Spinning the Globe (9 page)

He courted reporters as if he were a heartsick lover. He wrote them, wired them, and called them incessantly. He sent them press releases before the season began, wrote again as the game date approached, then dropped by to see them when he hit town. He kept his brother Harry chained to the rented typewriter in the Sapersteins’ front bedroom, pecking out dozens of cheap-rate “book telegrams” (the same text sent to multiple recipients) to sportswriters in every town the Trotters played. Abe was using mass-mailing techniques before they even had a name.

Unfortunately, once he started yakking with a sports editor, he never knew when to shut up. It was as if he couldn’t help himself, the hucksterism just poured out of him so profusely that perhaps even he couldn’t remember what was true and what was false. He had a chronic tendency to embellish, exaggerate, and sometimes lie. For instance, he repeatedly gave out contradictory, wildly varying, and demonstrably inaccurate figures for the Trotters’ win-loss record—always in their favor. In Abe’s calculus, the Trotters didn’t just improve from year to year, they improved
retroactively
—apparently going back in time and redeeming themselves in games they had already lost. And once Abe made a claim—true or not—he would keep repeating it, apparently believing that if he said it enough or could convince some reporter to write it, that would make it so.

One striking example was the way he made up college credentials for his players, most of whom were lucky if they’d graduated from Wendell Phillips High. His intent was apparently to circumvent the Amateur Athletic Union’s (AAU) rule against amateur teams playing professionals, which could have severely curtailed the Globe Trotters’ pool of potential opponents. So Abe attempted to make the Globe Trotters seem like all-American college boys out for a lark. This had echoes of the Giles Post tour of Wisconsin in January 1927, when Abe (or Dick Hudson) made up similarly preposterous claims. He claimed that Toots Wright was a former All-American at Crane College, Inman Jackson was a grad of City College of New York, and, subscribing to the principle that if you’re going to tell a lie you might as well tell a whopper, he even fabricated Ivy League credits for Kid Oliver and Runt Pullins, who he said had graduated from Brown University.

Abe saved his most elaborate fantasies, however, for his own erst-while athletic career. The sometime starter at Lake View High started telling reporters that he had played professional basketball. And once he crossed that imaginary line, Abe would alter the story from reporter to reporter and town to town as it suited his fancy. He told some writers that he had played pro ball in Philadelphia, told others about his career in Rochester, and his personal favorite was that he was “still under contract” to the Cleveland Rosenblums, one of the most famous pro teams in the mid-1920s. When he really got wound up, he went so far as to claim that he had been “the leading scorer” in the professional basketball league. In later years, Globe Trotter players would joke about Abe’s “little man complex” and call him “Little Caesar” behind his back, and while he was a compulsive embellisher, repeatedly trying to pump up his own image, he was no fool. Abe repeated these fables about his “pro career” only when he was talking to reporters out west, hundreds of miles from Cleveland or Philadelphia or Rochester, so he didn’t have to worry about anybody checking him out. In later years, when the Globe Trotters were making regular forays back east, he quietly dropped the pro basketball stories from his résumé.

Throughout 1932, the most ghastly year of the Depression, when national unemployment approached 25 percent, the Globe Trotters kept soldiering on. They already had more requests for games than they could fill in Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota—their familiar stamping grounds—but Abe’s dreams were more expansive than the Great Plains or the rolling hills of South Dakota, and so he pushed on into the Rockies, into the uncharted territories of Colorado, North Dakota, and Montana, where no one had ever heard their name. In 1932, they reportedly even crossed the border into Canada, making the first of many forays into British Columbia. The Globe Trotters had been playing the tank town circuit in the Midwest for five years, but as they moved into the mountain states, Abe was booking even smaller, more remote towns, if that were possible. They played Maddock, Crosby, and Wahpeton, North Dakota; Choteau, Roundup, and Crow Agency, Montana.

The logistics of playing in the mountains were more challenging than anything the Globe Trotters had ever faced. Two-hundred-mile hops between games in Iowa or Minnesota were nothing compared with those same distances in the Rocky Mountains, where they were traversing snow-covered passes at six thousand feet. In Montana, the roads sometimes became so impassable that they had to leave their cars and take trains to their next stops. And they were moving into a new dimension of cold weather that was more brutal than anything they had experienced. In the early 1930s, Montana had its warmest winters in history, yet in February the mercury still dropped to twenty below in Poplar and minus eleven in Big Sandy, both towns that the Trotters played.

On the court, there were important changes as well. By 1932, the Globe Trotters were beginning to establish their own identity, which distinguished them from other teams on the barnstorming circuit. With Runt Pullins and Inman Jackson leading the way, they were winning over 90 percent of their games (even allowing for Abe’s inflated figures), albeit most of their victories still came against very ordinary competition. The Globe Trotters rolled through the 1931–32 season, playing 146 games and reportedly losing only 10. At least a
few of those losses could be blamed on the weather. In March 1932, for instance, they got stuck in a snowdrift on their way to Rochester, Minnesota, and it took two hours to get free. Abe called ahead to delay the starting time, but when the Trotters finally arrived, they lost 29–25. Perhaps showing the lingering effects from that episode, or just worn down by the grueling travel, three nights later they were trounced 71–35 by the Spring Grove Independents, the worst loss in their history, when two Spring Grove players scored 32 and 24 points, respectively.

The Trotters’ usual strategy was to try to get an early lead and then go into their full-court stall and ball-handling routines. The crowds loved the showmanship, but it also served a second purpose: to give the Trotters a chance to rest their weary legs. Standing in place, whipping the ball around the court, the players didn’t have to run. The fans were so enthralled that they didn’t realize that the Trotters were actually catching a breather. Sometimes the strategy backfired, however, as there were games where their goofing off allowed the other team to catch up and, in some cases, actually beat them. And some teams were just better than they were. The Rochester [Minn.] Elks Aces turned the hat trick, beating the Globe Trotters three straight times.

Ultimately, however, it didn’t matter. Their margin of victory and even their record of wins and losses were becoming secondary to entertainment. The Trotters still wanted to win but, more important, they wanted to give the crowd such a good show that they would be invited back. And beating the local heroes by a handful of points, rather than in a blowout, was more likely to generate a rematch. The crowd went home laughing, and the opposition players, who had avoided complete humiliation, were hankering for another shot. The Trotters’ tactics were obvious to knowledgeable observers; in many newspaper accounts, sportswriters would note that the Trotters passed up easy shots and were content to “have fun” once they got a lead.

For the first time since the arrival of Inman Jackson, there was a shakeup in the Globe Trotters’ starting lineup. Kid Oliver, one of the original Trotters, who was a journeyman but never a star, was replaced by sharpshooting George Easter, another former Wendell
Phillips player, who was a familiar face to the other Trotters. He had played with Runt Pullins’s All-Stars and lived around the corner from Runt and Fat Long. Another familiar face, Rock Anderson, who had played for the original Savoy Big Five and many other pro teams, also appeared in the Globe Trotters lineup at times, apparently filling in for the injured Fat Long. As for Kid Oliver, he continued playing part-time for the Globe Trotters, but eventually returned to Chicago, got married, and went to work for Argo Corn Starch, where he would spend the next thirty years.

Other changes followed.

By the 1932–33 season, Abe had so many requests for games that he fielded a second Globe Trotter unit (which included Kid Oliver) that stuck close to home, playing a limited schedule in Illinois and Iowa. After five years of barnstorming, Abe had the formula down pat, and so he also organized a white basketball team, the New York Nationals, and sent it out on the same byways as the Globe Trotters, usually a few weeks behind them. His brother Rocky managed the team, which had a tremendous run of victories, but could not draw like the Globe Trotters and eventually folded.

Somehow, in between all of his travel and promoting, Abe found time to begin a courtship of Sylvia Franklin, from Kenosha, Wisconsin, whom he would eventually marry. Her father, perhaps hoping that his daughter would land a bigger catch, advised Abe that he should do more to promote the Saperstein name. So Abe had new lettering sewn on the team’s jerseys, reading “Saperstein’s Harlem New York.” It was a sign of his increasing stature in the sports world and of his growing desire to make the Trotters
his
team. Abe and the players were still splitting the gate receipts, with Abe getting a double share, as they had since their partnership began in 1929. But now Abe was trying to assert control in ways that would lead to the first great crisis in the team’s history.

In the early 1930s, the game of basketball itself began to change in ways that would profoundly affect the Harlem Globe Trotters. The National Basketball Committee, which regulated college teams, enacted two new rules that would significantly alter the game. First, a
line was painted across half-court (previously there had been none), and teams were required to advance the ball across the line within ten seconds. Second, when an offensive player had possession of the ball in the foul lane, and had his back to the basket, he had three seconds to shoot, pass, or move out of the lane.
*
Although the new rules were specific to college teams, they were adopted by most professionals, including the Globe Trotters. The full-court stall had been one of the Trotters’ favorite tactics, but Abe realized that the Trotters’ offense would now have to change. As he announced in a 1933 press release:

In the short term, the new rules propelled the Globe Trotters farther down the path toward showmanship and comedy, as they could no longer use the entire court for their stalling and passing displays. In any case, Abe’s “startlingly different” style held up well under the new restraints. As the
Grand Forks
[N.D.]
Herald
reported: “The Trotters have possession of the ball most of the game and the new rules have not affected their play, for they can play just as good a game of keep away in half of the court as they can in the entire floor.”

After five years, the Globe Trotters had developed a loyal following in many parts of Minnesota and Wisconsin, and were generally well received by the fans. On the court, however, there were ferocious battles between the Trotters and opposition players that sometimes led to physical confrontations. When that happened, racial prejudices that had been simmering beneath the surface sometimes came pouring out. In Minneapolis, at the end of one particularly
rough game (football star Bronko Nagurski was playing for the other team), Inman Jackson got into a shoving match with the rival center and threw a haymaker that broke the white player’s nose. A melee ensued, as a “wild rush of spectators and basketballers” charged onto the court. Jackson and the other Trotters made a run for their dressing room, where they were saved from physical harm by the game announcer, who locked them in. Local police were called to disperse the crowd, but it was an hour before the Trotters could leave the gym. And there was such a furor about the near riot in Minneapolis that a local Catholic team threatened to cancel its upcoming game with the Trotters. The Globe Trotters couldn’t wait to leave Minnesota.

In their first four years, the Harlem Globe Trotters had managed to carve out their own niche in the Great Plains and in the mountain states—an isolated refuge where they could outlast the Depression. In the meantime, the more famous pro teams in America, which were based in eastern cities, were barely surviving. The New York Rens, for instance, who in 1931 had been playing before 10,000 delirious fans at the Renaissance Casino, averaged only 400 fans for their first five games two years later. The Rens were forced to leave the East and make a long road trip down south, where they played black college teams before crowds of 200 or fewer. And the Savoy Big Five, newly reconstituted under Dick Hudson’s management, had also been forced to go on the road, and the
Defender
reported that they were playing in “hick towns and feeling that they were lucky to be able to perform at all.”

It was Abe Saperstein’s foresight to have anticipated the hard times and have staked out his territory years before the big name teams were forced to join him on the blue highways. He now had a four-year jump on the competition. Sensing his advantage in the Midwest and the Rens’ vulnerability, Abe began to challenge the Rens’ preeminence as the unofficial “colored world champions.” Showing his chronic tendency toward hyperbole, Abe began trying to convince the world—or at least his loyal band of Midwestern sportswriters—that the Trotters were on the same plane as the Rens. “Only the New York Renaissance team can rival this colored club when it comes to playing basketball,” the
Breckenridge
[Minn.]
Gazette-Telegram
faithfully reported in January 1933, “and Manager Saperstein believes his team could win the world’s colored basketball championship could he sign the Renaissance team for a series of games.”