Spinning the Globe (13 page)

The Harlem Globe Trotters, more than any other black team in America, must be understood in the context of that complicated history. It would be a simpler equation if they had remained just another black barnstorming team struggling to make a living in the Depression, but as the comedy routines in their games increased, so too did the scrutiny of what made those routines funny. In other words, what were their white audiences laughing at, and what images of black men were the Globe Trotters portraying? It is not coincidental that the Globe Trotters rose to prominence at the same moment in history when the highest-paid black actor in the country was Stepin Fetchit, and the most popular black radio stars (although they were actually white actors) were Amos ’n’ Andy, whose show debuted on Chicago’s WGN in 1928, when Tommy Brookins’s Globe Trotters were just forming.

By March 1935, Abe Saperstein had begun incorporating gags that played off the traditional stereotypes of African Americans that white Americans had been laughing at for decades. The most conspicuous example was a new “craps-shooting” gag that became part of every game: while two Trotters played keep-away from the opposing team, the other three would lounge on the floor, rolling dice. There seemed to be a deliberate transition from showing off the Trotters’ superlative basketball skills, and making fools of their white opponents, to making fun of blacks. Today, in hindsight, Abe’s use of such stereotypes to get laughs seems inexcusable, but in the context of that time, it would have been a natural progression for a white owner of a black team, in search of comic inspiration, to draw on the most pervasive tradition of black humor in American popular culture.

Abe’s increasing use of stereotypical humor, modeled on the popularity of Stepin Fetchit, was obvious to fans and sportswriters alike. They got the jokes. Indeed, some sportswriters began to mimic the racial overtones, using minstrel dialect. A headline in one British Columbia paper read: “Cullud Gemmen From Noo Yawk Will Show How Hoop Game Should Be Played.” And some of the Trotter players were even given minstrel roles and nicknames: “Abe Saperstein’s traveling minstrel show featuring End Men Robert ‘Stepin Fetchit’ Frazier…and Harry Russan [
sic
], a kinky-haired mite with more
tricks than you could shake a stick at, arrived at the Viking gym a little late last night.”

By the end of the 1934–35 season, the Harlem Globe Trotters had overcome the loss of their top star, the threat of copycat teams, and the embarrassment of being run out of Washington State by the AAU. They had forged their own unique blend of basketball and comedy, some of it overtly racial, that would define their legacy for decades to come. They had proven themselves to be survivors, had taken the worst blows the Depression could offer, yet they were still stuck in the backwaters of the American heartland. Over the next few years, Abe Saperstein would attempt to move the Globe Trotters onto the national stage, to build a national reputation that would open the doors to the gleaming cities back east. And to do that, he knew that he would have to challenge the greatest team of all.

I
n January 1939, Abe Saperstein, the former Lake View bantamweight, was anxious to move up to the heavyweight ranks. And frankly, time was running out. He was thirty-six years old, with a wife and a one-year-old daughter, Eloise, and the signs of middle age were rushing headlong at him at an alarming pace. All his life he had been teased about being short, but now his girth was catching up with his height, and that too was becoming a source of ridicule. The list of unflattering adjectives used by sportswriters to describe him was expanding as fast as his waistline: round little man, rotund, roly-poly, squat and barrel-chested, pudgy, chunky, a bowling ball—the list went on and on.

Moreover, the Globe Trotters had been out on the road for a decade, yet other than an occasional game in Detroit, Chicago, Portland, or Seattle, they were still playing the tank town circuit. If Abe’s team was ever going to break into the big time, it would have to come soon. He had paid his dues in the boonies for ten years; now he wanted more.

By most measures, Abe was already a successful businessman. In the past four years, he had developed a stable of black teams, including two Globe Trotter units (east and west) plus the Boston Brownskins, which functioned as a minor league club for the Trotters. He had even branched out beyond black teams, and was promoting ethnic teams of every description. Currently, he was fielding the Hong Wa Kues, a team of Chinese Americans from San Francisco, and the Cleveland All-Nations team. In addition to his own teams, he had a
financial interest in several “farm teams” in Detroit and Dayton, Ohio, and had developed a feeder system for new players, as a result of his relationships with black coaches in Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Detroit. And during the spring and summer, he was busier than ever with Negro League baseball, as he now owned the Chicago American Giants and was the publicist for the greatest event in black baseball, the East-West All-Star game in Comiskey Park.

Abe’s stature as a businessman and promoter had grown accordingly. He was no longer the young “smiling lad” of 1929 who did it all, as team manager, driver, ticket taker, and substitute player. No, in the eyes of the press, he had become a sports mogul—a full-fledged business magnate with a staff of secretaries in Chicago and a cadre of road managers who oversaw his teams while he was home, booking more games. And although sportswriters may have poked fun at his waistline, their adoration of him bordered on reverential. He had been lauded as a “guiding genius,” a “pioneer,” the “originator of entertainment basketball,” and the “Little Napoleon of the Hardwood” with an “uncanny wizardry of judgment.”

The Harlem Globe Trotters were still his flagship team, and they were doing better than ever. Abe had increased their schedule to 160 games per year, yet he was still overwhelmed with requests for games, including from such far-flung places as Hawaii, Mexico, England, France, and Estonia. And despite the lingering Depression, now in its tenth year, gate receipts had increased each year.

The Globe Trotters were still winning over 90 percent of their games, but they had evolved into a full-blown show business extravaganza. When promoters booked a game with A. M. Saperstein Enterprises, they didn’t just get a basketball game; they got a traveling vaudeville show. Borrowing from Dick Hudson and the old Giles Post tour of Wisconsin in 1927, Abe now carried his own halftime entertainment, including such acts as Bunny Leavitt, the world’s champion free throw shooter (Leavitt set the record by sinking 372 free throws in a row, missed one, then hit 499 in a row). Leavitt also served as the Trotters’ road secretary when Abe was away.

On the court, the Globe Trotters’ show had become so entertaining that fans sometimes didn’t want the games to end. In Vancouver, the referee was booed when he blew his whistle to end the game,
and one man yelled out, “If you tell me how much you want for that whistle, I’ll buy the dang thing.” Sometimes the officials themselves couldn’t bear to end the show. As one newspaper reported: “Even the timekeepers and referees were so intrigued they looked on wide-eyed and let the show go an extra four minutes.”

The Globe Trotters were drawing more attention than ever from the press. They had been featured in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
comic strip, had been compared to having “dinner with the Marx Bros.,” and one enthusiastic writer claimed that they put on a show that “had Ringling Brothers beat forty ways for Sunday.” Abe’s likeness and those of his players were now recognizable across the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, having been displayed on a series of cartoon posters that he had commissioned by noted Chicago artist Forrest B. Myers.

As the team’s popularity had increased, the entire Globe Trotter operation had been upgraded. The days of bouncing around the Dakotas in the old unheated funeral-parlor Model T were finally gone. A near disaster in Montana, in April 1936, might have forced the issue. After the clutch burned out on their car, Abe and the team were stranded in a blizzard and marooned for two days in a sheep-herder’s cabin with seventeen people. That winter was so ferocious that they had to travel by train much of the time, yet even their train was trapped in a snowslide for fifteen hours. Now, however, the Trotters were traveling in a specially equipped station wagon, in which they logged over 35,000 miles per year.

Abe had changed, the Globe Trotter operation had changed, and so had the game of basketball. In the past four years, the rules had changed more dramatically than in the previous forty-eight years since Dr. Naismith invented the game. Two fundamental changes had ushered in the modern game of basketball. First, the center jump after every basket was eliminated, and then the three-second rule in the lane was extended to
any
offensive player, with or without the ball. Almost overnight, basketball was transformed from a plodding game in which slow-footed players hunkered under the basket, hogging the lane, to one of constant movement. To their credit, the Globe Trotters adapted brilliantly to the new rules. Abe had the fore
sight to recognize the implications right away, and predicted that the new three-second rule would “eliminate the pivot play or ‘Man-in-the-hole’ entirely and make a much faster game…. I am getting an almost all new team, a bunch of boys who are ‘Runners,’ for in this new game a player will have to be on the go all the time.”

The Trotters were forced to abandon their traditional offense, which featured a “double pivot”—with Inman Jackson planted under the basket and a second pivot man near the free throw line. Now forced to move with the ball, the Trotters developed a figure-eight “weave” revolving around a single post man, which would become their signature for decades.

True to his word, in the wake of the new rules Abe recruited a new crop of players. Almost all of the old-timers were now gone: Kid Oliver, Toots Wright, Fat Long, Opal Courtney, William “Stepin Fetchit” Frazier, and Gus Finney. Only Harry Rusan, the dead-eye shooter from Detroit, and Rock Anderson, who would make his final curtain call with the Trotters that season, were still on the team. And, of course, Inman Jackson—Abe’s Rock of Gibraltar.

The new Globe Trotter players were bigger, faster, stronger, and more athletic than their predecessors. Some of them had
true
college experience, as opposed to the faux college pedigrees that Abe had made up. The new players included: Ted Strong, a six-foot-three, 207-pound bruiser from Baltimore with gigantic meat hooks (“the biggest hands in basketball,” Abe would say), who was also an All-Star first baseman for Abe’s Chicago American Giants; Babe Pressley from Cleveland, a terrific rebounder and defenseman; Bernie Price, a six-four center from Toledo; Zach Clayton, a Philadelphia native with a linebacker’s physique; and Bill Ford, from Columbus, Ohio, a smooth outside shooter.

The one constant through all of the changes had been Inman Jackson. He had looked like an old man since his mid-twenties, but now, although only thirty-two, he looked ten years older. The wear and tear of over fifteen hundred basketball games in ten years, playing a game a night and twice on Sunday, had eroded his skills and aged him beyond his years.

Abe and Jackson both realized that his playing career was com
ing to an end, but Abe made it clear that “Big Jack” could have a job with the Globe Trotters for as long as he wanted. In their ten years together, traveling five months out of the year, often rooming together on the road, and sometimes having to share a bed in a bug-infested hotel, the two men had moved beyond employer and employee to build a deep, abiding friendship. It was a tribute to the character of both men that they had transcended the barriers of race to build a bond of respect and affection. In every major crisis that the Globe Trotters had faced, Inman had stood with Abe, side by side. When Runt Pullins quit the team, Inman stayed—and the Trotters would have certainly folded if he had left. When Abe had to rebuild the team from scratch, Inman was the cornerstone upon which he built. When Abe decided to move into comedy basketball, Inman was the showman who invented the hand tricks and palming routines that made it happen.

Like any friendship, the relationship had not always been harmonious. Jackson was stoic and sober-minded, not given to frivolities, and would never use two words when one would do. That reticence would sometimes be misinterpreted as subservience, and some Globe Trotter players would even label Inman an Uncle Tom—a “big yaller Tom,” they’d call him, or “Abe’s boy”—but Inman Jackson was no Uncle Tom. He stood up to Abe when necessary. They sometimes argued and disagreed, and once got so mad that neither one would speak to the other for three weeks, even though they were still sharing a hotel room at night.

As his business enterprise continued to expand, Abe faced a dilemma that any executive must address: whom could he trust with the business? Clearly, Abe had decided that Inman Jackson was that man. By the 1936 season, they began making plans for Inman’s transition after his playing days ended. Inman was grooming Ted Strong as his replacement, teaching the young bull his trademark tricks: juggling three basketballs, palming a ball and waving it around his head windmill style, and his “hocus-pocus” gag of teasing an opponent with the ball, then snatching it back.

Two years earlier, Abe had announced that the 1936–37 season would be Inman’s “farewell tour” as a player, and fans across Montana, the Dakotas, and Washington State, whom he had entertained
so superbly over the years, gave him a rousing sendoff. As planned, the following season Inman moved to the bench as a coach and team manager in Abe’s stead, except for occasional fill-in stints on the court. But in 1938–39, the old warhorse would be called out of retirement to serve as the player-coach of the Trotters’ “eastern” unit (considered the second team) while Abe directed the main squad (the western unit).

By 1939, Abe Saperstein was an unqualified success in every respect but one. That exception was huge, however, and gnawed at him constantly. In the black press, he was still relegated to playing second fiddle to the New York Rens. The Globe Trotters were enormously popular out west, but the Rens were the unrivaled rulers of the East and the favorite of both the African American community and the black press. The Rens were the main obstacle in Abe’s way, guarding the door to the inner sanctum of basketball glory.

For five years, the Rens had ignored the Trotters completely. No matter how many challenges Abe had thrown down, no matter how many claims he had made to the mythical “colored championship,” Rens owner Bob Douglas had resolutely ignored him.

One of Abe’s problems was that it was difficult to get the attention of the major black newspapers—the
Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Amsterdam News,
and the
Afro-American
—which had been focused almost exclusively on the exploits of Jesse Owens and Joe Louis, the most celebrated black athletes in the country. Owens had been elevated to iconic status after his four-gold-medal performance at the 1936 Munich Olympics; and Louis, who had been briefly sidetracked by his loss to Max Schmeling in 1936, skyrocketed to fame when he beat Schmeling in a rematch and then claimed the heavyweight title from James J. Braddock in November 1937.

With the Rens ignoring him, Abe had managed to track down the other legendary team in professional basketball, the New York Original Celtics, although by 1938, the Celtics were no longer legendary or original. Their three greatest stars, Nat Holman, Joe Lapchick, and
Dutch Dehnert, had retired, and after several internal splits the team was now owned by singer Kate Smith. Still, the Celtics’ reputation was formidable, even if their talent was not. In March 1938, the Globe Trotters and Celtics had played in Chicago, with the game ending in a controversial tie. With 1:10 left in the game and the score tied, the Celtics had suddenly left the court, claiming they had a train to catch. But Fay Young, sports editor of the
Defender,
accused the Celtics of bolting to protect their bets, and claimed that some of the players were still in Chicago the next morning.

In any case, the game helped build the Trotters’ reputation. If they could play with the Celtics, they could play with the Rens. First, however, they had to catch them. In January 1939, determined to finally get Bob Douglas’s attention, Abe ran an announcement in the
Courier
:

Abe had been issuing such challenges out west for five years, primarily in white papers, but this one, on the front page of the
Courier
’s sports section, was harder to ignore. A week later, Abe finally got a response—not from Bob Douglas but from his road manager, Eric Illidge, who launched a ferocious counterattack in the
Courier.