Spinning the Globe (45 page)

Marie took her role as in-house historian seriously. In 1978, she commissioned a freelance writer, Chuck Menville, to write a “picture book” on the history of the team. George Vecsey of the
New York Times
had written a juvenile book for Scholastic Press in 1970, but the Menville book was intended for the commercial adult market, and was filled with photographs. Even as the book was coming off the presses, however, Marie was saddened that so much of the Globetrotters’ history had already been lost. “It is as accurate as we could make it,” she wrote to a former player. “Most of the people of the late ’20’s and ’30’s are not available and official records really did not undergo any formal compilation until the mid ’40’s.” In a letter to Karstens, she bemoaned the gaps in the story. “So much of the early days were never recorded as there was no real sense of history, so some of it is just [lore],” she wrote. “All of the people who knew all of the stories (Abe, Inman especially) are gone. The real inside stories will never be told.”

Marie and Joe Anzivino were the only conduits for old players who still wanted to feel connected to the organization, and she corresponded with many of them. Several times, she included a “Stars of Yesteryear” page in the annual yearbooks, featuring Globetrotters who had made good. There were many success stories—players who had built on their Globetrotter careers to become successful in business, government, or education. Among them were Harry Sykes, an educator and city commissioner in Lexington, Kentucky; Charlie Primus, a director of juvenile detention programs in Detroit; Bob Williams, a supervisor with Pillsbury Flour; Don Barnette, an administrator for the U.S. Office of Civil Rights; and Chuck Holton, a bureau chief for the Wisconsin Department of Family Services. One of the regulars in the “Stars of Yesteryear” was Mannie Jackson, who had risen quickly up the ladder at Honeywell to become its Labor Relations director.

Stan Greeson had continued as president after the Metromedia
purchase, but he resigned in January 1980. One of the last major actions he took was to fire his old client Meadowlark Lemon. The official announcement, on October 6, 1978, claimed that Meadowlark had “retired after requesting his release,” but he was actually fired. At forty-six years old, he had been showing his age but was still the Trotters’ biggest attraction. He was making $225,000 a year, but when he demanded a raise to $800,000, Greeson had had enough. The Trotters were playing in Europe when Greeson sent Meadowlark a telegram relieving him of his duties as the player-coach. Meadowlark was furious and called a meeting of the players. He told them about Greeson’s telegram and announced righteously, “We’re just not gonna play!”

“Uh, wait a minute, Lem,” said Dallas Thornton, a veteran known for his blunt style. “Shit,
we
didn’t get no telegram. He sent
you
a telegram; he didn’t send
us
no telegram.”

After years of being upstaged by “The Meadowlark Lemon Show,” the players were not going to stand up for Lemon now. He had cut too many private deals with management, had left the players hanging too many times, had pitched too many tantrums about other players stealing the spotlight he felt belonged solely to him. The players walked out of the room, and played the game.

“Meadowlark was truly upset behind that,” says “Sweet Lou” Dunbar, who was in his rookie year. The next morning, as the players were boarding the bus, Lemon was pacing around the parking lot, all alone. Dunbar had never seen Lemon wear sunglasses in a year of playing with him, but on this morning his eyes were hidden behind dark shades. Greeson installed Nate Branch as the player-coach, but Meadowlark continued playing until they finished the European tour. When the European tour ended, Greeson bought out Lemon’s contract and cut him loose. “Meadowlark [had] just got out of control,” says Red Klotz.

Geese Ausbie was promoted to top showman on the National Unit, with “Twiggy” Sanders and “Sweet Lou” Dunbar sharing the duties on the International Unit. Once Meadowlark was gone, there was an outpouring of criticism by other players, who suddenly felt free to speak their minds. “[Lemon] had become 95 percent of the
show…and would not allow anyone to do anything to rival him,” Curly Neal told Thomas Boswell of the
Washington Post.

The players made equally candid observations to Boswell about the state of the Globetrotters organization. “For the last couple of years the Trotters were in big trouble,” said Nate Branch, the new player-coach. “Most of the guys, myself included, hated being Globetrotters. Promoters were running away from us. The word was out: We were turning into box-office poison.” The players claimed that average salaries were still only $35,000 to $40,000 a year, and Branch warned, “We want a different future from the Trotters of the past…. In the near future, everybody on this team is going to be satisfied, or we’ll see the end of the Trotters.”

For the next few years, the Harlem Globetrotters continued doing well at the box office, but on the inside the organization was dying. “Everything seems to be so heavy, almost like a blanket of gloom covering the atmosphere,” Joe Anzivino wrote in 1980. Marie Linehan’s closest confidant was David Land, a London theater producer who had booked the Trotters for years.
*
“I cannot wait (but will have to) for August—to get away from this ‘un-fun’ place,” she wrote Lamb. “It hasn’t been fun for a long, long time…actually I do not fit into the corporate structure of rules and regimentation. And it gets worse…No sentiment about it. The organization as I knew it and loved it really doesn’t exist anymore. So any separation would be painless at this stage. Our tears were shed a long time ago.”

Abe Saperstein had built the organization on the strength of his personality and the relationships he’d built around the world, but such personal connections were now subsumed by corporate policies and procedure manuals. The Globetrotters were part of the Arena Entertainment Division of Metromedia, which included the Ice Capades, and were just another line item in the corporate budget. “The evolution to the impersonal corporate structure is complete,” Marie wrote in 1984. “We still sell a product which is recognizable and in demand but the operation mirrors any structured corporate
operation—for that matter we could be selling shoes or shovels or have a Roto-Rooter service. We are owned by the ‘mother’ company [Metromedia] and there is a rule for everything we do.”

By 1984, the ennui and listlessness within the organization began to show up at the box office. Week after week, gate receipts were falling short of projected revenue. In December, for instance, receipts during the first week were $43,000 short of budget projections, they were $68,000 below budget in the second week, and $21,000 below in the third. For a company that generated approximately $10 million a year, these were negligible amounts, but they indicated a disturbing trend. In March 1984, in a cost-cutting move, Metromedia eliminated the halftime entertainment, a staple of Globetrotter games for forty years; canceled the European tour, which was the first time in twenty-four years the Trotters hadn’t played overseas; and cut back to only one unit, which meant that half the players lost their jobs. “It’s been rough, real rough,” Geese Ausbie told the press. “I hope I’ll be back next year. I hope all of us will. But it hurts to see your brothers lose their jobs.”

Even for those who survived, the negative vibes were affecting their play on the court. In January 1985, the team’s road manager filed a report on two games in Kansas City. “The first show was a bad show, equally as bad as the Friday night show,” he wrote. “We had been showing no quality and an obvious lack of enthusiasm…. For all intents and purposes, without the help of some reams the Generals could easily have won the game…. Not entertaining—not good basketball.”

After the Globetrotters lost $500,000 in 1984, Metromedia decided to bring in new leadership. In February 1985, Earl W. Duryea was appointed president and chief operating officer. Duryea, forty-seven, was a former vice president of Ringling Brothers/Barnum and Bailey Circus. He had also been the arena manager for the Nassau Coliseum and the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City. Duryea’s résumé had one glaring omission: he had no experience in sports. Marie would sadly note the ascension of “Earl Duryea and his circus cronies.”

Duryea announced his intention to “hire better players,” and promptly instituted a general housecleaning, releasing the Trotters’ popular but aging stars Geese Ausbie and Curly Neal. In June,
Ausbie announced that he was retiring after twenty-four years, but three months later, at a tearful press conferénce, he said that he had actually been fired and was filing a federal lawsuit alleging age discrimination. Curly Neal joined the suit, claiming the company had refused to negotiate his contract in good faith.

The oldest employee in the organization, by far, was Marie Linehan, who at seventy-five was ready to get out herself. She had negotiated an agreement where she would work three days a week until 1987, then serve as a consultant. “Inasmuch as we are on the fourth president and the fourth change of administration in nine years, I have had all the transition periods I want,” she reported to David Land.

Duryea’s biggest innovation was to hire the Globetrotters’ first female player, Lynette Woodard, former Kansas University and Olympic star. Woodard’s signing, in October 1985, generated a huge wave of publicity (including an appearance on the
Tonight Show
and articles in
Sports Illustrated, People, Ebony,
and
Ms.
) and a significant bounce at the box office. Duryea added a second woman, Jackie White, the following year, and a total of eight women would play with the Trotters over the next few years. “Sweet Lou” Dunbar, who was now the top showman, had been skeptical about Woodard’s hiring, but reported, “This is a grueling schedule for men, and I just felt she wouldn’t be able to handle it. But she’s the best sleeper on the bus. She’s hangin’ in there, and we’re very proud of her. We consider her our baby sister.”

Duryea’s “circus cronies” were suggesting other ways to revitalize the Globetrotters, including a remote-controlled trick ball, a helium-filled ball, and a ball that disintegrated on the way to the basket. As one of his marketing people proposed, “The quality of play can’t be scripted, but we can ‘artificially’ produce spectacular plays. Why can’t we inject spectacular plays just like we do comedy reams. Every fast break should include a no-look pass. Instead of a layup, throw it off the glass and let a following player slam it home. We control the defense anyway, why can’t we MANDATE an exciting style of play.”

Despite the upturn in attendance after Woodard’s signing, Duryea’s relationship with the players and their independent union,
the United Basketball Players Association, was rapidly disintegrating. In November 1985, a game in Edmonton, Ontario, had to be canceled when the players refused to travel 500 miles by bus, after their flight from Helena, Montana, to Edmonton had been canceled because of bad weather. Duryea accused the union of violating a no-strike clause in their contract and tried to fire the entire team, but Metromedia refused to back him. The Edmonton cancellation cost thousands of dollars and generated terrible publicity. “The Harlem Globetrotters, it says here, are dying,” one Edmonton sportswriter opined. “The Globetrotters used to have a purpose….[but now]they’re just a bunch of black guys (and a gal) trying to perpetuate a tired, old—and now—bad act. In this day and age they’re preposterously out of place.”

In July 1986, Duryea and the union began negotiating a new contract, but over the summer their relationship deteriorated to the point that the entire team, other than Woodard, refused to report to training camp. But within a week, four players went back, including showman Twiggy Sanders, and Duryea had enough to field a team. The remaining five players—Dunbar, Billy Ray Hobley, Ovie Dotson, Jimmy Blacklock, and Osborne Lockhart—stayed out on strike the entire 1986–87 season. They filed an unfair labor practice against the company and even formed their own team, “Basketball Magic,” which toured in the Caribbean.

In December 1986, Metromedia sold the Globetrotters and the Ice Capades to International Broadcasting Company (IBC), a Minneapolis company that owned three amusement parks, a Minnesota dinner theater, and the Ice Chalets. The sale price was $30 million. Over the next six years, the seemingly irreversible decline of this once-proud franchise would continue unabated. Marie Linehan, in one of her last letters to her friend David Land, wrote:

On March 23, 1990, Marie Linehan died at age eighty. She had worked for the Harlem Globetrotters for forty-four years, the longest continuous service of anyone in their history. Although she had lived in California for nearly fifteen years, it had never felt like home, and so, at her request, her body was carried back to Chicago to be buried among her Irish kith and kin.

In August 1991, IBC filed for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11, after it was unable to restructure a $66 million debt with its major lender, National Westminster Bank USA (NatWest). In an attempt to recoup its losses, the bank assumed control of IBC, imposed severe cost-cutting measures, and considered selling off some of IBC’s holdings, including the Globetrotters, if the price was right. In 1991, the Globetrotters were still making a profit, but NatWest’s draconian cost-cutting only accelerated the downward spiral. The Globetrotters were cut back to one unit, laying off ten players, and the schedule was reduced by half. The 1992 South American tour was canceled. The scouting budget was eliminated, training camp expenses were slashed by $30,000, Red Klotz’s fee for games was cut 10 percent, contributions to the players’ pension funds were suspended for three years, and on it went.