Spinning the Globe (41 page)

As they traveled around the country, Goose made a point of sharing his favorite things with his son. One of his great joys was soul food, and Goose would take Reece to the best soul food restaurants in every town. He also loved watermelons and would stop if they passed a U-pick melon field. “We’d load up the whole back of the Caddy with melons,” Reece says. “And we’d sit in a park and eat melons—he loved that.” The boy became an expert at sighting another of Goose’s favorites: Stuckey’s restaurants. “We’d buy those Stuckey’s log rolls and munch on those,” says Reece. “I was an expert at spotting the Stuckey’s and the color TVs.” When they stopped for gas, Goose would buy grape sodas for Reece and himself, and show the boy how to pour a pack of salted peanuts in the soda and chug it down, the way he did when he was a kid. In Florida, Goose took his son to see an alligator farm. And if they passed some little funky museum along the highway, Goose would stop there as well.

In the off-seasons, they sometimes rented an apartment in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Mexico, and would just hang out for a month or two. In San Francisco, Goose would take Reece on walks to a nearby park, where Goose would play basketball with local guys to keep in shape. Or he’d take the boy out and play baseball, and even bought him a baseball uniform and glove. In Mexico, they went for boat rides on a canal. Mostly, however, they just hung out together, sitting around their apartment, watching TV. Sometimes, Goose would get out the hot plate he always carried and fry some “gourmet” bologna sandwiches on white bread. “Those times had nothing to do with him being
Goose Tatum
,” Reece recalls. “He was probably tired of all the traveling, and was thinking, ‘Can’t we just sit here for a while?’”

But there were times when being Goose Tatum was cool, however, because of the celebrity status it afforded. Once, at a Ray Charles concert, Charles stopped his performance to introduce
Goose, who stood up in the spotlights and took a bow. Another time, Goose took Reece to a Sonny Liston fight, when he was still the heavyweight champ, and took his son to Liston’s dressing room to introduce him. Another time, Goose took Reece to an airport and put him on a plane, and his “babysitter” on the flight was singer Della Reese.

The happiness in Goose’s personal life affected him on the basketball court. Goose was able to reach back and tap into a reservoir of creativity that had survived the wasted years. He was now pushing forty-five, but the old man seemed to catch a second wind, and he was his old self again on the court. In fact, he may have been better. At that time, there was a glut of black show teams that were spin-offs of the Globetrotters, including Marques Haynes’s Harlem Magicians, Goose’s Roadkings, the Harlem Satellites, Runt Pullins’s Harlem (né Broadway) Clowns, and Boid Buie’s Harlem Stars. They were all playing the same circuit, following right on each other’s heels, sometimes just a few days apart. Fans were seeing the same basic show over and over, and were getting bored. “Some nights Goose would say, ‘This is not working,’” Bill Powell recalls. “He’d make some switches or adjustments—tell you to do something different than the normal routine. Or he’d start working the crowd and getting people involved.”

For the first time in years, the master showman was creating new reams. All the other show teams, including the Trotters, were stealing
his
routines—the gags and trick balls and pantomimes that he had invented twenty years earlier—but instead of sulking about it, or suing somebody, Goose went out and invented new stuff. At a point in his career when he should have been sitting back and resting on his laurels, he was developing brand-new material. “Even while we were traveling on the bus, he would think of new routines he wanted to try,” says Powell. “He’d work on it for maybe two or three weeks, just practicing with the ball, thinking about it and visualizing it. And when you saw it on the floor, it’d blow you away.”

Some of his comedy was on the cutting edge, particularly for the early sixties. In one of his routines, he’d run up into the stands and “accidentally” trip and fall onto the lap of a pretty white woman. When he stood up, he’d be holding a pair of women’s panties, which he would lift up triumphantly and yell, “Where’d these come from?”
(The panties had actually been hidden in his shorts.) He’d run back to center court, stretch out the panties for all to see, and run around showing them off. “The crowd went insane,” Reece remembers. “As a kid, I just thought it was funny, but later I realized that he was really pushing the envelope.”

Goose’s straight game was also undergoing an amazing revitalization. The Globetrotters were playing stooge teams every night, but Goose couldn’t afford to bring his own opposition team every night, so he was often playing against
real
opponents—guys who wanted nothing more than to defeat the legendary Goose Tatum. After the ABL fell apart in 1962, there was an abundance of quality ballplayers, former pros who were looking for a game. Goose would show up, not knowing what kind of team he would face, but it wasn’t the Washington Generals. He had to really
play
.

After twenty years, Goose had come full circle. It was like the days before the stooge teams, when the Trotters were “playing for their beans” every night. He had to work to get a lead, so he could put on the show against teams that weren’t cooperating. It was the real thing. “He would be putting on the show and these guys don’t know they’re supposed to go along with the program,” says Powell. “That’s when you would really see what he could do—he’d hide the ball, put it behind them—and it was for real.”

By 1964, the year the Trotters had their “worst season ever,” the Roadkings were doing better than ever. Goose and Naomi were running the tour together—handling the programs, the transportation, the hotels. Goose hadn’t been drinking for three years, and had his old demons under control. He and Marques Haynes, who had maintained a solid relationship through the years, would show up at each other’s games when they played the bigger cities, and it was like the old days all over again. With his own team, Goose was still pulling off the father-son act with Tiny Brown, the fake Goose Tatum Jr. In fact, there were
two
fake Goose Tatum Jrs. Goose’s nephew, Bill Powell, had also played the role and had his picture published in the paper, standing alongside Goose.

That summer, the
real
Goose Tatum Jr came out on the road for a visit. Sonny, as he was called, was fifteen years old and a rising junior in high school. He and Goose barely knew each other, as Goose
had seldom been around when he was growing up. “We were not the Beaver Cleaver family,” says Marjorie Tatum Byrd. Goose might come to Gary only two or three times a year, yet Sonny worshiped his dad. What he wanted most in life was to play ball with his father—to
be
Goose Tatum Jr. “My brother heard there was a fake Junior and he wanted to be there with his father to earn his place,” Byrd adds.

The kid had talent, and Bill Powell, his first cousin, took him under his wing. “He was going to be a good ballplayer,” Powell says. But during his visit, Sonny and Goose had a falling-out—Goose snapped at him, most likely—and Sonny came to Powell in tears. “I want to go home,” he cried. “My daddy doesn’t like me.” Powell convinced him to go talk to Goose, to try and work things out. When the boy returned, Powell asked how it went. “We both started crying,” Sonny replied. Goose had taken a look at his own behavior and had reached out to his son. “That was the best thing that could have happened between them,” says Bill Powell. When Sonny went back home to Gary, Goose promised him that the next summer he could actually play with the team.

Life was good.

And then a fluke accident set the wheels spinning in motion toward catastrophe. In January 1965, playing in Houston before a full house of 8,000 people, Goose landed awkwardly on his right leg and it snapped. He went down on the floor, writhing in pain. The crowd, thinking it was one of Goose’s routines, started laughing. His team gathered around him, but the crowd had seen this before, too, and laughed harder. They were waiting to see the old sneaker-under-the-nose trick, and watch Goose leap up in the air. Over the public-address system, the game announcer asked, “Is there a doctor in the house?” As Reece III recalls, “People were in hysterics, thinking it was part of the act.” It wasn’t until they carted him off on a stretcher, and then to the hospital in an ambulance, that the crowd realized he was hurt. X-rays showed a fracture of the right leg. Goose told the papers he would be out of the hospital in three or four days.

Then came the bad news. Doctors discovered that he was suffering from a chronic bone infection. Worse, he had liver disease—almost certainly the result of his years of hard drinking. The broken
leg healed fairly quickly and Goose went back on the road, but the bone infection wouldn’t go away. “We went to doctors all over the country,” says Reece Tatum. “That leg was a nightmare.”

About this time, Goose and Naomi bought a three-bedroom stucco house in El Paso, Texas, and moved there. Goose started seeing a bone specialist in El Paso, a Dr. Garcia, who was treating the infection. The Tatums spent so much time in Garcia’s waiting room that young Reece named a little hand puppet Dr. Garcia. When the Roadkings went back on tour, Goose was still laid up with his leg. But it hurt business to not have the headliner perform, so he had to go out periodically and play, particularly in major cities. Eventually, Garcia performed surgery on the leg and was able to clear up the infection, but it was months before Goose was recovered.

In the summer of 1965, Sonny Tatum—the
real
Goose Tatum Jr.—came back to play with his father. With Goose’s help, Sonny had convinced Nona to let him skip his senior year of high school to play with the team. “She didn’t want to let him go at first, but they promised her that he would finish high school,” says Marjorie Tatum Byrd.

All that summer and fall, Goose, Naomi, Sonny, and Reece were living in the stucco house in El Paso, on Puerto Rico Street. They shared a running joke about having three Reeces in the same house, and when Naomi called for Reece, any one of them might answer. But it was a glorious few months. For the first time, they were like a regular family in a regular house. Young Reece, who was eight, suddenly had a brother. Sonny, who was sixteen, found a girlfriend in El Paso, who would come to visit. Goose brought home two dogs, which he named Kenyatta and Castro, and kept them in the backyard. For that brief time, they
were
the Beaver Cleaver family.

But when basketball season began, they went back on the road. Goose started working Sonny into the games, teaching him the routines. Some nights he would play on the Roadkings, and other nights he would play on the opposition team. He wasn’t good enough yet to be the dribbler, so Tiny Brown was still playing the part of Goose Tatum Jr. But Sonny had designs on the job, which was his birthright.

Then, on April 2, 1966, two weeks after Abe Saperstein’s death, the Harlem Roadkings were scheduled to play a night game in
Mt. Pleasant, Texas. Goose, Naomi, and Reece had gone on ahead in the Cadillac. Sonny was coming later, riding in a car with several players from the opposition team. They drove through Texarkana, Texas, sixty miles from their destination. Two miles west of town, Sonny’s car collided head-on with a chicken truck. He was killed, along with two passengers in the other vehicle.

Goose and the Roadkings had already arrived in Mt. Pleasant. There was a full house in the local gym. The Roadkings came out on the court and went through their normal pregame warm-ups, but the opposition team still hadn’t arrived. The crowd was getting antsy. Game time came and went, but the other team still hadn’t shown. Goose was stalling for time. Naomi had already collected the money and certainly didn’t want to have to give it back. Young Reece was sitting at courtside and realized that something was wrong. Where is the other team? he wondered. Finally, an announcement was made that the game was canceled, but nobody ever said why.

Goose and Naomi couldn’t bring themselves to tell young Reece. A few days later, they were in the Cadillac, cruising down the highway. From his usual seat in back, Reece called out to his father, “Dad, I wish my brother didn’t give me noogies on my head.” It was a typical sibling complaint that any young kid might make—why is my brother picking on me? Goose turned around and looked at him and said, “Your brother is dead.” Huge teardrops were pouring out of his eyes and rolling down his cheeks. Goose got out of the car and walked away. “That was something that is etched in my soul,” Reece says today. “My father’s reaction was so overwhelming; he had nothing but red eyes and baseball-sized tears falling out of his eyes.”

Goose could not forgive himself. After reconciling with his older son and having the chance to be the father he had never been, he had let the boy come out on the road, against his mother’s wishes, and get himself killed. Goose made all the arrangements for the funeral and had Sonny’s body shipped back to Gary, with instructions not to have an open casket, as there had been extensive facial damage. But he couldn’t bring himself to face Nona, so he didn’t return for the funeral. Nona took it hard that Goose didn’t come. Over time, however, she would come to terms with her son’s death, saying,
“At least Sonny had that time with his father. That’s all he ever wanted.”

Goose started drinking again. Those suffering from liver disease have a good chance of recovery, even if they’d been heavy drinkers, if the disease is caught early and they never drink again. However, the American Medical Association warns, “Your liver will remain particularly sensitive to alcohol, so any future drinking should be considered virtually suicidal.”

Goose didn’t seem to care. “I remember watching my father fall apart after my brother died,” says Reece. “It destroyed him. That was it!” The word filtered back to his family in El Dorado that Goose was “drinking himself to death.” When Nona heard, she told her daughter, “It’s more than he can handle.”

Two months after Sonny’s death, Goose’s liver started shutting down. He was admitted to Providence Hospital in El Paso, the first of many stays. Chronic liver disease is a degrading way to die. Fluid retention causes grotesque swelling of the ankles and stomach. There is memory loss, weakness, confusion, nausea, and vomiting. Men lose their sexual urge and their breasts sometimes enlarge. In its final stages, there can be internal bleeding or hemorrhage. Doctors can reduce the swelling with diuretics, but they cannot reverse the course of the disease. At one point, Goose spent four straight months in the hospital, and had to cancel a South American tour. When he was home, the house on Puerto Rico Street looked like a hospital ward. “There was an entire tabletop filled with pills,” says Reece. “There were so many pills—an arsenal of drugs. That period in El Paso was the end time.”