King of the Court Jesters : Anzivino Has Helped the Globetrotters Earn Respect, a Profit and Lots of Laughs

He gets up in the wee hours of the morning, when he hears the morning paper thump the driveway at his suburban Los Angeles home. By 6, the paper is read and he is on his way to the office. At 6:30, he’s in a paneled room running one of the world’s most successful basketball teams. His title: vice president and general manager.

This could be a profile of the Lakers’ Jerry West, but it’s really about a roly-poly ex-sports writer named Joe Anzivino, who is about a foot shorter than West and 20 years older. Anzivino recently was named GM of the Harlem Globetrotters and, like West, is responsible for the health and prosperity of a sports institution.

Never mind that the Globetrotters have not lost in nearly two decades. Their fans don’t really care about winning and losing. It’s the razzle-dazzle. Red, white and blue uniforms. Ballhandling wizardry. Water buckets. Balls attached to rubber bands. Players named Meadowlark and Goose. “Sweet Georgia Brown.” The Globetrotters are like the circus come to town. Fathers who were taken to games by their fathers are taking their children.

“The Globetrotters have been handed down from generation to generation,” Anzivino said. “It’s a worldwide phenomenon. We’ve played in 101 countries on six continents before three Popes and audiences as large as 75,000.”

Anzivino is sitting in his Hollywood office. Globetrotter photos and memorabilia spanning 61 years fill the walls. He points to a hanging wooden slab. “It’s a piece of the original floor from the gym in Hinckley, Ill., where the Globetrotters played their first game in 1927,” he said.

Anzivino has been connected with the Globetrotters for 27 years. He was hired by Abe Saperstein, the originator of the team and a colorful promoter. “Abe was the only person I ever knew who would go from L. A. to San Francisco by way of Honolulu,” Anzivino said.

Anzivino was the publicist for the Pacific Coast League’s Hawaii Islanders when he accepted an offer from Saperstein to be the Trotters’ advance man. This meant long stretches on the road. “When I got back from 16 weeks in Europe, my 2-year-old didn’t know me,” he said.

Then, in 1966, Saperstein died. “He never believed the Globetrotters were here to stay,” Anzivino said. “He believed that when he left this Earth, there’d be no Globetrotters.”

The organization not only stayed, it prospered. The Saperstein estate sold the team for $3.7 million in 1967 to a trio of Chicago businessmen headed by Potter Palmer. Nine years later, it was sold to Metromedia for $11 million. In December, 1986, Metromedia sold a package that included the Globetrotters, Ice Capades and 15 Ice Chalet skating rinks to International Broadcasting Corp., for $30 million.

After Saperstein’s death, a new corporate structure went up and, in 1969, Anzivino became a vice president. VP in charge of scheduling. VP in charge of player personnel. VP in charge of programs and publicity.

“I did just about every job in the company except rub down the athletes and be the coach,” Anzivino said.

His ascent to head Globetrotter was not big news in a sports community that considers the team slightly to the left of pro wrestling, but it made headlines in Youngstown, Ohio, Anzivino’s hometown. A local columnist made note of the promotion last April and recalled Anzivino’s days as an Ursuline High sports hall of famer.

Anzivino, a football and basketball star during the ‘30s in the Ohio steel town, broke his fingers so badly in a playground baseball game that he was classified 4-F during World War II. But instead of staying home, he got a job with the Navy and was sent to Hawaii to work on a Navy newspaper, the Pearl Harbor Banner. He became sports editor and, after the war, stayed in Hawaii and became sports editor of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.

“That’s how I met Saperstein,” Anzivino said. “He came over with the Globetrotters in 1946. It was the first place the team ever visited outside the continental United States. We developed a close relationship, but I never dreamed that one day I’d be occupying Abe Saperstein’s chair.”

In 1955, Anzivino left Hawaii to “try to save a doomed marriage” and went into the restaurant business in Oakland. On the side, he dabbled in publicity for an auto race track and promoted boxing. In Hawaii to publicize a hypnotist in 1961, he was offered the Islanders’ PR job and took it, but a month later, Saperstein called him about the job as the Trotters’ advance man.

“I told him I had a contract for the season and if he would wait until it was over, I’d join the Globetrotters,” Anzivino said. “Right after the season, I came running.”

Anzivino remarried in 1962. He and his wife Nita have three children and have lived in Agoura Hills since 1976. The trek down the Ventura Freeway used to be shorter before the Globetrotters moved their headquarters from Sherman Oaks to Hollywood 13 months ago. Still, early riser Anzivino is the first person at the office, which is in a building the team shares with the Ice Capades.

Like the Ice Capades, the Globetrotters aren’t taken seriously by the media, their entertainment quotient putting them in the realm of show business instead of sports. Besides, say the skeptics, aren’t the games fixed? The Globetrotters always beat the Washington Generals.

Anzivino has trouble with that image. “We put on a show, but basketball is our game,” he said. “Our main goal is to play a helluva game every time we go out. An awful lot of people believe our games are prearranged, but they’re not. Nobody has ever told Red Klotz he’s supposed to lose.”

It probably is only coincidence that Klotz’s team, the Generals, have lost 6,501 games in a row (as of May 31) and haven’t managed to win since Jan. 5, 1971, a date that Anzivino can’t forget.

“It was in Martin, Tenn.,” he said. “I have a brother-in-law there who went to see the game. He calls afterward and tells me the Generals won, 100-99. He says, ‘I didn’t come to see the Globetrotters get beat.’ ”

If they didn’t clown around, Anzivino says, the Globetrotters and Generals are capable of playing ball a notch below the level of the National Basketball Assn.

Both team are made up of former college stars. The Globetrotters’ current 11-man squad, which includes two women, was picked for all-round basketball skills, not only for an ability to generate laughs.

“We look for ballhandlers, not comics,” Anzivino said. “If we had 10 comics, we wouldn’t have a good team.”

A few star players are working on six-figure contracts, Anzivino said, and the average salary “is higher than the Italian leagues pay.” There are bonuses for good years, but it’s a hard life.

Except for a few weeks off at Christmas and a day off every three weeks, the team tours from late fall through August, playing 115 games in the United States and 150 to 160 games in Europe and South America.

It is ironic that a team founded because of segregation is still all black in the days of integration, but that’s part of the act, too. “We’re the Harlem Globetrotters,” Anzivino said, adding, “Nobody ever complains.”

The Globetrotters, Anzivino says, had a white player in the mid-’40s, Bob Karstens, and tried to sign Rick Barry in 1967 when Barry, then with the Golden State Warriors, was preparing to sit out a season and jump to the Oakland Oaks of American Basketball Assn. “We came awful close to signing him for that year,” Anzivino said. “But his legal counsel decided against it.”

Although Anzivino has no illusions about the outcome if the Globetrotters played the Lakers in a genuine game, there was a time when the Globetrotters proved to be the dominant team. It was 1948, when the NBA was off limits to blacks and the Globetrotters had stars such as Goose Tatum and Marques Haynes. According to a photo display in Anzivino’s office, the Lakers and Globetrotters met in an exhibition at Chicago Stadium. The Minneapolis Lakers were led by George Mikan and Jim Pollard, but the Globetrotters won, 61-59.

“It was a war,” Anzivino said, “but that game probably did more for the popularity of the Globetrotters than any game in the history of the club. Abe has said that that was the turning point.”

The Globetrotters, good, clean family fun and now an American tradition, are more popular than ever, Anzivino says. The team gets 200 fan letters a month “from kids all over the world,” he said. People even complain if the team doesn’t use the old gag standards like the confetti-filled water bucket.

This season, the Globetrotters will do their tricks before more than a million fans.

“The Globetrotters are in excellent shape,” Anzivino said. “We’ve had some phenomenal years.”

And business is so good that next season Anzivino will send out two teams of Globetrotters.

“It’s a damn hard thing to explain,” said Anzivino, “but the legend goes on.”