Ballhandling Skill Keeps Sherwin Durham’s Show on the Road

Sherwin Durham spoke into the telephone with no certainty in his voice.

“I’m in Charleston,” he said cautiously, testing the sound of it. “Charleston, West Virginia, “ he said with more conviction, and then he laughed at himself.

Charleston is just another in the string of towns Durham rolls through, mostly for one-night stands during which he sees little more than the inside of an arena and his hotel room.

“We’re always on the go, so I really have to think to recall where we’re at,” he said. “Actually, this is one of the towns we’re actually going to be able to stay two days. Those make you feel at home.”

Durham is a Harlem Globetrotter, and if the first part of that name is no longer literal, you’d better believe the second is. Durham, 27, was married in August, but he and his wife, Janice, have spent less than two weeks together since.

His dazzling ballhandling and passing skills used to grace the gyms of Bolsa Grande High School, Golden West College and Southern California College. Now, they delight crowds in far-flung arenas from America’s mid-size hometowns to Mexico, South America and Australia.

“You may get tired of the travel, but it’s a thrill every night to be able to put on that uniform, that red, white and blue,” Durham said. “No doubt about it. That’s the ultimate.”

Most of the towns he plays are a long way from Compton, where Durham first discovered the basketball showman in him as an 11-year-old, imitating the sliding, on-your-knees dribble that Marques Haynes and Curly Neal made famous.

“And I didn’t have knee pads,” Durham said, laughing at the thought.

It is that trick, the sliding dribble, that is his special routine now with his Globetrotter team, the junior of two touring squads. The other stopped in Irvine for a game this week.

“I’ve got that role right now,” Durham said. “It’s an honor just to be able to have that routine and follow in the footsteps of legends.”

The sliding dribble, of course, is only one move in a full bag of Globetrotter tricks.

“They’re kind of hard to explain,” Durham said. “You have your basic arm rolls and neck roll. You have a fake pass that you let slide down behind your back and catch with your opposite hand, so if you fake a pass with your right hand, you reach around and catch it with your left. Then there are different types of passes off those routines. There’s one you can slap off the back of your butt. We have a few kick passes, a few elbows passes.”

Dribbling and passing have always been Durham’s special talents, honed by years of practice.

“He was a gifted, gifted ballhandler even as a high school player,” said Southern California College Coach Bill Reynolds, who also works as a counselor at Bolsa Grande. When Reynolds first saw him, Durham was a 5-foot-2 high school freshman, a pipsqueak point guard who could dribble like nobody’s business.

“He was just a gifted dribbler, even then,” Reynolds said. “But his greatest asset was his ability to see people in the open court that other people couldn’t see.”

Bolsa Grande had good teams during the years Durham, a 1981 graduate, played there. But they were always overshadowed in the Garden Grove League by others such as Los Amigos, which had Clayton Olivier (now the Los Amigos coach) and La Quinta, which had Johnny Rogers, who went on to UC Irvine and has played in the NBA.

When Durham played at SCC, where he was an honorable mention All-American in 1985, “people didn’t press us,” Reynolds said. “We played some good teams, Loyola Marymount, the University of Portland. Nobody pressed us effectively with Sherwin in the backcourt.”

Durham’s skills were undeniable. His problem was that he was undersized. Even now, he is just 6 feet. He went to Golden West after high school, partly because his grades weren’t very good, and then on to SCC.

“He was a legitimate Division I basketball player who happened to play at an NAIA school,” said Reynolds, who watched Durham average 15 points and nine assists in 1985. “I think maybe some people shied away from him because of his size.”

But what he lacked there, he made up for in showmanship.

“We used to call him Mini-Magic,” Reynolds said. “His personality is just infectious. He really does look a little like Magic Johnson--big eyes, a big broad smile. He has a lot of Magic’s qualities, only he’s about a foot shorter.”

After college, Durham had hopes of making the NBA. A brother, Darius, had been a late-round NFL draft pick after playing at San Diego State and spent a year each as a wide receiver with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and San Francisco 49ers.

“I tried out summer league and kind of got my heart broken there,” Durham said.

By 1986, he had joined a splinter group of the Globetrotters, a touring team by the name of the Shooting Stars, run by Meadowlark Lemon. Durham played with the late Pete Maravich and with Neal, one of his idols.

This season, he got his chance to join the Globetrotters, a team with one of the most famous names in professional sports. He will make between $30,000 and $40,000 this season, and if he stays more than three years, his earnings stand to increase dramatically.

He still thinks about the NBA occasionally, even though it’s becoming a longer and longer shot.

“I still have that desire, even though I’m getting up there in age,” Durham said. “It would have to happen soon. If it doesn’t, I can be satisfied with a career here.

“I like to entertain people. When I’m playing, I want people there to go home and say something they remember, not only about myself but about the team. I take pride in getting people off their seat with a nice play.”