Spinning the Globe (40 page)

Ten months and three days after Abe Saperstein’s passing, Goose Tatum died in El Paso, Texas, and the two men were reunited again in history.

Goose had been on a roller-coaster ride for years. After leaving the Trotters in 1955, he had joined up with Marques Haynes as a co-owner of the Harlem Magicians, and they barnstormed together for the next two seasons, doing very well financially. On the court, Goose was as good as ever. He scored 44 points one night in Philadelphia, and 62 in Washington, D.C. With Goose and Marques working together, other great ballplayers rallied to join them. Chuck Cooper, who had spent seven years in the NBA, signed on, as did Globetrotter veteran Josh Grider, who told reporters that he was “better satisfied, making a better salary, and less weary than I would be if I were playing with the other team.”

Alarmed by the Magicians’ success, Abe began pressuring local promoters to block the Magicians from playing big arenas, and was able to keep them out of Madison Square Garden, Chicago Stadium, and Detroit’s Olympia. But Abe’s old nemesis, Boston Celtics owner Walter Brown, let them play in Boston Garden, and in January 1957, the Magicians set a new Garden attendance record with 13,800 people. Marques couldn’t resist taking a little shot at Abe, saying, “We
honestly believe we have the finest aggregation of professional basketball players since the heyday of the New York Renaissance Club.”

The next season, however, Goose decided to strike out on his own, forming the Harlem Stars in October 1957. It was one thing to be the headliner on the court, but it was altogether different to be the team owner and run the tour, and Goose’s temperament wasn’t really suited to it. After just one month, players were already jumping ship. Jim Tucker, a former All-American from Duquesne, packed his bags and left, as did Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs’ popular shortstop, who was reportedly earning $100 a night as the team’s announcer. In December, Goose had to cut back on expenses by dropping his regular opposition team, Bill Spivey’s New York Olympians (Spivey would later sue Goose for back pay). Goose tried to arrange to play local teams in each city, but it didn’t always work out. “Sometimes we’d show up for a game and there’d be nobody to play,” recalls Elzie Lewis, who spent that season with Goose.

Over the next few years, he formed one new team after another. In July 1958, he organized “Goose Tatum and His Harlem Trotters,” after Bunny Leavitt (the former world champion free-throw shooter) and an outfit called Western Productions reportedly offered Goose a $150,000 guaranteed contract, with incentives that could bring his income to $200,000 a year. This was the same year that Abe signed Wilt Chamberlain for $65,000, and Goose openly scoffed at that puny amount.

In September 1958, Leavitt announced a thirty-nation tour, covering Europe, South America, India, Australia, and New Zealand. But Abe immediately filed a lawsuit, claiming that Leavitt and Western Productions were pirating the Globetrotters’ trademarked name and slogans. Abe also launched a full-scale publicity campaign in the international press to ensure that fans did not mistake Goose’s team for the real Trotters. By the time Goose limped into Australia, he was drawing as few as 300 people for some games.

The next year, he went back to calling his team the Harlem Stars, but a report made the papers that his “off-court tantrums” had cost him a few players. “One day he’d be the best guy in the world, the next day he wouldn’t want you to come near him,” says Elzie Lewis. “Any little thing would set him off. If he thought a waitress was
giving you more attention than him, or if we were in a nightclub and you’d be talking to a young lady, he’d come up and say, ‘Rookie, it’s your bedtime, go home.’ He always wanted the young ladies, but he didn’t want you to have them.”

Goose’s biggest problem was that he had started drinking. He had been a teetotaler during his years with the Trotters and an infrequent club hound, but now he started hanging out regularly in bars. There were rumors that he was even popping pills. He bought a pink Cadillac and grew a goatee, and when he stepped out of that car, dressed in his black beret and black jacket, he was the coolest dude around. But the combination of alcohol with his already fragile metabolism sometimes led to explosive results—particularly with women.

Goose and his wife, Nona, had always had an unusual marriage, in that he was seldom home, but now he started running around openly with other women. That was too much for Nona. Once, in Chicago, they staged a Keystone Kops–like chase scene in which Nona was running after Goose, shooting at him with a pistol, while two Chicago cops were chasing her. One of Nona’s shots clipped Goose’s right ear, after which, according to Marques Haynes, an eyewitness, “Goose went into second gear.”

Nona divorced him shortly after he quit the Globetrotters in 1955. “I think they had a genuine love for each other,” says Marjorie Tatum Byrd, his stepdaughter. “But they just couldn’t be together, because there were other women involved.” Even years later, when Goose had remarried, he and his new wife would come stay at Nona’s house. “Other people thought that was strange, but my mother didn’t mind,” Byrd adds. “I think she was one of the few people who really understood him.”

Unhinged from Nona, his only thread of normalcy, Goose began to spiral out of control. There followed more drinking and more women, in rapid succession. He moved to Kansas City and married a woman named Delores, but the marriage lasted less than two years. Around Christmas 1956, he and Marques Haynes and their Harlem Magicians played a game at the University of Detroit, then went back to the Gotham Hotel, a classy black hotel. An attractive white woman, Naomi Hirsh, showed up at the hotel that night. She was
from New York, the daughter of Hungarian Jews, and was an art student and a bohemian. From then on, she and Goose started seeing each other.

That was the final straw for Delores, who filed for divorce in January 1957, alleging that Goose was “quarrelsome, drank too much, and associated with other women.” A Kansas City judge ordered Goose to pay $2,000 a month temporary alimony until the divorce was final.

By March, Naomi Hirsh was pregnant. She went back east to New Hampshire, where she delivered a baby boy in December 1957; she named him Reece Tatum III.

By then, Goose had started dating Lotti Graves, a stunning exotic dancer from Detroit who was known as “Lotti the Body.” Considered to be Detroit’s answer to Gypsy Rose Lee, she was also billed as “The Chocolate Bombshell.” Goose took her back home with him to El Dorado to meet his family, and took her on overseas jaunts to Cuba, Australia, and Japan. Lotti the Body let everyone know that he was her personal manager—and her man.

Over the next three years, there were two confusing, quasi-legal marriages. Lotti the Body claimed that she and Goose had gotten married in Mexico in 1958, but then, in 1960, he allegedly married Naomi Hirsh, also in Mexico, when his son, Reece III, was two years old.

If women were complicating his life, that was nothing compared with the affair he had with the Internal Revenue Service. In January 1961, just hours before he was to take the court in Dallas, two U.S. marshals served him with indictments on two counts of federal tax evasion. A grand jury had charged him with failing to file income tax returns in 1956 and 1957 on gross income of $58,869 and $40,924, respectively. The IRS said Goose owed $118,000 in back taxes and penalties. He was arrested and taken before a U.S. commissioner in the Dallas federal courthouse. Dressed all in black, Goose wept softly when he was brought before the judge. Required to post a $5,000 bond, Goose opened a black leather satchel stuffed with bills, and deputies counted out $5,000 on the table. “Basketball, I knows, and knows well,” Goose told a reporter. “Money, I don’t.” His eyes were bloodshot and a reporter described him as “mystified” by the pro
ceedings. He claimed that a Kansas City attorney handled all his bookkeeping. “I can’t figure it out,” he said, brushing away tears. “You know, I don’t worry about money. If I did, maybe I wouldn’t be here now. All I’ve ever wanted in the world is to have the best basketball team, better than the Globetrotters. That’s what I’m after and I think I’ve got that team now.”

Ironically, the indictment was good for business, as an overflow crowd of 9,500 showed up that night in Dallas and cheered Goose wildly. That was the thing—he could still put on a show. He was forty-three years old, with flecks of gray in his hair and beard, and sportswriters were referring to him as “ageless” and comparing him with Satchel Paige (who was actually touring with him, providing halftime entertainment). Yet he could still bring it on the court. And good players still wanted to play with him. Sweetwater Clifton, for instance, now retired from the NBA, was touring with him.

But there was an element of unreality about the whole thing. In 1961, he started advertising that his twenty-two-year-old son, “Goose Tatum Jr.,” was playing with him, and they’d stage “father-son” publicity shots with Papa Goose giving pointers to Junior. But the real Goose Tatum Jr. (called Sonny) was only eleven years old and living with Nona in Indiana, and the guy in the photos was a fake. His real name was “Tiny” Brown, and he was a dribbling specialist from Detroit. Still, they’d play it up big during the games, with Goose Sr. working the pivot and “Goose Jr.”—the “gosling,” some reporters called him—dribbling the ball.

Other strange things started happening. Two months after his tax indictment, he got arrested in Henderson, Kentucky, for punching a referee. Goose’s team was losing to some ex–college boys in the third quarter, and Goose got in an argument with the ref and hit him, knocking him to the floor. He posted a $1,000 bond and apologized, saying, “You get in the heat of things and you lose your head.”

A few weeks later, Lotti the Body “put their business on the street.” In a lengthy interview with the
Pittsburgh Courier
’s theater critic, of all people, complete with revealing photos of her on the stage, Lotti begged Goose to take her back. “The Goose Still Loves Me” the headline crooned. His love life had become a national soap
opera. The article read like a kiss-and-tell armchair psychoanalysis of Goose, but it did disclose some disturbing insights about his state of mind. Mutual friends described him as a “troubled man, filled with suspicion of almost everyone; a tortured athletic genius who, in the twilight of a fabulous career, feels that almost every man’s hand is turned against him.” Furthermore, his friends said he was “dissipating large sums of money and maybe his health in a calculated drive of self-destruction” and needed Lotti as a “shelter in his own personal storm.”

In May, he pleaded nolo contendere to the tax evasion charges, which the judge described as a “gentlemanly way of pleading guilty.” Prosecutors revealed that he hadn’t filed tax returns at all in 1956 or 1957, and had filed returns but not paid any taxes in 1958 and 1959. “It looks like this man’s skill may be primarily confined to his hands and feet,” the judge said. “He may need a manager or a guardian or maybe both.” A month later, the judge sentenced him to ninety days in jail and three years’ probation. “Goose, you’re a fine basketball player,” the judge remarked, “but I can’t say much else for you.”

He went to prison, where he tried to stay in shape by practicing his hook shot in his cell, using an old loaf of bread for a ball. After serving fifty days, he was released early when Texas oilman Cal Boykin offered to underwrite a new tour for Goose’s team. Eventually, Goose settled with the IRS by agreeing to pay $15,000—which was less than ten cents on the dollar for the $152,611 in back taxes, penalties, and interest that he owed. Plus, the feds would take 30 percent of his earnings for the next ten years, if he made more than $5,000. One reason the IRS agreed to the settlement was that Goose was broke, and they’d rather get something than nothing at all. He had no bank account, only $100 in cash, and was $169,000 in debt. An accountant began traveling with the team, balancing the books after every game and making sure the IRS got its 30 percent of the gate.

In the midst of all this financial misery, with his world crumbling around him, how did Goose deal with it? He celebrated his release from prison by buying himself a new $7,500 Cadillac. The man needed his ride.

But going to prison seemed to have been a wake-up call for him. He now had a young son who was depending on him. Reece III and Naomi were going out on the road with him, traveling in the Caddy while the other players rode in the team bus. “I grew up in the backseat of my dad’s Cadillac,” says Reece, who is now forty-seven. “That was my home.” The boy followed Goose around so much that Goose nicknamed him Bird-Dog, which was later shortened to Bird.

In April 1962,
Ebony
magazine did a five-page photo spread about Goose, entitled “A Trio of Goose Tatums,” which featured pictures of Goose with four-year-old Reece and the fake Goose Jr. (Tiny Brown). “I’ve settled down now,” Goose said. “I have my sons with me now. I’ve got to set the right example.”

And he did, at least for a while. Goose pulled himself together and stopped drinking. He changed the name of his team to the Harlem Roadkings, which symbolized a fresh start. Naomi started functioning as the road manager, so that Goose could concentrate on the team. She counted the house, collected the gate receipts, and carried the money box. “My dad played ball and my mom was in the money room,” says Reece. “That’s where she lived.”

By 1963, Goose’s life was turning around. He was drawing big crowds, his team was traveling in a converted Greyhound bus, and they were making enough money that
all
his players were buying Caddys. “We were playing some big houses in Detroit, Milwaukee, and all around California,” recalls Bill Powell, Goose’s nephew from El Dorado, who spent three years playing with the team.

The money was rolling in again. “When we were traveling, we’d stop at banks a couple of times a week,” says Reece. “My dad was always opening up new savings accounts. We’d stop at a bank, Dad would deposit a bunch of cash, and we’d drive on to the next city.”

For the first time in his life, Goose was really functioning as a father. In the past, he might have seen his older son, Sonny, only a couple of times a year, but Reece was with him every day. “My dad was really trying—for me,” Reece says. “I showed up during the glory years, and it was an awesome life for a young kid.” Whenever they stopped at a hotel, Goose and Naomi would rent one room for themselves and give Reece his own room. By the time he was four, he had learned to read two words: “color TV.” As soon as they got to
the outskirts of their destination city, Reece would start scanning the billboards, searching for a hotel with color TV. When they checked in, he would ask the desk clerk, “Does this hotel have room service?” “I was so spoiled,” he says, laughing. “I had my own room, my own color TV, and was ordering pork chops from room service. I thought that was normal—the way every kid lived.”