Spinning the Globe (7 page)

“How ya doing?” he called out as Brookins approached.

“Fine,” Brookins replied. “You new to the island?”

Strauss said he was just visiting.

“What do you do?” Brookins asked.

“I’m a sportswriter.”

With that, Brookins stopped walking. “What do you know about the Harlem Globe Trotters?” he asked.

“I’ve covered them a few times,” Strauss replied. He had been at the
Times
since 1930, and in his five decades of reporting had covered the entire gamut of sports, including major league baseball, football, boxing, horse racing, snow skiing, college and professional basketball—and the Harlem Globe Trotters.

For the next few minutes, standing there in the sand with the waves lapping at their ankles, Tommy Brookins told an incredible story to this total stranger on the beach. But Strauss was intrigued by what he heard. In addition to his regular job at the
Times,
he was a prolific freelancer, writing articles for over thirty different magazines. He was always looking for a story—about sports, travel, skiing, anything that caught his fancy. And this story definitely caught his fancy. Strauss had known Abe Saperstein personally (by then Abe was deceased), he knew all about the Globetrotters, and his initial reaction was one of incredulity—that this tale could not possibly be true—but the more he listened, the more intrigued he became.

He arranged to meet Brookins at his restaurant, Portofino, for
dinner, to continue their conversation. When he got there, Brookins told him more details about the story and pulled out old photos to make his points. Strauss was convinced enough to write a freelance article, but he knew the story would be controversial—and still had doubts himself—so he didn’t offer it to a top-tier magazine, like
Esquire,
but sold it instead to a small Philadelphia-based basketball periodical, where it was published with no notice.

Today, Michael Strauss is ninety-one years old and lives in Palm Beach, Florida. He retired from the
Times
in 1980, when he turned seventy, after an astonishing fifty-three years there, but has yet to retire from sportswriting. He is now the sports editor of the
Palm Beach Daily News
and writes at least five columns a week. He doesn’t do it for the money, as he’s a millionaire from investments in the stock market. “I do it to keep busy,” he explains.

And thirty years after his encounter with Tommy Brookins, he still has vivid recollections of it. “Absolutely,” he says. “I can see myself standing right there on the beach at St. Martin, and he was talking to me. And I didn’t believe it. It came from left field…but he was sincere and well-spoken.”

The story Brookins told that day on the beach is just as sensational today. And some of it can now be documented.

“It all began with our schoolboy team,” Brookins began. He told Strauss about playing on the great Wendell Phillips team that nearly won the city championship, only to lose to Lane Tech. He told him about Dick Hudson starting the Savoy Big Five, which included Brookins, Randolph Ramsey, Toots Wright, Lester Johnson, and Inman Jackson. He told him about beating George Halas’s Chicago Bruins (although the Bruins actually beat the Savoy the first time they played, when Brookins was still on the team). And he told him about how they had changed the name of the team to “Tommy Brookins’ Globe Trotters” (and later to the Original Chicago Globe Trotters) and moved their games from the Savoy Ballroom to the Eighth Regiment Armory, after Hudson and I. J. Faggen, the Savoy owner, got into a hassle over money.

And then Brookins started talking about Abe Saperstein. He said that the Globe Trotters were hoping to do some barnstorming in
Michigan and Wisconsin,
*
to make extra money, and Dick Hudson told them, “Well, I’ve got a man who I think can help us. His name is Abe Saperstein.” Hudson explained that Abe had booked baseball teams in both those states, and could help the Globe Trotters “because he has a white face.”

According to Brookins, Abe was hired strictly as a booking agent. The deal was that he would book ten games, for which he would get a 10 percent booking fee of whatever money they made. In addition, Abe asked for $100 expense money up front so he could “go into the country and find us some places to play.” The players voted to accept his deal, chipped in the $100 for travel expenses, and off he went.

After Abe booked the games, the Tommy Brookins’s Globe Trotters headed out on the road to play them. “Everything was going great,” Brookins told Strauss. But one night, after a game ended, the team was sitting in the locker room when a fan came in to congratulate them.

“I saw you guys the other night in Eau Claire,” he said. “You fellows are great!”

“Eau Claire?” Brookins responded, quizzically. “We haven’t even played there yet. You must be mistaken.”

Randolph Ramsey, who had overheard the conversation, was left to deliver the bad news. He told Brookins that Abe Saperstein was booking a second team, using the name Globe Trotters, in Wisconsin. Apparently, while Brookins’s was playing in Michigan, the “second” Globe Trotters team was in Wisconsin.

Brookins was shocked—and livid. “How come you never told me until now?” he demanded.

“I was going to tell you,” Ramsey said sheepishly, “but I was waiting until I thought you were in a good mood.”

When Brookins asked what players Abe had on the other team, Ramsey said, “All the fellows we didn’t want.”

As soon as Brookins could, he caught up with Abe and confronted
him. “What’s the big idea?” he asked. “They tell me you’ve started another team and used our name.”

Abe freely admitted it, saying, “I thought it would be a good idea to book two teams at once.” When Brookins told him he hadn’t treated them fairly, Abe shrugged and said, “What can I do now? I’ve booked the games and they’re already playing them.”

It might have become a much bigger row, but Brookins was ready to get off the road anyway. He had an offer to sing at the Regal Theater, next door to the Savoy Ballroom, for $75 a week. Plus, as he told Michael Strauss, his mother was sick in Chicago and he wanted to be close to her. So he took the singing job. Brookins told Strauss that he had one final meeting with Abe, at which Abe promised to hire some of the original players from Brookins’s Globe Trotters, and they parted on good terms. Later, Abe called him and asked if he had spare uniforms left over, and Brookins sent him three sets that were collecting dust in his closet.

That was the end of Tommy Brookins’s Globe Trotters, although Brookins himself would still play some basketball, on and off, including with a new Dick Hudson team called the Chicago Hottentots. Primarily, however, he focused on his singing career. And if he hadn’t run into Michael Strauss on the beach in St. Martin, his story would have never been told.

Of course, the obvious question must be raised: is the story true?

There are minor inconsistencies with some names and dates, but the fact is that Brookins’s version of how the Globe Trotters began has far
fewer
inconsistencies—and is much easier to document—than Abe’s official version. We know, for certain, that Brookins, Ramsey, and Wright formed a team called the Globe Trotters in November 1928, and that that team was referred to in the
Defender
as “Thomas Brookins’ Globe Trotters.” It was his team.

Further, Abe and Brookins both agreed that Dick Hudson was the liaison who originally hooked up Abe with a group of former Giles Post–Savoy Big Five players to start barnstorming, and that Hudson recommended him because of Abe’s experience in booking baseball games. Of course, Brookins added one additional qualification: “because he has a white face.”

Ultimately, Brookins’s story meshes so closely with the chronol
ogy of events that can be documented (as opposed to the multiple contradictions in Abe’s chronology) that it seems believable. Michael Strauss certainly thinks so, even though he had his doubts at the time. “Oh, it absolutely all started with this guy,” he says. “Abe was a booking agent originally—just came upon it by chance. There’s no doubt in my mind that’s what happened with Saperstein.”

Brookins has another expert in his corner. J Michael Kenyon, an Oregon-based researcher who has been studying the Globetrotters for over thirty years, combing through hundreds of reels of microfilmed newspapers and compiling the most comprehensive archive of Globetrotter box scores, game reports, and chronologies in the world, believes the story as well. “Almost every word of what Brookins says in this piece rings true for me,” says Kenyon. His only criticism of Brookins lies in how he came up with the name “Globe Trotters,” which he claimed was because all five players did “plenty of trotting.” In fact, Kenyon’s enormous archive shows that two of the most well-known barnstorming teams in the Midwest in the mid-1920s were Basloe’s Globe Trotters and the Minneapolis Globe Trotters. As Kenyon explains, “[The name] Globe Trotters was well established in the basketball lexicon by November of 1928, and was there for the plucking by Brookins.”

So when and how did the Harlem Globetrotters begin? The best estimate is in early 1929, as a spin-off (or rip-off) of Tommy Brookins’s Globe Trotters. In later years, when Abe claimed that the team started in 1927, he may have backdated it by two years to include his first involvement with the Giles Post tour of Wisconsin.

If Brookins’s story is correct and Abe surreptitiously booked a second Globe Trotter unit, then who made up this second team? Ironically, it may have been the Savoy Big Five. It could be mere coincidence, but in March 1929, the same time frame in which Brookins’s Globe Trotters would have been touring, the Savoy Big Five, under the direction of Coach Al Monroe, was reported to be on a barnstorming tour of—guess where—Michigan and Wisconsin. Could these have been “all the fellows we didn’t want”—the players who had stayed with the Savoy, instead of coming with Brookins?

An even more likely possibility involves Runt Pullins, who seemed to be everywhere in late 1928 and early 1929, as these events were unfolding. He had played a preliminary game for Brookins’s Globe Trotters, in February 1929, with his own team (alternately called Runt Pullins’s All-Stars or the South Side Boys Club Comets). Abe certainly would have known about him, as he was one of the most famous high school ballplayers in Chicago, as a result of his Wendell Phillips championship in 1928. To field a second team, Abe needed a star. Brookins and Ramsey provided that for their team, but Abe needed a “blue-chipper” who could carry a team on his shoulders. Pullins was that kind of player.

Like everything else connected with the Globe Trotters’ origin, there is controversy about who those “original” ballplayers were, but the most accurate roster includes Pullins, Toots Wright, Fat Long, Kid Oliver, and Andy Washington—all from Wendell Phillips. Toots Wright and Kid Oliver had both been listed as members of Tommy Brookins’s Globe Trotters when the team first formed, but by early 1929, neither one is showing up in the box scores for Brookins’s team. Evidently, they had been cut—perhaps they were the “fellows we didn’t want.” If Abe was trying to put together a second team, Pullins, Wright, and Oliver were all available.

And in an ironic twist, one of the first documented games that this new Globe Trotter team played was in Hinckley, Illinois. But it was on January 21, 1929.
*
A surviving box score from the game shows that the Hinckley Merchants beat the Globe Trotters by a score of 43–34. According to Runt Pullins, they netted a grand total of eight dollars, which was split six ways among Abe and the five players. “Each of us got $1.60,” said Pullins.

The Harlem Globe Trotters were on their way.

I
n October 1929, the collapse of the stock market pitched the United States into the worst depression in the nation’s history. With the economy in free fall, hundreds of banks closing, breadlines stretching around the block, plants and businesses shutting their doors, Abe Saperstein and his new Harlem Globe Trotters headed out into the teeth of the storm. He purchased a used Model T Ford from a local funeral parlor and drove out of Chicago. “All the banks were closing,” he later said, “so we went where there were no banks.”

He had appropriated the name Globe Trotters from Tommy Brookins (or even older namesakes), but he added one variation of his own. Instead of the Chicago Globe Trotters, as Brookins had started calling his team, Abe selected the more exotic “New York Harlem Globe Trotters.” It was a sign of his marketing acumen, as he realized that an unheralded team of Negro ballplayers from the South Side might have a hard time drawing a crowd if they showed up in nearby Aurora, only thirty miles from Chicago. But when a “dusky quintet from the wilds of New York,” as the
Aurora Beacon
described them, “invaded” the high school gym—now that was a draw. The redundancy of putting New York and Harlem together also was shrewd. Abe may have been trying to capture some of the luster of the New York Rens (who were known interchangeably as the Harlem Rens), but he also wanted opposing teams to understand that they would be playing a black team. Harlem, the capital of black America, flashed that message in neon lights. Abe wanted to avoid
any potential trouble if the Globe Trotters came to town and kicked the butts of the local white heroes. Nobody could say afterward that they didn’t realize what they were getting into.

Before the fledgling team took to the highways, Abe and the players formed a partnership in which gate receipts would be split among them. The five players each got a share, and Abe got a double share to pay for gas, car maintenance, and his booking expenses.
*
For Abe, this was a giant step up from the 10 percent booking fee he had been receiving. Now he was getting a third of the total receipts, although he also had to foot the bill for travel.

Abe was a one-man band: team manager, chauffeur, booking agent, publicity director, and the lone substitute player. He was everything but the owner—a critical distinçtion. This was not
his
team; they were all “equal partners,” Pullins would say.

Sometimes, if Abe’s car was broken down or the weather was bad, the Globe Trotters had to find other ways to get around. One night, they took the train to play a game in Hinckley, and the Hinckley players drove out and picked them up at the station (which was in nearby Aurora). But the ball game ran late and the Trotters missed the last train back to Chicago, so they ended up spending the night on the floor of a doctor’s office. Another time, Abe’s car was on the fritz, and Kid Oliver’s younger brother, Napoleon, drove the Trotters in his car.

Abe ran the tour out of his hat and his overcoat, which were stuffed with chits listing the names, addresses, and phone numbers of every reporter from every cow-town weekly, every promoter or high school coach along the way—anybody who had a court. The scraps of paper spilled out of the pockets of his coat; it was his own mobile filing system. His only office was the front bedroom of his parents’ house on Hermitage Avenue, and his office staff consisted of his fourteen-year-old brother Harry, who was taking a typing class at Lake View High. “I needed the practice,” Harry recalls, laughing.
“Abe couldn’t type at all, so I did his typing for the first two years. He rented a typewriter for three dollars a month and set it up in this very small front bedroom in our home. That was his office.”

Harry Saperstein typed all of Abe’s press releases and telegrams. “Abe couldn’t afford the cost of regular telegrams, so he used Western Union night letters,” he recalls. A night letter was delivered overnight and allowed fifty words for about the same price as a ten-word regular telegram. In fact, Harry says, Abe dropped “New York” from the team’s name just to save the cost of two additional words. He also typed Abe’s so-called contracts with promoters, although the Globe Trotters were generally playing for whatever they could get. “The terms were very meager—maybe a twenty-five-dollar guarantee plus ten percent of the gate,” Harry says. “He was lucky to get thirty-five bucks.”

Despite Abe’s multiple roles with the team, however, there was no doubt about who was the real star of the Harlem Globe Trotters. Runt Pullins was the youngest player on the team, at nineteen, but by far the most celebrated. He was only five foot nine and skinny as a rail, but he was the fastest man on the team and could shoot the ball from any spot on the court. “I am convinced that Pullins was the magnet which pulled them together in the beginning,” says J Michael Kenyon. “Without Runt, they were just a bunch of guys named ‘Joe’ (and Abe).”

Runt was still a teenager, and the other players were not much older. Kid Oliver was twenty-one, and Toots Wright and Fat Long were the “old men” at twenty-two. Despite their youth, however, the Globe Trotters had terrific chemistry on the court, which was not surprising since these men had grown up together and played hundreds of ball games on the dirt courts of the South Side. And Pullins, Wright, and Oliver actually lived right around the block from each other. This familiarity was like a sixth sense on the court, an unspoken language. They knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses, their favorite shots and moves, and one quick glance or tiny motion of the head was all it took to signal a break to the hoop before the defense could respond.

“The Globe Trotters knew exactly where each man was on every
play, and they passed without even looking,” the
Aurora Beacon
reported in 1929. “At times they tossed the ball around in an uncanny manner, and always there was at least one man open, usually under the basket.”

In 1929–30, their first full season, the
Defender
reported that they “swept through the West like a tidal wave,” racking up over one hundred victories. Of course, these were not world-class teams they were playing. There were no New York Rens or Chicago Bruins on the schedule, no noteworthy college teams. The Globe Trotters mostly feasted on a diet of bush-league quintets from the hinterlands: the Fairbanks Townies, Valley City Clothier, A. J. Busch Grocers, Gibson Painters, Kelowna Famous Players, and the Mayville Teachers College Comets.

That first season, they played primarily in Illinois and Iowa, with a possible excursion into Minnesota at the end of the season. Each year thereafter, Abe would add another state or two, gradually expanding into Wisconsin and Michigan, then North and South Dakota, and Montana. It would be six years before they’d reach the Pacific Coast and play Washington and Oregon.

Out there on the vast prairies, the Globe Trotters were playing in small farming communities that had no African American residents (some have few, if any, today). In some cases, the Globe Trotters were the first black men these people had ever seen. Former Trotters remember youngsters coming up and touching them, curious to see if the skin color would rub off. They were also bringing a different style of basketball to the American heartland. When they chose to, the Trotters could play the conventional ball-control, slow-tempo game with the best of them. “[The Globe Trotters gave] one of the best exhibitions of stalling ever seen here,” the
Aurora Beacon
wrote. “[They] used the entire floor, and sometimes they would pass to a player under the basket and he would dribble back to the other end of the floor, thru [
sic
] the entire opposing team, and then the performance would start all over again.”

But when they wanted to turn it on, the Globe Trotters displayed a new kind of basketball—the
black
style of ball played on the courts of Bronzeville. It was a game of speed, quick passes, and ball-handling
wizardry that mesmerized both their opposition and the fans. “They played such basketball as few Aurora fans ever saw,” the
Beacon
enthused. “They dribbled thru [
sic
] and around the local five almost at will, and because of their clever and bullet-like passing it was an almost impossible task to cover them.”

Although set comedy routines would not appear until a few years later, from the beginning the Trotters melded basketball with showmanship. “The crowd was in an uproar during the last three quarters at the antics and clowning the Trotters mixed with their stellar playing,” one Midwestern scribe wrote. Abe Saperstein did not originate showmanship in the sport, any more than he originated halftime entertainment or the Globe Trotter name. The Original Celtics and New York Rens were renowned for their ball-handling exhibitions and spectacular passing, and the Globe Trotters, at least in the early years, were apparently doing the same kind of routines that the Celtics and Rens had been doing for years. Nonetheless, that combination of basketball expertise and showmanship became a primary feature of the Globe Trotters’ identity.

And the fans and sportswriters loved it. In 1929, one Midwestern reporter wrote that the Globe Trotters “handled the ball like a Scotchman handles currency.” A reporter from the
Mason City
[Iowa]
Globe-Gazette
gave the Trotters similar raves: “Something new in basketball was displayed last night when the New York Globe Trotters bewildered the local cagers with the best short passing game ever witnessed here. The invading colored boys amazed local fans with a clever handling of the ball…passed with dazzling speed and enlivened the program with some antics in handling the ball which demonstrated that the colored players were ‘too hot’ to handle.”

The Globe Trotters were beginning to establish their own identity, although they were buried so deep in the provinces that few people even noticed.

On December 5, 1930, one of the first great milestones in Globe Trotters history occurred, one that would shape the team’s character for decades to come: Inman Jackson made his first appearance in a
Globe Trotter lineup. The big man had quit the Savoy Big Five, which had been reorganized under Dick Hudson,
*
and joined the Trotters in time for a trip to Cincinnati to play the DeHart Hubbard Lion Tamers, one of the better teams in the Midwest. It was an inauspicious debut for “Big Jack,” as the Lion Tamers defeated the Trotters, 39 to 32.

Clearly, he was no savior. While Runt Pullins had always been a star, and Toots Wright and Fat Long had always been starters, Jackson was a career backup—a three-year second-stringer for the Savoy Big Five—and had always been eclipsed by more famous teammates like Tommy Brookins, Randolph Ramsey, Rock Anderson, Joe Lillard, and Specs Moten. Now, for the first time, he had a chance to start. And not just in the one or two games a week that the Savoy had played, but every day and twice on Sundays. It was his chance to find out what kind of player he could really be. And, little by little, as he adjusted to that grueling schedule, the big man began to come around. Maybe that was all he had needed, just time to unlock the natural talent hidden in that big body.

Inman had played against some of the roughest teams in professional basketball, such as George Halas’s Chicago Bruins, who had simply transferred Halas’s gridiron techniques to the hardwood, but now he was banging under the boards with corn-fed farm boys from every hick team in the Midwest. The great advantage Inman had was his size and strength, which he began learning how to exploit. At six feet, three inches and 200 pounds, he was an imposing figure for that era and was often described as a “giant” in newspaper accounts. And because the rules required a center jump after every basket, he had the opportunity to assert his dominance over the entire game. During one game in Arcadia, Wisconsin, he controlled every single tip.

With Inman in the lineup, the Globe Trotters had the nucleus of the team that would carry them through the bleakest years of the Great Depression: Jackson, Runt Pullins, Kid Oliver, Toots Wright, and Fat Long. Each man had his role. Inman controlled the lane and
the tipoffs, Runt was the outside shooter, Toots Wright was the backbone of the man-to-man defense and a “veritable jumping jack,” and Oliver and Long did yeoman’s duty under the boards, using quickness, in Oliver’s case, and brawn, in the case of the aptly named Fat Long.

By the end of Inman Jackson’s first season, the
Defender
was calling him the “most improved player on the squad” and predicting that the “elongated center [was] still coming and should reach even greater heights, but he is considered to be ‘too high’ now by all those who have faced him.”

The Globe Trotters had found themselves a big man.

Inman Jackson’s arrival also heralded the creation of two Globe Trotters icons: the dribbler and the showman. Runt Pullins had been drawing plaudits for his dribbling and ball-handling tricks since the first season of 1929. As one reporter wrote: “[Pullins] might as well have had a marble, so adept was he at concealing the sphere. The old hidden ball trick, formerly confined to football, was introduced for the enjoyment of the fans by the Harlem lad.” But now Runt and Jackson began to play off each other, incorporating more formalized showmanship into the games; some of their creations would become Globe Trotter staples.

Pullins developed a dribbling routine in which he’d weave his way through the entire opposition. He invented a trick shot from half court without looking at the basket. Jackson perfected a hook shot that he launched with his back to the basket. And his trademark was to palm the ball (which was almost unheard of in that day, as the ball was larger) then hold it out tantalizingly in front of his opponent and snatch it back. “Jackson, the giant center…drew a big laugh when he wrapped his large hand around the ball and offered it to Connolly (a local center), drawing it back before Connolly could grasp it,” reported the
Mason City Globe-Gazette.
Finally, when the other team took a shot, he would leap up, poke his arm through the net, and knock the ball away. It was a clear violation of the rules, but it got a laugh.