active player, the most in Globetrotter history. Hall reportedly wasn’t even told directly, but found out when he called to ask about his airline ticket to training camp. Today, he remains so embittered that he would not even attend his induction ceremony into the Harlem Globetrotters’ Legends Ring.

HERE INTERRED LIE THE REMAINS OF THE MAN SAMBO

The labor wars raging within the Globetrotter organization remained largely invisible to the public, other than the 1971 strike, but the Harlem Globetrotters were coming under increasing public scrutiny during the 1970s for a very different reason: the Uncle Tom question. As far back as the mid-1930s, Abe had been criticized for putting on a minstrel show that demeaned black players, who lolled on the floor, shooting craps and gambling for their shin guards. But now a fierce debate over racial identity was roiling the black community, which was exploding with “Black is beautiful” slogans, foot-high Afros, and dashikis. Against that backdrop,
everything
about what it meant to be black, from hairstyles to the proper name for the race, was under intense scrutiny, and the Globetrotters became an easy target.

Black critics were particularly excoriating. “White American spectators are perhaps most at ease when they are treated to the rhythmic jabbering of the Harlem Globetrotters, who project a slave mentality for Mr. Charlie’s entertainment,” Dr. Ross Thomas Runfola, a social science professor, wrote in the
New York Times
. Columnist Lacy J. Banks, of the
Chicago Sun-Times,
was even more critical:

Young blacks were the most dismissive of all. Willie Worsley, who played on the 1966 national championship team at University of
Texas at El Paso (UTEP), was quoted as saying, “The Trotters are clowns, and some of the young Negroes don’t like it…. Clowninglike animals. Acting the fool. Cheating and screaming. They’re out there telling the whites exactly what the whites want to hear.”

Criticism of the Trotters was coming from outside, and from within their own ranks. In 1972, a biography of Connie Hawkins included a damning chapter on his three years with the Trotters, entitled “Tomming for Abe.” “What we were doing out there was actin [
sic
] like Uncle Toms,” he said. “Grinnin [
sic
] and smiling and dancing around—that’s the way they told us to act, and that’s the way a lot of white people like to think we really are.” Today, Hawkins has a more positive view of his Trotter years, but his earlier statements are still being widely circulated in articles, dissertations, and books.

It wasn’t just the black community criticizing the Trotters, as whites lined up to take their turn. Author Jack Olsen described them as “the white man’s favorite black road show…. Running about the court emitting savage jungle yells, shouting in thick Southern accents (‘Yassuh, yassuh!’)…they come across as frivolous, mildly dishonest children.” Even grandfatherly James Michener offered this disparaging critique:

To be fair, it wasn’t completely one-sided. There were Globetrotter defenders in the African American community, including Bill Cosby (who played in a 1972 celebrity game against them and was given a lifetime dollar-a-year contract) and Jesse Jackson, who came to their defense in 1978, saying, “I think they’ve been a positive influ
ence…. They did not show blacks as stupid. On the contrary, they were shown as superior…they were able to turn science into an art form. I know professionals today who are still in awe of Marques Haynes and Goose Tatum.”

Once again, Meadowlark Lemon became a lightning rod for the controversy. His defense was that if he was a Tom, so were all comedians, white or black, but there were elements of his act that offended even some teammates. “He was always screaming—‘yeh-yeh-yeh-yeh-yeh-yeh’—and that would permeate the entire show,” Frank Stephens recalls. “And he’d give you that Stepin Fetchit walk and that big smile, and we really didn’t appreciate it. But who’s gonna tell Meadowlark? That’s what The Man wanted him to do, and if we question anything, first thing Meadowlark’s gonna do is get us fired. So what we used to do was carry ourselves as dignified human beings. He was doing his Amos ’n’ Andy shit, but we carried ourselves with dignity.”

Even former Trotters who hadn’t played in decades were pulled into the debate. “If you look at the showman, the guy looked like a minstrel person,” says Dr. Johnny Kline, who played from 1953 to 1959. “It was a stereotypical kind of thing—Meadowlark doing all the clowning, stupid stuff, giving himself up, becoming something demeaning. I heard that many times.” And for some former players, the issue once again brought up unfavorable comparisons between Meadowlark and Goose Tatum. “Goose didn’t run around screaming like Meadowlark did,” says Frank Washington, who played from 1946 to 1955. “Just running up and down the court hollering—I don’t think the people like it.”

The Globetrotters had always had more whites in their audiences than blacks, partly because of ticket prices, but in the crucible of the 1960s and ’70s, as Black Pride became the defining ethos of the age, the Trotters were losing much of the black support they once had. The more popular they became among whites, and the more they were portrayed as buffoons on TV, the less credibility they had in the African American community. A divide formed between the black community and the Globetrotters that would take many years to close. Some black families, who had once considered the Trotters a high calling, now discouraged their sons from trying out. “When I
told my father I was going to try out for the Globetrotters,” recalls Mannie Jackson, “his words to me were, ‘Why would you want to play with that bunch of clowns?’”

By 1974, Wells Twombly of the
San Francisco Examiner
was already composing the Trotters’ epitaph:

In 1976, the Harlem Globetrotters were sold to Metromedia, an entertainment and communications company that owned the Ice Capades and a chain of radio and television stations. Metromedia had bid on the Trotters in 1967, and finally had them ten years later. CEO John Kluge decided to relocate the Globetrotters to Los Angeles, where the company was based. Most of the old-timers in the Chicago office chose not to go (Wyonella Smith, Bill Margolis, Marian Polito, and Morry Saperstein, among them), but Marie Linehan packed up her file cabinets and her memories and moved to sunny California.

She and Joe Anzivino, who had come to work as an advance man in 1961, were the last of the old guard. Inman Jackson, the only remaining survivor from the Globetrotters’ early years, had died in April 1973, at the age of sixty-five. Big Jack had been in failing health for several years, and his friends were thankful that his suffering had ended. “We all miss Jack, of course,” Marie wrote to Bob Karstens, “but he was so sick at the end.”

With Inman gone, Marie became the institutional memory of the organization. Her surviving correspondence serves as a poignant
journal of the gradual deterioration that would bring the organization to the edge of ruin. The Harlem Globetrotters were not the same as they had once been, and Marie Linehan, in the same meticulous fashion with which she had detailed their greatest triumphs, was now recording their demise.