Spinning the Globe (12 page)

More and more, sportswriters began to focus on the Globe Trotters’ entertainment value rather than their basketball skills. “Furnishing a laugh with each motion, a chuckle with every dribble,” one Montana paper reported, “the Harlem Globe Trotters gave a clever show here tonight.” And the
Spokane Spokesman-Review
added this critique: “The [Globe Trotters] make the basketball do everything but talk…[and] put on an entertainment that equals vaudeville.” To Abe, the results were clear: clowning sold tickets. Barnstorming basketball teams were crawling all over the Midwest, but the Trotters were carving out a unique niche. With the Trotters’ popularity on the rise, Abe
increased his guarantee to $75 a game, plus a fifty-fifty split of the gate. Yet he still couldn’t fill all the requests for games.

The 1934–35 season was rolling along splendidly, with all indications that it would be the Globe Trotters’ best season ever, when Abe was suddenly embroiled in another controversy with Runt Pullins, one year after their split. Pullins was still barnstorming in Montana and the Dakotas with his team, now known as the New York Globe Trotters (and soon thereafter as the Broadway Clowns), which included Pullins, George Easter, Fat Long, and Randolph Ramsey. Everywhere Abe went, it seemed, Runt had either been there ahead of him or was right on his tail. An irate Abe started “bombarding” local newspapers with letters and telegrams, attempting to “prove that his club is the original Globe Trotter five and that the other clubs bearing this or similar names are imitators.” He told the
Great Falls Tribune:
“While imitation is flattering, it is often confusing to the paying public.”

Pullins’s wasn’t the only Globe Trotter knockoff team on the Midwest circuit, as a plethora of black teams were now descending on Abe’s formerly exclusive turf. There were the New York Harlemites, the Negro Ghosts, the Colored House of David, and, most troubling, the Famous Globe Trotters, owned by Bobby Grund from Iowa. This battle with copycat teams would plague the Globe Trotters for sixty years, generating a half dozen lawsuits and millions of dollars in legal fees.

Abe’s problems with Pullins were minor, however, compared with the imbroglio that erupted in 1935 between Abe and the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), which regulated amateur sports. The AAU had an ironclad rule against amateur teams playing professionals, and violators would be banned from further competition. The graybeards who controlled the AAU did not play around: the great Jim Thorpe had been stripped of his two gold medals from the 1912 Olympics after a reporter revealed that he had played semiprofessional baseball, and in 1936, after his triumph at the Munich Olympics, Jesse Owens would be suspended by the AAU for not participating in an AAU-sponsored European tour.

The AAU constitution defined an amateur as “one who engages in athletic competition or exhibition solely for the pleasure and physical, mental or social benefits derived therefrom and to whom
the sport…is nothing more than an avocation.” Furthermore, all players had to have valid AAU membership cards and all teams had to carry an AAU travel permit, which allowed only twenty-one-day barnstorming tours. By any reasonable interpretation, the Globe Trotters were clearly professionals, yet Abe had somehow managed for years to play college and amateur teams in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, and the Dakotas without being challenged. The Trotters depended on those games to fill out their schedule, and purported to have thirty-five college teams scheduled in 1934–35 alone.

When the Trotters arrived in Oregon in February 1935, however, they passed into the jurisdiction of the AAU’s Pacific Northwest district, which apparently held the rules in higher regard. Aaron M. Frank, the district president, demanded that Abe produce his AAU travel permit and his players’ AAU cards. When Abe couldn’t (because he had none), several amateur teams in Oregon and Washington canceled upcoming games against the Trotters. This was a looming disaster that threatened to destroy the entire West Coast tour. A more timid businessman might have been dissuaded by the absurdity of convincing President Frank that the Trotters played solely for pleasure, but not Abe Saperstein. He assured Frank that the Trotters’ AAU papers were all in order, but he had inadvertently left them in Chicago and would go home straightaway and fetch them. Of course, there were no such AAU papers in Chicago and Abe had no intention of going home to fetch anything.

What he did, instead, was begin poring over the AAU rulebook like a constitutional lawyer preparing an oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court, looking for a loophole. And he found one—a hairline crack in the impregnable foundation of the amateur creed that might be exploitable. Although the AAU was adamant that players could not be paid, the rules did allow them to receive up to $8.50 per day for “travel expenses.”

This was the opening Abe needed. With the unshakable confidence of a master salesman, he launched a campaign to convince the AAU that five African American men with no other means of support, in the middle of the most devastating economic depression in American history, had been traveling nonstop for five months, driving 30,000 miles in an unheated Model T, playing upwards of 150 games,
merely for the pleasure of amateur competition and a pregame hamburger. The proposition was farcical, but Abe had faith in his ability to win over the AAU leadership; and compared with some of the other fables he had invented about his players’ Ivy League credentials and his own pro basketball career, this was minor league embellishment.

His initial tactic was to find a more sympathetic audience, since President Frank seemed like a tough nut, so he began working on T. O. “Lefty” Hoagland, an AAU district commissioner in Spokane, where the Trotters were playing. He started wheedling Hoagland with an endless stream of jabberwocky, telling him that the Central AAU, which regulated the Trotters’ home state of Illinois, had issued the team’s travel permit, and that the Trotters’ AAU cards had just expired on February 1 and the new ones hadn’t arrived yet. Further, he insisted that the Trotter players received “far less” than the AAU’s $8.50 daily expense limit. And finally, he had one of his brothers in Chicago send a telegram to Hoagland claiming that the Central AAU had designated the Globe Trotters as “good-will ambassadors for the National A.A.U.”

Incredibly, it worked—at least for the moment. Lefty Hoagland emerged from Abe’s impassioned presentation as a born-again Globe Trotter disciple. “The Globe Trotters are amateurs,” he proclaimed authoritatively, “competing under the expense limit specified by the A.A.U.” But Hoagland went even further, praising the Trotters as
exemplars
of the amateur spirit. “They not only do basketball a great deal of good, with their remarkable displays, but they serve as goodwill spreaders of the Amateur Athletic Union,” he said.

One might expect that Abe would have been ecstatic, but he wanted more. He wanted the AAU to bring down its wrath on Runt Pullins and Bobby Grund and his other professional competitors, to shut them out of the Pacific Northwest entirely. And Lefty Hoagland gave him just what he wanted, designating the Trotters as the “only officially sanctioned amateur team among all of the barnstorming quintets which have visited the northwest in recent weeks.” In effect, Abe was now the
exclusive representative
of the AAU, carrying its official imprimatur, which would completely slam the door on Pullins and the others.

Abe’s seduction of Hoagland had been smashingly successful, but
it all came crashing down on February 19, when district president Aaron Frank reentered the fray. Obviously suspicious that Abe’s only documentation had been a telegram from his brother—
not
from the Central AAU—Frank sent his own telegrams to two AAU officers in Chicago, asking them to authenticate Abe’s claims. Their response was brief and direct.

Employing a Wild West analogy to describe Frank’s ruling,
The Oregonian
reported that he had “carved another niche in the handle of the big gun he has been waving” in the faces of Abe and other barnstorming teams that had invaded the Pacific Coast to play “unsuspecting college and A.A.U. basketball teams.” If Frank was a gunslinger, then Abe was a dead cowboy dragged out of the saloon and buried on Boot Hill.

The West Coast tour was wrecked, the thirty-five scheduled games against college teams were gone. Yet Abe still wouldn’t give up, and a week after Frank’s ruling, Abe sat down with the sports editor of the
Mason County
[Wash.]
Journal
to plead his case all over again. He still insisted that his players were paid “considerably” less than the AAU’s $8.50 daily limit for expenses, and complained that the AAU’s twenty-one-day travel limit was “formulated purely to hamstring such touring attractions as the Globe Trotters.” As often happened, once Abe got wound up he couldn’t stop himself, and his familiar lies came spilling out again. He repeated his old story that “each of his players was a college graduate,” and added several new whoppers about himself, claiming that he had been a “cage star” at the University of Illinois,
*
had played “several years of professional ball in the East after graduation,” and had quit the pros after being “traded to a team he didn’t want to play for.”

All of it did him no good. President Frank wouldn’t budge and several amateur teams canceled their games with the Globe Trotters. This was the opening skirmish in a thirty-year war between Abe and the AAU that would only intensify over the decades, as the AAU would adopt an even more restrictive definition of amateurism and even harsher penalties for violators, perhaps motivated, in part, by Abe’s attempts to pawn off the Trotters as amateurs. It would get so bad that some amateur teams would take to the court against the Trotters wearing masks and using fake names (the “Masked Marvels,” for instance) to hide from the AAU and maintain their amateur status.

In the wake of the AAU fiasco, the Globe Trotters’ clowning became even more overt. Much like the earlier crisis with Runt Pullins, Abe’s conflict with the AAU propelled the Trotters farther down the road to showtime ball. And although both crises were painful to endure, they were also liberating. The split with Pullins freed Abe from any allegiance to straight basketball, and the AAU controversy freed him from trying to maintain the façade of amateurism. Now he was unleashed to pursue an entirely new form of basketball. And by the end of the 1934–35 season, the Globe Trotters were creating more elaborate—and controversial—comedy routines than ever before. Prior to this, the Trotters had simply expanded upon their standard ball-handling tricks, spinning the ball on their opponents’ heads, passing it with such English that the ball came back to them, or rolling it up and down their arms. But now they moved into a realm of comedy that was one of the oldest, and most popular, traditions in America: the minstrel show.

White people in America have been laughing at black people since before the nation was born. Comical, stereotypical images of African Americans were prevalent during the colonial period, fueled by white perceptions of blacks as “mirthful by nature.” As Joseph Boskin says in his seminal work,
Sambo: The Rise and Demise of an American Jester:
“Presumed to be intrinsically comical, black actions became a vast source of white humor.” As early as the 1790s, white actors in blackface were performing parodies of blacks on the stage, and by 1828, when the song “Jim Crow” became a popular hit, a pantheon of comic Negro characters (including Sambo, Tambo, Rastus, Pompey, Caesar, and Uncle Tom) had become institutionalized on the American stage. Minstrel shows became so popular, in both the North and South, that, according to Boskin, at least thirty-nine full-time minstrel companies were performing prior to the Civil War.

Even after Emancipation, the minstrel show survived for nearly a hundred years. In the 1930s, the Federal Theater Project, one of FDR’s New Deal programs, staged minstrel shows around the country and distributed minstrel scripts to Boy Scouts, school groups, and youth clubs. During World War II, the USO dispensed hundreds of minstrel songs and skits to military bases around the world. And as late as 1954, Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye performed a minstrel bit in the film
White Christmas.
Strangely enough, black minstrel groups (with black actors wearing burnt cork) were very popular in the African American community, and were still performing well into the 1930s (including at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago, which even held an annual minstrel ball). The image of the happy-go-lucky, shuffling, lazy, ignorant, chicken-stealing, craps-shooting, dialect-spouting, whiskey-sipping, conniving black man who’s always trying to fool Mr. Whitey was promulgated in American popular culture in songs, plays, novels, racist jokes (in the 1920s,
Collier’s
and
Reader’s Digest
devoted sections to “Negro Humor”), comic books, postcards (“coon cards”), Currier and Ives prints, salt and pepper shakers, Mammy and Sambo figurines, and red-suited yard jockeys. In the twentieth century, that tradition was carried on by radio, movie, and television characters such as Stepin Fetchit, Amos ’n’ Andy, Farina, Buckwheat, and Rochester.