Spinning the Globe (8 page)

Many of the Globe Trotters’ early comedy routines developed
purely by accident. According to one Trotter legend, they were playing a game in Williamsburg, Iowa, in an old meeting hall with potbellied stoves at either end, when Kid Oliver backed into a red-hot stove and ran screaming across the court, smoke trailing from his shorts like a vapor trail. The crowd roared, thinking it was intentional, but Oliver was actually on fire. Kid Oliver’s rear end was soon fine, but the message was clear: white fans liked to laugh at the antics of black ballplayers. It was the first sign of a troubling racial aspect of the Globe Trotters’ popularity. Many more controversies would follow.

By 1931, the Great Depression had taken a stranglehold on the country. Nearly a quarter of the workforce was unemployed and industrial output was one half its 1929 level. Thousands of banks had closed, wiping out the life savings of millions of Americans, and the national banking system was on the verge of collapse. Nearly two million Americans were homeless, hundreds of thousands of farmers in the Dust Bowl had been driven from their land, caravans of desperate Okies were streaming into California, looking for work, and Hoovervilles were springing up under bridges all over America. Yet President Herbert Hoover insisted that “prosperity is right around the corner,” refused to support federal relief programs because they would undermine “self-reliance,” and offered a veiled condemnation of the unemployed, implying that those who wanted a job could find it.

In the face of the ever-deepening crisis, the Globe Trotters had their best season yet, and their schedule expanded to 150 games. It was a high-volume, low-margin business, as gate receipts from most games were so paltry that the Trotters had to play every night to survive. Sometimes they carried that to absurd lengths. In one stretch that winter they played 61 games on consecutive nights.

Despite the Herculean schedule, there were signs that the Globe Trotters’ fortunes were improving. Abe purchased a second Model T (with 79,000 miles on it) to use as a baggage car, which followed behind what he facetiously dubbed the “club car.” In March 1931, he told the
Chicago Defender
that the Globe Trotters had “experienced
the greatest financial season since their organization and this is something to be proud of in these days of business depression.”

One cannot truly appreciate the boldness of this venture, and its improbable chance of success, without pulling out an old highway map and plotting the team’s itinerary through these numbing years of the Depression. It is difficult to even locate some of the towns they played: Baraboo, Menomonie, Pardeeville, and Mauston. These were towns that few people had ever heard of, even in nearby states: Zumbrota, Grand Meadow, Lanesboro, Owatonna, Otteson, and Mendota. They were towns on the “blue highways” of old road maps, the two-lane country roads that William Least Heat Moon described so eloquently in his book by the same name.

The Globe Trotters were the kings of the “tank towns,” as Runt Pullins described them, so named for the water tanks that were visible from a distance. “In my dictionary, beside the definition of ‘tank town’ there should be a picture of Mendota,” says J Michael Kenyon, the world’s foremost authority on the Globetrotters’ schedule.

It wasn’t just the smallness of the towns; it was the distance between them that made the Trotters’ schedule so daunting. Two-hundred-mile hops between games were typical; three or four hundred miles were not out of the question. And those miles cannot be measured by today’s standards, with the cruise control set on 75 mph, the heater purring silently, the defroster and rear window defoggers cutting the ice, the cushioned captain’s chairs with adjustable lumbar support, the Interstate rest areas mindlessly clicking by, and the fast food joints looming up at every exit. No, the Globe Trotters did it in a Model T Ford with a top speed of 30 mph, which had no heater, no defroster, leaky windows, six-inch-diameter tires, no shocks or I-beam suspension, and there were no rest areas or welcome stations along the way. One must also factor in the debilitating effects of cold weather, as the Trotters were traveling in the dead of winter in a wretchedly intemperate region of the country.

Once they arrived in a town, with their kidneys battered from the jostling, their toes numb from the cold, and their joints stiff and sore from the absurdity of six grown men—five giants and a midget driver—all crammed together in a rattletrap flivver, they had to play
a basketball game. They had to run up and down the court for an hour, then take a shower (if they were fortunate), or more likely just towel off and pile back in the car, hopefully with a couple of bucks in their pockets. If they were lucky, they might find a restaurant that would serve blacks, but often they had to “live off the grocery”—buy some crackers and bologna or a couple of doughnuts. If they were
really
lucky, they might find a hotel that would rent them a room, but all too often there were none (good luck finding any kind of hotel in Rugby, North Dakota, or Malta, Montana, much less one that would rent to blacks), so they would drive on through the night to the next stop, or to the home of an African American family that would let them sleep on the floor. Then they did it all over again the next day. Day after day, from late November to early May, 150 games a season.

The fact that the Harlem Globe Trotters did not just survive but prevailed, to paraphrase William Faulkner, was a testament to their courage, determination, talent, and perseverance. It was also, not in small part, a measure of the desperation of the times. Thousands of other Americans were standing in breadlines or selling apples on street corners. Playing basketball, even under these conditions, didn’t seem so bad.

A multitude of stories about the hardships of those early years have been passed down over decades, although some may be more folklore than fact. There was the game in Princeton, Minnesota, during a horrendous blizzard, with the temperature well below zero and only fifteen fans in the stands, when Abe discovered that the gym had just been painted and the fumes were making everyone sick. All the doors and windows had to be opened, and players and fans alike nearly froze to death.

There was a night in Waterloo, Iowa, when the temperature was so cold that
nobody
showed up for the game. The Trotters and the Waterloo team played anyway, but when the game was over there were no gate receipts to split. Abe begged the promoter to give him five bucks, just to buy food and rent a place to sleep. When the Trotters piled back in their old Model T, one of the Waterloo players, Dell Raymond, felt sorry for them. “I reached in my pocket and gave them sixty cents,” he recalled in a 1968 interview.

And there was the time the Globe Trotters showed up in Wheatland, Iowa, a town of five hundred people, to find that the hayloft of a barn had been converted into a makeshift court, complete with bleachers on either side. Lester Johnson, a former Wendell Phillips and Savoy player who was moonlighting with the Trotters, was driving in for a layup when he got shoved and crashed right through a boarded-up door, falling twenty feet down a flight of stairs. Fearing that he was dead, the team rushed downstairs to find Johnson sprawled in a pile of manure, unhurt but screaming epithets that eastern Iowa might not have heard before. From that day on, Johnson would forever be known as “Luscious Lester.”

In the early years, the Globe Trotters carried just five players and Abe. No substitutes. No second team. When a player got hurt or sick or fouled out, there were no backups to take his place. Sometimes it didn’t matter. In Marshalltown, Iowa, after one player fouled out in the fourth quarter, the Trotters played on with only four—and eventually three. As the local
Times-Republican
reported: “The last five minutes of the second game were finished with only four Trotters on the floor…. As a matter of fact, Pullins got tired in the final minute and went over and sat down, leaving Jackson, Wright and Easter to battle it out. The number did not make any difference. The chances are that trio could have beaten either of the local fives in a regulation ball game if it wanted to turn on the steam.”

For the first few years, Abe was the only substitute, and he wore a uniform under his street clothes, just in case. It had been a decade since his brief stint at left guard for the Lake View bantams, and the intervening years had not been kind to his body or his skills. All of the extra weight he put on seemed to settle around his waist, and sometimes the Trotters might have been better off playing on with four, or even three, and leaving Abe on the bench.

In Fargo, North Dakota, they lost by one point when Kid Oliver was unable to play, and the
Fargo Forum
placed some of the blame on Abe: “Apparently handicapped by loss of its regular fifth man, the Harlem quint failed to click effectively…. A.M. Saperstein, diminutive manager of the traveling outfit, was the fifth man in the lineup.” His statistics in the box score were dismal: no field goals, no free throws, and three personal fouls.

Other sportswriters were openly sarcastic, with Abe the target of their ridicule. “Four clean-limbed young colored men and a squat, bandy-legged chap of Jewish extradition [
sic
] furnished local basketball devotees some exceptional diversion here Saturday night,” wrote the
Arcadia
[Wisc.]
Leader.
“Saperstein was the only man on the team who seemed to be working hard, while the colored fellows seemed just as fresh after the game as at the start.” And once, in Montana, after a Trotter starter came down with appendicitis, Abe had to fill in for an entire week, and the team obviously suffered with him in the lineup. “[Saperstein’s] shooting and passing was not up to the standard of the other four members of the team,” the
Great Falls
[Mont.]
Tribune
reported.

With six men stuffed into one Model T, living and working together in close quarters for months at a time, conflict was inevitable. There were no documented racial incidents between Abe and the players, but a dispute over money did lead to blows. After one game, Fat Long thought that Abe had shorted the players while splitting the gate, and an argument ensued. “Fat ended up punching Abe,” says Napoleon Oliver, who heard the story from his brother Kid. “And Fat got so mad that he left the team, but he soon came back.”

Other times, however, there were acts of kindness and consideration that transcended the racial distinctions between Abe and the players. After a game in Des Moines, the Globe Trotters couldn’t find a hotel that would allow blacks, so Abe rented a room in a white hotel and had the players sneak up the fire escape, climb through the window, and sleep in his room.

They traveled together, played together, lived together, and suffered together through the hardships of the Depression. There were weeks when they had only one or two bookings, and many games where the turnout was so low that their take wasn’t enough to buy a hot dog. With admission prices usually a quarter for adults and a dime for children, a crowd of 200 would net the Trotters only around $25 or $30—less than $3 per man. There was one game in the early years when an overly optimistic promoter promised Abe a $25 guarantee or 40 percent of the gate, whichever was more. Total gate receipts that night were $5.95.

“I owe you twenty-five bucks,” the promoter said.

“Just give us our $2.40,” Abe responded. “Maybe we’ll be back this way again sometime and things will be better.”

It was typical of Abe’s dealings with promoters. He was always thinking ahead, looking toward future games with larger crowds. No town was too small, no gym too cramped or decrepit for Abe to book a game. He was constantly scaring up new bookings on the fly, as the tour progressed. If he managed to get a game in one town, he’d scout out new contacts in the neighboring burgs and book those on the Trotters’ return. The Globe Trotters might pass through the same county two or three times a year, hopscotching between towns, mining every quarter or half-dollar to be found.

And once Abe got his hooks in a promoter, he never let go. The Trotters returned to the same towns year after year. The only contract Abe had was a handshake or a ten-word telegram: “Game confirmed for October 12th. 8 PM. Forty percent gate.” But that was enough. Promoters knew they could count on him. Indeed, entire towns came to depend on the Globe Trotters’ annual appearance. No matter how desolate the winter had been on the prairies, no matter how many blue northers had come howling down from Canada or how many interminable weeks of arctic gloom, the people in those little towns knew that on the appointed night the Globe Trotters would show up at the high school gym and put on a show that made the winter more tolerable. It was the highlight of their year, and farmers would be talking about it for weeks around the feed store, as they warmed their fingers over the stove and waited for the thaw. One of Abe’s great strengths was that he never forgot those tank towns that helped him survive the Depression, even years later, when his team had succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. And those tank towns returned that loyalty in kind.

The young boy who had never stopped talking, who was always in perpetual motion, had found the perfect channel for that bubbling spring of energy. Abe Saperstein developed relationships with promoters in hundreds of towns across America—and, later, around the world. He remembered everyone’s name—every arena owner or high school coach, every principal or Rotarian with access to a gymnasium, auditorium, National Guard armory, church basement, livery stable, or barn.

Above all others, he had a special passion for sportswriters. Early on, Abe showed a remarkable talent for building rapport with sportswriters. It reaped huge dividends for the Trotters, of course, but this went far beyond good marketing. Abe
loved
sportswriters. He loved hanging out with them, chewing the fat, swapping lies, and, most of all, talking up his team. Sportswriters in that era were a different breed. They were a grizzled, hard-drinking, chain-smoking lot, and a sports editor of a small-town paper had lifetime employment. These guys died in the saddle, strapped in behind their Underwood Noiseless, with a crushed fedora on the back of the chair, dandruff cascading down their coffee-stained coat, and a half-smoked Camel dangling from their lips. Over the next few decades, Abe would build a network of
hundreds
of sportswriters—men whom he had first met in the early 1930s, when they were all full of piss and vinegar—who would become his biggest boosters.