Spinning the Globe (38 page)

And without a doubt, the Harlem Globetrotters helped him achieve what may be a world record. In three separate autobiographies, the Dipper described in vivid detail his apprenticeship with the Trotters in learning to pick up women. What emerges from his stories, and those of many former players, is an indisputable truth: playing for the Harlem Globetrotters may be the world’s greatest party.

As Wilt described his initiation to the Trotters on his first day in Milan:

Today, no one would be surprised to learn that professional athletes, movie stars, hip-hop artists, rock stars, and even politicians have access to sexual favors beyond the norm for the average Joe. Money, fame, looks, and power are intoxicating stimulants that attract some
members of the opposite sex. The Harlem Globetrotters had no monopoly on this phenomenon, but they may have been in a unique position to take advantage of it.

“There’s one thing that’s undeniable,” says Mannie Jackson, the team’s current owner, who played with the Trotters in the 1960s, “the access to sexual opportunities in this kind of life is endless. It’s only limited by a person’s stupidity and their capacity. And as you would probably expect, these guys have great capacity. That’s part of what makes them [great ballplayers]—you couldn’t do it without this kind of physiology.”

According to Wilt, the Globetrotters were looking for postgame action no matter where they were, but it was harder on the U.S. tour, where they were traveling every day and playing games every night. That didn’t prevent them from going out clubbing until the wee hours when the games were over, but it was tough. On the overseas tours, however, they often stayed five or six days in one city—in Paris, Rome, Rio de Janeiro, or Manila—which provided more time to party. And overseas, there were fewer strictures on interracial sex.

Just imagine this scene: a dozen young black men in their early twenties arrive in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1954—or 2004, for that matter—all of whom are impressive physical specimens and world-class athletes, and they are paraded through the streets to the fanciest hotel in town, welcomed by the mayor, and then perform every night before thousands of adoring fans, exhibiting remarkable feats of agility and skill, and when the game is over at nine-thirty or ten, go out to the local nightclubs to relax. Is there any doubt what would happen?

“At first, it was a novelty kind of thing,” says Jackson. “You just didn’t see guys packaged like this and have access to them. And the testosterone level is so high around the guys, it attracted all kinds of people.”

The Globetrotters capitalized on what was offered. For some of the players, the sex made up for not being paid well. “My first few years, I had so much fun on the road that I couldn’t wait to get back out there,” says one former Trotter. “It took me a few years to realize that I wasn’t making any money.”

Wilt Chamberlain described how the Trotters developed their own secret language around picking up women. Before the games,
players would scan the audience, looking for attractive women, and figure out a way to “drop the bomb” during the game—which meant giving the women their phone numbers. “Did you drop the bomb on that girl yet?” they would ask. Sometimes they would incorporate “dropping the bomb” into one of their reams, finding an excuse to go up in the stands and slip their number to a woman. And the one unforgivable sin for any player was to be caught with a “mullion”—Globetrotter code for an ugly woman. Guys would hide or run around the corner to keep from being seen with a mullion. When the Trotters returned from their historic 1958 tour of the Soviet Union, Wilt Chamberlain summed up Russian women as “100 million mullions.”

In 1947, when the Trotters made their first trip to Havana, Cuba, in the heyday of the Fulgencio Batista regime, prostitutes lined the streets near El Ciboney Hotel, and the
fanciest
brothels, where each whore dressed like a different movie star, cost only two dollars. For half that, the regular whorehouses provided a shot of habanero rum and a pallet on the floor.

But once the Globetrotters became celebrities, they no longer had to pay for sex. It was free and plentiful. They would scope out pretty women during the games and arrange to meet them later, or pick up women in bars and clubs, or just meet them on the street. The Globetrotters could draw a crowd just walking down a boulevard in Rome or Madrid. Mannie Jackson believes that some of the sexual attraction was a subtle form of misplaced trust. “Over the years, the aura that built up around the Harlem Globetrotter brand meant that you could trust them,” he says. “It’s not like you’re a jazz guy or a hip-hop artist or have a reputation of being that way. The Globetrotters attracted women who wouldn’t ordinarily take a chance, because they think, ‘He’s a Globetrotter.’”

Some Trotters were notorious for concocting all sorts of elaborate seduction schemes. Duke Cumberland, for instance, would buy cheap rings at pawn shops, give one to his date, and beg her to marry him. He was such a good actor that he could cry on command, so he would get down on his knees and blubber, “Oh, baby, I’m tired of the road, I’m gonna settle down and marry you.” Other times,
Cumberland and Ducky Moore would entice women to their hotel rooms with a Brownie flash camera to compete for the title of “Globetrotter Queen,” which would begin as a cheesecake photo shoot and usually lead to more.

Women were plentiful on the road, and so were drugs. Even in the early 1950s, when the Trotters started playing in Colombia, Panama, and Mexico, marijuana was widely available. Most of the Trotters preferred beer or whiskey, but some tried reefer and even cocaine.

The frenetic pursuit of sex on the road was not limited to the players; it started at the top. “Abe didn’t drink or smoke,” says Harry Saperstein, his ninety-one-year-old brother. “His only vice was women—lots of them! He had women stashed all over the world.” Abe made no effort to hide his womanizing, and bragged about his sexual prowess. “He thought he was the greatest lover in the world,” Johnny Kline recalls. Abe had girlfriends in different cities that he would date whenever the Trotters came to town. They were gorgeous women, some of them actresses and singers. And he seemed to have a particular fondness for black women.

It was one of those troubling paradoxes about the Trotters. Abe would insist that his players not date white women, and would constantly warn them, “Stay away from those white girls!” Yet he openly dated black women. One former Globetrotter first encountered that dichotomy in France, when he got up in the middle of the night to find something to eat, and ran into Abe on the elevator. “I see this black woman standing there,” the player recalls. “She’s beautiful, about five foot ten. And she says something to Abe, and I realize they’re together. And I watch them walk out together, and he puts his hand on her, and I thought to myself, What a revelation.”

From a business perspective, some of the players could understand, and even accept, the double standard, realizing that black men dating white women would not play in Peoria or Biloxi and could blow up in Abe’s face, but they felt disrespected when Abe flaunted his black girlfriends in front of them. Once, while touring in Washington State, Abe put a well-known black piano player, Hadda Brooks, on the Globetrotter bus, and let everyone know that she was
“his woman.” Brooks traveled on the bus with the players for several days. “He was putting his business on the street,” says Frank Washington, “and rubbing our noses in it.”

During the one full season that Wilt Chamberlain played with the Globetrotters, in 1958–59, attendance soared. Wilt scored points at a phenomenal pace, and the fans were breaking down the turnstiles to see him. In his regular season debut at Chicago Stadium, he scored 25 points, then pumped in 50 at Boston Garden, and it went on like that the rest of the year. Abe knew that was what the fans were paying to see, and kept urging, “You gotta score more, Wilt.”

The more Wilt scored, however, the more insecure Meadowlark Lemon became. “If anyone else stole the limelight,” Wilt would later write, “‘Lark’ sulked and bitched and threatened to clobber the guy.” One night, there was a confrontation in the locker room where Lemon jumped Wilt, who simply lifted him up over his head until Lemon calmed down.

Abe and Eddie Gottlieb’s original plan was for Wilt to play the 1958–59 season and then come to the Philadelphia Warriors, so in March 1959, Gottlieb selected him in the first round of the NBA draft. But Wilt was having so much fun with the Trotters, and Abe was making so much money, that Abe tried to convince Wilt to stay. He offered more money, but Wilt eventually signed with the Warriors. Abe and Gottlieb’s relationship would never be the same.

Even though Wilt had gone to the NBA, he kept returning to the Trotters. After his first NBA season, he was so fed up with the “roughhouse tactics” used against him that he announced his retirement from the league. Abe immediately offered Wilt $125,000 to rejoin the Trotters. Wilt eventually returned to the Warriors, but for the next eleven years, until 1969, he joined up with the Trotters every summer to play on the European tour. They always kept his number thirteen jersey ready, because he might appear at any time.

Even when he wasn’t there, just the mention of his name was enough to inspire fear in the minds of the Trotters’ opponents. During the College All-Star tours, if the All-Stars won several games in a row, Harry Hannin would start spreading the word, “Wilt’s coming!
Wilt’s coming!” As Ray Meyer recalls, “If we beat them, then [we’d hear] ‘Wilt is coming’—and then school was out! They always used that threat. I don’t remember if he ever actually played, but we were scared to death.” In fact, the threat was real. On April 3, 1960, Wilt scored 28 points to lead the Trotters to an 88–82 victory over the All-Stars.

In 1974, near the end of his NBA career, Wilt once again announced that he was thinking about retiring from the NBA and joining the Trotters. Until his death in 1999, Wilt would say that playing with the Harlem Globetrotters was the most fun he ever had in sports.

Abe Saperstein’s signing of Wilt Chamberlain was one of the great coups of his career. Sadly, it would be his last great hurrah. Abe made a concerted effort to sign Elgin Baylor in 1958, and Oscar Robertson in 1959 and 1960, but Baylor and the “Big O” both chose the NBA. In later years, the Trotters would attempt to sign Cazzie Russell, Elvin Hayes, Lew Alcindor (aka Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), and even Bill Walton and Pete Maravich. They failed. After the splendid year of Wilt the Stilt, the Harlem Globetrotters would never sign another premier player that the NBA coveted. The league that Abe had kept afloat for so many years had passed him by. The Harlem Globetrotters would still have great ballplayers, many of them NBA caliber (and some who actually played in the league), but their talents would henceforth be secondary to the show. If players had a choice, most went to the NBA. The Trotters were strictly for show.

O
n Sunday, January 16, 1966, the Harlem Globetrotters appeared on CBS’s
Sports Spectacular,
on a live broadcast from the campus of Michigan State University in East Lansing. The show, which started at two-thirty in the afternoon, was a ninety-minute extravaganza featuring the Trotters against Red Klotz’s Washington Generals, with halftime entertainment by the Czechoslovakian Folk Dancers.
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The Globetrotters were led onto the court by Meadowlark Lemon, the reigning Clown Prince of Basketball, who had become a huge international star. Lemon was surrounded by a talented squad of ballplayers: Fred “Curly” Neal, a dribbling specialist whose bald pate and incandescent personality were already making him one of the most popular and recognized sports figures in the world; Hubert “Geese” Ausbie, Lemon’s backup and the most spontaneous showman since Goose; Hallie Bryant, a former “Mr. Basketball” from Indiana; Bobby Jo Mason, an All-American guard from Bradley University; the lovable veteran J. C. Gibson; and two of the most legendary school-yard players in New York City history, “Jumping Jackie” Jackson and Connie Hawkins.

This was a spectacular group of players, with as much pure basketball talent as the Trotters had ever had. Curly Neal could shoot
jumpers from half court with unfailing accuracy. Connie Hawkins, considered by some as the greatest one-on-one ballplayer in history, was playing his third season with the Trotters, after having been banned unfairly by the NBA for alleged involvement in gambling.
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Ausbie had averaged 28 points per game in college. And stories about Jumping Jackie Jackson’s exploits in the Rucker League would be talked about for years to come.

These were great ballplayers, but they were clearly a supporting cast in what had become, by 1966, “The Meadowlark Lemon Show.” Meadowlark was terrific in his starring role: he controlled the flow of the game, working the reams and the ref and the fans with equal aplomb. He also had improved as a ballplayer, and his quirky, over-the-shoulder hook shot, which he could hit from half court more often than not, was being imitated by young boys all over America. Goose Tatum had set the stage for Meadowlark, carrying the Trotters right up to the edge of the Information Age, and Meadowlark had reaped the rewards. He was a made-for-TV showman in the right place at the right time, and his face was now familiar to
millions
of people around the world who had never heard of, or had forgotten, Goose Tatum.

By 1966, the Trotters were a regular staple on American television. They had been on the talk show circuit, appearing once on Jack Paar and three times on the Steve Allen show, where they played basketball against a celebrity team of Allen, Peter Lawford, Julius LaRosa, and Leo Durocher. They had done variety shows, appearing on ABC’s
Hollywood Palace
with comedians Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, and singers Vic Damone and Edie Adams. They had even reached the long-hair music crowd on CBS’s
Omnibus,
hosted by Alistair Cooke, splitting time with Leonard Bernstein and a sixty-two-piece orchestra. Even their old movies were on TV;
The Harlem Globetrotters
and
Go, Man, Go
were still showing up at 1
A
.
M
. on
The Late, Late Show.

And the Trotters had practically taken up permanent residence on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
having made six different appearances, to the point that “Sweet Georgia Brown” was nearly as familiar to Sullivan’s audience as Topo Gigio’s “Hey, Eddie, you keesa me good
night!” Their most recent appearance, on Halloween 1965, was their first color TV broadcast, and the Sullivan show had just installed revolutionary Plumbicon tube cameras that brought “stunning” clarity to color broadcasts. Guest stars Liza Minnelli, Allan Sherman, and the Harlem Globetrotters had never looked so good.

But their appearances on CBS’s
Sports Spectacular
are the most important of all. In 1960, CBS contracted to broadcast one Globetrotter game per year across the country. In fact, the Harlem Globetrotters were so popular that CBS put them on the premiere broadcast of
Sports Spectacular
. Over the years, CBS would broadcast Globetrotter games from New York, Rome, Mexico City, Washington, D.C., and, in 1967, from the decks of the U.S.S.
Enterprise,
recently returned from Vietnam.
*

So this game in East Lansing, on
Sports Spectacular,
is a homecoming for the Globetrotters. Television has become their best friend. CBS is paying Abe $150,000 a year on this contract, and the network is getting its money’s worth. On this Sunday, for instance, the Trotters’ game is competing against a movie on NBC and, most intriguing, the
NBA Game of the Week
on ABC, which matches up the league’s two best teams, the Boston Celtics and Philadelphia Warriors, and the two biggest rivals, Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. At the end of the day, the Trotters will earn a whopping 16.2 Nielson rating, compared with a pathetic 3.2 rating for the NBA. The Globetrotters can no longer compete with the NBA for the best players, but they still put on a better show.

And Meadowlark Lemon is the perfect showman for TV. His rote, scripted performance is exactly what CBS wants. In fact,
Sports Spectacular
will actually use a written script, with already prepared lines for announcer Pat Summerall and special guest Pat Harrington, the Washington Generals’ “coach.” Goose Tatum would have been too “hot” for TV; he would have driven the CBS cameramen nuts
because they would have never known what he was going to do next—the very source of his humor. But they never have to worry about Meadowlark: he always knows his lines, hits his marks, and does it just in time for a commercial break.

The one person missing from this game at East Lansing is Abe Saperstein. In the past, it would have been unthinkable for him to have missed a national TV broadcast. He would have been there with bells on, being interviewed before the game, rattling off the litany of Globetrotter successes, flashing that million-dollar smile.

But Abe is dying.

He has been in declining health for the last two years, and is now on a quickening slide from which he will not recover. After forty years of nonstop travel, of working harder than anybody in sports, his body is giving out. He is officially the Most Traveled Person in the world, having been recognized as such by the commercial airlines; he has flown over 5 million miles and visited eighty-nine countries. Recently, he said he has only two remaining goals in life: to make it to 100 countries and be around for the Trotters’ fiftieth anniversary.

He has ten years to go. The 1965–66 season was officially declared the fortieth anniversary of the Trotters,
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a milestone that was promoted with great fanfare. From the outside, watching them on
Sports Spectacular
or reading the press releases churned out by publicist Bill Margolis, it would appear that the Globetrotters are more successful than ever before. There is no question that more people have seen them play, counting their enormous TV audiences. And there have been many highlights in the past few years.

Just since 1958–59, the Year of the Big Dipper, the Trotters have had audiences with two popes (John XXII and Paul VI); have accompanied Drew Pearson on Christmas tours to U.S. military outposts in Alaska and North Africa; have made their first visits to India, Pakistan, Tasmania, and continental Africa; and have pushed farther behind the Iron Curtain, to Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia,
Czechoslovakia, and Poland. In 1963, the “international unit” of the Trotters made a circumvention of the world, playing the entire season overseas. In 1964, the Globetrotters were the first sports organization invited to play at the New York World’s Fair. And playing almost exclusively against stooge teams like the Washington Generals and Hawaiian Surfriders, the Trotters haven’t lost a game since 1962.

But even reading the Trotters’ own flack, there is a sense that for the last few years they’ve been repeating themselves. They keep adding new countries and planning new tours, but there’s a hint of weariness to it all, as if they realize they can’t keep topping themselves. They’ve done it all so many times, it’s a variation on the same familiar theme. How many times can they play Wembley Stadium before they lose their edge? How many times can Aretha Franklin sing “Respect” before it gets a little stale?

So much of the Trotters’ expansion has been fueled by Abe himself, by the white-hot fire burning within him, and there has been a noticeable slackening as that light has dimmed.

Abe has always been extremely healthy, the kind of guy who was too busy to get sick. But in 1959, he had his first serious medical problems, when he underwent routine surgery and nearly died from complications. As Marie Linehan described it, “[Abe] was very, very sick. He had a mighty close call—too close for comfort.” After seventeen days in Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago, he hopped back on a plane to London as soon as the doctors released him, but it was enough to scare him. “It was nip and tuck,” he admitted to Ermer Robinson.

His doctors told him that he needed to slow down, but he wouldn’t, or couldn’t. “Everybody was telling him he had to slow down,” says his sister Fay, “but that didn’t mean anything to him.” He kept barreling ahead, working as hard as ever, and developed a serious heart condition. His cardiologist prescribed daily medication, but Abe would forget to take his pills. “I’d go by his office and see the pills on his desk,” says Wyonella Smith, one of his secretaries. “I’d say, ‘Abe, did you take your medication?’ And he’d say, ‘I’ll take it, I’ll take it,’ but I’d go back at four-thirty and the pills were still there.” If she
reminded him again, he’d take all the pills at once. “He’d just throw them down, and say, ‘Aw, it doesn’t matter.’”

By 1963, he looked like a sick man. In March, the British amateur basketball association honored him by mounting a plaque at his birthplace in London’s East End, on Flower and Dean Streets. Abe was ill and unable to attend the unveiling, but when he flew over later, they took a picture of him standing under the plaque. He looked terrible. His face was ashen, his cheeks hollow. And he wasn’t even making an effort to smile, which was a dead giveaway.

Even if he had been a dutiful patient and taken his pills, his lifestyle was enough to kill a healthy man. He was traveling constantly, living on gourmet restaurant food and frozen airplane dinners. He kept a detailed Air Travel Log in which he recorded every flight he made, with arrival and departure times, total mileage, and comments on the weather, service, and food. His reviews of airline fare were brutal: “real ‘slum’ food not even fit for pigs,” “usual American Airlines ‘dog food’ breakfast,” “pure hogwash!”

The Travel Log is a diary of the cumulative effects of forty years on the road and how he was finally wearing down. Commenting on a short flight from Berlin to Frankfurt on Pan Am, his growing exasperation showed: “Cheesiest equipment in Europe. Eighty sardine-packed customers (most could use a bit of cologne)….[Pan Am]‘junk’ equipment. Oiy vay!” And when he left Paris after one of his final visits, he wrote poignantly: “The skies were sad—the winds were sad—and I was sad—leaving Paris!”

Abe had always been a prodigious letter-writer, producing a voluminous amount of correspondence to promoters, business associates, and old friends, but in these last years his letters had become more reflective, as if he were taking stock of his life.
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He wrote lyrical descriptions of Paris, Athens, and London—and then, predictably, would send the identical letter to a half dozen people. He wouldn’t follow his doctors’ orders to slow down—he couldn’t seem to
manage that—but he was taking time to reflect. From Budapest, after a visit to Auschwitz, he wrote:

His deteriorating health was compounded by a series of bad business decisions. No promoter is successful with every venture, and over the years Abe had had his share of flops. His attempt to start a Negro Baseball League on the West Coast in the late 1940s never really got off the ground; and in 1955, his love affair with vaudeville prompted him to stage
The Harlem Globetrotters Varieties of 1955
, a ten-act variety show starring Earl “Fatha” Hines and “the luscious Hadda Brooks,” which cost him $15,000 a week and folded quickly.

Beginning in the early 1960s, however, Abe seemed to have lost his Midas touch, and made a series of much costlier mistakes. The biggest was the American Basketball League (ABL). Abe had been yearning to own an NBA franchise since 1950, when he had contracted to buy the Chicago Stags (but the deal fell through). Around 1959, the NBA reportedly promised him a franchise in Los Angeles
when the league expanded, as repayment for all the years he’d kept the NBA afloat with doubleheaders. Instead, the NBA allowed the Minneapolis Lakers to relocate to Los Angeles. Then Abe was supposedly offered a San Francisco franchise, but the NBA demanded a $250,000 franchise fee. Abe blew up, feeling that the fee was unjust, given his contributions to the league. Compounding this, he and Eddie Gottlieb had fallen out over Wilt Chamberlain, and Abe got so mad that he sold his stock in Gottlieb’s Philadelphia Warriors and began testing the waters for a new league. It took him a year, but he pulled it off.
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He called the ABL a league for “the little guy,” and proposed innovations such as the three-point shot, a redesigned foul lane, a thirty-second shot clock, and a bonus rule after five team fouls. He was the obvious choice for league commissioner and ran the ABL out of the Globetrotters’ office, with Marie and her front office staff doubling up on their work.