Spinning the Globe (42 page)

Goose’s hospital bills were draining his cash, and Nona tried to keep the Roadkings going without him. In January 1967, a Dallas promoter decided to help out by holding “Goose Tatum Day” at the Roadkings’ regularly scheduled game on January 19. He invited all former Globetrotters and others who had played with Goose to come back and honor him. Marques Haynes said he would leave his own team in California and go to Dallas to play in Goose’s place. Goose had been readmitted to Providence Hospital on January 4, and his doctors told him he shouldn’t even think about playing basketball
again for at least six months. But from his hospital bed, Goose vowed that he would not only come to Dallas, but play. “They are expecting me to be there and I’ll be there,” he said. “I think I’ll even be able to play some. I want to hear them laugh.”

Against doctor’s orders, he booked a flight from El Paso to Dallas, then left the hospital and went home to get ready for the big show. On Wednesday, January 18, about nine
A
.
M
., he was taking a bath, and felt weak as he climbed out of the tub. He called for Naomi, then struggled to the bed and collapsed. Naomi called for help, and the El Paso fire department responded. Firefighters gave him external heart massage on the way to the emergency room, but he died at 10:17
A
.
M
. An autopsy concluded that he had died of natural causes.

Nine-year-old Reece was at school. “I don’t remember saying good-bye to my dad that morning before I left,” he says, ruefully. “I always wished I had.” During the day, one of his classmates told him, “There was an ambulance in front of your house and they took your dad somewhere.” Reece was worried, so he went home. When he walked in the door, Naomi was sitting on a chair, with a neighbor beside her. “Reece, I need to talk to you,” she said. She took him in a back room and said, “Your father died today.”

“I didn’t know what to do with that,” Reece says. “I didn’t know how to even put it in my head.” It had just been a few months since his brother died, and now his father had passed, too. “I must have been in shock, because I did the exact same thing I did every day when I got home from school: I walked in and turned on cartoons on TV. I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t cry for my father that year, or the next year. I couldn’t get it in, I couldn’t comprehend. But years later, it came out!”

Goose had always refused to reveal his true age, but the El Paso hospital announced definitively that he was forty-five years old, and recorded his date of birth as May 3, 1921. Sportswriters around the country would note wistfully that at least one mystery had been solved. But Goose was actually forty-eight, and was still fooling them from the grave.

Naomi Tatum announced that Goose’s funeral would be private, following his wishes, and that he would be buried at Fort Bliss Na
tional Cemetery at ten o’clock on Friday morning, with full military honors. Dallas promoter Lon Varnell said he was going ahead with plans for Goose Tatum Day on Saturday. “We are going to make it as big a tribute to Goose as possible,” he said. “We know that’s what Goose would want.”

In El Dorado, his sister, Thelma, was devastated. She and Goose had remained extremely close over the years. Their mother, Mary, had died a few years earlier, but Goose had always been a dutiful son, checking on her constantly and paying for an addition on Thelma’s house so that Mary could live there. Goose had often returned to El Dorado to visit, and sometimes he brought his team and played a game. He was El Dorado’s most famous favorite son. Whenever he came to town, he’d bring the whole team over to Thelma’s house for one of her fried chicken dinners, with dumplings and greens and apple cobbler for dessert. Neighborhood kids would gather on the front porch, and Goose would come out and show them a few tricks and talk to them about staying in school and obeying their parents.

When Thelma heard that he was gone, she broke the news to her daughter, Shirley, before she went to school that morning. Thelma and Booker Tatum, Goose’s older brother, both intended to be at the funeral, but then they looked at a map. It was over 900 miles from El Dorado to El Paso, a two-day drive, and there was no way to make it by Friday morning. Thelma didn’t understand why Naomi wanted to bury him so quickly. “My mom was very hurt by that,” says her daughter, Shirley McDaniel. “She didn’t get a chance to be there.”
*

Marques Haynes heard the news of Goose’s death on his car radio. He was driving with Josh Grider from Las Vegas to Los Angeles for an upcoming game when an announcement came on the radio that two famous sports figures had died: prizefighter Barney Ross and Goose Tatum. The next morning, Marques and Grider flew
from Los Angeles to Oklahoma, picked up Marques’s first wife, then caught an afternoon flight to El Paso for the funeral. They arrived Thursday evening, rented a car, and checked into a hotel.

Knowing that the funeral was scheduled for ten
A
.
M
. Friday, they arrived at the Fort Bliss Cemetery early, in plenty of time. There were no signs of a funeral. Finally, they found some gravediggers who told them that Goose had been buried an hour earlier, with no ceremony.

“Did they say a prayer or read scripture?” Marques asked.

“They didn’t do nothing,” one gravedigger replied. He told Marques that they backed the hearse up to the grave, lowered the casket into the ground, and drove away.

Earlier that month, Marques had called Goose in the hospital and they had talked about touring together again when Goose got better. The two men had played ball together all over the world for twenty years, and now Goose was dead and in the ground before Marques had even had a chance to say good-bye.

He and his wife and Josh Grider drove to a drugstore, bought a $2.98 Bible, and returned to Goose’s newly filled grave. Out of respect, the gravediggers wandered over and formed a half circle around the grave, while Marques read the Twenty-third Psalm and they all recited the Lord’s Prayer. The most celebrated African American basketball player in the world had at least had a proper burial.

Saturday night, a full house turned out for Goose Tatum Day in Dallas, honoring the memory of basketball’s greatest showman. Just a week before he died, Goose had done an interview with an El Paso reporter. When asked if he had any plans to retire, Goose had shrugged and said, “I’ll keep playing until the people stop laughing. They’re still laughing, so I’ll keep playing.”

The people were still laughing, but the Golden Goose was gone.

I
n the 1970s, America was a terribly fractured nation. The volatility and innocence of the 1960s had hardened into cynicism, polarization, and backlash. A decade of assassinations, which had created a pantheon of fallen heroes—JFK, Medgar, Malcolm, Martin, and Bobby—gave way to a decade of self-inflicted martyrdom—Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison. The country was now keenly polarized over Vietnam, busing, abortion, and equal rights for women. The initial upsurge of the civil rights movement, with its victories in Selma and Birmingham, had been blunted by the murder of Dr. King, riots in Watts and dozens of other cities, and the slow grinding battles over court-ordered desegregation. Lunch counter sit-ins and nonviolent civil disobedience had been replaced by Black Power salutes and Bobby Seale exhorting black Americans to pick up a gun. “The Summer of Love” and Woodstock had given way to Kent State and Altamont Speedway. The Supremes and the Beatles had broken up, and John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, and Jackie Robinson were dead.

Today, the sixties are sometimes romanticized in myth and legend, but the sixties didn’t arrive in much of America until the seventies. Marijuana, hashish, LSD, quaaludes, speed, and even heroin moved beyond Haight Ashbury and Harlem into suburban schools and middle-class homes. Hippie communes sprouted in East Tennessee. Women’s consciousness-raising groups were birthed in Muskogee and Montgomery.

Every day, the news brought shocking blows to American
confidence and supremacy. In just the first six months of 1971, Lt. William Calley was convicted of murder in the My Lai massacre, the Pentagon Papers were published by the
New York Times,
and the Harlem Globetrotters lost a game.

It sounds silly.

In the context of what was happening in America, it was hard to take the Globetrotters seriously. Abe Saperstein had been dead less than five years, but that seemed like another age—like an exhibit from a traveling museum. Nonetheless, the 1970s were also tumultuous for the Trotters, and three events from 1971 capture that best.

On January 5, the Globetrotters did, in fact, lose their first game in nine years, falling 100–99 to Red Klotz’s New Jersey Reds. The game, which took place in Martin, Tennessee, ended the Trotters’ 2,495-game winning streak, going back to the final College All-Star series in 1962. But rather than emphasizing the Trotters’ dominance over that period, the loss symbolized how far they had fallen. It became a joke. “One of the most discouraging aspects of a sportswriter’s professional life is to watch a mighty franchise come apart at the seams,” Bill Gleason wrote mockingly. “And now it’s happening again with the most awesome dynasty of them all, the Harlem Globetrotters…. Somewhere Goose Tatum is grinding his teeth.”

Every time the Trotters’ front office bragged about their win-loss record, people smirked. The nine-year winning streak just meant that it had been nine years since they’d played a legitimate team. Red Klotz had been providing opposition teams for the Trotters since 1950, when Abe had loaned him $1,500 to buy a used DeSoto to haul around his team, which has been known alternately, over the years, as the New York Nationals, Atlantic City Seagulls, Boston Shamrocks, New Jersey Reds, and, most famously, the Washington Generals. Klotz still insists that his team plays to win, but they’re not allowed to contest passes to the showman or interrupt the basic reams; with those restrictions, they’re bound to give up enough baskets to lose.

The Martin, Tennessee, game wasn’t so much a triumph for Klotz’s lovable losers as it was a reflection of everything that was wrong with the Globetrotters. Even knowing the script, they managed to lose. “It was a terrific ball game,” Klotz recalls. “Generally in
the last quarter the Trotters went into their show, but that night Meadowlark decided to really play. He was going to really whip us.” Klotz lets out a satisfied chuckle. “But it didn’t work out that way.”

The Reds built a 12-point lead with two minutes to play. The Trotters made a furious comeback, aided by the timekeeper, who Klotz insists was stalling the clock, and took a 99–98 lead. But Klotz, who was a legitimate ballplayer in his day (he played on the 1948 Basketball Association of America champion Baltimore Bullets) and one of the best long-range shooters in the country, connected on a two-hand set shot from twenty feet to put the Reds up by one. On the Trotters’ final possession, Meadowlark’s shot rimmed in and out, and the Reds got the rebound. Klotz dribbled out the remaining seconds, as the crowd counted down: “five-four-three-two-one.” When the buzzer sounded, the fans sat frozen, unsure of what had just happened. “They were still waiting for the show,” Klotz says. “They couldn’t believe the game was over.” Finally, when it dawned on them that the Globetrotters had lost, people started booing. Klotz rushed his players off the court and into their locker room, where they hoisted Klotz on their shoulders and poured orange soda over him, since they had no champagne. Later, Klotz would say of the win, “It was like killing Santa Claus.” The Trotters had become “The Meadowlark Lemon Show” to the point that if they really needed to play ball, it was hard to turn it on.

Four months after their loss, a second emblematic event occurred: the Trotters hosted an NBC show called “An Evening with the Harlem Globetrotters” at Hofstra University, with Joe Garagiola as the announcer. This was their first prime-time broadcast of a game and their first show on NBC. After eleven years of Sunday afternoon games on CBS’s
Sports Spectacular,
the Trotters had leveraged a two-year contract with NBC for
prime-time
specials, hoping to reach an even larger audience. If the Martin, Tennessee, loss symbolized the team’s decaying basketball skills, the NBC specials were equally indicative of their emerging
show business
talents. They had become a ubiquitous force in the television industry, blanketing all demographic segments.

On their NBC prime-time specials, aimed at adult viewers, they would host celebrity games against the likes of Bill Cosby, Soupy
Sales, Red Buttons, James Caan, Jackie Cooper, Johnny Mathis, Robert Goulet, and Jo Anne Worley. In 1973, they would jump to ABC, signing a multiyear contract to broadcast annual Globetrotter specials on
Wide World of Sports
. In fact, the Globetrotters would be on that season’s premiere episode of
Wide World,
with the game announced by ABC’s
Monday Night Football
trio of Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford, and Don Meredith. The show would be the second highest rated show in the history of
Wide World of Sports,
topped only by a Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight.

Over the next thirteen years, ABC’s Globetrotter specials would be filmed in exotic locations all over the world, including London, Hong Kong, the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, Disney World, the Grand Ole Opry, and in 1976, most unique of all, on the grounds of Attica State Prison, where Howard Cosell presented a reprise of the 1971 Attica riots. As the Trotters’TV persona expanded, the basketball games themselves became almost secondary. Feature segments were shot of the Trotters roaming the French Quarter, singing with Charley Pride, boogying with Mr. T and Ben Vereen, riding “Thunder Mountain” at Disney World, touring F.A.O. Schwartz, and schmoozing with the Rockettes and the Broadway cast of
Annie.

In between their yearly specials on
Wide World,
the Trotters would become talk show regulars, appearing on Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Joey Bishop, Mike Douglas, and Merv Griffith. They would appear on variety specials with Goldie Hawn, Burt Bacharach, and Donny and Marie Osmond. And they would play themselves in episodes of
The White Shadow, Gilligan’s Island,
and
The Love Boat.

Having saturated the adult viewing audience, market research showed that the Trotters’ strongest fan base was with children, so, in September 1970, they invaded the Saturday-morning kids’ market.
The Harlem Globetrotters,
a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, debuted on CBS, featuring six of the actual players (or animated versions of them), with their voices dubbed by Scatman Crothers, Stu Gilliam, and other actors. It was an immediate hit. Airing at 10:30
A
.
M
., opposite
The Pink Panther
and
Here Comes Doubledecker,
the show swamped its competition, typically drawing more viewers than ABC and NBC combined. It became the most watched show on Saturday mornings, was extended for two more seasons, then went into international syndi
cation.
*
The cartoons had a good-versus-evil theme, as the Globetrotters traveled around the world in their red-white-and-blue-striped bus, accompanied by their canine mascot, Gravy, and their bus driver, “Granny,” a plucky senior in a cheerleader outfit.

Already a hit in animated form, the Trotters themselves took to the air in December 1972 with their own variety show,
The Harlem Globetrotters’ Popcorn Machine,
again on CBS. The pilot was a one-hour prime-time special featuring eighteen Globetrotter players, led by Meadowlark Lemon, Curly Neal, and Geese Ausbie, singing, dancing, and performing comedy sketches with Bill Cosby, Dom DeLuise, Mama Cass Elliot, Ted Knight, and
All in the Family
stars Jean Stapleton and Sally Struthers. Again, the Trotters ruled the airwaves: the
Popcorn Machine
was the top-rated show in its time slot, outperforming
Adam 12
and
The Paul Lynde Show,
and was viewed in 13.4 million homes.

The pilot was spun off into another Saturday-morning children’s show, which premiered in September 1974 and ran until 1976. Each show had a different theme (honesty, kindness, safety, brotherhood, teamwork, discipline, etc.), and the Trotters performed comedy sketches, songs, and dances, assisted by child star Rodney Allen Rippy. A special guest star appeared every week, with such well-known performers as Ruth Buzzi, Arte Johnson, Ted Knight, Sally Struthers, Esther Rolle, and Jim Backus. Sixteen episodes were produced, with memorable sketches of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Three Musketeers,” “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” and “Snow White and the Seven (Globetrotter) Dwarfs.”

It was clean family entertainment with redeeming social values, and great marketing, but some old-time Globetrotters had to ask: “What the hell does this have to do with basketball?” And for the Globetrotter fans who still remembered the historic wins over the Lakers, it was hard to connect the dots from Inman Jackson, Goose Tatum, and Sweetwater Clifton to Geese Ausbie and Curly Neal in drag, playing Cinderella’s evil sisters. For five decades, the Trotters had
built their image as a great barnstorming team, perhaps the best basketball team in the country, which could also entertain. “First we win, then we put on the show,” Abe used to say. The show was always the final affirmation of their basketball supremacy—counting coup on their victims—but now the show was all there was. “First we clown and, if there’s time, we play a little ball,” seemed to be the new motto. In their
Wide World of Sports
specials, the directors would include the Magic Circle and the corniest reams—the confetti in the bucket and the baseball game—but when it came time for straight basketball, they’d show a few dunks and go straight to commercial. The Globetrotters were no longer a great barnstorming team that could clown, they were just clowns. Or something. “At some point the Harlem Globetrotters ceased being anything in particular,” Frank Deford wrote in a 1973
Sports Illustrated
feature.

Which leads to the third, and most revealing, event of 1971: the Harlem Globetrotters went on strike. It didn’t compute. “Smiles, Giggles and Ha-Ha’s on Strike,” read the headline in the
New York Times.
“In all the laughter, it never occurred to anybody that the Globetrotters might be unhappy,” wrote Dave Anderson. “But the laughter has stopped…. The thought of the Globetrotters on strikeis as incongruous as Snoopy stalking out of the ‘Peanuts’ comic strip shouting for a larger doghouse. But it’s happening.”

On November 16, 1971, the Globetrotters’ east unit (now known as the National Unit) was supposed to play a game at Port Huron, Michigan. When they arrived in town, nine players refused to play. Their attorney, Elliott Goodman, held a press conference in Chicago and said that he had asked for a meeting with management to discuss the players’ grievances. He also set a 5
P
.
M
. deadline for management to respond. If they didn’t, the players would strike the Port Huron game. When five o’clock came and went, the players threw up a picket line outside McMorran Sports Arena in Port Huron, in front of the ticket booth. They held hand-lettered signs: “Globetrotters Protest Unfair Treatment!” Even then, the whole scene had a surreal quality, as young children milled around the players, asking for autographs.

Significantly, the star of the team, Meadowlark Lemon, refused to
join the strike. Instead, he flew back to Chicago and announced that he was eager to resume “making people laugh.”

The sixties had finally caught up with the Globetrotters. Abe Saperstein was turning over in his grave.

In the first forty years of the Harlem Globetrotters’ existence, they had one owner and one boss. In the next twenty-five years, they had five owners and eight different bosses. The one constant through all of the changes was Marie Linehan, who had been there since 1948 and would not retire until 1987.

When Abe died in March 1966, he did not leave the Harlem Globetrotters to his family. Instead, his will (which he wrote in 1951) stipulated that the executors of his estate—Allan Bloch, his longtime attorney, and Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company—were authorized to carry on the business for as long as they “deem it to be in the best interests of the trust estate.” In other words, his executors had total discretion to keep or sell the Globetrotters, whichever they felt was best for the estate.

Abe died a wealthy man, with the total value of the estate, after taxes and estate fees, assessed at $2.5 million.
*
But the vast majority of that was the value of the team, and the Globetrotters would generate more value for the estate on the open market, rather than just continuing to operate the business.