Spinning the Globe (21 page)

The move to first base did something else for Goose—it gave him a chance to entertain the crowd. When he caught a ball on a put-out, he’d whip his glove across his body or windmill it around his head, turning a routine out into a little show. Or when he stretched out those freakish appendages to snare a one-hop throw in
the dirt, he’d jump up and do a little dance around the bag, waving his glove to display the ball. When the crowd responded, he added more flourishes and capers. He was such a funny-looking guy anyway, it didn’t take much to get the crowd laughing, and when he
tried
to be funny, people loved it.

Off the field, such clowning would have been totally out of character for him. But this was a revelatory experience that would forever change his life: Goose realized that he could make people laugh. This bashful, taciturn young man, a loner in every other area, had found a way to connect with people. What was difficult for him one-on-one seemed easier at a distance, in front of a crowd. And, perhaps for the first time, his oddly shaped body was working in his favor.

At the end of that season, the Black Lions went their separate ways. Newt Ellis returned to Pine Bluff for his senior year at Arkansas A and M, and the local players oiled their gloves with Neetsfoot oil and packed them away, then returned to their jobs at the shoeshine stands and hotel kitchens. But Goose was not ready to quit. He knew that he wanted to make his living playing ball, but he could never do that in El Dorado. So he said good-bye to his family and friends, hopped a freight train heading north, and hoboed to Louisville, Kentucky, six hundred miles away. He had reportedly read an article in the
Pittsburgh Courier
saying that the Louisville Black Colonels were looking for ballplayers. When he arrived, he looked up the owner of the Black Colonels, Leonard Mitchell, and convinced him to give him a tryout. Mitchell was impressed enough to put him on the team, and he also gave him a place to sleep and a job cleaning apartments (Mitchell had the maintenance contract at a white apartment complex). Goose cleaned apartments and did yard work during the week, and played with the Black Colonels on the weekends.

The Black Colonels were in the Negro Southern League, which was several steps above the competition Goose had faced with the Black Lions. They played teams like the Atlanta Black Crackers, Memphis Red Sox, St. Louis Stars, and Birmingham Black Barons. Goose played first base or right field. At first base, he continued to expand his repertoire of showboating tricks. “He was a marvelous first baseman,” recalls Jimmie Armstead, eighty-six, one of his teammates. “He had such flash, and would do all kinds of tricks with the ball.”

As in El Dorado, the teams split the gate receipts after the nut, but in this league the players could make as much as thirty dollars a game. “We weren’t getting rich off it,” Armstead says, “but that was almost as much as a week’s pay for a regular job.” Combined with his wages at the apartment complex, Goose was making more money than he’d ever had in his life. But he certainly wasn’t spending it on the high life. Many of the Black Colonel veterans were heavy drinkers, but Goose seldom went to bars or socialized with his teammates. “He didn’t hang with anybody, really,” says Armstead. “He was by himself most of the time; a loner.” Even during the ball games, Goose maintained his distance. “He’d usually be sitting at the end of the bench by himself, just studying the game,” says Armstead. Part of his reticence was due to his extreme shyness, but he was also younger than most of the players, and more immature. “He was very childish,” Armstead remembers.

When he wasn’t working or playing ball, Goose’s primary entertainment was going to movies by himself or, in the off-season, to basketball games at Louisville Central High, Louisville Municipal College, or black recreation centers. Curiously, he’d watch the games for hours, but would never play. He’d scrutinize the players, watching their moves and shots, absorbing the strategies of the game. In his own contemplative fashion, he was learning the intricacies of the game. “It was like he was preparing for something,” says Armstead.

Indeed, he was.

Goose Tatum spent a couple of years in Louisville, playing alternately for the Black Colonels and the Zulu Cannibal Giants, the most controversial team in the history of Negro League baseball. The Zulus took the field wearing grass skirts, fake wigs and beards, and sometimes in whiteface. They played mostly for white audiences against white teams. After relocating from Miami to Louisville, the Zulus’ owner arranged to share players with the Black Colonels—including Jimmie Armstead and Goose Tatum. “We’d play as Zulus one weekend and Black Colonels the next,” Armstead recalls. Although the notion of black athletes wearing grass skirts and fake beards seems inconceivable by today’s mores, Armstead judges it in the context of
the times. “I was glad to have an opportunity to play ball,” he says. “I really enjoyed it.”

Goose ended up leaving Louisville because of an altercation with the Black Colonels’ owner, Leonard Mitchell. According to Armstead, Mitchell had been drinking heavily one night, took offense at something Goose said, and started cursing him and punching him. To defend himself, Goose put a headlock on Mitchell, enveloping him in his long tentacles. Always courteous, Goose pleaded with the older man, “Please, Mr. Mitchell, don’t hit me.” But Mitchell kept trying to get at him, so Goose squeezed harder. Mitchell turned pale and started to faint. “To tell you the truth,” Jimmie Armstead recalls, “Goose was about to kill him.” It took the two biggest players on the team to pry Goose off, as he was deceptively strong. The fight, such as it was, was over, but Goose was so upset about Mitchell’s attack that he bought a bus ticket to Chicago and never returned.

Over the next two years, he played with other Negro League teams, eventually ending up with the Birmingham Black Barons, whose manager, Winfield S. Welch, had started working for Abe Saperstein as a Globe Trotter road manager in the off-season. There are conflicting accounts about how Goose ended up with the Trotters, but his version was that Welch saw him fooling around with a basketball one day in Fort Benning, Georgia, after their baseball game was rained out, and invited him to the Globe Trotters’ training camp.

When he arrived in November 1941, he had far less basketball experience than any of the other hopefuls, but Abe recognized Goose’s flair for showmanship. Inman Jackson worked with him, as he did with all the rookies, to teach him the ball-handling tricks that he had been doing for a dozen years. But Goose had an aptitude for improvisation. He didn’t just repeat the tricks, he expanded on them, adding his own variations, spinning off new gags from the old standards. Inman Jackson had been a great
showman
and ball handler, but he was no clown; he was too dignified for that. But clowning seemed to come naturally to Goose, and despite his inexperience on the basketball court, his potential as a showman seemed limitless.

Goose was so raw, however, that he would play sparingly, if at all, for the Globe Trotters that first season, and likely spent the bulk of it with one of Abe’s farm teams. When the basketball season ended, he
would play first base for the Ethiopian Clowns,
*
which were owned by Abe’s friend Syd Pollack. The Clowns were nearly as controversial as the Zulu Cannibal Giants, as they intentionally parodied black stereotypes, painting their faces white and putting on a pregame show—“shadow ball”—for mostly white audiences. In the
Courier,
Wendell Smith labeled them a “minstrel show” and urged black fans to boycott them. Nevertheless, Tatum would become a star first baseman for the Clowns and continue to expand his showmanship and trickery.

As the 1941–42 season unfolded, Abe was feeling so confident about the future of his team, even after losing Sonny Boswell, that he predicted that professional basketball would have its greatest year ever. He told the
Courier,
“People don’t realize how fast professional basketball is growing. Why the whole country is basketball conscious.” Abe and the Globe Trotters were looking forward to an upcoming grudge match against the Detroit Eagles, who had knocked them out of the 1941 World Pro Tournament and then gone on to claim their crown. It was the Globe Trotters’ chance for revenge. The game was set for December 7, 1941.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caught the U.S. Navy by surprise, killing some twenty-four hundred Americans, sinking or crippling sixteen warships, and disabling much of the Pacific Fleet. The next day, President Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress, where he called December 7 “a date which will live in infamy” and asked for a declaration of war. The nation was reeling, still struggling to come to grips with the enormity of what lay ahead. But in the immediate days after Pearl Harbor, Americans lived in a limbo state between war and peace, between mobilizing for world war and continuing their normal lives. The Harlem Globe Trotters, for instance, played a regularly scheduled game in Decatur, Illinois, on December 9, although it was moved from the local armory to the high school gym after Governor Dwight Green canceled all nonmilitary use of state armories. During halftime, the public address system
piped in President Roosevelt’s speech to the nation. Yet the game went on.

A few days later, as planned, the Trotters left on their usual West Coast tour, although fourteen games had already been canceled because of the war. Soon, however, as the nation mobilized to fight the bloodiest war in history, and thousands of American men and women lined up to volunteer for the military, the war effort took precedence over everything else. The federal government imposed rationing on all war-related products, including rubber and gasoline. For an organization that depended entirely on travel, the Globe Trotters could have been devastated. Indeed, some barnstorming teams, including the Rens, would be homebound for the duration of the war, and others suspended operations because so many of their players were in the military.

But Abe Saperstein decided to keep playing as long as he could. And once again, his marketing brilliance shone through. He devised an ingenious method for keeping the Trotters on the road, by offering to play games at military bases, often for charity. In effect, the Globe Trotters became part of the war effort. This strategy had a huge secondary benefit, as the Globe Trotters could fill their gas tanks at military pumps and buy a new set of tires, if needed. For the duration of the war, Abe scheduled every third or fourth game at some kind of military installation, including navy bases, civilian shipyards, the Presidio of Monterey, army air corps bases, and innumerable army posts. He offered free admission to base personnel and raised thousands of dollars for military hospitals, recreation facilities, the Navy Mothers club, and dozens of other war-related causes. Although the Trotters made less money, these benefits served a larger purpose: to allow them to stay on the road, where they could also play their regular dates.

By the start of the 1942–43 season, many of Abe’s best players were either in the military or working in war production jobs. All eligible men, from ages eighteen to thirty-eight, were required to register for the military draft, but names of draftees were drawn by lottery, so not all men who were fit for service were necessarily drafted—or not right away. And a job in a war-related industry qual
ified one for a deferment. Bernie Price, Roosevelt Hudson, Ted Strong, and Babe Pressley all went to work at the Studebaker aircraft plant in Chicago, as did former Trotters Sonny Boswell, Hilary Brown, and Duke Cumberland. All of them (except Strong) played basketball for the Chicago Studebakers, which was sponsored by the United Auto Workers local union, and was one of the first integrated professional teams in the country.

Without his top players, Abe told reporters that he was “uncertain” about whether to even field a team, but was “left no choice” because of the “avalanche of requests for games to stimulate the morale of war industry workers and help raise funds for various war fund efforts.” There are no doubts about Abe’s patriotism, as evidenced by the many benefit games he played, but he also was a savvy businessman who had found a way to keep his business afloat. And by March 1943, Abe would claim that the Globe Trotters were the only pro team still playing every day.

Although he’d lost much of his team, Abe was able to cobble together two Trotter units, using his remaining veterans and a motley crew of newcomers, including Al Singleton, Bob Powell, Wilbert King (another Detroiter from the Brewster Center), Troy Logan, Davage Minor, Vic Kraft, and Buzz Matthews. Once again, Inman Jackson was forced to reprise his role as the lead showman on the first unit (Inman would celebrate his three-thousandth game that season, with “Inman Jackson Day” in Seattle). And Abe even convinced Runt Pullins to come back to the Trotters, seven years after his “insurrection” (Pullins played a few games early in the season, then disappeared from the box scores). One Trotter unit played primarily in the Chicago area, so that players could still work their factory jobs during the day. The traveling unit, under Inman Jackson’s direction, was made up of players with military deferments, which Abe would later refer to as the “Psycho Five.”

The season was a constant struggle. Players had to be shuffled in and out, juggling the Trotters’ games with their war production jobs. Abe could never keep the same lineup on the court for any length of time, and the lack of continuity showed. Even Abe, the eternal optimist, would later admit that the 1942–43 team was the “weakest” in
the Trotters’ history. Fortunately, the competition was equally inept, as many of the games were against makeshift teams from military installations.

Even with the nation at war and the Trotters doing their patriotic duty to raise morale, racial prejudice did not miraculously disappear from American society. For instance, gas rationing forced Abe to sometimes use public transportation, but the director of the U.S. Office of Defense Transportation threatened to “not allow Negro ball teams to ride buses”—a potential calamity that Abe circumvented by promising to play service teams almost exclusively. And several Trotter games in Missouri were canceled because of fears of a racial incident, after Paul Robeson publicly criticized the Jim Crow seating of blacks and whites during a performance in Kansas City, which prompted most of the whites in the auditorium to walk out. Even during wartime, Americans did not suspend their racial bias.