Spinning the Globe (36 page)

He was in “the zone,” that mystical place that top athletes sometimes reach, where everything comes together in slow-motion perfection. Here, at the pinnacle of his career, Goose was in complete mastery of his game, his gags, and the fans who marveled at the artistry unfolding before them. Sometimes he’d pull off something so amazing that one of his Trotter teammates would be standing there with his mouth open, and Goose would say, “Buy a ticket, dummy, if
you wanna watch the game.” The other players had to stay on their toes because he would snap off passes so fast that they’d hit an unsuspecting player right between the eyes. But like the audiences, the players understood that they were witnessing a genius at work. And like all great masters, in sport or art, he made those around him better. They just had to trust him, go
with
him, and he would take them on a ride they would never forget. “Give me your mind!” Goose would tell them. “Don’t think!” As Leon Hillard recalled, years later, “You never had to wonder when to cut because he told you with his eyes. And he was so darn good and he made you play better than you ever thought you could play.”

There were no signs, outwardly, of any trouble between Goose and Abe. But in March 1955, after three years of relative calm, and without any warning, their relationship exploded. As with Marques Haynes, the exact details have never been revealed, but money was certainly part of it. Abe hadn’t given Goose a raise in three years, although he was making $3,500 a month. According to his son, Reece Tatum III, one point of contention was Goose’s share of endorsement money from advertisers. What is certain is that Goose’s old wanderlust returned in full force.

The climactic moment occurred on March 12, when the Trotters played a memorable benefit game for the U.S. Olympic Fund at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, outside Chicago. It was an all-navy crowd, from admirals down to seamen first class, with no civilians allowed. Abe was going to donate $4,000 to the Olympic Fund, but what made the game historic was that CBS-TV was broadcasting it live, on a coast-to-coast hookup reaching eighty-three cities and 26 million homes. It was the first nationwide telecast of a Globetrotter game in the team’s history. They had been on Movietone News, on the silver screen, and on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
but now an entire game was being beamed to the nation. It was the dawning of a new era in which the Globetrotters would become
institutionalized
in American popular culture, with “Sweet Georgia Brown” and the Magic Circle as familiar on TV as
The Wizard of Oz
and baseball’s
Game of the Week.
And the person who would usher in this new age—the
only
person who could captivate those millions of Americans sitting in their living rooms, as he had captivated kings
and queens and beggar children around the globe—was the Clown Prince of Basketball, Goose Tatum. This was the grand stage that Goose had been building toward his entire life, and he was spectacular. He scored 34 points and had the navy brass and sailors completely under his spell. He was shooting his hook from all over the court, mugging for the TV cameras, autographing programs in the middle of the game, stealing a flash camera from a sailor to take his own picture, and pulling out all his favorite reams—the string ball and the wobbly ball and the pantomime baseball game. He put aside whatever grievances he had with Abe, his chronic worries about money, and his own personal demons and strutted out upon that stage and “made them love it.” He put on the greatest show of his life, before the greatest audience of his life.

And then he disappeared into the night.

He missed the team plane the next morning, and nobody had any idea where he was. Like so many times before, he was just gone. He didn’t show for the next three games, so Abe suspended him for thirty days, the longest punishment he’d ever imposed. Abe had to pull in the showmen from the other units, Sam “Boom Boom” Wheeler and Bob “Showboat” Hall, to substitute for Goose on the big team. A week went by, with still no sign of Goose. Then, out of the blue, he called a friend in Chicago and said he was in Little Rock, at his sister’s house, “taking a rest.”

On March 27, two weeks after his disappearance, the Trotters were forced to open the College All-Star tour in Madison Square Garden without him, and when fans rocked the Garden with chants of “We want Tatum!” Abe took his case to the press, as he always had. “I would take Goose back if he promises to show some responsibility,” he said. “We advertise that he plays for us and the public deserves to be protected. We pay him $53,000 a year and I think only two major league baseball players make more.”

Goose remained silent. On April 3, Abe told the papers, “I haven’t heard a single word from Goose. His suspension will be over April 12th and, frankly, if I don’t hear from him I’ll just have to release him.”

On April 20, Abe issued a statement giving Goose his unconditional release. By then, Goose was already putting on exhibitions in
Arkansas and Louisiana with a team called the Fabulous Harlem Clowns. A reporter for the
Arkansas Gazette
caught up with him in Little Rock, staying at the Charmaine Hotel, and asked him if there was any chance he’d return to the Trotters. Goose shook his head and said, “After fourteen years, you want a change.” That was the only explanation he would ever give. He estimated that he’d played 3,500 games in his career and now planned to “take it easy,” perhaps spending some time down in Mexico on the thirty acres he’d bought.

By the next season, he had joined up with Marques Haynes, as a co-owner of the Harlem Magicians, reuniting the two great players on the same team. The nationally televised game at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station would be Goose Tatum’s final game as a Harlem Globetrotter. He had led the Trotters to the promised land, but he would not cross over Jordan.

Even Abe had to acknowledge, in a candid moment, that he missed Goose being on the team. “Sure, who wouldn’t miss him,” he told Wendell Smith. “Would the Boston Red Sox miss Ted Williams? Would the Cardinals miss Stan Musial? Would the Giants miss Willie Mays? Sure I miss him!” But then he caught himself and immediately reverted to his old standby, the familiar incantation that had worked so many times in the past: the Trotters would be fine without Goose, the new showmen would have audiences laughing just as hard, and the Trotters were bigger than any one player. Abe would have never subscribed to the old racist stereotype that “all Negroes look alike,” but there were subtle elements of that at work. All he had to do was find some guy who looked like Goose, walked like Goose, could imitate Goose, and the Globetrotters’ white audiences would never know the difference.

“I’m not worried in the least,” Abe said cheerily. “We’ve been packing ’em in since the season started.” He already had his eye on a young player, only twenty-three years old, who wanted desperately to be a showman. “He’s a natural,” Abe said. The youngster’s name was Meadow Lemon.

O
n a summer afternoon in Moscow in July 1959, a group of American sightseers was touring the Kremlin, the 500-year-old medieval fortress once occupied by the czars, with its multihued palaces and the fantastical swirled turrets of St. Basil’s Cathedral, which now served as the seat of power of the Soviet state. The weather was pleasantly mild and the Americans were dressed in summer suits and ties. Their Russian tour guides were showing them an ancient cannon that the czars had used to drive off mobs of hungry peasants gathered in Red Square. A group of Russian passersby followed behind the Americans, drawn out of curiosity.

Suddenly, a gate opened in the Kremlin and a motorcade of drab Soviet-made limousines headed out across the cobbled streets. As the last car passed the group of American tourists, it suddenly stopped in the middle of the road. The rear door was flung open and a squat, bald man in a suit jumped out and walked briskly toward the Americans. The leading cars also had stopped and were disgorging their passengers. Grim-faced men in dark broadcloth suits, some carrying weapons, hurried to catch up with the chubby man in the lead.

The Americans noticed him and moved in his direction. Behind them, the curious Russians who had been following them stopped and, recognizing the man in the suit, pulled back warily to a safe distance.

The little man rushed up to the Americans and raised his hand, smiling broadly. “Harlem Globetrotters?” he called out in halting English.

It was Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the Soviet Union.

“Yes, the
famous
Harlem Globetrotters,” replied Parnell Woods, the Trotters’ traveling secretary and the nearest man in line.

“Ah, American basketball!” Khrushchev said, beaming.

Eagerly, he shook hands with the Globetrotter players: Tex Harrison, Showboat Hall, Clarence Wilson, Bobby Jo Mason, Joe Buckhalter, Norman Lee, and Meadowlark Lemon. Abe Saperstein was pushed forward and introduced as the team owner, then the rest of the traveling party took turns shaking hands with the premier. Khrushchev seemed particularly fascinated with one of the Globetrotter players, whom he stared up at with a look of amazement. At seven feet, one inch, Wilt Chamberlain was the tallest player in Globetrotter history.

By now, a crowd was gathering and Khrushchev’s security guards were trying to keep it at bay. Turning to an aide, Khrushchev said something in Russian, then pantomimed dribbling a basketball. He laughed at his own joke, and the other Russians laughed along.

A photographer appeared out of nowhere. Khrushchev, who had survived a coup attempt the previous year, understood the importance of good PR and was eager to counter his image as an uncouth boor. But he had just met his match when it came to garnering publicity. Abe squeezed in beside him, and Tex Harrison and other players and staff peered over their heads as the flashbulbs began popping. Khrushchev was looking slightly off to one side, with a squinty smile, but Abe always knew where the camera was pointing and was grinning right at it.

Through an interpreter, Khrushchev asked whether the Americans were enjoying their trip, but most of the conversation was lost in the translation. Then his security guards whisked him back to the limousines, and the motorcade drove away. The whole thing was over in five minutes.

But that photo of Abe and the Trotters with the Soviet premier would be sent out by the international wire services and published all over the world. It would become the most famous, and widely distributed, photo in the team’s history. And this trip to the Soviet Union would stand as the greatest media bonanza in Abe Saperstein’s career.

For eight years, he had been trying to arrange a trip to the So
viet Union, after Bill Veeck first proposed the idea to the Russian embassy in 1952. The idea went nowhere until Abe was contacted in London by an American promoter, Morris Chalfin, who had just succeeded in booking the “Holiday on Ice” show for seventy-four days in the Lenin Sports Palace, where the American skaters drew 900,000 spectators. Chalfin suggested that Abe go straight to the stadium director, Vasily Napastnikov, instead of working through bureaucratic channels. After several three-way phone calls, with a translator in between, Abe and the Russian tentatively agreed on the terms and logistics for a tour. Then Abe waited five days, on pins and needles, to see if Soviet officials would approve.

He was in Paris when the telegram from Napastnikov arrived: “This cable will confirm our consent to Harlem Globetrotters tour Moscow July 6 to 12 inclusive for nine performances on terms agreed in earlier memorandum.” Abe was so proud that he had the cable blown up to three feet high and had photos taken of himself, wearing a Russian mink fur cap, pointing proudly to the cable.

Once Abe had the dates locked down, he set out to tell the world. And he succeeded royally. He got wall-to-wall press coverage before the Globetrotters even left for Moscow, with Drew Pearson taking the lead. Pearson called the Trotters “Diplomats in Short Pants” and suggested that the tour might portend a thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations. Abe ensured full coverage of the actual trip by inviting reporters along, including Wendell Smith, who filed daily reports for the
Chicago Herald-American.
And Abe got tremendous coverage when the Soviet tour was over, if for no other reason than he personally sent cables and letters to his network of sportswriters around the country.

Thirty-seven people made the trip, including the San Francisco Chinese, the Trotters’ opposition team (the Soviets would not allow any of their teams to play the Trotters), ten halftime entertainers, and Abe’s son, Jerry. The Soviets sent a plane to pick up the Trotters in Vienna and fly them to Moscow, where they were met by a welcoming throng of Soviet officials, reporters, and thirty-seven Russian girls with bouquets for each of the guests.

That night, 15,000 people filled the Sports Palace for the first game. Abe would later say that one of the highlights of his life was
standing at attention in the arena that night as “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played. When the game began, the Trotters got a curiously stoic reaction from the Russian crowd. No one was laughing. In sixty-eight other countries, they had never experienced dead silence. The Russians took their basketball very seriously, as evidenced by the Soviets’ dominance in international play, and the audience was expecting the Trotters to play straight basketball. They didn’t understand the show. After that first game, Abe had the announcer read a pregame statement, explaining that the Trotters were ballplayers
and
entertainers, and the crowds finally got it. From then on, the Trotters got the wild reception they had come to expect, with every game sold out and tickets being scalped outside the arenas. The fans mobbed the players for autographs, particularly Wilt Chamberlain, and the Trotters shook so many hands that they had to soak their swollen paws in hot water at night.

As elsewhere, the Trotters did their part to sell America to the world. When Radio Moscow interviewed some of the players for a broadcast to Africa, Trotter captain Clarence Wilson said, “We have nothing particularly in common with Africa, other than color. We’re Americans in every sense of the word. We don’t like the idea of you people trying to use us as propaganda pawns just because we happen to look like the people you are trying to win from the West.” On a tour of Moscow University, the Russian guides pointed out that Soviet universities were free and open to everyone, without discrimination, whereas American Negroes were still enslaved, as evidenced by the protests in Little Rock, Arkansas, over integration of schools. “Did you ever hear of a slave owning thirty suits, twenty pairs of shoes, a Cadillac, and a ranch house?” Wilt Chamberlain responded, with a smile. Most subversive of all, Abe had brought over several rock-and-roll musicians among the halftime entertainers, who held surreptitious nightly jam sessions with Russian musicians who were accompanying the tour. At the final game, the Russians cranked out their own rock version of “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

The Soviet tour was an extraordinary success, with an estimated 135,000 people watching the nine games. The last game was broadcast live by the Moscow Television Network, reaching 1.75 million homes. The Soviets hosted a gala farewell banquet, at which Vasily
Napastnikov, the director of the Lenin Sports Palace, predicted brazenly that the Soviets would dominate the world in athletics, surpassing the United States, by the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Wilt Chamberlain did his part to prevent that by besting three Russian diplomats in a vodka-chugging contest. The only diplomatic snafu on the tour was that the Soviets had paid Abe 40,000 rubles (approximately $11,500) and refused to let him exchange them for dollars. He had to either spend the rubles or deposit them in a Soviet bank. Abe spent them: he bought $9,000 worth of sable furs and $2,500 worth of Russian postage stamps, as collectibles. The Globetrotters climbed aboard their return flight from Moscow loaded down with Russian furs.

The 1959 Soviet tour and the signing of Wilt Chamberlain were two of the crowning achievements of Abe’s life. Wilt was the first true
national
high school phenomenon. When he came out of Overbrook High School in Philadelphia in 1955, he was coveted by every college in the country. He was seven-foot-one, strong, intelligent, and amazingly nimble for a big man. He could run the court, dribble, pass, and control a game to a degree never seen before. He may have been the best all-around athlete of his time, as he was also a high jumper and a decathlete. The “Dipper” was a legend on the playground courts of Philadelphia, and up and down the East Coast, as he had played summer ball in Washington, D.C., and in New York City’s Rucker League, a famous proving ground for playground hoopsters, as well as college and professional stars.

After an intense recruiting battle, he signed with the University of Kansas. Freshmen were still ineligible to play varsity ball, but in his sophomore and junior years he was a unanimous first-team All-American, averaging 29.9 points and eighteen rebounds per game, and led the Jayhawks to the 1957 NCAA championship game, where they lost to North Carolina in triple overtime.

But Lawrence, Kansas, was a long way from Philadelphia, culturally and geographically, and Wilt was homesick and bored with the college game. He was ready to move on.

At that time, NBA franchises had territorial rights to the high
school and college players in their region of the country. Eddie Gottlieb, owner of the Philadelphia Warriors, had cleverly drafted Wilt when he was still in high school, to establish his territorial claim even after Wilt went to Kansas. But the NBA prohibited college players from signing pro contracts until their college class graduated. In Wilt’s case, he couldn’t play in the NBA until 1959.

Wilt was looking for a way out. While at Kansas, he had become friends with Goose Tatum, who was then living in Kansas City and touring with his own team, the Harlem Clowns. Goose had tried to convince Wilt to play with him, and had offered a $100,000 salary, but couldn’t find backers to put up the money.

Eddie Gottlieb offered Wilt more than $25,000 to join the NBA right then, which would have made him the highest-paid player in the league, but Gottlieb couldn’t convince the NBA to grant a waiver to Wilt on its underclassman rule as a hardship case.

So Gottlieb called Abe Saperstein. Abe was a stockholder in the Warriors and had been friends with Gottlieb since the 1930s, when they both started promoting Negro League baseball. Gottlieb also booked Trotters games on the East Coast and often accompanied the Trotters on their European tours. According to Gottlieb, he explained the roadblock with Chamberlain and the NBA, and suggested that Abe try to sign Wilt to play with the Trotters for one year, after which he would come to the Warriors. It would be a beneficial deal for both of them. Abe agreed to try.

Abe had a lot riding on signing Wilt. Two years earlier, he had made an all-out run at signing Bill Russell, who had led the University of San Francisco to two straight national titles. Abe had started courting Russell when he was a sophomore, and by March of his senior year, Abe was telling the San Francisco papers that he would offer Russell $10,000 to sign with the Trotters. Then, as Abe was wont to do, the salary figure kept creeping higher in the press: first $20,000, and eventually $30,000.
*
When USF came to Chicago to play in a tournament, Abe invited Russell to come to his office for their first face-to-face meeting. According to Russell, Abe made his
sales pitch about joining the Globetrotters, but Russell was noncommittal. So Abe opened his desk drawer and pulled out a packet of pornographic pictures. “If you sign with the Globetrotters,” he said, “you can have all this and more.”

Russell was repulsed. As he described his reaction in his autobiography: “Is this what he thinks Negroes are?” Unfazed, Abe continued expounding on the “social advantages” of being a Globetrotter, then suggested that they meet later that day at Russell’s hotel, with his USF coach in attendance “to keep everything on the up and up.” But when Abe arrived (along with Harry Hannin), he talked only to USF coach Phil Woolpert, who was white, and completely ignored Russell, who was sitting on the couch being bombarded by Harry Hannin’s jokes. For Russell, a proud, outspoken man, that was the final insult. He decided that if Abe considered him too dumb to talk to, then he was too smart to play for Abe.

Abe’s disastrous courting of Russell was a metaphor for the clash between the old and the new—between the old-school sports mogul and the young, strong-willed “New Negro.” Abe probably thought he was doing the “boy” a favor, talking money to his coach, who could help Russell make the right decision. But Russell would make his own decisions, then and always. And when Abe offered only $17,000, Russell realized that he would have to play year-round to earn that much, compared with the NBA’s five-month schedule. That fall, Russell signed with the Boston Celtics and led them to eleven NBA championships.

Abe had lost the best player in the country in 1956, but now he had a second chance to sign the best player in the country in 1958. And where Russell was known primarily as a defensive specialist, Wilt Chamberlain was an offensive scoring machine and would be much more of a drawing card.