Spinning the Globe (16 page)

By 7
P
.
M
., the afternoon showers had stopped, and the crowd began filing into the Coliseum for the evening’s tripleheader. The Celtics and Sheboygan Redskins were playing an elimination game in the other bracket at 8
P
.
M
., followed by the Rens and Trotters at 9
P
.
M
., and the Oshkosh All-Stars would face the winner of the Celtics-Redskins game at 10
P
.
M
. By tip-off of the first game, the Coliseum was packed with 8,000 fans, many of them African Americans. A contingent of well-known college coaches, in town for their annual convention, also were in attendance, including Nat Holman of CCNY, Adolph Rupp of Kentucky, and Branch McCracken of Indiana.

After Sheboygan dispatched the Celtics in the first game, it was time for the Trotters and Rens. Even though the Rens’ young Turks—John Isaacs and Puggy Bell—had sparked their come-from-behind win against the New York Yankees, Bob Douglas and Eric Illidge started their veteran guards, Fat Jenkins and Eyre Saitch, along with Pop Gates and Tarzan Cooper at forward, and Wee Willie Smith in the pivot. The Trotters countered with Harry Rusan, Babe Pressley, Ted Strong, Hilary Brown, and their hired gun, Larry Bleach. Inman Jackson had played briefly in the first two games, but against the Rens he would never leave the bench.

By the time the warm-ups were concluded, the crowd was already in a frenzy. The excitement in the Coliseum was palpable as
tip-off approached. For Abe and the Trotters, all of their dreams were right in front of them. The Rens had more experience in such big games, but even they were feeling the tension. Bob Douglas was so nervous that he could not sit down, and paced up and down in front of the bench.

Pat Kennedy, the theatrical referee, motioned both teams to center court for the opening tip. The players shook hands and wished their opponents a good game. Despite the rivalry, there was mutual respect among the players, although the same could not be said for the owners, as the contest had become a blood feud between Abe and Eric Illidge. The players jockeyed for position around the circle. Ted Strong and Willie Smith, the opposing centers, crouched down to make their leap. Kennedy tossed up the ball, and the game was on.

And then, amazingly, as suddenly as it began, it appeared to be over. The Rens raced out to an 8–1 lead before the fans had settled into their seats. Their big men, Cooper and Smith, were manhandling the smaller Trotter players inside, and Fat Jenkins was hitting from the perimeter. The Trotters seemed to be in a daze, moving in slow motion compared with the Rens. Harry Rusan, the smallest man on the court at five-nine, was completely neutralized by the Rens’ larger, faster guards; Larry Bleach and Babe Pressley were clanging shots off the rim; and Ted Strong and Hilary Brown could do nothing against Cooper and Smith.

It got worse. The Rens hit another bucket and a foul shot to make it 11–2. Under the old rules of basketball, the game would have been effectively over. Even under the new rules, it might well be. There was no twenty-four-second shot clock, no time limit on holding the ball, and the Rens and Trotters had each won
hundreds
of games by getting a 4-or 5-point lead and then stalling the rest of the game. The Rens didn’t do comedy routines like the Trotters, but they were the most renowned ball handlers in the world and experts at eating up clock time. A 5-point lead was the Trotters’ safe margin, at which point they would put on the show—but this was a 9-point lead, a blowout by the standards of the day.

But the Trotters were playing so poorly, the Rens didn’t need to stall. Even when the Trotters had the ball, they couldn’t score. They went fifteen minutes in the first half without scoring a single point,
despite numerous open shots at the basket. They were stone cold. Frozen. They were choking in the biggest game of their lives.

It was Abe’s worst nightmare. After all his puffery and boasting, when the Trotters finally got a chance to show the world what they could do, they were embarrassing themselves. The Trotters didn’t look like contenders for the crown, but pretenders. They were playing like one of the hick teams they’d been feasting on for years—the Wahpeton Science Wildcats or Buck Bailey’s Angels or the Wenatchee Men’s Store. Few people had actually expected the Trotters to win, but if they didn’t at least make a game of it they would lose all credibility. Instead, they were playing like rank amateurs, not even in the same class with the Rens.

With the clock winding down in the first half, the Trotters finally hit a couple of baskets and whittled the lead to five points, and the half ended with the Rens up 15–10. Five points wasn’t an insurmountable lead, but the way the Rens handled the ball, it was close to one. There is no record of what Abe or Inman Jackson said to their disheartened players in the locker room, but it hardly mattered. Everyone in the room knew that unless they started hitting some buckets, the game was over. The Rens were even better at playing keep-away than the Trotters, and so they would have to make the most of their few possessions.

As expected, the Rens came out in the second half and went into their stall. The Trotters seldom got the ball, and even when they did, they were still missing their shots. The few times they managed to score, the Rens responded in kind. The third quarter ended with the Rens still ahead by 5. No matter what the Trotters did, the lead held. The Rens weren’t even having to extend themselves.

In the fourth quarter the same pattern continued, with the seemingly impregnable 5-point lead still holding. With four minutes left in the game, the Rens increased the lead to 8, and the game seemed hopelessly out of reach. The clock wound down to two minutes. Time was running out. And then, out of the blue, Babe Pressley hit a long set shot, his first basket all night. Larry Bleach followed with another bomb, and the lead was down to four. It was the closest the Trotters had been since the game began. The crowd stirred back to life. Abe was exhorting his team from the bench. Bob Douglas, who
had been pacing the sidelines all night, had chewed his half-smoked cigar down to a stub.

On the Rens’ next trip down the court, the Trotters defense stiffened. The Rens missed a shot, and the Trotters got the rebound. They worked the ball upcourt and passed it inside to Ted Strong, who had been smothered all night by Wee Willie Smith and held to only 2 points. This time, however, the big man responded, laying in a basket that cut the lead to two points: 25–23.

There were forty-eight seconds left. Miraculously, the Trotters had come back. They had a chance to win. The fans were screaming. The noise in the Coliseum was deafening. The Rens dribbled the ball up the court slowly, taking their time. With no twenty-four-second clock, once they got the ball across the half-court line, they didn’t need to shoot. If the Trotters couldn’t somehow get the ball, the game was over. The Rens passed the ball around the key, playing keep-away. The clock was ticking down. Thirty seconds. The Trotters had to foul or steal the ball. Frantically, they were trying to press whichever Ren player had the ball, doubling up on him, trying to force a mistake. Twenty seconds. Suddenly, with the Trotters all sagging on the ball, big Tarzan Cooper saw an opening underneath and broke down the center of the lane, catching his defender unaware. The Rens’ ball handler saw him break, whipped a pass to him, and Cooper laid it in. There were fifteen seconds left. The lead was back to 4.A two-possession game.

It was over. The Rens won 27–23. When the gun sounded, their fans rushed onto the court, mobbing the Rens players. Although most of the fans were from Chicago, many were still Rens loyalists in their hearts. Bob Douglas was surrounded by well-wishers. The Globe Trotters straggled off the court, unnoticed by the cheering fans. They were numb and crestfallen, heartsick with the weight of the loss. All the years of building toward this golden opportunity, and now it was gone.

The next night, in a game that was clearly anticlimactic, the Rens faced the Oshkosh All-Stars for the world championship. Oshkosh had cut a swath through the other bracket, eliminating the Clarksburg
Oilers and Sheboygan Redskins to earn a spot in the finals. The All-Stars were led by Leroy “Cowboy” Edwards, a former All-American from Kentucky and three-time National Basketball League (NBL) scoring leader, who had already set a tournament scoring record with 18 points in the win over Clarksburg. “Edwards was a horse,” says John Isaacs. “And he could take it to the rack, too…. If somebody got in front of Leroy, he’d run over them like a Mack truck.”

Only 3,000 fans, fewer than half the number that had watched the Rens and Trotters, turned out to see the game. Most of those were rooting for Oshkosh. The two teams had played twice earlier in the year, splitting the two games, and the championship game started out dead even, with the score knotted at 6–6 after seven minutes of play, and 9–9 after eleven. It was a “rough and tumble affair,” the
Defender
reported, with both teams fouling often. “That Oshkosh team was massive,” Isaacs recalls. “All they wanted to do was beat you up—leg whip you, just lay you out.” The big men for both teams—Tarzan Cooper and Wee Willie Smith for the Rens, and Leroy Edwards for Oshkosh—were shutting down the lane, forcing everything to the outside.

Then, halfway through the second period, the Rens exploded. Isaacs, Cooper, and Pop Gates hit five straight baskets, initiating an 11–0 run that blew the game open. The Rens outscored the All-Stars 15–2 before halftime, and went to the dressing room with a 24–11 lead. In the second half, both of the Rens’ big men, Tarzan Cooper and Willie Smith, fouled out, and Leroy Edwards was able to rally the All-Stars to within 5 points, but the Rens responded and coasted to a 34–25 victory. They had won the world championship and the $1,000 first prize.

In the consolation game, the Globe Trotters rebounded from their devastating loss to defeat the Sheboygan Redskins, 36–33, in what the
Chicago American
called “easily the best game of the night.” Sheboygan led through most of the first half, but the Trotters pulled within one point, 20–19, at the break. Early in the third quarter, Larry Bleach hit two quick baskets to put the Trotters ahead, and the lead seesawed throughout the rest of the game, with the Trotters finally pulling out a thrilling 36–33 victory.

That win earned the Globe Trotters third place and a $400
check. Babe Pressley was selected to the all-tournament team, along with Leroy Edwards and the Rens’ Zach Clayton and Puggy Bell (who was chosen as the Most Valuable Player). But third place wasn’t something Abe was going to brag about on his publicity posters. Winning the tournament could have opened doors to the biggest venues in the country, but losing to the Rens doomed the Trotters to a purgatory of more rotgut food, filthy hotels, and thirty-dollar purses in Polson, Montana, and Chelan, Washington.

Even more galling, the Rens had stolen the championship trophy in the Trotters’ backyard, so they had to sit and watch as the South Side embraced the Rens as conquering heroes. Bob Douglas hosted a big party at the Hotel Grand, and toasts were being raised all night long in Bronzeville’s clubs and bars. The next morning, the
Defender
took a photo of the Rens at the Chicago train station as they were about to head home to New York. The players were dressed in suits and topcoats and were doffing their hats in a victory salute. The
Defender
splashed the photo across the top page with the caption “Happy World Champions Off for Home.”

While the Rens were celebrating, the African American community expressed pride—and even some aggravation—at how well the two premier black teams had done in the world tournament. Wendell Smith of the
Courier
even leveled an oblique charge of racism against the promoters for seeding the Trotters and Rens in the same bracket. “If they hadn’t been paired in the same bracket with the flawless Rens, we might have two sepia teams playing for the title,” he wrote. “But, of course, they just couldn’t let that happen, could they?”

Despite their loss, the Globe Trotters were praised for their all-around play. “The Globe Trotters have the nucleus of a fine, promising young club,” Chester Washington wrote. “They, too, should go places.” And the Trotters could find some solace in their courageous comeback at the end of the Rens game, when they cut the lead to 2 points. They had not embarrassed themselves, after all, and had proven they could play with the Rens. But there was no way to soften the blow of losing the most important game in their history. The Trotters were relegated, once again, to playing second fiddle to the Rens. Only now there were no doubts about it. Previously, Abe
might have been able to get some takers for his boasts, but now the proof was in: the Rens were the champs, the Trotters were third-place chumps.

It might have been easier to handle if they could have gone back on the road and played their way through the pain. That might have taken their minds off the loss. But the season was over, so they had to listen to the recriminations all summer and fall, answering the same question over and over, like an interrogation that would never end: “Why didn’t you beat the Rens?”

Truthfully, there was only one answer to that question: the better team had won. Whether the Globe Trotters would ever get another shot at the Rens, no one knew.

I
t took only one game for Abe Saperstein to realize that his new Harlem Globe Trotters team was different. On November 26, 1939, in one of the first games of the 1939–40 season, the Globe Trotters took on the bearded House of David at the White City arena in Chicago. The Trotters had played the “Bearded Aces” many times before, and they had always been tough opponents. Although the Davids had been eliminated in the first round of the World Pro Tournament by Honey Russell’s New York Yankees, they were still a hard-nosed professional squad that could hold its own against anybody.

Yet in this game, the Trotters had completely outclassed the House of David, coasting to a 31–19 win that was more lopsided than the score indicated. Abe played every player who had dressed out—nine altogether—yet the Davids were never in the game. It was the first inkling that this team might be special.

Abe Saperstein was not a man who wallowed in self-pity or gnashed his teeth about the misfortunes that life had bestowed upon him. In his father’s Yiddish vernacular, he did not
kvetch.
Nor was he the reflective type who anguished over past mistakes or how he might have gone wrong. He was a man of big ideas and big dreams, and the crushing defeat by the New York Rens in the 1939 World Tournament had not deterred those dreams for an instant. He had moved on, with the same resolute determination he had shown in 1934, after the tumultuous split with Runt Pullins.

Truthfully, he was too busy to mope. His summers were more and
more occupied with Negro League baseball, promoting the East-West All-Star game at Comiskey Park (which regularly outdrew the major leagues’ All-Star game), along with managing Satchel Paige. He was also booking upcoming basketball games for the Trotters, the all-Chinese Hong Wa Kues, and another of his quirky promotions, a team of professional football players playing basketball (on the premise that fans who would pay to see these big lugs beat each other up on the gridiron would pay to see the same mayhem on the basketball court.)

So Abe had plenty to keep him busy over the summer. But the loss to the Rens still stuck in his craw. And being a man of action, Abe decided to do something about it. Something dramatic. It had been obvious to anyone who knew basketball that the Globe Trotters had been manhandled by the Rens, who were too big, too strong, and too fast. Yes, the Trotters had come back in the last few minutes to make a game of it, but the Rens had been coasting since the second quarter, sitting on their lead. If they had tried to run up the score, the results could have been ugly. So Abe decided to completely remake his team—to transform the Globe Trotters into a club that could match up with the Rens. In other words, he wanted to clone the Rens.

The first way he tried, in typical Saperstein fashion, was to buy the Rens players outright. “Abe Saperstein wanted the Rens to leave Bob Douglas en masse and come to play for him,” says John Isaacs. “When that didn’t work, he decided to go individually—and he wanted me. He even had Harry Rusan contact me and try to get me to come play. I told him, ‘Okay, but first put my money in escrow, then I’ll consider it.’ Rusan looked at me like I was crazy. I decided, I’m not gonna get caught up in this.”

When Abe’s attempt to raid the Rens failed, his only option was a wholesale housecleaning of the Trotters. Since the beginning of the team, the Globe Trotters had always had a little guy as one of their stars. First it was Runt Pullins, then Harry Rusan and Gus Finney, who were all five-nine, or smaller. It may have been a subconscious link to Abe’s own playing days at Lake View High, but the little guys were always the featured performer in the show. They were the fancy dribblers and trick-shot artists. For over a decade, those little guys had been entertaining fans in Montana, Minnesota, and Washington, but on the front lines of the World Pro Tournament in Chicago, the
Globe Trotters’ little guys had been completely overmatched. With monster centers like Mike Novak and Tarzan Cooper swatting balls above the rim, and six-foot-two athletes like Pop Gates and John Isaacs playing guard, the little guy was an anachronism, a fossil from basketball’s Stone Age. In the Rens game, little Harry Rusan had been shut down completely by the bigger Rens guards.

What the loss to the Rens showed most clearly was how much the game had changed. Five years earlier, Inman Jackson, at six-foot-three, had been considered a giant on the Iron Range, but now every team had taller and more agile players—guys like Wee Willie Smith and Leroy “Cowboy” Edwards, and the Trotters’ Hilary Brown and Bernie Price.

So Abe went looking for players who fit the new prototype. Sadly, that meant the end of the road for some of his most loyal players, including: Rock “Pops” Anderson, whose career stretched all the way back to the Savoy Big Five; Bill Ford, who had been out with the team since 1935 (although he would make another brief appearance a few years later); and, most significantly, it meant cutting Harry Rusan, the quintessential little guy, who had bailed out Abe in the aftermath of the Runt Pullins insurrection.

By the start of training camp in early November, they were all gone. The only holdovers from the previous year’s team were Ted Strong, Hilary Brown, Bernie Price, and Babe Pressley. And of course Inman Jackson, who was doing more of the hands-on coaching, but would still be pulled out of mothballs from time to time.

To find new players, Abe once again turned to the network of black coaches and farm teams that he had developed across the Midwest. The Rens had de facto territorial rights to the best players in the East, so Abe staked his claim to the Midwest and South. And even if the Globe Trotters had not attained the same heights as the Rens, they were successful enough for Abe to attract the best black players in those regions. When training camp opened, he had brought in five new players: Sonny Boswell, Roscoe “Duke” Cumberland, Marvin Freeman, Everett “Ziggy” Marcell, and Chuck Bowen. These signings indicated how much Abe was expanding his recruiting territory: Boswell and Cumberland were from Toledo, Freeman was from Memphis, and Marcell from Houston.

The cream of the crop were Cumberland and Boswell. They had both played at Toledo’s Scott High, where Boswell had set the school scoring record, then played pro ball with Jesse Owens’s Olympians. In the 1938–39 season, Boswell had starred for the Dayton entry in the Midwest Independent League.

Cumberland was six foot three and 175 pounds (he would eventually fill out to 210) and a rugged inside player who could also shoot from the perimeter. Boswell was an unimposing physical specimen: he was a wiry six-foot-two, 165-pounder with skinny legs who seemed too frail to hold up in the brutish world of pro ball. But the scrawny kid may have been the best pure shooter in all of basketball. He was a selfish gunner and a shameless ball hog who would take a shot whether he was ten feet out or thirty, even with two defenders draped all over him and a wide-open teammate standing under the hoop. But when Sonny Boswell got on a roll, he was unstoppable.

In the game against the House of David, the Trotters started Boswell, Cumberland, Ted Strong, Babe Pressley, and Hilary Brown—none of them under six-foot-two. Abe had his new prototypes. After the White City game against the Davids, the Trotters set off on their regular pilgrimage through Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana, Oregon, and Washington, then northward into Canada. Almost immediately, Sonny Boswell starting showing signs of being the most prolific scorer the Trotters had ever had. By the time they made it to Washington, in early January, he was lighting up scoreboards nearly every night. He scored 16 against the Yakima YMCA All-Stars, 26 points against the Olympia Sta-Dry Ducks (out of the Trotters’ 42 total points), 20 against the Port Townsend All-Stars, 17 against the Grandview Town Team, and 24 against the Seattle Select Stars. After just two months on the pro circuit, the
Bellevue
[Wash.]
Journal
proclaimed him “American’s best long shot man.” When the Trotters crossed into Montana, he kept up his terrific pace. He hit for 20 against the Helena All-Stars, and reportedly even scored 48 points in one game—an incredible feat in that era.

What made these accomplishments so remarkable was that almost all of his points came from outside. He was not scoring off fast breaks or driving to the basket, but on two-hand set shots from long range. He may have been the best shooter in the world, but he was a one
dimensional player with glaring weaknesses in the rest of his game. Most notably, he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, play a lick of defense. “Sonny couldn’t guard anybody,” Jim “Nugie” Watkins says emphatically. Watkins, now eighty-four, played with the Trotters, and Boswell, in the early 1940s. “But he could
really
shoot. He would step back and shoot that ball so high that when it came through the net it wouldn’t even move.” Some of the other players resented his ball-hogging, until they started seeing the results. “When the guys realized that Sonny could shoot them to a championship, they protected him on defense—doubling up on his man,” says Watkins. Another ballplayer might have been insulted by his teammates’ covering for him on defense, but Boswell never protested. “Sonny was a pimp,” says Watkins, chuckling. “He let them do it. He never did say, ‘You don’t need to guard my man.’ No, he’d say, ‘I can’t guard that good, but I can shoot.’”

And could he ever. When Abe and Inman realized what kind of cold-blooded killer they had in Boswell, they oriented the entire offense around him. “Abe always protected his shooters,” Watkins recalls. Fortunately, Sonny Boswell wasn’t the only dangerous weapon in the Trotters arsenal. Babe Pressley, Hilary Brown, Duke Cumberland, and Bernie Price could all put up big numbers, and Ted Strong could still score when needed. On nights when Boswell’s shots weren’t falling, one of the other players would fill the void. There were games when three or four Trotters would score in double figures.

With Boswell leading the way, the Trotters were scoring more points than ever before. Instead of the low-scoring affairs of the past, with point totals in the 20s or 30s, they were consistently scoring over 50 points a game. And their margins of victory were increasing as well. The Trotters had traditionally held down the score, not wanting to embarrass their local hosts, but with Boswell raining baskets from all over the court, they were overpowering opponents, thrashing them by 20 points or more, sometimes doubling the other team’s score, even though the Trotters still spent most of the fourth quarter putting on the show. The scores were outrageous: 51–25, 44–22, 55–40, 54–29. Even the
Courier
’s Chester Washington, a longtime Rens man, couldn’t help but notice when the Trotters rattled off 56 wins in their first 57 games. “Out in the great northwest…the Globe Trotters are going like ‘Gang Busters,’” he wrote. “Along with
the Rens, the Trotters rank with not only the best sepia quints in America but with the best fives in basketball, regardless of color.”

It wasn’t how many games the Trotters were winning, but
how
they were winning them that was so striking. In the past, Abe would have reined them in, because beating teams this badly was bad for business. They were annihilating local teams that he had been playing for a decade, humiliating them in front of their own fans. But Abe didn’t call off his players, even at the risk of creating ill will with longtime promoters. It might have been the first time in his life that he did something that was completely counterproductive for his business.

There can be only one explanation: he wanted to beat the Rens. As usual, Abe was looking down the road, already steering toward the biggest landmark ahead: the 1940 World Professional Invitational Tournament, which was scheduled for late March. Abe made his intentions very clear to sportswriter Alex Shults of the
Seattle Times,
when he sat down with him in January 1940. In his typically loquacious style, Abe started bragging about the Trotters. “[We are] tops of all the touring pros,” he began. “We play on an average 155 games per season, draw the biggest crowds and get the most publicity.” When the loss to the Rens came up, as it always did, Abe insisted that the Rens’ victory had been a lucky fluke, and that the Trotters had lost only because “a shot went into the basket and ‘Englished’ out again.” Of course, this bit of revisionist history was contradicted by the fact that the Trotters had lost by four points, not two, and that the Rens had never seriously been threatened until the final seconds.

The Globe Trotters may have built their reputation on clowning, but Abe Saperstein was deadly serious when it came to winning. And the entire 1939–40 season was pointing toward a hopeful rematch with the Rens in the World Pro Tournament. The Trotters had improved themselves in every facet of the game. They were bigger, stronger, faster, and now had the most dangerous shooter in basketball. If a few hick teams had to be sacrificed as warm-ups for the tournament, so be it. Abe had lost once to the Rens—had been humiliated and manhandled, his “Englished out” blarney notwithstanding—but if he got a second chance at them, he intended to be ready.

In March 1940, the world situation was even bleaker and more threatening than the year before. Britain and France had officially declared war on the Axis powers; German U-boats were prowling the North Atlantic, sinking British merchant ships almost at will; and the Luftwaffe was bombing British naval anchorages (although England’s cities had as yet been spared), inducing the first civilian casualties.

Yet there was a different tone to the news stories in Chicago’s papers from the previous year. In 1939, there had been a naive outrage about Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia, but such incursions had become so commonplace that there was now a sense of resignation and revulsion toward it all. In the intervening months, Hitler had overrun Austria and Poland, Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, and Joseph Stalin, who was preparing to sign a nonaggression pact with Hitler, had occupied parts of Finland. Yet the hostilities were thousands of miles away, across a vast “ocean fortress,” and it was still possible for Americans to wall themselves off from the whole bloody mess. The true horrors were yet to come.