Spinning the Globe (11 page)

When Abe refused to back down, the team split right down the middle. Pullins, Easter, and Long quit on the spot, while Inman Jackson and Razor Frazier threw their allegiance to Abe. This appeared to be a mortal blow. Abe might be able to handle the loss of Easter and Fat Long, whose physique was starting to emulate his nickname more each day, but Pullins had been the team’s headliner since 1929. Abe had spent five years building up Runt, canonizing him as the holder of the imaginary “American scoring record,” and describing him in publicity materials as the “kingpin of the dynamite trio” (Pullins, Jackson, and Toots Wright) and the “sensational midget” with a “natural eye that can find the hoop from the most difficult angles of the floor.” At Abe’s urging, sportswriters had done their part
to enshrine him as well, calling Pullins the “fastest man…ever seen on a basketball court” and a “sensational shooter” who “delights his audience by shooting accurately without looking at his basket, backwards, and from ridiculous positions during the game.” One scribe accorded him the highest praise of all, for a white sportswriter, knighting Pullins as “the Bronze Nat Holman” (Holman was the star of the Original Celtics).

Now, overnight, Runt was gone. And Long and Easter were gone with him. Abe and the two remaining players, Jackson and Frazier, were stranded in Montana with a full schedule of games but no team to play them. The heralded West Coast tour seemed doomed, and the “colored championship” just a foolish pipe dream. News of the Trotters’ breakup soon appeared in the press, with one paper labeling it “an insurrection” and another describing a “disturbance in the front office.” With no other choice, Abe suspended the tour and retreated to Chicago, along with his two loyal players, their season in shambles.

This was the first crisis in the Globe Trotters’ early history and a crossroads in Abe’s management of the team. If he had left well enough alone, the Trotters were on the verge of unprecedented success, with prospects for opening up the entire Pacific Northwest. Now, his actions had destroyed the team and raised fundamental questions that would determine its future: Whose team was it—Abe’s or the players’? Who would be at the center of the organization—Abe, as the owner, or Runt Pullins, the star of the team? Finally, who would run the show? Was Abe going to be the boss or the coach, the owner or merely the manager?

If Abe Saperstein anguished over these questions, it certainly wasn’t for long, because he acted decisively upon returning to Chicago. He called the Brewster Center in Detroit, got in touch with Gus Finney and Harry Rusan, the two young stars of the Brewster team who had been so impressive in the Thanksgiving Day game, and offered them jobs. “How soon can you get here?” he asked. Then he recalled the venerable Rock Anderson, who at age forty-one had been bouncing around pro teams for two decades, including at least four separate stints with the Trotters. Abe now had a starting five.

Finally, he reached out to the sportswriters whom he had been
romancing for five years and claimed that the three rebel players had not quit but had been fired. Long’s dismissal, he said, was due to his getting “fat around the middle” and the loss of Easter and Pullins, his biggest star, was of no concern because they had been replaced by “superior players.” And, as they would for nearly forty years, the sportswriters bought his story hook, line, and sinker. “Better Than Ever” was the headline in one paper, whose sports editor repeated Abe’s version of the crisis verbatim:

Abe’s handling of this split with Runt Pullins would become the template for similar player revolts in decades to come. Abe had crossed his own Rubicon from which he would never look back. From this point on, no player would be indispensable, and the most important member of the Harlem Globe Trotters would be their owner, Abe Saperstein. He was the institution; he was the franchise. Players would be seen as cogs in the machine to be replaced with newer or better parts. Each player would have a designated role—the dribbler, the showman, the wing man—and when one left and a new one arrived, Abe would merely crank out a press release to announce the arrival of a “superior player” who made the Globe Trotters “bet
ter than ever.” And if Abe said it, the sportswriters would surely write it, and it must be so.

Less than three weeks after the breakup in Montana, the new “improved” Harlem Globe Trotters were back on the road, with Gus Finney, Harry Rusan, and Rock Anderson joining Inman Jackson and Razor Frazier in the lineup. In early March, they started playing their way across Minnesota and North Dakota, hoping to salvage the West Coast tour.

In Runt Pullins’s spot, Abe inserted Rusan, another small, fast, eagle-eyed guard. Finney took George Easter’s place, and Rock Anderson supplied a wide body in the lane, replacing Fat Long. And since Negroes all looked alike to white people, who could tell the difference?

It took Rusan and Finney about a week to hit their stride, but then the Trotters reeled off a string of victories. After beating the Minot (N.D.) Elks by a score of 47–31, the manager of the Minot team was so impressed that he told the
Minot Daily News,
“The Trotters displayed better form than in any of the previous eight encounters with the Elks.”

Not everyone agreed. “Without Easter and Pullins, the sensational scoring pair formerly with them, [the Trotters] were not the outfit they were a year ago,” wrote the
Minneapolis Star.

By late March, however, the reinvented Globe Trotters seemed to be, as Abe had predicted, “a classier ball club than ever.” Surprisingly, they even garnered their first story in the
Pittsburgh Courier,
the second most popular black newspaper in the country. In a glowing piece,
Courier
columnist Chester Washington compared the Globe Trotters favorably with the Rens:

As for Runt Pullins, within a few weeks he had formed his own team, which he called, after an exhaustive name search, the Harlem Globe Trotters. It was the first of many copycat teams that would crib the Globe Trotters’ name. Runt took his team right back to Minnesota and the Dakotas, challenging Abe on his familiar turf. He even managed to steal games out from under Abe’s nose. In Rochester, Minnesota, a game was advertised for Abe’s Harlem Globe Trotters, but it was actually Runt’s team that showed up to play.

By mid-March, the two identically named teams were competing head to head, and Abe was frantically trying to clear up the confusion over which was which. He told the
Fargo Forum
that his team was the “original Harlem Globe Trotters,” which had been organized seven years ago in New York by Abe, while the other club was “under the direction of Pullins and Easter, two former players with Saperstein’s team who have split with the original club.”
*
Despite Abe’s efforts, however, there were now
two
Harlem Globe Trotter teams touring the Midwest, and others would soon be on the way.

The most conspicuous effect of Runt Pullins’s departure was that Inman Jackson now became the unquestioned leader of the team, shouldering the load as top scorer, showman, and team captain. This was a huge adjustment for Jackson. “He had been surrounded by the same players for four years, but now he had a completely new team,” says J Michael Kenyon. And despite his taciturn nature, “Big Jack” was forced to step into the role of the headliner, carrying the team on his back. And as he did that, the tributes began to roll in. One paper reported: “The leading role in the professional basketball show last night was played by Inman Jackson, towering center of the Harlem five, and with all due credit to other great pivots seen here none compare with tall Inman.”

As team captain, he became the leader both on and off the court.
He even began to take on management and marketing responsibilities when Abe was away booking games, as shown in this letter to the editor he sent to the Iron River, Michigan, newspaper:

He took his leadership role so seriously that not even a severe injury could keep him out of the lineup. In mid-March, he damaged an artery in his left arm so badly that he couldn’t use the arm at all, yet he still played every minute of the next few games. “Jackson played the entire game with just one hand and arm to work with and was still the best two men on the floor,” the
Helena
[Mont.]
Independent
reported.

In late April, the Trotters made their third venture into Canada, playing a series of games in Winnipeg and other cities. Their opponents included Abe’s white New York Nationals and the House of David, an unusual barnstorming team sponsored by a communal religious sect in Benton Harbor, Michigan (the House of David players all wore beards, which was part of the sect’s doctrine, although many of the players were not members of the faith).

When the Canadian tour ended, the Globe Trotters turned and headed home to Chicago, having survived the total breakup of the team. Abe would report that gate receipts were “twice as gratifying as last year,” which further validated his earlier prediction that the team was “better than ever.”

The split with Runt Pullins was not only a demarcation point in Abe’s control of the team, it was also a tipping point in the Trotters’ progression toward full-fledged clowning. In some ways, the departure of Runt, Toots Wright, Fat Long, and George Easter—all of whom were serious ballplayers—freed up Abe to move into pure showmanship. He no longer had any pressure to fluff up Runt’s fictional “American scoring record” or the “colored world championship.” Now he could make the Globe Trotters whatever he wanted.

In the 1934–35 season, Abe added two new players, Opal Courtney and Pat McPherson, to go along with Jackson, Frazier, and Rusan. Almost immediately, new comedy routines began to appear. The
Duluth
[Minn.]
News-Tribune
had one of the earliest accounts: “Not content with baffling the Duluthians with straight ball-handling, the Trotters spun the ball dizzily in professional ‘wheel’ plays, bounced the sphere to make it return to the handler, and rolled it along the floor between the legs of the All-Stars, to the amusement of the crowd.”

Opal Courtney was quickly incorporated into the show, spinning the ball on his finger for several minutes at a time and dribbling the ball four or five inches off the floor. Inman Jackson had been doing palming tricks for years, teasing his opponent with the ball, but now he began to openly taunt them, balancing the ball on their heads or rolling it between their legs.

In December 1934, during a game in Iron Mountain, Michigan, a former player from Olson’s Terrible Swedes named Tony Wapp began one-upping the Trotters, waving the ball around, windmill style, and bouncing shots off his head. He was showing up the Trotters at their own game, and had the fans in hysterics. Fearing that they were losing the crowd, Inman Jackson felt he had to do something dramatic, so he spontaneously drop-kicked the ball from the free throw line. Amazingly, the shot went it. It was an impromptu reaction to Wapp’s showboating, but the crowd went wild, assuming it was part of the act. The reaction was so phenomenal that Inman practiced the dropkick and began attempting it every night. In that same game, Jackson unveiled another gag that would become a Trot
ter standard for decades. As the game clock was winding down, he hoisted Harry Rusan, the smallest member of the team, onto his shoulders, and Rusan dropped the ball through the basket as time expired.

There was a Pygmalion effect with the trickery. The more the Trotters clowned, the more the crowd demanded it. So the players added comic elements to their traditional ball-handling repertoire, developing routines that were repeated each night. As the Poplar, Montana, paper reported: “They twirled the ball on finger tips. They rolled it between the legs of Great Northern players. They bounced it off arms, elbows and shoulders as the crowd shouted with glee.”

A subtle transformation was occurring that only more knowledgeable observers of the game would have noticed. In the past, the showmanship had been secondary to playing ball, and was unveiled only when the Trotters had a safe lead or as a stalling tactic, to give them a rest, but now the showmanship began to take precedence over everything else. They were entertainers first, ballplayers second. In January 1935, the
Aberdeen
[S.D.]
Daily News
wrote: