Spinning the Globe (48 page)

During Mannie’s second season, the momentum kept building. The Globetrotters appeared on
Good Morning America
and on Oprah’s tenth anniversary show, where they shot baskets with her on an outdoor court; Columbia Pictures optioned a movie deal on the Globetrotters’ early history; and Mannie unveiled a new mascot, “Globie,” who entertained the kids before the games.

Mannie was still working full-time for Honeywell and running the Globetrotters by fax, phone, and on the weekends. Back home in Minneapolis, his fax machine was burning up, as he required the Globetrotters’ road managers to fax him nightly reports, showing the cost, revenue, and operating profit for every game. Honeywell had been his life for twenty-five years, and CEO Michael Bonsignore had been extremely supportive of Mannie’s private venture with the Trotters, insisting that there was no conflict of interest between the two jobs. But Mannie came home one night and told his wife, Cathy, “I don’t have a conflict of interest, I have a conflict of passion.”

He had fallen in love with the Globetrotters. What was supposed to have been a calculated investment had become an all-consuming passion. He had gotten hooked on the challenge of turning around the business, and on the people. In December 1994, he resigned from Honeywell and threw himself into managing the Trotters full-time. Making the move was not without risk, both personally and professionally. Being the owner of the Harlem Globetrotters might bring him additional fame and wealth, but he knew that the corporate world did not consider entertainment to be serious business, and he could lose some standing as a major player in that world. To compensate, he served on the boards of directors of five Fortune 500 companies, including Ashland Oil, Jostens Inc., Reebok, Stanley Tools, and Martech Controls (Honeywell’s South African subsidiary).

He soon relocated his family and the Globetrotters’ headquarters to Phoenix, Arizona. Now, with Mannie engaged full-time, the intensity level in the front office increased exponentially. For the first time since Abe Saperstein died, there was an owner who was totally and exclusively committed to the Harlem Globetrotters. Indeed, although Mannie Jackson and Abe Saperstein have very different personalities, there are striking similarities in a few key areas. They were both terrific salesmen and marketing wizards, had unusual communication and relationship skills, communicated a vision of where they wanted the Globetrotters to go, infused the organization with their own energy and sense of purpose, and worked harder than anybody else.

Over the next few seasons, Mannie focused on three major priorities: increasing the team’s competitiveness and the quality of the show, developing corporate sponsorships, and broadening the Trotters’ community involvement.

Improving the team may have been the easiest of the three goals. He cut 30 percent of the veterans in 1994, replacing them with younger, more talented players, and instigated a relentless search for better players. Even with the growth of the NBA, the Continental Basketball Association (CBA), and the European leagues, there was no shortage of talented basketball players coming out of American colleges. “There are so many good basketball players today,” says coach Tex Harrison, “but we’re looking for great players who also have the right personality to be Globetrotters.”

Wun Versher, a current player, believes that it takes a certain kind of personality to handle the constant demands on the Globetrotter players. “You can’t turn it on and turn it off,” he says. “If you don’t really love being around people, you will lose your mind out here.”

What Mannie Jackson was trying to do was take the Globetrotters back to their roots, to the days when they had great players who could also clown—not just clowns. “We didn’t want to connect back to the cartoon period of the 1970s,” he would later say, “but to the period when it was a great barnstorming team that could compete and play against anyone.” But convincing the press and the public that the Trotters could play serious ball—and understanding why they would even want to—was a challenge. It had been over thirty years since the
Globetrotters had last played a legitimate game (when the College All-Star series ended in 1962), and to an entire generation of Americans they were strictly a show team—or, worse, cartoon characters on
Scooby Doo.

In those thirty years, the NBA had
become
the Globetrotters, adopting the flashy style that had once distinguished the Trotters from the “serious” pro leagues. The thrilling dunks and behind-the-back passes that had once been the Globetrotters’ exclusive trademarks had now become standard fare at NBA games. Superstars like Julius Erving, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan had redefined modern basketball in Harlem Globetrotter colors. Magic Johnson and the Los Angeles Lakers had institutionalized the Globetrotters’ style and given it a Hollywood name: “Showtime.”

But Mannie was determined to prove that the Trotters could become one of the best teams in the world again. First, he had to find somebody, besides the Washington Generals, who would even play them. And he needed someone with legitimate basketball credentials.

In September 1995, the Trotters opened an eleven-game “Ultimate Challenge” series in Europe against the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar All-Stars, who included the forty-eight-year-old Abdul-Jabbar and former NBA stars Nate Archibald, Artis Gilmore, and Jo Jo White. They were all in their forties, but Abdul-Jabbar still had his pride and some of his game. When Mannie went to his house to talk about the series, Abdul-Jabbar warned him, in his characteristically sober manner, “Now this ain’t going to be no show. Nobody’s gonna throw a bucket of confetti on
me!
”

Mannie had intentionally scheduled the games in Europe, knowing that American sportswriters would never take the games seriously. “We couldn’t do it in the U.S.,” he says, “but in Europe they’re a little more naive, a bit more open to a fresh idea.”

After the Trotters won the first two games against Abdul-Jabbar’s forty-somethings, Kareem went out and recruited some younger players, including Bo Kimble, a three-point specialist who had played in the NBA, and a six-foot-nine enforcer from the European leagues. In the third game, in Vienna, Abdul-Jabbar hit fifteen of sixteen shots, scored 34 points, and led his team to a 91–85 victory over the Trotters, ending their 8,829-game winning streak that dated back to Red
Klotz’s fabled 1971 victory in Martin, Tennessee. The Trotters rebounded to win the remaining games, but the cynicism of U.S. sportswriters still followed them across the ocean. “What in the name of the Washington Generals is Abdul-Jabbar doing?”
Sports Illustrated
asked skeptically. “And what in the name of Meadowlark Lemon are the Globies doing? Both the sky-hooking legend and the merrymaking legends seem out of their element.”

Unfazed by the sarcasm, Mannie kept looking for legitimate games. In April 1997, he revived one of the Globetrotters’ greatest traditions, the College All-Stars series, and the Globetrotters defeated a team of college stars 126–114 in Phoenix. As an extra drawing card, Magic Johnson played for the Trotters, scoring 29 points and adding eleven rebounds and fifteen assists. Between 1997 and 1999, the Trotters would play, and win, five more games against college all-star squads that included ten future NBA first-round draft picks. In 1998, the Globetrotters also won the championship of the prestigious Los Angeles Summer Pro League, which included international teams from Germany, Mexico, and China.

In January 2000, Mannie scored a major coup by signing an agreement with the National Association of Basketball Coaches to play a series of preseason games against NCAA teams, as well as an All-Star game during NCAA Final Four weekend. Since then, the Trotters’ “Fall College Tour” has matched them up against some of the best college teams in the country, including defending champions in every NCAA division. They have played Division I champs Michigan State (2000), Maryland (2002), and Syracuse (2003), and have defeated such Division I powerhouses as Purdue, Iowa, Minnesota, and St. John’s. The Fall College Tours have also provided national TV exposure, as ESPN and ESPN2 have broadcast several games. At the end of the 2003 tour, the Trotters had a 20–9 cumulative record,
*
and had reestablished their credibility on the court.

In November 2003, Kenny Smith, the NBA analyst for TNT television, was sitting courtside with Mannie, watching as the Trot
ters completely manhandled the Syracuse Orangemen, the reigning NCAA champs. “Mannie, right now you’d be the sixth or seventh seed in the [NBA’s] Eastern Division,” Smith said.

Off the court, Mannie was equally aggressive in pursuing corporate sponsorships, both to relieve the pressure on ticket sales as the Trotters’ primary revenue stream and to give added cachet to the Globetrotters’ name, by associating with well-known companies. Northwest Airlines was the first corporation to come aboard as a major sponsor, but Disney, Denny’s, Reebok, Monsanto, Dixie Crystals, Valvoline, and Jostens soon followed. In 2001, Mannie signed a five-year-deal with Burger King—the largest sponsorship deal in Globetrotter history—to become the “title sponsor” for the Trotters’ world tour. Then, in July 2002, Mannie signed an agreement with FUBU to become the Trotters’ exclusive outfitter and to produce a new Globetrotter clothing line. Coming at the height of the “retro” craze, FUBU’s Globetrotter jerseys and warm-up suits became an immediate hit and sold over $60 million the first two years.
*

The FUBU success proved that the Globetrotters were cool again—and, most significant, they were cool in the African American community. Mannie Jackson had played with the Trotters in the early 1960s, when the black community rejected the team as Uncle Toms, and he was determined to bridge that forty-year-old divide. He had consciously reached out to black organizations, had donated money to the United Negro College Fund and the NAACP, had done all the right things—but the FUBU clothing line did more than any of those to seal that gap. Eighteen-year-old kids, who weren’t old enough to remember when the Trotters were considered Toms, were snapping up sixty-dollar Globetrotter retro jerseys so fast the stores couldn’t keep them in stock. And older African Americans, who
did
remember when the Trotters were seen as Toms, were still buying $100 fleece warm-up suits with Goose Tatum’s name on the back. “[FUBU] sealed the gap,” Mannie says proudly. “It’s gone.”

Having rebuilt the Trotters’ credibility on the court and in corporate boardrooms, Mannie also set out to reclaim their image as “ambassadors of goodwill,” particularly in the black community. In April 1994, he donated $250,000 to the United Negro College Fund, the first of $10 million in charitable contributions he would make over the next decade.
*

Since 1998, the Globetrotters have been holding Summer Youth Basketball Camps in major cities across the country, with scholarships provided to inner-city kids. In June 1996, the Trotters were the first professional basketball team to tour the newly democratic South Africa, where they were welcomed by President Nelson Mandela. During their tour, they put on clinics for 300,000 kids, donated 50,000 basketballs and 5,000 hoops, and raised $1.5 million for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. The Trotters made a return visit to South Africa in 1997, where they performed for Mandela’s seventy-ninth birthday. In 2000, the Trotters had an audience with Pope John Paul II and made him an Honorary Globetrotter.

Further, Mannie hasn’t shied away from politically explosive issues. When the South Carolina NAACP called for an economic boycott of the state because of a controversy over the Confederate flag, Mannie donated $50,000 to the state NAACP and has refused to play in South Carolina ever since.

Today, the Globetrotters schedule community service events in every city on their tour. They have performed special Magic Circles with kids from the Foundation for Blind Children, have had cancer victims from the Make-A-Wish Foundation serve as honorary coaches, have given Black History presentations in public schools, and have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Red Cross national disaster relief fund (the Globetrotters donate one dollar for every mile their buses travel, which totaled $92,485 in 2003). In partnership with the U.S. Department of Education, the Globetrotters
now visit hundreds of elementary schools as spokespersons for the CHEER for Character program.
*

In the past ten years, the Harlem Globetrotters have reestablished their credibility on the court and with their fans and with corporate America. They have rebuilt their image in the African American community and reaffirmed their reputation as ambassadors of goodwill in the community at large. But the most difficult rebuilding job Mannie Jackson faced was with a much smaller community that held much greater animosity toward the Globetrotters: former players. For an organization whose entire history has been built around making people happy, it is astounding how many former players hold deep, personal grudges toward the Globetrotters, going all the way back to the era of Abe Saperstein. To them, the Globetrotters’ demise was not about falling gate receipts or losing credibility with corporate sponsors—it was personal.

Some former Trotters were still mad at Abe for cutting them, or for not paying them what they were worth. Some of them were mad because they felt exploited—because Abe got rich and they just got old. Some of them were angry because they had no pension and no health insurance for their ruptured disks and worn-out cartilage from too many games and too many miles on the bus. But most of all, they were angry for being ignored.

However they felt about Abe Saperstein, at least when he was alive the Globetrotters were a kind of family. Like many families, it was somewhat dysfunctional, with some members not speaking to each other, but a family nonetheless. Even after Abe died, at least Inman Jackson, Marie Linehan, and Joe Anzivino were still there and still remembered them. There was someone who would still laugh at their stories and make sure they had complimentary tickets when the Trotters came to town. Someone who would let them know when one of their old teammates passed on. But in the twenty-five years between Abe’s death and Mannie’s ascension, the Globetrotter players were ignored. Nobody in the corporate office even knew who they were. And they were pissed.