Spinning the Globe (6 page)

The grand opening was a tremendous success, as thousands of people turned out in their most elegant finery for the gala. Still basking in that afterglow, the white owner of the Savoy, I. J. (Jay) Faggen,
decided to expand beyond dancing to sports. There was a tradition in the African American community of combining dancing and basketball, particularly in Harlem, where the New York Rens played at the Renaissance Casino, and dancing (before and after their games) was part of the evening’s entertainment. When Faggen decided to replicate that model, it was only natural that he turned to Dick Hudson, who already had a successful team and, after his falling out with the Giles Post commander, was in need of a sponsor.

On December 31, 1927, the
Defender
announced that Hudson’s Savoy Bear Cats, as they were originally called, would make their debut at the Savoy Ballroom on January 3, 1928, against Howard University—with a dance to follow. The Bear Cats defeated Howard twice that first week of January, although by then “Bear Cats” had been dropped in favor of the name they would carry for posterity: the Savoy Big Five. Their inaugural games, like the Savoy’s inaugural ball, were extremely successful, with an estimated 1,200 people turning out for each. It was a propitious beginning for the new team in their new home, especially since the Savoy’s dance floor was not conducive to basketball. There were columns in the middle of the floor that blocked the view, the hardwood floor was slippery from wax and buffing, and, most annoyingly, there were no seats for the fans, so they had to stand the entire game, craning to catch a glimpse of the action between the columns.

To make sure fans realized that the Savoy Big Five was Hudson’s old Giles Post team, the
Defender
referred to them interchangeably as the Legion Five and the Savoy–Giles Post Big Five. It was the same crew: Hudson was the head coach and team manager, assisted by Bobby Anderson (a two-sport athlete who also played Negro League baseball), and the headline stars were the “old Phillips gang” of Tommy Brookins, who was selected as the team captain, along with Toots Wright, Randolph Ramsey, and Lester Johnson. The early box scores read like a Wendell Phillips class reunion, except for Joe Lillard, the bull from Iowa, and the former Lane Tech star Bill “Ham” Watson.

Only one unfamiliar name appeared in those box scores. It was a name that drew no special accolades or evoked any memories of past glories: Inman Jackson. He played only a backup role, scored a
total of two points in both games, and drew no mention in the press. It was the first appearance of a mystery man who would eventually rise to become the most famous player of them all.

Inman Jackson was such a private person that no one
ever
knew much about him. Even today there is little definitive information about his personal life, but this much is known: when he made his debut with the Savoy Big Five, he was nineteen years old, living on the South Side with his mother, Sarah, and working as a painter for a cab company. He reportedly went to high school at Lane Tech, Chicago’s noted vocational school, but there is no indication that he ever played basketball there. Of course, Bill Watson, his Savoy teammate, had been a star player at Lane and may have been responsible for getting Inman a tryout with the Savoy Big Five. Clearly, he was the most inexperienced player on the team—a raw, untested neophyte on a team of all-stars. Every other player had years of experience in high school and amateur ball, had played in city championship games and had seen their name—and often their picture—headlined in glory on the pages of the
Chicago Defender
. What Inman had going for him—the
only thing
he had going for him—was his size. He was six foot three—the tallest player on the squad and a giant by the standards of the day. In the Savoy’s in-house newsletter,
The Savoyager,
one gets the first hint of the greatness that he will achieve: “The big boy from Lane…plays a nice game and it is thought that before long he will make them all sit up and take notice.”

While the Savoy Big Five was successfully kicking off its first season, the attention of many South Side basketball fans was on a sensational young ballplayer who was rocketing to stardom: Runt Pullins was leading the Wendell Phillips lightweights on a run for the city championship. In January, the Phillips “ponies” ran off six straight wins, grabbing the lead in the Central Division race, and by early February they had clinched the division title. Runt’s face had become a fixture in the
Defender,
and his exploits moved sports editor Fay Young to invoke classical allusions: “Phillips’ little fellows can do more with a basketball than Nero could do with his fiddle.”

On March 10, Runt Pullins led the Phillips lightweights into
the championship game against Harrison High. The
Defender
had predicted that “the entire South Side [will] declare a holiday,” and, indeed, thousands of fans, including most of Phillips’ two-thousand-member student body, filled a specially reserved cheering section. With Harrison’s defense concentrating on stopping Pullins, two of his teammates were open under the basket all night and scored sixteen points between them. Phillips won an overwhelming victory, defeating Harrison in a landslide, 32–10. Even the staid
Chicago Tribune
was effusive in its praise, characterizing Phillips as “easily the best lightweight team the city league has had for several years.”

The Phillips players were hailed as conquering heroes when they returned to the South Side, and Runt Pullins above all others. The team was so popular, in fact, that no one wanted them to stop playing, so the following week the team was reconstituted as the “Savoy Flashes,” and played a preliminary game before the Savoy Big Five’s regular contest.

Runt Pullins’s high school career had ended, but his basketball exploits had just begun.

With the high school season over, the Savoy Big Five had the spotlight to itself. The squad had racked up wins against college teams from Wilberforce, Lincoln, and Fisk Universities; the Indianapolis YMCA; a renowned Pittsburgh Loendi club; the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity from New York; and two local Jewish teams, Irving Cohn Jewelers and the Jewish People’s Institute. With only one loss (in a return engagement with Wilberforce), the Big Five was starting to make enough noise in basketball circles that Dick Hudson issued a challenge to the New York Rens, the best black team in America, and one of the two best teams overall (along with the Original Celtics, a white team from New York).

But Hudson was overreaching. The Savoys took a tumble when George Halas’s Chicago Bruins, a brawny pro team from uptown, made its first visit to the Savoy Ballroom and “toyed with” the Big Five, running out to an 11–0 lead and coasting to a 29–25 win, in a game that wasn’t as close as the score indicated. Hudson’s team certainly wasn’t ready for the Rens.

The Bruins game also marked the first sign of any internal dissension. A few weeks earlier, Hudson had brought in a veteran
ballplayer from Cincinnati, Lawrence “Rock” Anderson, who had beat out Toots Wright for his starting job. In a huff, Wright quit the Savoy and joined the Fort Dearborn Elks, a newly formed black team that had played a few of its games at the Savoy.

By mid-April, the Negro League baseball season was opening, and basketball began to fade into the background. Two Savoy players, Joe Lillard and Rock Anderson, left town to practice with their baseball teams (Minneapolis and Cincinnati, respectively), although they were supposed to return for the final game of the season on April 14, against the Evanston Boosters.

And then, just prior to that game, the Savoy Big Five blew up—and the gory details were splashed across the pages of the
Defender
. The story was that Tommy Brookins, Randolph Ramsey, Bill Watson, and Inman Jackson had quit after objecting to bringing Lillard and Anderson back to Chicago for the final game, and paying them to play, when that money could have been divided among the remaining players. Brookins, the team captain, was apparently the ringleader of the insurgency, which left the Big Five shorthanded for the Evanston game. The Savoy management was able to cobble together a team by pulling in some older South Side stalwarts, and Lillard and Anderson returned in time to crush Evanston, 33–12.

The season ended with the Savoy Big Five in complete disarray. Of the players who had seen action in their first game, barely three months before, only Joe Lillard remained. This dramatic breakup at the end of the first season would have repercussions that would haunt Dick Hudson for years.

For Abe Saperstein, 1928 had to have been a disappointing year. His initial bookings for Hudson’s Giles Post tour of Wisconsin, a year earlier, had ended in controversy over the inflated college attributions, and once that tour ended, he was out of the picture.

He may have continued to book some Negro League baseball games for Walter Ball, but his promotional career was apparently floundering so badly that he took a job with the city. A regular job—
not
in sports. He was able to wrangle a patronage job from his local ward boss, working as a forester in Chicago’s massive Lincoln Park.
Abe had once hoped to study forestry at the University of Illinois, and this job involved hiring tree surgeons to maintain Lincoln Park’s canopy of trees. He even got his younger brother Harry a job with one of the tree surgeons.

Whatever he had going in sports, it wasn’t enough to quit his day job.

The 1928–29 basketball season brought many changes to the Savoy Big Five, which began preseason workouts in early November. First, Dick Hudson was gone, having been replaced as coach by Al Monroe, who was also a sportswriter for the
Defender
. Then Monroe scored a major coup by luring Specs Moten, a former New York Ren who was one of the best players in the game, to sign with the Savoy. And due to the success of the Big Five’s initial season, Savoy owner Faggen had even organized a Savoy girls’ team and had invited black college teams to play their home games at the ballroom.

The biggest change of all, however, was that Tommy Brookins and his insurgents had not returned. Apparently, their grievances about money had not been resolved over the summer. In fact, Brookins had gone so far as to form his own team. That announcement was made, with no fanfare, in the November 24, 1928, issue of the
Defender
in a minuscule four-sentence article that was sandwiched between a story about boxer Baby Jo Gans and ads for Kidney Plaster that promised to “End Lame Back!” and eczema medication guaranteed to “Stop the itching in one hour!”

The name of this new team was the Globe Trotters.

The article described how Brookins, Toots Wright, and Randolph Ramsey—the old triumvirate from the 1925 Wendell Phillips heavyweights—along with Inman Jackson, Bill Watson, Willis “Kid” Oliver (another former Phillips player), and Bobby Anderson (the previous assistant coach for the Savoy Big Five) had formed their own team called the Globe Trotters, which would be opening its season on the following Thursday, November 29, against a white team from Milwaukee. Interestingly, they would be playing at the Eighth Regiment Armory, their old stamping ground from the Giles Post days. Although his name was not listed in the article, it is very likely
that Dick Hudson also was involved with the new venture, which would explain his departure from the Savoy.

Brookins, who was clearly the leader of the team, also predicted that he had lined up the services of Joe Lillard and Rock Anderson, in effect stealing the heart of the Savoy team. But when the Savoy Big Five opened its season (with a redemptive 29–21 victory over the Chicago Bruins), Brookins’s prophecy proved false: Lillard and Anderson were both in the lineup, as were Bill Watson and Inman Jackson, who had apparently had second thoughts about going with Brookins and had returned to the fold. Brookins’s defection certainly didn’t hurt the Savoy at the box office, as more than two thousand fans, white and black, showed up for this interracial matchup.

The Savoy Big Five had a terrific second season, winning 33 of their 37 regular season games. One of those losses was to the legendary New York Rens, who made their first visit to Chicago in early February. Inman Jackson was getting more playing time this year, but the big fellow was still a second-teamer, a backup player to the Savoy’s big guns.

As for Tommy Brookins’s Globe Trotters, after that initial announcement in November, they completely disappeared from the pages of the
Defender
for two and a half months. Finally, on February 9, 1929, a lengthy article appeared, accompanied by a photo of Brookins, which previewed two upcoming games against Morgan College of Baltimore, to be held at the Eighth Regiment Armory.

There were two intriguing items at the end of the article. First, before the Globe Trotters took the court against Morgan College, a preliminary game was gong to be played by Runt Pullins’s All-Stars. Second, there was news that the Globe Trotters had “recently returned from a trip through southern Illinois, where they made an excellent showing, winning seven games and losing two.”

Now the story gets
really
interesting.

Thirty years ago, in the early 1970s, Tommy Brookins was living in St. Martin, in the French Antilles, a speck of an island in the Caribbean that is jointly owned by the French and the Dutch. At
that time, Brookins owned an Italian restaurant called Portofino on the island, but in the 1930s and ’40s he had been a celebrated singer and vaudevillian, entertaining all over the world. In his heyday, he had performed at the Palace Theater in New York, the Palladium in London, and had owned the Cabin in the Sky nightclub in Chicago with his partner and lover, Ethel Waters. His glory days as a basketball player on the South Side were far behind him.

Walking on the beach one day, he came upon Michael Strauss, a sportswriter for the
New York Times,
who was in his bathing trunks, strolling in the opposite direction. Strauss was there visiting his daughter, who lived on the island. A loquacious and outgoing type, Strauss had a habit of greeting everyone he met.