Spinning the Globe (49 page)

Mannie Jackson inherited that bitterness when he bought the team, along with the company trademarks and the rights to “Sweet Georgia Brown,” “A lot of the old players wouldn’t even return a phone call,” he says. As a former Trotter, he understood their hostility, and attempted to reach out to the Globetrotter audience that mattered most. In 1993, the first year he bought the team, he created a Legends Ring, the equivalent of a Globetrotter hall of fame, to honor former players who had made a lasting contribution to the team. Chosen by an advisory board, the Legends Ring now includes nearly twenty former Globetrotters, including Goose Tatum, Marques Haynes, Meadowlark Lemon, Curly Neal, Geese Ausbie, Bob “Showboat” Hall, Wilt Chamberlain, Connie Hawkins, Bob Karstens, J. C. Gibson, Frank Washington, Dr. Johnny Kline, Tex Harrison, and Lynette Woodard, among others.

That was a nice beginning, but nearly 200 former Globetrotters are still alive, out of an estimated 500 who have played for the team, and Mannie can’t put all of their pictures on the wall. Most of them will never be inducted into the Legends Ring.

He had to do more. In 2000, he decided to form an alumni association to try to reconnect with the surviving players and heal the family feud. He knew that only a former Trotter would have the credibility to make the alumni association work, so he turned to the friend he had known longer than anyone else: Govoner Vaughn, who had had a distinguished career as an executive for Detroit Edison. Mannie convinced Gov to move to Phoenix and become the director of alumni relations. Slowly, one by one, Gov started tracking down the old-timers. He compiled an alumni roster, published a newsletter, and became the liaison between the past and the present. “A lot of the guys just want somebody to talk to,” he says today, between constant phone calls.

Gov also became the de facto Globetrotter historian, unpacking all the boxes of old files and photographs that Mannie had salvaged from a storage warehouse in L.A., where they were rotting away. He built a Harlem Globetrotters archive in his office, with manila folders for every player and three-ring binders full of old photos and newsclips. With their history and their contributions finally being appreciated, the former players have come around. There are still a few
who won’t return Gov’s calls, but he’s slowly bringing them back into the fold.

Many former Trotters have done well in their lives, but many others have fallen on hard times. There are guys who played before there were pension plans and 401(K)s, and guys who had nothing to fall back on—no skills or college degree—when their playing days were done. Mannie Jackson has begun to reach out to them, too. In 2004, he donated $250,000 in seed money to the alumni association to help former players in need.

Today, it has all come together in an astounding resurgence for this nearly eighty-year-old institution. The Globetrotters are playing before two million people a year in twenty-five countries. Attendance was up 15 percent in 2004, the tenth consecutive year of double-digit increases. Total revenues have grown an average of 16 percent a year for the past ten years, and gross revenues have increased fivefold, from $9 million to over $40 million per year.
*
In 2000 and 2002, the Globetrotters were recognized as the “most liked and most recognized” sports team in the United States by the “Q Ratings,” an entertainment industry survey.

From the brink of collapse ten years ago, the Harlem Globetrotters have firmly reestablished themselves as an American sports icon and an international phenomenon. It would be tempting to say that the story has come full circle, and that the Trotters have recaptured the luster of their glory days in the 1950s and ’60s. But that would be too simplistic, and too cute. The world has changed, basketball has changed, and the Globetrotters are not looking to recapture their past.

In the 1950s, the Globetrotters were emissaries who carried basketball around the world, introducing it in countries where the game was as yet unknown. But now basketball has become a global sport. What began with Dr. Naismith and a peach basket in Springfield,
Massachusetts, has spread around the world, and the game that America dominated just fifteen years ago—when the 1992 Dream Team swept to Olympic gold in Barcelona—has in many ways passed it by. One need only look at the humiliating defeat of the American men in the 2004 Athens Olympics to know that the world is no longer in awe of American basketball or its self-absorbed NBA millionaires.

And as basketball’s popularity creates a new global market, who better than the Harlem Globetrotters to capitalize on it? Fifty years ago, Abe Saperstein had the foresight to take his team around the world, when no one else could envision it, and build the Globetrotters into the most popular sports franchise on earth. Today, Mannie Jackson sees the potential for the Globetrotters to become more popular internationally than even Abe could have dreamed. In August 2004, the Globetrotters signed a five-year contract with the Chinese government to play sixty games a year there, with the possibility of that number doubling. Similar opportunities exist in Japan and across the Asian Rim. The Chinese don’t just want the Trotters to perform; they want them to teach values and character development in Chinese schools. The Trotters’ unique combination of sport, entertainment, humanitarian work, and family values may catapult them to a level of international popularity that no sports franchise has ever achieved.

At sixty-five, Mannie Jackson is beginning to reflect on the legacy that he will leave behind for the Globetrotter organization. “If I’ve accomplished anything, it is [to create] the possibility of this American icon exploding worldwide in ways we’ve never imagined,” he says. “No one knows yet what the global market will evolve to be, but the rules will not be defined by the NBA or the American media, but by someone sitting in Beijing or Brisbane or Istanbul. And the Harlem Globetrotters will be a major player. We’ll be at least number two in the world, and with the right influences, we’ll be number one.”

Final Circle

I
t’s an hour before game time in Tampa, Florida, and the Harlem Globetrotters are in their dressing room at the Ice Palace, eating a pregame meal of fried chicken and french fries out of Styrofoam take-out containers. The meal would not win any “Healthy Heart” certificates, but there is no time for a sit-down meal this afternoon. The Trotters arrived two hours earlier from Bradenton, fifty miles south, where they played the previous night, then immediately hit the floor for their daily practice and scrimmage against the New York Nationals, their regular opposition team.

The Trotters practice every day, even after long hauls between towns, and those practice sessions are surprisingly intense. Coach Clyde Sinclair, a recently retired player himself, screams at the Trotter guards from the sidelines, “Push it! Push the ball!” The Trotters and the Nationals, who are owned by Red Klotz, have played hundreds of games against each other and the Nationals have never won, yet the players still go at each other hard on the floor.

By the time practice ended, there was only an hour before this Saturday matinee was to begin, so the players make do with the take-out chicken. Curley “Boo” Johnson (Curley is his real name), the veteran dribbling specialist now in his sixteenth year, picks half-heartedly at his food and then starts laying out the oversized knee pads that protect him when he goes into his slides. A reflective, studious man, Johnson has been keeping a daily journal every year since he joined the team, and functions as the Trotters’ resident historian. Other players joke around as they eat, showing the easy
familiarity of men who spend four straight months traveling together.

Two of the Trotters’ stars, Paul “Showtime” Gaffney and Michael “Wild Thing” Wilson, are already out in the arena, talking to about thirty-five adolescents from the Florida Sheriff’s Boys Ranch. This is a daily pregame ritual called “Globetrotter University,” at which Trotter players talk to youngsters from local boys or girls clubs, scout troops, or AAU basketball teams. Gaffney emphasizes the importance of staying in school and getting a college degree. “The Globetrotters are not just the most entertaining team in the world, we’re the most educated,” he says, citing the fact that over 80 percent of the Trotters have college degrees.

After their initial presentation, the players field questions from the kids.

“Do Globetrotter players go to the NBA?” one boy asks.

“Yeah, a lot of Globetrotters play in the NBA,” says Wilson. “There’s not a
talent
difference; it’s a
choice
difference. I see more of the world in a month than most people see in a lifetime.” Wilson knows something about talent. The six-foot-five beanpole, who starred at Memphis University, is listed in the
Guinness Book of World Records
for an incredible twelve-foot dunk.

“Are you guys sort of like ‘And 1’?” another kid asks, referring to the popular street-ball hoopsters who have been featured on ESPN.

“No, ‘And 1’ is like us, only we’re better,” Gaffney replies.

Globetrotter University wraps up forty-five minutes before game time and Gaffney and Wilson hurry back to the locker room to gulp down their now-cold chicken dinners and get into their game uniforms. This pregame meeting with kids is indicative of the difference between the Globetrotters and the NBA. There may be more of a talent difference than Gaffney and Wilson would admit, but the
image
difference is truly striking.
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Nearly every week, it seems, the press is
reporting another scandal involving professional athletes: failed drug tests, wife beatings, murder raps, drunk-driving charges, steroid abuse, and on and on. While the NBA’s multimillionaires are notorious for blowing off fans, refusing to sign autographs, and cultivating a gangsta image (which now includes the horrifying spectacle of Ron Artest and other Indiana Pacers brawling with Detroit Pistons’ fans in November 2004), Globetrotter players visit schools and hospitals in every town, hold free clinics for underprivileged kids, and sign autographs for at least thirty minutes after every game.

The crowd is starting to fill up the Ice Palace, the 20,000-seat home of the Stanley Cup–champion Tampa Bay Lightning. The Globetrotters’ announcer is already hard at work, interspersing music with announcements about the Trotters’ Web site and pitches for Burger King, the tour sponsor. The crowd is made up almost entirely of families with children, and with a half hour still to go before game time, the younger ones are getting antsy.

An eight-year-old girl attending her first basketball game asks her father, “Daddy, how does basketball work?”

The father starts to explain, then hesitates, wondering how to translate a Globetrotters’ game into regular basketball terminology. He is saved by the announcer, however, who booms out, “And now it’s time to meet the world’s most popular mascot—heeeerrreee’s Globie!!!”

From the north end zone, the Globetrotters’ mascot emerges—a young man wearing a gigantic globe-shaped head, a red-white-and-blue uniform, and clown-sized sneakers. Globie is one of Mannie Jackson’s creations, a perfect combination of marketing savvy and customer satisfaction. Globie fills the thirty minutes before the game by entertaining the younger kids. It’s like having Big Bird in sneakers. After high-fiving his way around the arena, Globie invites a young boy out of the stands and, with “Come On Everybody, Let’s Do the Twist” blaring on the PA, coaxes the boy to dance. Then Globie teaches the boy to shoot an over-the-head shot with his back to the basket; every time he misses, hundreds of children in the stands groan in sympathy.

Just before game time, the announcer says, “Globie will be signing autographs in the north end zone,” and there’s a stampede of
youngsters to that corner. The eight-year-old who doesn’t know how basketball works turns to her dad. “I want to meet Globie!” she cries, and they’re rushing off to join the throng. Of course, the kids need something for Globie to autograph, and there are Globie T-shirts and Globie basketballs and Globie beanie babies for sale—and every kid has to have one.

The Globetrotters and the Nationals come out on the court and, after introductions, the Trotters perform the Magic Circle. For fifty years, the Trotters have been entertaining fans with this same ball-handling routine, but it never grows old. People are tapping their feet and clapping their hands to “Sweet Georgia Brown,” and it’s the same all over the world. The song and the show are magic.

The game begins, and Showtime Gaffney takes over. Globetrotter showmen are now miked, so they can be heard in the upper reaches of big halls, and Showtime directs the Trotters’ weave, feeds Michael Wilson for a rim-rattling dunk, harasses the ref, steals a woman’s purse, and hits a hook from half court on his third try. Before halftime, Curley Boo goes into his dribbling routine, sliding across the floor with a Nationals player in pursuit. Later, Curley pushes a young girl in a wheelchair to center court and, with a little assistance, has her spinning the ball on her finger. By the time the game is over, the Trotters will have pulled out most of the old standards—the confetti-in-the-bucket and the slow-motion-football pantomime—and the parents in the crowd will be laughing as hard as they did when they were kids. The father of the eight-year-old wonders if his daughter will ever want to see a regular ball game after this. But then, as he sees the joy on her face, he knows that for her, as for so many millions of fans around the world, this will be a memory that will last forever.

It’s the final night of the Harlem Globetrotters’ greatest triumph. After seventy-five years, the Trotters have been inducted, as a team, into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. They’re only the fifth team to be inducted, and now join their old rivals the New York Rens. The induction ceremony, on Saturday night, was hosted by Ahmad Rashad and broadcast live on
ESPN2. Besides the Globetrotters, other inductees included coaches Larry Brown and Lute Olson and, most notably, Magic Johnson, who sat in the front row of the Springfield Civic Center, in a place of honor.

When the Trotters’ turn came, Rashad introduced a short video about their history, which included highlights of their two victories over the Minneapolis Lakers and interviews with Trotter greats Marques Haynes, Meadowlark Lemon, and Curly Neal. As the video ended and the lights were coming back up in the auditorium, Rashad leaned down toward Magic Johnson and said softly, off-mike, “You know you stole some of that stuff.” And Magic nodded and pointed at Rashad, and threw back his head and laughed.

Indeed.

Later, after a jam-packed reception at the Hall of Fame, the Globetrotters’ entourage gathered in the lobby bar of the Sheraton Hotel, where they were staying. Mannie Jackson had flown in a group of former players for the big event, including Marques Haynes, Curly Neal, Geese Ausbie, Tex Harrison, Dr. Johnny Kline, Lynette Woodard, and Govoner Vaughn. He had also brought in a squad of current players, who had performed the Magic Circle at the induction ceremony.

Now, around midnight, they were all gathered in the lobby bar. The old guys were clustered together around several small tables, nursing beers, while the young players, still wearing their Trotter warm-up suits, sat nearby at the bar. As happens whenever former Trotters get together, they started telling stories and swapping lies. “He never tells the same lie twice,” one old veteran exclaims, disputing a former teammate’s recollection of an ancient event. This same scenario is reenacted all over the country wherever former Trotters gather—in Detroit, New York, or Phoenix.

The memories flow, good and bad alike. They tell stories about the Big Dipper, remembering the time Wilt slammed a ball so hard that it hit the ground and bounced all the way back up through the basket. They remember Connie Hawkins taking off from the foul line and swooping down out of the sky so powerfully that the defenders turned and ran.

They make fun of the wanna-be Globetrotters who periodically crop up at big events (one is even here in Springfield), claiming to have played with the Trotters, when all they ever did was try out and get cut, or play one game
against
the Globetrotters.

They laugh now about racial incidents that weren’t funny at the time, like the time rednecks in Evansville, Indiana, set the team bus on fire; or the time, in 1983, when Sweet Lou Dunbar, Ovie Dotson, and Jimmy Blacklock were thrown to the ground and arrested by Santa Barbara police, at gunpoint, after a jewelry store was robbed, even though they didn’t match descriptions of the suspects in the least.

The racial complexities of being a Harlem Globetrotter are ever-present, even tonight. Two of the current players, Wun Versher and Curley Boo Johnson, are approached at the bar by a white mother with two young boys. She sends the boys up to ask for autographs, which the players give obligingly. But after she leaves, Curley Boo asks reflectively, “Now, do you think she would come anywhere near us, with those kids, if we weren’t wearing Globetrotter warm-ups?” At any other time, seeing two young black men sitting at a bar at midnight on a Saturday night, the woman may have run the other way. “I know I get treated different when people know I’m a Globetrotter,” he continues, “but I wouldn’t say anything to her about it. Because I’m a Globetrotter, maybe people can see me as person.”

With the arrival of a second round of beers, the old-timers start loosening up, and the stories about Abe Saperstein come spilling out, even thirty-five years after his death. They are still debating, passionately, how much he actually knew about basketball, and whether he was prejudiced or whether it was all “just business.” “Abe was about six different kinds of asshole, but racist wasn’t one of them,” says Bobby Hunter, who paid his own way to Springfield to be there for the Hall of Fame induction.

More solemnly, they talk about their former teammates—some who are doing well, and others who aren’t. If a generalization can be made, the former Trotters who seem to be doing better are those who played only a few years, five or six, perhaps, and then moved on with their lives. These guys built on their Globetrotter experiences,
used the connections they made, and the celebrity status it brought them, to forge a new career. “The Harlem Globetrotters were something I
did,
” says Frank Stephens. “It’s not who I am.”

The guys having the hardest time, however, are the ones who couldn’t let it go. The longer they played, the harder it became to be something
other
than a Globetrotter. Two of the saddest cases are the two most famous Globetrotters, Curly Neal and Meadowlark Lemon.

Curly Neal is still one of the most recognized sports figures in the world, twenty years after he retired. Everywhere he went in Springfield, peopled recognized his bald head and dazzling smile. “Curly! Curly!” screamed a middle-aged woman working at a local Burger King, rushing out to give him a hug. When the Trotters visited the cancer ward of the Baystate Children’s Hospital, he was inundated with requests for autographs by nurses and doctors. Saturday night, at the induction ceremony, a crowd of people stood in line behind a rope to get his autograph; and some of the other former Trotters stood to one side, shaking their heads and marveling at the scene. “Curly could have been a multi-multimillionaire,” said Govoner Vaughn, “but he was his own worst enemy.” Neal has had financial problems and has been reduced to making appearances for Lowe’s; he carries around a little ditty bag of publicity photos, and sometimes seems to be searching for someone to give them to.

Perhaps the saddest case of all is Meadowlark Lemon, who was noticeable by his absence in Springfield. It is hard to find many former Trotters who will say nice things about him, other than that he was “a professional.” But Lemon, more than any other Globetrotter, cannot let it go. At seventy-two, he is still trying to play basketball, still going out on tour and doing his old reams. Now a born-again Christian minister, Lemon has his own Web site, on which he sells Meadowlark Lemon nutritional drinks and, improbably, the Meadowlark Lemon home-schooling curriculum. He has recently published a new autobiography, available only through the Web site, for the remarkable price of $350—complete with an authenticated thumbprint.