Spinning the Globe (46 page)

From 1987–88 to 1991–92, attendance had been dropping precipitously in many of the Trotters’ major venues: from 25,932 to 12,573 in Philadelphia; from 26,271 to 10,935 in Houston; from 22,667 to 8,247 in Minneapolis; and from 11,275 to 4,279 in Cleveland.

The last of the old-timers, Joe Anzivino, who had been with the Trotters since 1961, was installed as president in March 1992, but he had little authority and was answering directly to the bank’s crisis manager, Burton Merical, and to Ice Capades’ president, Michael
Booker. “In my 30 years I have never experienced the bizarre leadership we’ve had in the past four years,” Anzivino complained to Merical.

By 1992, the Globetrotters had degenerated into more of a farce than a comedy show, and basketball had been forgotten long ago. They were getting almost as much publicity in police reports as in the sports pages. There were drug busts, assault charges, a fistfight between two players in a bowling alley that had to be broken up by police, a hotel scuffle between a player and his wife that made the papers, even a rape charge against a former Trotter. On the court, it was almost as bad. One player was photographed giving the finger to the crowd, another was drinking so heavily that he was “noticeably tipsy” on the bench, a Washington Generals’ player told the referee to “Shut the fuck up!” and a Globetrotter star told a promoter to “go fuck himself.” One mother wrote a complaint letter, outraged over her children watching the showman “pretend to have sex” with the referee. Other fans complained about players caressing each other’s buttocks and performing a “pantomime of sodomy.”

It all spiraled down to the season opener in October 1992, when the players took to the court not in their traditional red-white-and-blue uniforms, but in a new one-piece spandex pull-on suit designed by a costumer for the Ice Capades. The sleek uni-suits were the inspiration of Michael Booker, former British national figure-skating champ and president of the Ice Capades, who had suggested that the Trotters needed to update their look. In the locker room, players would step into their “unis” and ask a teammate, “Would you zip me up?”

It was as bad as it could get.

O
n March 28, 1993, Mannie Jackson took his teenage daughters to see the Harlem Globetrotters play in Boston Garden. He wanted to see the team play one last time before making his final decision. You see, Mannie Jackson was the man who was going to shut down the Globetrotters. Close down the tour and put the Trotters in the museum alongside the Negro Leagues and colored water fountains and other relics of America’s Jim Crow past. He had a handshake deal with NatWest, the bank that controlled the Trotters, to buy the team; and he hoped to convince Hollywood to make a movie, he planned to write a book on the Trotters’ history, and he figured he could sell Globetrotter merchandise in retail outlets. But the team itself was finished. “It had made a great contribution to the world, but it was over,” he would later write.

If anyone was going to shut down the Trotters, Mannie Jackson was the perfect man for the job. He was a former Globetrotter himself, having played in the early 1960s, before going on to a star-studded career in corporate America, first at General Motors and then for twenty-five years at Honeywell, where he had risen to become a corporate officer and senior vice president for marketing and administration, overseeing a $2.3 billion global business unit. He knew business and he knew basketball, and he knew that the Harlem Globetrotters could no longer survive in either realm.

And so he had brought his daughters with him to Boston to watch this game. Mannie’s daughters, Candace and Cassandra, who were thirteen and fourteen, respectively, did not think of their father
as a basketball player. Their image of him was as a fabulously successful Honeywell executive who bought and sold companies over the phone, making $20 million acquisitions before breakfast. They pictured him in his luxurious office at corporate headquarters, or jetting halfway around the world for an afternoon meeting, then returning home at night to their Minneapolis mansion on the lake. To them, his one athletic passion was golf, which he pursued to an eight handicap at exclusive country clubs. Mannie Jackson had a beautiful family, a stellar business career, and all the money he would ever need. He had it all—and basketball was not part of it.

So his daughters held no romanticized image of their father as a Harlem Globetrotter. That part of his life had ended twenty-five years ago, long before they were born. They weren’t that thrilled by a trip to Boston in the first place, so Mannie had enticed them by saying, “Listen, we’ll check out Harvard while we’re there.” Fine, the girls said,
that
was worth a trip.

But that night, as they sat courtside in Boston Garden, what they saw unfold before them was so shabby, so bumbling and amateurish, that they could not imagine their father had ever been part of it. It did not jibe with their image of him at all. “Daddy, you used to do
this?
” they asked, in that incredulous tone that only teenagers can summon. “You used to play with
these guys?
”

“Yeah,” Mannie admitted, with embarrassment. “I did.”

Candace and Cassandra couldn’t believe they had come all the way to Boston for
this
—Harvard or no Harvard.

For Mannie, the game confirmed all of his misgivings about the team’s future. The attendance was dismal, the players looked lost, and the Globetrotters’ front office was so desperate that they had brought Meadowlark Lemon out of retirement for a forty-eight-game “Reunion Tour,” even though he was sixty-two years old. A forty-year-old basketball player is considered an old man, but Lemon was old enough to draw Social Security! He was so sensitive about his age that the front office had issued a company-wide memo to deflect any inquiries with the standard response: “Meadowlark is between 18 and 100.” Lemon was playing only one quarter in each game, and some nights he was able to recapture flashes of his old magic, but most nights, like this one in Boston, he looked like an old geezer hobbling around the court.

It wasn’t just the team that was embarrassing, it was the entire operation. “I realized that every little detail was being mismanaged,” Mannie says today. “Every single detail—from the concessions, the box office, transportation, to the attitude of the players and the road staff—was being terribly managed.”

Mannie took notes on all the problems he saw and decided to call a meeting of the players in their hotel after the game. The players had heard the rumors that he was going to buy the team, and they knew he was at the game, so he figured it was time to talk to them face-to-face. Few of them actually knew him, but they had heard stories about him and knew his reputation. He was the guy who’d made it big—the former Trotter who’d hit the number and cashed in all his chips. When they assembled, Meadowlark included, Mannie fully intended to give the speech he had been preparing, about closing down the tour, selling licensed products, putting out a movie. “You guys, through no fault of your own, are in a terrible situation,” he began. “This is on its deathbed.”

But as he continued talking, something unexpected happened. “I saw something in their eyes,” he recalls. There was a spark, a yearning, a kind of hunger that he had not anticipated. Mannie found himself thinking back over sixty-five years of Globetrotter history to all the great players who had gone before—Inman Jackson and Goose Tatum and Marques Haynes—and, very subtly, the verb tense of his speech began to change from past to present, from the pluperfect to the conditional. He began talking not about shutting down the team, but about what it would take to resurrect it. He started laying out a business plan of what he would do if he bought the team—and by the end it was not “if” but “when.” Instead of convincing the team that the end had come, he had convinced himself to try to bring the Globetrotters back from the dead.

“Mannie came
strong,
” recalls Curley “Boo” Johnson, a Trotter veteran who was at the meeting.

“Saving the Globetrotters has got to be a religion for us,” Mannie told them. “You guys are my disciples; I’m going to be your leader. If you don’t want to join me, get out of here now.” No one left the room. “If you guys are with me, I’ll make you wealthy, I’ll make it popular, I’ll make it big, but it’s going to be a rough ride before it’s over,” he added.

Mannie went back to Minneapolis, determined to convince NatWest to sell him the team. He had a handshake agreement, but there were other prospective buyers for the Globetrotters, including Jerry Saperstein, MOMA Concerts USA, and Century Park Pictures Corporation. In November 1992, Mannie Jackson had offered to buy the team by himself, but NatWest refused. “Who have you got with you?” the bankers kept asking.

Mannie read a subtle message between the lines: NatWest was not going to sell to a lone black man, no matter how much credibility he had, without other investors to bail him out if he fell on his face. “I really hate to say that, because you’d think in the nineties you could buy a company by yourself,” he says, “but it was really necessary that I had a support group with me.” Mannie wanted to put together a black ownership group, so he approached other well-known African Americans, including Isiah Thomas, rap artist M.C. Hammer, and several black CEOs he knew, but none would put up any money. “That was the saddest thing I experienced in the whole process,” he recalls. He did get one taker, John L. Jones, a Xerox and Jostens executive, but that was not enough.

So Mannie turned to Dennis Mathisen, a Minneapolis investment banker, and asked him to assist in putting together a local investment group. Eventually, they pulled together twelve investors, mostly friends and business partners from Minneapolis, who had the financial credibility that the bank desired. In addition to Mathisen, these included retired Honeywell chairman Ed Spencer, who had been Mannie’s mentor in his early years with the company; H. William Lurton, chairman and CEO of Jostens Incorporated; A. Skidmore Thorpe; Barbara L. Forster; Miller and Schroder Capital Corporation, Dennis Lind; Ruth Busta; Draft Company/Nicholson Boys L.P.; the Sienna Corporation Employees Profit Sharing Plan; and the only African American investor, John L. Jones. These investors contributed a total of approximately $500,000.

The newly formed Mannie Jackson Associates (MJA) then made its pitch to NatWest, offering $5.5 million for the Globetrotters. NatWest accepted, on the condition that the bank would retain a 20 percent ownership of the team, which Mannie could buy out over the next five years. Mannie would hold 35.5 percent of the company
and have full control of its operations, Dennis Mathisen would control 34.5 percent, and the remaining investors would split the final 10 percent.

Before the sale was publicly announced, Mannie organized a three-day strategic planning retreat on a farm in southern Minnesota. The participants included Red Klotz and former Globetrotters Hallie Bryant, Curly Neal, Geese Ausbie, Osborn Lockhart, and Tex Harrison. They asked themselves, “What could the Globetrotters be? What
should
they be?” And the answer, they concluded, was that the Globetrotters could be anything they wanted to be. “But we had to believe that internally first,” Mannie says today. “The people had lost confidence in themselves, and the company was rudderless.”

In June 1993, the sale was announced with great fanfare in the national media. Mannie Jackson became the first former Globetrotter to own the team and the first African American to own a major sports franchise in American history. Those two historical firsts were symbolic of just how far he had come.

There is an old adage that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step, but the first steps in Mannie Jackson’s journey were taken in more humble surroundings than one might imagine: he was born in a railroad boxcar in Illmo, Missouri, in 1939. A combination of the abbreviations for Illinois and Missouri, Illmo was a railroad hub on the banks of the Mississippi River, in southeastern Missouri, with 1,100 residents. During the bleakest days of the Great Depression, the St. Louis Southwest Railway (later the Cotton Belt Railway) started providing converted boxcars as free housing for its section hands. Eventually, there were as many as twenty boxcar houses near the train station, with both black and white families living there. The boxcars had electricity but no running water, and several families shared an outdoor bathroom. Mannie Jackson’s maternal grandfather was a straw boss for the railroad, which is why the family was living there when Mannie was born. His grandmother used plywood and bed-sheets to make separate rooms for the eleven members of the family. “My grandmother made it a castle,” he later recalled.

He spent his first four years in the boxcar house, then moved to
Edwardsville, Illinois, a suburb of St. Louis, twenty miles across the Illinois state line. Edwardsville had a population of 8,000 people, and everybody knew everybody else. The school system was still segregated, so Mannie enrolled at the Lincoln School, which included kindergarten through twelfth grades. His father got a job at the local Chrysler dealership, and his mother and paternal grandmother worked as domestics, cleaning white people’s houses. Mannie would sometimes accompany his mother to her jobs. “My mother was a domestic, and for some African Americans that sounds demeaning,” he says, “but the experience I had of going with her and my grandmother was positive for me. Going in those homes, I got to see my mother’s work ethic and the relationship she had with the people she worked for, and how much they loved her and respected her. And I was able to see the inside of their homes and walk through their libraries and see how they expressed themselves and how they conducted their lives. It was a source of inspiration and goal setting and envisioning what life could be.”

In the first grade, he met the new kid in town, Govoner Vaughn, whose family had just moved north from Mississippi, and the two young boys would forge a friendship that would last for sixty years. On the sandlot basketball courts in front of the Lincoln School, Mannie and Gov played thousands of games together, and by the time Edwardsville integrated its schools, in 1950, Mannie and Gov entered the eighth grade as a dynamic duo. They swept through junior high and onto the Edwardsville High freshman team, where they continued their outstanding play. On January 29, 1953, for instance, Mannie scored 28 points and Gov added 12 to lead the Edwardsville freshmen to a 61–45 win over Belleville.

In their sophomore year, Mannie and Gov made the varsity and had high expectations about starting, but they ran headlong into the diminutive Coach Joe Lucco, who promptly sat them on the bench. The Edwardsville Tigers had finished fourth in the state in 1952–53 and were loaded with talented upperclassmen, including Don Ohl, who would play for the NBA’s Baltimore Bullets. Lucco was an extreme disciplinarian who ran the program like a Marine Corps boot camp. He made his players cut their hair the same way, refused to let them play football, forced them to run cross-country to build their
endurance, and wouldn’t let them date during the season. Players who questioned him or talked back or sulked would provoke a tirade that left more than one of them in tears.

Mannie Jackson was like the
anti
-Lucco. He was a free spirit who dressed in flashy clothes and a big fedora. He had a smart mouth and a quick mind and sometimes engaged the former before the latter. His father was an outspoken civil rights leader and active in the fight to integrate the local schools, and Mannie was primed to challenge any perceived racial slight or slur. “I was outspoken, particularly about racial stuff, and I would challenge anyone,” Mannie recalls. “I had a way of looking a certain way or doing a certain thing that would set Lucco off.”

Mannie was six feet tall, but a scrawny 150 pounds, and had an unorthodox jump shot that he launched from way behind his head. But he could hit his quirky shot consistently from twenty feet, was blindingly fast off the dribble, and had been dunking since he was twelve. Gov was taller, at six-four, and had an even sweeter outside shot.

Lucco realized what kind of exceptional talents he had in Mannie and Gov, but still made them conform to his system. “Now I appreciate him being tough on me,” Mannie says. “The reward was that we won and we were all better for it.” By their senior year, Mannie and Gov were the talk of southern Illinois. Mannie had grown to six two and a half and filled out to 170 pounds, and with him on the left wing and Gov in the pivot, they were unstoppable. They had such quick first steps to the basket that opposing coaches were constantly complaining to the referees that they were traveling. When one official kept calling traveling on Mannie, Lucco told the ref, “He may have traveled, but it happened too fast for
you
to see it.”