Spinning the Globe (19 page)

For all intents and purposes, the game was over. The Trotters had to bring the ball in under the All-Stars’ basket and go the length of the court, but there was not enough time. So they did the only thing they could do: they got the ball to Sonny Boswell. When you have the deadliest gunner in the game, why would you do anything else? Boswell barely had time to get to half court, then heaved a desperation shot as the buzzer sounded. The ball went straight in.

Sonny Boswell had done it again. They were going to overtime.

The lead seesawed back and forth during the five-minute overtime period, with numerous lead changes. All 20,000 fans were on
their feet, “screaming themselves hoarse,” as the two teams carried the fight up and down the court. With a minute left, the All-Stars were ahead by 2, but Babe Pressley hit a basket to tie the score at 42-all. Then the All-Stars’ cocaptain, Stan Szukala of DePaul, took a pass on the right wing, cut toward the basket, and hit a shot to win the game, 44–42.

When the final buzzer sounded, the most amazing spectacle of the entire evening occurred. As Wendell Smith described it: “In one of the wildest demonstrations we have ever witnessed, 22,000 fans rose as one after the battle was over and gave both teams an ovation that shook the lofty rafters of this mammoth stadium.”

If the pregame publicity had been a tad hyperbolic, the postgame descriptions went beyond superlative. “Wow! What a game and what a finish,” was the lead in the
Chicago Defender,
which predicted that the Trotters, even in defeat, had “lost not one bit of their reputation.” Most eloquent of all was Wendell Smith, who had been a Rens loyalist for many years, but with this game would become the Trotters’ biggest fan. He described the contest as “basketball’s first real dream game” and ended by saying: “Sometime, somewhere a greater basketball game may be played…but until that happens the one I saw here tonight will go down as the greatest.” But Abe Saperstein might have summed it up best of all, saying: “It was the night we came into our own.”

The one-two combination of the world championship and the All-Star Classic was the greatest publicity bonanza in the history of the Harlem Globe Trotters, and it catapulted them to a new level of fame and respect. For over a decade, Abe had been promoting his team with very little to go on, except for his own creativity (which sometimes strayed into the world of make-believe), but now he had two sensational hooks—and he sold the hell out of them. Give a natural-born marketing wizard a championship title
and
the All-Star Classic, and just see what he can do.

The most immediate effect was that “world’s basketball champions” became the lead to every news article, press release, and marketing letter about the Trotters—and Abe would continue using it for
years, long after the Trotters had ceded that title to other teams. New team stationery and envelopes were printed up with the phrase stamped across the bottom in forty-eight-point type, along with a logo of Inman Jackson holding three balls, superimposed on top of a globe.

There were other improvements. Abe hired a traveling secretary, Chuck Jones, from Vancouver, to manage the team in his absence, and a full-time publicity man, Bill Margolis, a former newspaper reporter. He rented a two-room “suite” at 192 Clark Street, although it was just a tiny two-room cubicle about the size of the bedrooms in the Saperstein house. Most significant, for his players, he bought a used army “carry-all”—a cross between a station wagon and a panel truck—and emblazoned “1940 World Professional Champions” on the sides. The new vehicle gave the players more room to stretch out, and they passed the long drives between towns napping, playing endless games of bid whist, or singing. The carry-all was a definite improvement from the old days in Abe’s Model T, but it was still just a glorified truck. It had no heater, and in the dead of winter icicles would form on its uninsulated roof and hang down like daggers above the players’ heads. One player had to always stay awake to break off the icy stalactites so they didn’t spear them in the head when the carry-all hit a bump. The players wrapped their legs with blankets, like mummies, and put lit kerosene railroad lanterns on the floorboards to keep warm.

Pro basketball, in general, and the Globe Trotters, in particular, were starting to draw increased media attention. Abe boasted that noted sportswriters Bill Corum and Grantland Rice, the dean of American sportswriters, had “made us their pets.” And
Esquire
and
Collier’s
both ran glowing pieces on the team.

As a result of this coverage, attendance swelled. In early 1941, Abe told a sportswriter, “We’re drawing more basketball customers than we ever dreamed of before…by 200, or perhaps even 300 percent. Perhaps basketball interest is booming, but of course we’re world champions now and getting publicity such as no basketball team ever got before.” Not content to merely ride this crest of publicity, Abe redoubled his marketing efforts, reaching out to new
towns and venues. In December 1940, for instance, he sent a blind marketing letter to Delford T. Precht, manager of the New Ulm Brick and Tile team in New Ulm, Minnesota:

Abe told Precht that he still had three open dates in January, and laid out the terms of a contract (the Trotters would get the first $20 in receipts, then the remainder would be split 50-50). Abe was relentless once he had a promoter in his sights, so he sent a follow-up letter to Precht a week later. By then, he had brand-new stationery with the
Herald-American
’s story about the Trotters’ championship game wrapped around the left margin.

Abe’s sports empire was also expanding. He added two new teams to his ever-increasing stable: the Chicago Brown Bombers, which played mostly on weekends in the Chicago vicinity, and the newly resurrected Savoy Big Five, which became a farm team for the Globe Trotters, and sometimes even played as a Globe Trotter second unit.

The most striking indication of how the Trotters’ status had changed, however, was that the Rens were now chasing them, instead of the other way around. Eric Illidge admitted to Wendell Smith that the Rens’ “sole wish”—even more important than winning their other games—was to atone for their loss to the Trotters. Nine months after the game, Illidge was still moaning and making excuses about the loss. “They caught us on an off night,” he whined. “We couldn’t
get going. It was the worst game any Renaissance team has played in years. At that, they only beat us by one basket.” The Rens would remain a formidable team for another nine years (until Abe actually bought them), but from 1940 on, the Harlem Globe Trotters would be the preeminent black team in America.

Immediately after the All-Star Classic, the Trotters headed west, playing their way to Washington, Oregon, and then into Canada. They still had the championship squad intact: Sonny Boswell, Babe Pressley, Bernie Price, Duke Cumberland, and Ted Strong, but they were strengthened by the full-time addition of Hilary Brown, along with Agis Bray and Roosevelt Hudson, two more former Wendell Phillips stars; veteran guard Bill Ford, who returned after a one-year absence; Al Johnson, a former player for the Savoy Big Five and the New York Rens; Tony Peyton, another Toledo player; and Roscoe Julien. And Inman Jackson, now five years removed from his “farewell tour,” was still playing a few minutes in most games.

The abundance of talent allowed Abe to put two units on the road full-time. Jackson was the coach and road manager for the first unit (with Boswell, Strong, Price, Pressley, Hilary Brown, and Agis Bray), and Abe hired Winfield S. Welch, the longtime baseball manager of the Birmingham Black Barons, as the road manager of the second unit, which played alternately as the Globe Trotters or the Savoy Big Five.

Despite the increased attendance and publicity, however, the logistics of keeping the Trotters on the road were still formidable. It was a grind, whether they were world champions or not. The only internal communiqué from this period that still survives, a December 26, 1940, letter from Abe to Inman Jackson, provides a revealing behind-the-scenes look at the challenges that even a successful barnstorming team faced. It also gives an intriguing view of Abe’s hands-on management style and of the relationship between the two men. As road manager for the first unit, Inman was required to send daily reports, by either wire or mail, itemizing the gate receipts, travel expenses, and giving a summary of the team’s performance. Inman’s unit had spent Christmas playing in the Spokane area, and this letter from Abe (with his characteristic use of ellipses, in the style of Walter Winchell) was his response to one such report:

Sonny Boswell, so sensational in his rookie season and during the World Professional Tournament, was even more phenomenal his second season. He was hitting in double figures most nights and scoring
over 20 points on a regular basis. One night, in Port Angeles, Washington, he tried a dropkick from seventy-five feet, nearly the length of the court, that went through the net “so cleanly that half the crowd sat dumb for a moment, not realizing what had happened.” Boswell was no longer just a scoring machine; he was becoming a great showman. He could spin the ball on his finger for forty-five seconds, and during games would sometimes steal the referee’s whistle and run around blowing it, halting play.

All over the country, sportswriters were effusive in their praise of Boswell. A Salt Lake City sportswriter testified that no other player he had ever seen in twenty years “could hold a candle to the present star of stars, Sonny Boswell.” Another scribe even coined a name for one of Boswell’s moves, which he called the “Boswell Glide.” And Wendell Smith devoted an entire column to him, predicting that Boswell was “destined to go down in basketball’s book of all-time greats.” Abe Saperstein had the greatest player on the greatest team in America.

Perhaps the most indiscernible, and insidious, change that occurred after the Trotters’ 1940 triumphs was in Abe Saperstein himself. Invigorated by the Globe Trotters’ spectacular achievements, Abe became even more self-assured in his dealings with sportswriters and promoters—and more full of himself. And as his stature and prestige increased, he began to separate himself from his players, creating a distinct racial barrier that kept them apart. In the early years, he had sometimes shared a bed in a flea-bitten hotel with his ballplayers or slept crammed together in the back of his old Model T, but those days were gone. He was now a successful entrepreneur—a
white
owner of a thriving sports enterprise—and gradually he distanced himself from his ballplayers. He began to hold himself above them, not just in terms of income and lifestyle but in his attitudes as well.

It showed up first with sportswriters. Clearly, one of Abe Saperstein’s greatest pleasures was talking to sportswriters. It may have been the place where he was most comfortable. For him, hanging out with the fourth estate was the equivalent of joining an exclusive men’s club, such as the Reynold’s Club in Chicago, which
would not accept him because he was a Jew. But Abe suffered from a flaw shared by many compulsive talkers: he never knew when to stop. And sometimes, enthralled by the sound of his own voice, he would lapse into reflective discourses on the intelligence, constitution, and habits of African Americans. With hindsight, he might have preferred that his comments had never seen print.

One of Abe’s confidants was Alex Shults of the
Seattle Times,
and in December 1940, Abe was regaling Shults with a recitation of the Trotters’ wins and losses, when he suddenly veered off into a history lesson on the Globe Trotters’ evolution from straight basketball to clowning. “When we first coached this team to start its clowning and trick ball handling they didn’t like it,” Abe explained. “They wanted to be serious about every game. Then they tried the trick stuff in public and when the fans laughed and applauded the boys thought it was grand. A Negro is a natural entertainer and it wasn’t long until we had to watch the team to keep them playing basketball until victory was safe before clowning too much.”