Spinning the Globe (51 page)

Fred “Preacher” Smith

George “Sonny” Smith

Gerald “Deep” Smith

Herbert Smith

Howard Smith

John Ford Smith

“Little” John Smith

“Fabulous” Leon Smith

Orick Smith

Thomas “Tarzan” Spencer

Larry Spicer

Larry Spriggs

Khary Stanley

Frank Stephens

Harrison Stepter

George Stevenson

Jackie Stevenson

Albert Stirrup

Lee Andrew Stoglin Maurice Stokes

Frank Streety

William “The Prince” Stringfellow

Othello Strong

Ted Strong

Murphy Summons Kevin Sutlon

Shannon Swillis

Harry Sykes

Shon Tarver

Jermaine Tate

Reece “Goose” Tatum

Harry “Trees” Taylor

Herb Taylor

Herman “Honey” Taylor

Fred Thomas

Willie Thomas

Garnett Thompson

Dallas “Big D” Thornton

Murdock Thornton

Homer Thurman

Tony Tolbert

“Shark” Tserenjanhor

“Slick” Al Tucker

Ed Tucker

James Tucker

William Tupelo

Roman “Doc” Turmon

Bridget Turner

Herschell Turner

John Turner

Wayne Turner

Johnny Tyson

Jim Usery

David Vaughn

Govoner Vaughn

Jeremy Veal

Jerry Venable

Conley Verdun

Wun “The Shot” Versher

Quincy Wadley

Ernie Wagner

Joyce “The Juice” Walker

Leroy Walker

Robert “Skywalker” Wallace

Charles “Tiny” Ward

Hammie Ward

Andy Washington

Frank Washington

James “Nuggie” Watkins

Johnny Watts

Kenyan Weaks

Winfield Welch

Charles “Bubba” Wells

DuJuan Wheat

Sam “Boom Boom”

Wheeler

Tyson Wheeler

Jackie White

Vincent White

Charles Whiteman Jr.

Tony Wilcox

Al Williams

Brandon Williams

Donald Williams

Ella Williams

Jermaine Williams

John “Hot Plate” Williams

Koney Williams

Orlando Williams

Robert Williams

Sean “Elevator” Williams

Tracy Williams

Clarence “Cave” Wilson

“Jumping” Johnny Wilson

Michael “Wild Thing” Wilson

Ron Wilson

Willie Wilson

Jackson Winters

Robert “Sonny” Woods

Lynette Woodard

Bruce Wright

David Wright

Kareem Wright

Walter “Toots” Wright

John “Yank” Yancey

Charles Young

George “Jake” Young

Vertes Zeigler

B
en Hogan once said, famously, that he found his near-perfect golf swing “in the dirt.” I thought of that comment many times in the past three years, because I felt as if I was digging this story out of the dirt. The Globetrotters have existed since the late 1920s, but there are
no
records prior to the late 1940s—no schedules, rosters, or correspondence. When I started my research, there was no way to know where the Globetrotters had played in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, or ’80s. In the early years, Abe Saperstein ran the tour out of his hat and coat, and until Marie Linehan arrived in 1945, apparently little, if anything, was preserved. And after the team was sold four times between 1967 and 1993, much of what had been preserved was lost.

So I had to find it “in the dirt”—primarily, in old newspapers. The most reliable source, for obvious reasons, was the black press, so I read every issue of the
Chicago Defender
and
Pittsburgh Courier
from 1922 to the late 1960s. The
Defender,
in particular, was the “newspaper of record” for every significant event in early Globetrotter history. I also scoured the
Baltimore Afro-American
and the
Amsterdam News,
although they proved less helpful. Many old newspapers are now available on the Internet, but the grunt work still had to be done with microfilm in the basement of university libraries. My eyesight may never be the same. Fortuitously, J Michael Kenyon found me six months into my research, and he had a thirty-year head start
cataloging old newspapers; his archive filled in
decades
of missing Trotter games.

The other great newspaper resource was in the Globetrotters’ headquarters in Phoenix, where Govoner Vaughn has filled three large binders with original news clippings, covering games from 1930 to 1945. Unfortunately, the clippings from the 1930s were never dated or identified, but J Michael was able to cross-reference and identify many of them.

The most exciting research discovery was finding the “missing” Globetrotter records—seventeen banker’s boxes of material—in the Center for American History at the University of Texas. In the late 1980s, Marie Linehan and Joe Anzivino, the last of the old-time front office staff, decided to preserve the most significant team records before they were tossed in the dumpster by the new corporate owners. Marie filled two boxes, which comprise the Abe Saperstein Collection, and there are fifteen additional boxes in the Joseph Anzivino Collection. These boxes include dozens of press clippings, team yearbooks and College All-Star programs, massive amounts of correspondence and marketing letters, Abe’s travel logs and estate records, chronologies of all Globetrotter television appearances, Abe’s complete files on the American Basketball League, financial and attendance records, team rosters and schedules (from 1961 on), records of lawsuits and labor-management conflicts, and an entire box of photographs.

A summary of the major sources for each chapter follows:

In chapter 1, details about New Year’s Day 1950 and the Globetrotters’ first game in Madison Square Garden were extracted from New York newspapers, including the
Times, Daily News, Herald Tribune, Daily Mirror,
and
New York Age;
from Paramount News’s “Eyes and Ears of the World,” dated January 28, 1950, which is available at the Special Media Archives Services Division of the National Archives in College Park, Maryland; and from interviews with Marques Haynes and Frank Washington.

In chapter 2, historical information on Chicago, Jewish immigration, the Great Migration, and the 1919 race riot was drawn from numerous reference books, including
City of the Century, Land of Hope, Black Chicago, The Negro in Chicago, Jews in Chicago, Maxwell
Street: Survival in a Bazaar, The Gold Coast and the Slum, Bronzeville, An Autobiography of Black Politics, The Slum and the Ghetto, Race Riot, Kup’s Chicago,
and
The South Side.
Details about Abe Saperstein’s family and upbringing were based on interviews with his three surviving siblings, on U.S. Census records, and on Lake View High School yearbooks. His basketball career was documented in the
Chicago Tribune
and
Chicago Evening Post.
The involvement of Jews in basketball was drawn from
Ellis Island to Ebbets Field
and
City Games.
The history of basketball on the South Side was influenced by Gerald Gems’s “Blocked Shot” and
Windy City Wars,
as well as Robert Pruter’s
Early Phillips High School Teams.
Biographical information about the first Globetrotter players was drawn from U.S. Census records and interviews with Napoleon Oliver, Timuel Black, and Larry Hawkins.

In chapter 3, the history of the Giles Post American Legion, the Savoy Big Five, and Tommy Brookins’s Globetrotters was drawn from the
Defender,
Michael Strauss’s interview with Tommy Brookins, Kenyon’s archive, and my interviews with Kenyon and Strauss.

Primary sources for chapters 4 through 7 included Govoner Vaughn’s clipping files, Kenyon’s archive, Globetrotter press releases, numerous interviews Abe gave to sportswriters, and my own interviews with Napoleon Oliver, John Isaacs, Nugie Watkins, and Timuel Black. Descriptions of basketball in the 1930s came from Frank Basloe’s
I Grew Up With Basketball, Cages to Jump Shots
by Robert W. Peterson,
24 Seconds to Shoot
by Leonard Koppett,
A Hard Road to Glory
by Arthur R. Ashe Jr.,
Elevating the Game
by Nelson George,
Fifty Years of Basketball
by Joe Lapchick,
Smashing Barriers
by Richard Lapchick, and
The Ronald Encyclopedia of Basketball.
Information about the Trotters’ rivalry with the New York Rens came from Susan Rayl’s dissertation “The New York Renaissance Professional Black Basketball Team, 1923–1950” and from articles in the
Defender, Courier, Afro-American, Amsterdam News,
and the
People’s Voice.
The history of minstrelsy and black humor in America was drawn from
Sambo
by Joseph Boskin and
On the Real Side
by Mel Watkins. Information on the World Pro Tournament came from Chicago papers, including the
Defender, American, Herald-Examiner, Tribune,
and
Daily News,
as well as the
Pittsburgh Courier
and the
Sheboygan Press.

Background on Goose Tatum, in chapter 8, came from interviews with former teammates, Arkansas friends, and surviving relatives, along with U.S. Census records and various newspaper articles. Similarly, information about Marques Haynes, in chapter 9, came from newspaper articles, interviews with former teammates, and with Haynes himself. Langston University’s 1946 victory over the Globetrotters was documented in the
Daily Oklahoman.
Information about the Globetrotters’ front office staff came from interviews with Wyonella Smith and Katherine Linehan, and from the Saperstein and Anzivino collections at the University of Texas. Details on the Trotters-Lakers games, in chapter 10, came from newspapers in Chicago and Minneapolis, previously published interviews with key participants, George Mikan’s two autobiographies, a sixteen-minute outtake of a 1949 Movietone newsreel, and my interviews with Marques Haynes, Vertes Zeigler, Ray Meyer, and Timuel Black. Information in chapters 11 and 12, about the College All-Stars and the Globetrotters’ overseas tours, was drawn from magazine articles (including
Reader’s Digest,
January 1952;
Negro Digest,
May 1950;
True Magazine,
April 1952;
Collier’s,
November 13, 1948, and January 31, 1953;
The American Mercury,
December 1955), Globetrotter year-books, the Saperstein and Anzivino collections at UT,
Around the World with the Harlem Globetrotters
by Dave Zinkoff and Edgar Williams,
Never Lose
by Dr. John Kline, and interviews with former Globetrotters and Ray Meyer. Details about Abe Saperstein and the integration of the NBA came from the Saperstein and Anzivino collections and Ron Thomas’s
They Cleared the Lane.
The role of the U.S. State Department in booking the Trotters overseas was documented in the National Archives in College Park, Maryland (Records Group 59, Central Decimal File 1950–54); and in “Saperstein’s Sambos,” by Josh Wetterhahn (a senior thesis at Northwestern University), “Spreading the Gospel of Basketball: The State Department and the Harlem Globetrotters, 1945–1954” by Damion Thomas, and the books
Race Against Empire
and
Parting the Curtain.

Background information for chapters 13 through 17 and the epilogue came from interviews with numerous former Trotters, team records in Phoenix, and the Saperstein and Anzivino collections at UT. Wilt Chamberlain’s recollections about the Trotters were printed
in his memoirs (
Goliath: A View from Above
and
Wilt
) and in
Look
magazine (“Why I Am Quitting College,” June 10, 1958). Bill Russell’s interactions with Abe Saperstein were documented in his autobiography,
Go Up for Glory;
his claim that Abe showed him pornographic pictures was made in a televised interview in Seattle in 1975, which was later printed in the
Everett
[Wash.]
Herald
( January 9, 1976). Criticisms of the Globetrotters as Uncle Toms were drawn from
Foul: The Connie Hawkins Story, Elevating the Game, Basketball Jones, The Black Athlete: A Shameful Story, Winning Is the Only Thing, Darwin’s Athletes, Sports in America
by James Michener, and “The Harlem Globetrotters and the Perpetuation of the Black Stereotype” by Ben Lombardo.

I
am always afraid, in writing the acknowledgments for a book, that I will leave out someone who helped me along the way; and I’m even more afraid than usual with this book because there are so many people in that category.

I want to start by thanking the person who originally suggested the book, my literary agent, Jim Rutman. My first reaction when he called was to ask, incredulously, “There’s never been a book on the Globetrotters?” Today, I’m still incredulous that an organization that has been around for nearly eighty years has never engendered a comprehensive history. I have felt thankful, on many occasions, for being the writer who got to do that book, and for Jim’s thoughtful guidance from beginning to end.

I felt a sense of responsibility to get the story right, and also a sense of urgency. Many of the principal characters in the story are already dead, and many of the surviving Globetrotters are in their seventies or eighties. If the book didn’t happen soon, I was afraid that it might not happen at all.

In that respect, I want to thank HarperCollins, and Dawn Davis, the executive editor of Amistad Press, in particular, for appreciating the importance of the story and for being committed to seeing it into print. I’ve felt lucky to be the one writing this book, and lucky as well to have Herb Schaffner as my editor. I have never had an editor who was so engaged, enthusiastic, and dedicated to making this book the best it could be. I’ve felt as if I had a partner, a colleague, and a friend at every step along the way.

Next, I want to acknowledge the contributions of the Harlem Globetrotters’ staff, including Colleen Lenihan, Eve Miner, Brian Killgore, Cassandra Jackson, and Jeff Munn. Most important, I want to appreciate Govoner Vaughn, the Globetrotter’s director of alumni relations, who put up with me camping out in his office and rummaging through his file cabinets, and Brett Meister, the vice president of communications, who has been my number-one point of contact for the entire project. We have shared long drives, cold pizza, baseball sagas, faulty cell phone connections, stories about our daughters, and two years of hard work to make this book happen.

One of my most pleasant surprises was discovering a network of researchers, journalists, and Globetrotter fans across the country who have been collecting information about the Trotters for years, and I want to thank those who graciously shared their knowledge with me, including: Lyle K. Wilson, Gerald Gems, John Carroll, Susan Rayl, and Robert Pruter (who, in addition to writing about basketball at Wendell Phillips High School, also sent me a copy of Michael Strauss’s interview with Tommy Brookins on the origins of the Globetrotters). The Web site of the Association of Professional Basketball Research proved to be a gold mine of information about the Globetrotters, and I want to thank APBR members John Grasso, James B. Rasco, Dan Quinn, Bijan C. Bayne, and Robert Bradley for their help. Two noted Chicagoans, Timuel Black and Larry Hawkins, provided valuable insights on the Trotters’ identity in Chicago’s black community.

I want to give special thanks to Michael Strauss, for his detailed recollections of his interview with Tommy Brookins; Jay Smith, from WTTW in Chicago, the producer of an award-winning documentary on the Globetrotters, who shared his interview notes and contact list, which became guideposts for my own research; John Christgau, author of the recently published
Tricksters in the Madhouse,
on the 1948 Lakers-Trotters game, who recommended important works on the history of minstrelsy and shared an incredible sixteen-minute archival film of the 1949 Lakers-Trotters game. One of the most helpful, and enthusiastic, supporters of this project has been Bill Hoover, the resident expert on Globetrotters from Detroit, who hooked me up with J Michael Kenyon, shared his own biographical
sketches of Detroit Trotters, and took me on a wonderful driving tour of famous sites in the history of Detroit basketball.

Many others assisted me along the way, including: Karen Siciliano, Sandi Frost, Carolyn Pendergrass, Robin Jonathan Deutsch, Jeff Sauve, Tom Frederick, and Josh Wetterhahn.

It was the personal recollections of actual participants in the Globetrotters’ saga that brought this story to life. I want to thank Abe Saperstein’s siblings, Leah Raemer Saperstein, Fay Saperstein, and Harry Saperstein (who passed away in May 2004, at age ninety-one), for sharing insights about their family and Abe’s upbringing. I also appreciate the interest and support of Abe’s grandson, Lanier Saperstein. Napoleon Oliver, the brother of one of the original Globetrotters, was a delightful resource for understanding the players and the world in which they grew up. Wyonella Smith, who worked for the Globetrotters for over twenty years, helped me understand the inner workings of the front office. I also deeply appreciate Nita Anzivino and Katherine Linehan for steering me to a treasure trove of untapped Globetrotter materials at the University of Texas. And I thank Ray Meyer, longtime DePaul University basketball coach, for sharing his memories of the College All-Star tours.

One of my biggest challenges was bringing Goose Tatum to life, and I appreciate the assistance of Darren Ivy, Jim “Newt” Ellis, Elvie Walker, Marzell Smith, and Jimmie Armstead in doing that. I also want to thank Goose’s family—Shirley McDaniel, Bill Powell, Marjorie Tatum Byrd, and a late surprise, Reece Tatum III—for helping me portray the man as he was.

Ultimately, the richest source of information about the Harlem Globetrotters came from Globetrotters themselves, and I greatly appreciate the willingness of so many former Trotters to share their memories. I only wish there had been space to include more of their stories, and more of their names, in the book. I want to thank Rob Ashton, Geese Ausbie, Don Barnette, Nate Branch, Hallie Bryant, Alvin Clinkscales, Kara Coates, Mel Davis, J. C. Gibson, Chuck Holton, Bobby Hunter, John Isaacs, Bob Karstens, Dr. Johnny Kline, Elzie Lewis, Curly Neal, Charlie Primus, George Smith, Frank Stephens, Harry Sykes, Frank Washington, Jim “Nugie” Watkins, Bob Williams, and Vertes Zeigler. I had brief conversations with other
former players, including Bob “Showboat” Hall, Mike Jackson, Max Jameson, Dedrick Reffigee, Larry “Gator” Rivers, Ernie Wagner, and Lynette Woodard. One of the nicest things that happened to me while working on the book was spending many hours on the phone with Marques Haynes, who provided invaluable details about the team. I am also extremely thankful for the input of current Globetrotter players and coaches, including “Sweet Lou” Dunbar, Paul “Showtime” Gaffney, Curley “Boo” Johnson, Clyde Sinclair, Wun Versher, Michael Wilson, and longtime coach Tex Harrison.

Finally, I want to thank two men who were absolutely essential to this project. Mannie Jackson, the owner and chairman of the Harlem Globetrotters, gave me unlimited access to the team’s archives and went out of his way to encourage all former players to talk to me. I appreciate Mannie’s trust that I would tell the story truthfully and fairly. And on a personal level, I have enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of talking to someone who has thought so deeply about the Trotters’ legacy.

Without J Michael Kenyon, I could have written a book of some kind, but I never could have written
this
book. After nearly thirty years of research, he is the greatest storehouse of knowledge about the Trotters in the world. And in an incredibly generous act of professional courtesy, he shared all of that with me. He sent me hundreds of pages of material, answered dozens of late-night queries, fact-checked and critiqued the entire manuscript, and was undoubtedly the most valuable resource for getting this story right. J Michael, I can never express how much I value your help and, more important, your friendship.

Last, but not least, I want to thank my family—my wife, Tracie, and my daughters, Emmy and Eliza—for tolerating my living in a cave for the past six months, trying to finish the manuscript. I barely came out of my office, except for food and water. Girls, I owe you big-time, and am looking forward to returning to a normal life.