Spinning the Globe (43 page)

The most interesting bequest in Abe’s will was that Inman Jackson, Marie Linehan, and his sister Fay Saperstein were each left 4 percent of his estate, or $97,964.50 apiece. He had rewarded Inman and Marie for their decades of service with a financial windfall. His wife, Sylvia, received one-half of the estate, and his two children, Eloise and Jerry, split the rest.

For the first year after Abe’s death, Morry Saperstein and Marie ran the business, under the oversight of Allan Bloch. The rest of the
old front office crew were still there: secretary Wyonella Smith, advance man Joe Anzivino, accountant Marian Polito, and publicist Bill Margolis. Inman Jackson was given the title of consulting coach. But the day-to-day decisions fell to Morry, who handled the scheduling, and to Marie, who had her hands on everything else. The executors had incorporated the Globetrotters as Abe Saperstein Enterprises, Inc., and Marie was put on the board of directors and given the title of vice president of administration. Years later, Anzivino would recall that first year: “We would all sit around and someone would say, ‘I wonder what Abe would’ve done?’ Marie would tell us what Abe would have done. She was one of those powerful forces.” The extra responsibility took its toll, however, and she would describe those months as “killing ones for me” with “virtually no time off.”

In a twist that Abe would have appreciated, they borrowed his old mantra for dealing with the loss of a star player: “We miss Abe, but the Globetrotters are better than ever!” And the results backed that up, as the Trotters broke the three million mark in attendance for the first time since the Year of the Big Dipper in 1958–59.

In the long run, however, Allan Bloch and Continental Bank were not interested in becoming basketball tycoons. Jerry Saperstein, Abe’s twenty-seven-year-old son, was working in the front office and hoping to “some day fill the shoes of his showman father,” but with a big inheritance tax looming, Abe’s executors put the team up for sale. In January 1967, they started receiving bids from prospective buyers. There were three serious bidders, and in May, the executors signed a contract with Metromedia, which owned the Ice Capades and several TV and radio stations, to purchase the Trotters for $3.5 million. But the deal had to be approved by Judge Robert Dunne and, at the last minute, one of the other bidders raised its offer, and the judge accepted it.

On June 8, 1967, the Harlem Globetrotters were sold for $3.71 million to a trio of young businessmen: Potter Palmer IV, thirty-two, part-owner of the Atlanta Braves and a scion of Chicago’s most famous family; his brother-in-law John O’Neil, from Miami, who would be a silent partner; and George Gillette Jr., a twenty-eight-year-old Wisconsin entrepreneur and management consultant, who was also the business manager and part-owner of the Miami
Dolphins. In approving the deal, Judge Dunne said, “Abe Saperstein was a shrewd businessman. He saw fit to give the coexecutors of his estate discretion to sell his lifetime enterprise. I will not interfere with the exercise of that discretion.”

Gillette, Palmer, and O’Neil had bought
everything
that belonged to the Harlem Globetrotters, from the player contracts and trademarks to Abe’s Eiffel Tower lamp and a Naugahyde recliner he’d used just before he died.

Gillette was named president and general manager, and gave up his position with the Dolphins to manage the Trotters on a daily basis. He shared two characteristics with Abe Saperstein: he was very short and he was a workaholic. Otherwise, they were from different worlds. He was the son of a prominent surgeon in Racine, Wisconsin, had gone to college at Amherst, and had worked for McKinsey and Company, a leading management consulting firm. Abe was an old-world immigrant and an old-school boss, who wouldn’t have known what to do with a management consultant if one fell in his lap.

One of Gillette’s first priorities had to be signing the players to new contracts, as all but Meadowlark had one-year deals that had already expired. When the sale of the team was first announced, the Trotters were on their European tour, and the players decided to ask for a meeting with the new owners to talk about salaries. With fresh young leadership, they were hoping to upgrade their salaries and working conditions. They still got no meal money, had no pension, and had to wash their own uniforms in their hotel sinks. Meadowlark was making $3,333.33 a month (still less than Goose Tatum in 1953), but the other nineteen players averaged barely more than $1,000 a month. Gillette and Palmer agreed to meet with them, which was, in itself, a good sign, as Abe would have had a fit at the suggestion of a team meeting about salaries.

The players knew that having Meadowlark on their side would be critical to their success, so they talked to him about their plans. He said he’d go with them to the meeting. When the meeting time rolled around, however, the players had all assembled in the hotel lobby, but Meadowlark hadn’t shown.

“We decided we’d better go on up and Meadowlark could catch up with us,” says Frank Stephens, who was in his second year with
the Trotters. “Just as we got to the room, the door opened and Meadowlark walked out, with a big grin on his face. He said, ‘I got mine, you get yours.’ We all looked at each other and knew we were in trouble, because whatever his deal was, we were excluded.”

It was a bad omen of things to come. Gillette had used his modern management techniques to play Meadowlark and the other players against each other. Over the next few years, the gap between the public’s perception of the Globetrotters and the private reality of the players’ lives would become a deepening chasm.

Gillette began modernizing the operation. He moved the front office out of the old Dearborn Street offices into a modern suite in the IBM building, with wood paneling and deep-pile carpets. He upgraded the game programs, replacing the bland testimonials from Abe’s gray-haired sportswriters with four-color graphics and snappy layouts. Gillette was fascinated by television and its potential to increase Trotter revenue and attendance.
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He met Fred Silverman, at that time a thirty-year-old CBS programming executive,
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who was interested in doing a show about the Globetrotters, which became the
The Harlem Globetrotters
cartoon. Gillette also arranged an appearance on the Johnny Carson show and a celebrity game in Los Angeles, which was broadcast on ABC. When attendance improved, it appeared that his strategy was working.

The more popular the Trotters became on TV, however, the more disenchanted the players became. The flash and glitter was seductive, and they enjoyed their new celebrity status, but it was ephemeral, like a façade on a Hollywood set. Behind the false front, the team was boiling with resentment. As early as 1969, they were planning to strike in Portland, Oregon, but Gillette got wind of it and fired Willie Campbell, who was one of the ringleaders. “Persons of your caliber we do not need in the organization,” Gillette wrote in his dismissal letter, chiding Campbell for his “organizing activities” and the “un
forgivable incident in Portland.” Marie Linehan agreed with Gillette that “making an example…of a troublemaker will prove something to all the others,” but she warned Gillette that “the problem is severe and deep and involves more than just Willie [Campbell].”

Some of the players’ resentment focused on Meadowlark Lemon, who had become even more self-absorbed as his celebrity status increased. He started his own line of clothing, was pursuing a singing career, and resented anyone who took away from his limelight. Curly Neal was especially troubling. Meadowlark and Curly were portrayed as a tag-team act, the two most famous Trotters, but Meadowlark resented Curly’s popularity with the fans. Curly had a radiant innocence about him, and fans adored him. His bald head and beaming smile were catapulting him to superstar status. Other than Muhammad Ali, he may have been the most recognizable sports figure in the world. But this was supposed to be “The Meadowlark Lemon Show.” One night in Madison Square Garden, the fans gave Curly a standing ovation when he was introduced. “Curly was grinning from ear to ear,” recalls Frank Stephens. “Meadowlark started motioning to the announcer, ‘Cut it, cut it.’” Curly was stealing his show.

Meadowlark’s insecurity led to altercations with Wilt Chamberlain, Connie Hawkins, and some Washington Generals’ players. At least one turned deadly. A Trotter player, Murphy Summons, was fired for allegedly pulling a gun on Lemon, and possibly firing it.

The players also resented that Meadowlark was in a special category with management. He was the only player allowed to have an agent (Stan Greeson, who represented Soupy Sales and other celebrities). The other players were still negotiating directly with Gillette, who would call them into his office one at a time, pull out a bottle of Old Grandad, and pour them a drink. After a few minutes of chitchat, and perhaps a few more drinks, he’d slide a blank contract across the table and tell them to sign. “I’ll fill in the amount later,” he’d say. Some players were so eager to play with the Trotters, they did.

It all came to a head at Port Huron in November 1971. The game that night at McMorran Arena had to be canceled, and the striking players said they wouldn’t play the next night either in London,
Ontario. George Gillette told the press it was a “classic power play” by the players’ attorney, Elliott Goodman (who also represented the Saperstein family), which was designed to sabotage the new owners. Madison Square Garden was still running newspaper ads for two upcoming Trotters’ games in early December, but no one knew if they would even be played.

There had been other player uprisings in the Globetrotters’ history, going back to Runt Pullins and Sonny Boswell, but this was the first full-blown strike. The leaders, Bobby Hunter and Frank Stephens, were representative of the new breed of Globetrotters. They were college educated, articulate, and attuned to the rising consciousness of “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud.” Hunter, who was a backup showman to Meadowlark and was being groomed as his eventual replacement, was a sophisticated, street-smart guy from Harlem. After graduating from Tennessee A&I and being cut by the New York Knicks, he joined the Trotters in 1966, the last player Abe recruited before he died. Stephens was the tallest player on the team, at six-foot-ten, and also had joined the Trotters in 1966, after graduating from Virginia State College and playing one year with the NBA’s St. Louis Hawks.

The biggest issue in the strike was salaries, but the players had a laundry list of other demands. They wanted meal money, a pension plan, better insurance benefits, limits on travel between games, extra pay for doubleheaders, more amenities on their bus, and their uniforms cleaned between games. Finally, they wanted Gillette to recognize their union and negotiate with it from that point on. To outsiders, the issue of clean uniforms might have seemed insignificant, compared with salaries and a pension, but it was particularly galling to the players. Each Globetrotter had two uniforms, which they were responsible for cleaning. Traveling every day and playing every night, it was difficult to find time, or the means, to clean them. “A lot of our show was interacting with the crowd,” says Stephens. “The last thing you want to do is go up there and squeeze a person and you smell like a week of funk and sweat.”

The players had timed the strike to do the most damage. Gillette and Palmer had formed Globetrotter Communications, Inc., a publicly held corporation, and were buying up radio and TV stations,
hoping to build a diversified communications company. They had scheduled a public stock offering for November 17, the day after the strike.

Clearly, it was going to be a bloody battle.

Gillette told the press that the strike was illegal because “each player had a good and valid contract.” When rumors circulated that he was going to field a replacement team to play Madison Square Garden, Bobby Hunter went to the Teamsters Union, which threatened to shut down the arenas it controlled. “All the tactics that they had applied to former players didn’t work with us,” says Hunter. “We were college graduates, more intellectual, more East Coast.”

The players held a press conference in New York. They did interviews for newspapers and television. “We just want to be treated as men and given our human dignity,” Frank Stephens told Dave Anderson of the
New York Times.
Internally, however, they were struggling to hold their own ranks together. Meadowlark had already gone over to management,
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and as the strike dragged on for weeks, other players began to waiver. “A lot of brothers started telling on each other,” says Mel Davis, a longtime Trotter veteran and one of the strikers. “Guys thought they would get ahead by stabbing each other in the back.” Indeed, several Trotter veterans cut their own private deals with management. At the time the strike began, the Trotters’ International Unit was playing overseas, which made it difficult for those players to stay in touch. The union even tried to get Jesse Jackson and Bill Russell involved, but the players themselves were not united.

Finally, after twenty-seven days, the strike ended. Fourteen games had been canceled, including both shows in Madison Square Garden. The players had won a partial victory, as the minimum salary was increased from $7,800 to $13,200, and they got $12.50 for meal money, soft drinks on the bus, extra sets of uniforms (washed by the team equipment manager), and a stock option plan for all employees.

The Globetrotters returned to the court on December 13, in Springfield, Massachusetts, but it was not business as usual. Gillette was becoming more interested in his new television and radio acquisitions, and decided to find someone else to manage the Globetrotters. Meadowlark’s agent, Stan Greeson, had just negotiated a new lucrative contract for him and had also been involved in the negotiations for
The Harlem Globetrotters
cartoon. In a bizarre move, Gillette and Palmer hired Greeson, who had been an agent for over twenty years, as the new president.

The players saw the handwriting on the wall. Meadowlark was already aligned with management, and now his agent was the new company president. More repercussions from the strike quickly followed. Five of the striking players were terminated in April 1972, including Leon Hillard, a fourteen-year veteran, and four rookies. Then Gillette did something very shrewd: he brought back Marques Haynes. Marques agreed to fold his own team, the Fabulous Harlem Magicians, and rejoin the Trotters. With one stroke, Gillette had brought back into the fold the most respected player in Globetrotter history—on the side of management.