Spinning the Globe (47 page)

Together, Mannie and Gov led Edwardsville to a 28–6 record, and they lost in the finals of the state championship by 2 points. Mannie averaged 24.4 points per game and finished his career as the greatest scorer in Edwardsville history; he made the all-state team and was voted “Prep Player of the Year” in the greater St. Louis area. He had scholarship offers from sixty colleges, including UCLA, Seton Hall, and St. John’s, but he and Gov decided to stick together and signed with the University of Illinois.

Mannie and Gov hoped to carry the Fighting Illini to a national title, but they picked the wrong years to be playing in the Big Ten. Ohio State won the national championship in 1960, with Jerry Lucas, John Havlicek, and Larry Siegfried; and Walt Bellamy was a two-time All-American at Indiana. “We never had a big guy,” Gov laments. “If we’d had a good big man we could have gone all the way.” Mannie and Gov started for three years, and Mannie was elected the first black captain of the Illinois team and made second team All Big Ten. Gov scored 1,001 career points, making him the third-highest scorer in school history.

After they graduated in 1960, Abe Saperstein tried to sign both of them to the Globetrotters. But Mannie and Gov had dreams of playing in the NBA, and they had an offer from the New York Tuck Tapers, in the National Industrial Basketball League, whose players worked out regularly with the New York Knicks. Tuck Tape would give the players corporate jobs, and they’d play ball on the weekends. Once again, Mannie and Gov decided to stick together.

They played that summer with the Tuck Tapers and worked out with the Knicks. Mannie had a management job in customer service, and liked the exposure to the world of business. “The thing that occurred to me then was that the smart guys were going to the Industrial League,” Mannie says. “The smart white guys, the guys that got the As and Bs and were business students and more serious students, they were either going to graduate school or to the Industrial League, where they could get executive positions. The guys that were jocks, they were going to the NBA…. I always thought the business guys were cooler.”

But Abe kept after them. He sent them airline tickets to the Globetrotters’ training camp, and they decided to go. They had a terrific camp, and Abe told them, “I want you both here right now!” He offered them $700 a month, they bargained him up to $1,000, and Gov decided to take it. But Mannie felt he was so close to making the Knicks, and was so enthusiastic about his job at Tuck Tape, that he couldn’t go. For the first time, they split up the dynamic duo. A few weeks later, Gov was playing with the Globetrotters at Madison Square Garden, and Mannie went to see him play.

Abe kept hammering at him. “You can always go to work, son,”
he said, “but you can’t always have the thrill of traveling around the world and playing with the Globetrotters.”

“You know what, Abe?” Mannie said. “You’re right.”

He was becoming discouraged about his chances of making the NBA, although he had no doubts that he was good enough. “At the time I came out of school,” he says, “prejudice was just accepted—the racism and the quotas on the teams. When I tried out for the Knicks, there were like twenty-five guys trying out, and eighteen or nineteen were black, but we knew that only two or three of them were going to make the team.”

On May 1, 1961, he flew to Chicago, and four days later was on a plane to Europe for the Globetrotters’ summer tour. He played one full season and portions of the next five, joining the team in the summers or for a week here or there.

Abe took a liking to him, and used to tell the other players, “Keep an eye on this guy, he’s going places.” Years later, Mannie would say that Abe Saperstein was “one of a handful of white adults at that time who I thought cared about me personally.”

For many of the Trotter players, basketball was their life, but for Mannie Jackson it was a means to an end. “It was really fun to play with the Globetrotters,” he says, “but it was grueling. And it was really hard on my knees.” In 1963, disenchanted with the racism in pro basketball, and worn down from the Trotters, he went back home to Edwardsville to find his bearings. He took a teaching job in St. Louis, teaching junior high biology. He was commuting to St. Louis and playing ball with the Schumacher Saints in the Edwardsville city league but still had a hankering to prove that he could play in the NBA. He moved to Detroit and lived with Earl Lloyd, the former NBA player, who was scouting for the Detroit Pistons. If he couldn’t hook on with the Pistons, Mannie hoped to find a job in the auto industry. During a workout with some of the top players in the city, he met John Watson, a white guy who worked for General Motors.

“You seem like a bright guy,” Watson said. “I’ve got a good situation at GM, why don’t you apply?”

“They won’t hire me because I’m black,” Mannie replied.

“No, they test you—if you pass the test, you’re hired.”

He passed the test. “All of a sudden the world opened up for me,
and I never played basketball again,” Mannie says. He was hired in GM’s Cadillac division, and quickly advanced up the corporate ladder. By 1966, he was director of training and development for Cadillac, in charge of the apprenticeship program for eleven skilled trades. It was a turbulent time at GM, with increasing racial tension in the plants and bad blood between management and the United Auto Workers, in the wake of a five-week-long strike in 1964. But Mannie had great rapport with black workers and built a solid relationship with the white business managers of the UAW local. “Those guys adopted me,” he says, “and I could walk into some of the toughest plants and people knew me.” He was eventually promoted to Cadillac’s director of labor relations, and also took graduate classes in business administration at the University of Detroit.

In 1968, his rising star at GM attracted the attention of Honeywell, the Minneapolis-based manufacturer of building control systems (such as thermostats). He was offered a job as an equal employment officer and moved quickly through the managerial ranks. In the early seventies, he moved to Boston and became director of human resources for Honeywell’s computer business. By 1979, he was invited to Minneapolis to run Honeywell’s Venture Center, overseeing mergers and acquisitions of new businesses all over the world. It was exhilarating. He was working seventeen-and eighteen-hour days, living off the adrenaline rush from making deals. But in 1991, Honeywell decided to sell off all of its allied businesses, including the Venture Center, to concentrate on its core. Mannie was rewarded with a promotion to corporate headquarters, as senior vice president in charge of marketing and administration. It was the dream of all senior managers: a corporate vice presidency, a plush office at headquarters, and a fantastic salary. “I disliked every minute of it,” Mannie says. “I had been running one hundred miles an hour, making deals all over the world, and now I was parked in corporate, looking out the window, being an administrator. I had a burning desire to do the deal, and it killed me to sit.”

By then, he was one of the most prominent African American business executives in the country and had taken a leadership role on many initiatives in the black community. In 1986, with twenty-three other black executives, he cofounded the Executive Leadership Council (ELC), which served as a national support network and also
developed guidelines for U.S. companies doing business with South Africa. He was an investor and founding member of Stairstep, Inc., a Minnesota corporation that developed and financed black-owned small business initiatives. He served on the board of directors of the Entrepreneurial Development Center at Florida A&M University and on the Dean’s Advisory Council at the Howard University Business School.

But he was still craving the thrill of the deal. He bought a failing health club in Minneapolis and turned it around and, in 1989, spearheaded an effort to secure an NBA franchise for San Diego (the league ultimately turned him down).

So when he got a tip that NatWest had put the Globetrotters on the market, he was already trawling for failing companies that he could buy on the cheap, get back on their feet, then flip his investment two or three times over. “There was nothing passionate about buying the Globetrotters,” he says. “It was just another business opportunity. I figured for a million bucks, maybe two million bucks, I could leverage a down payment and a loan, and get a good return on it. Plus, I could preserve the legacy of the organization, which was number two on my list.”

Some experts questioned his judgment on both counts. The Globetrotters had fallen so low that some people—ones who should have known better—already thought they were dead. A few months after Mannie’s acquisition of the team, NBC was broadcasting an NBA playoff game, during which the cameras panned the crowd and zoomed in on Meadowlark Lemon, who was sitting in the stands. The sight of Lemon inspired announcers Dick Enberg and Magic Johnson to reflect on the Globetrotters’ legacy. “How many years they’ve delighted fans,” Enberg observed. “And now the NBA has become so good that, in a legitimate game, they’ve put the Globetrotters out of business.”

“It’s tough to compete with the NBA,” Johnson agreed sadly.

Mannie Jackson called NBC and got the network to issue an onair apology, with Enberg backtracking and noting the Trotters’ “strong pulse,” but the damage had been done. If NBC’s game announcers thought the Trotters were already dead, how many fans thought the same?

Mannie Jackson’s mother once told an Edwardsville sportswriter that she never expected her son to become that good an athlete because “he just didn’t seem to have the necessary energy.” Somehow in the intervening years he had found it, because when he took over the Globetrotters in the spring of 1993, it was like a tidal wave had slammed into the front office. Everything the Globetrotters had been doing for years—every process, every practice, every assumption—was examined, analyzed, critiqued, and often thrown out with the trash. The evaluation process was so intense that some of the old-time staffers, including Joe Anzivino, would end up leaving, and not always by choice.

Even before the sale closed, Mannie was requesting copies of all contracts with merchandisers, arena owners, foreign promoters, players, and front office personnel. He wanted reports on how players were recruited and how training camp was run. All front office employees were required to write one-page summaries of their jobs and their perceived future with the company. Top executives completed a sixteen-page questionnaire evaluating the organization’s culture and leadership. Mannie held an employee retreat to develop a new mission statement and company objectives. Over the summer, reams of data were collected into a “Production Bible” that broke down every item in the Trotters’ budget, including the costs for materials, the relationship between fixed and variable costs, overhead, and the break-even point for every venue.

A series of focus groups were convened around the country to assess how damaged the Globetrotters’ credibility was with the public, and the results showed that young people didn’t know anything about them, and many older people hadn’t heard about them in years. Mannie hired musicians to write original music for the Trotters’ games, and got rid of the players’ hated zip-up uniforms, replacing them with the Trotters’ traditional red, white, and blue stripes.

Mannie was convinced that the Trotters had to first reestablish their credibility as a business before they could hope to reestablish any credibility in sports. So he leveraged his contacts in the business press to get articles in the
Wall Street Journal, Forbes,
and
USA Today.
The
Globetrotters had also lost credibility with arena managers, the people who controlled the buildings in which they played. Fortunately, Mannie knew a fair number of them through Honeywell, which supplied their control systems or security systems. “I’m in a new world now, can you help me out?” he asked, and many of them offered the Trotters a cut rate that first year. “Giving us a deal, period, was helpful,” Mannie says, “because several had given up on the product.”

All summer, the Globetrotter players had been hearing rumblings about the drastic changes Mannie was instituting, but they experienced them firsthand when they reported to training camp. In past years, the players had practiced two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and had the rest of the day off. But under Mannie’s new regimen, they were rousted out of bed at six
A
.
M
. to run four miles before breakfast. Then, they practiced two hours before lunch, spent the entire afternoon in the classroom, being schooled on African American and Globetrotter history, media relations, and public speaking, and returned after supper for another two-hour practice. Mannie also imposed a zero-tolerance policy on drugs or alcohol abuse, and warned the players that flagrant womanizing or rudeness to fans were grounds for immediate dismissal.

One of Mannie’s first personnel decisions was to give Tex Harrison a lifetime coaching contract, and Harrison wrote a detailed assessment of the players and the show. His first recommendation was to drastically improve the quality of players on both the Trotters and the Washington Generals, and Red Klotz responded by firing his entire team. Harrison urged that “slapstick type comedy” be eliminated and insisted that the showmen “must be skilled as basketball players first and comedians second.” Indeed, one of the first changes Mannie made to the show was to remove some of the racially stereotyped gags from the Meadowlark Lemon era. Former Globetrotters noticed the changes right away. “One of the things I was thrilled about when Mannie took over was they no longer did that Amos ’n’Andy stuff,” says former Trotter Frank Stephens. “That was the first thing I noticed—they had taken out the Stepin Fetchit stuff, that minstrel shit.”

To save money, IBC and NatWest had cut back to one Trotter unit, but Mannie reinstated the second squad, thereby doubling the total number of games. When the season began, he instituted a
fifteen-minute autograph session after every game, which became so popular with the fans that it was lengthened to thirty minutes. By early 1994, the changes were already starting to pay off. Attendance and gate receipts were up, and instead of mothers writing to complain about players “pantomiming sodomy,” Mannie passed a letter around the office from a mother in Indiana who raved about the Globetrotters’ postgame autograph session, and said her teenage daughter and her friends had left “with new heroes that evening.”