Life Is Always a Ball : The Faces Change, but Not the Quality of Harlem Globetrotters’ Performance

As he begins his job shortly after noon, Sweet Lou Dunbar walks slowly, which is understandable. He is getting over flu. He was in Las Vegas Saturday night. He was in Sacramento the night before that. Reno the night before that. Salt Lake City the night before that.

But this is the Forum and this is Sunday, so the ‘Clown Prince of Basketball” sits on his throne, a bench in the Laker locker room, and smiles broadly even if he has a royal headache.

“I love this job,” he says. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

All around Dunbar, the other members of the Harlem Globetrotters slip into their red, white and blue uniforms with the four stars on the jerseys.

“The only way I can describe the Harlem Globetrotters is fun, fun, fun,” says Rob (Skywalker) Wallace. “Every time I laugh, I laugh with my heart.”

In their 66th season, the Globetrotters have had fun with basketball by putting on shows in more than 100 countries before 100 million people.

Curley (Boo) Johnson empties two cardboard boxes of mail on the floor in front of his chair and sorts it into piles for each player.

Wallace opens a box containing a new pair of basketball shoes. He immediately starts to whoop with glee.

“These are the shoes that will take me to the other side,” Wallace shouts.

This is the third pair of shoes that Wallace, a four-year Globetrotter, has tried in a month.

“Meanwhile,” he says, “your feet are getting stomped.”

Lucius Levett, who plays the part of an official during the performances, passes out socks to the players. Reginald (Airman) Dixon starts needling him and Levett jokingly threatens to stuff a pair down his throat.

“Where’s my belt?” bellows Levett, who pulls a leather belt out of his bag and slaps it across a table.

The Globetrotters break up. There is more seriousness down the hall.

This afternoon, like almost every other time they perform, the Globetrotters play the Washington Generals. The Generals of coach/owner Red Klotz haven’t beaten the Globetrotters since 1971.

Any professional coach with a 21-year losing streak would probably be on shaky ground, but Klotz is unconcerned as he finishes a hot dog in the Generals’ locker room where his players watch a NBA game on television.

“I own the team,” he says.

But Klotz also used to be a player, and it was his shot at the buzzer that beat the Globetrotters the last time. For a while, Klotz served as player-coach, but he quit playing three years ago. He was 67.

By his estimation, Klotz has participated in more than 8,000 Globetrotter-General games. That seems long enough for a series to be fairly well established as a rivalry, but there really isn’t much of a rivalry when one team keeps winning.

“The Trotters are the show,” says Klotz, who named the Generals after Dwight D. Eisenhower. “We’re not funny. We’re not fancy.”

As Klotz talks, Sandra (Sweetness) Hodge, the Globetrotters’ female member, emerges from her separate locker room to run sprints down the hall.

“Ten minutes,” a team official announces.

Pauley Shore of MTV has brought a crew to shoot tape of him playing with the Globetrotters. In the tunnel outside the locker room, Hodge tries to teach Shore how to spin a ball on his fingertip. She gets it started and puts the ball on Shore’s finger. He drops it.

“Why did it fall off?” Shore asks.

“Maybe you’ve got a bad finger,” Hodge says.

Bob Karstens stands nearby. Karstens, 76, first played with the Globetrotters in 1942 when Goose Tatum left to join the Army Air Corps and is the only white ever to play with the Globetrotters.

Karstens remembers when he was traveling with the Globetrotters in 1957 in Rio de Janeiro and heavy rains flooded the storm sewers.

“The water came up underneath the floor in the place where we were playing and the court started to break up and float away,” he said. “We started jumping around from piece to piece, like we were on ice floes.”

The Forum is a much safer place. The Generals are introduced and get booed. The Globetrotters are introduced to cheers. Everybody seems to have a nickname. “The Protector of Paint,” “The Baron of Boards.” Hodge even has two--”The Darling of Dribble” to go along with “Sweetness,” which sort of clashes with Dunbar’s “Sweet Lou.”

At one break, an announcement is read that Globetrotter concessions are available, an assortment of goods that include Globetrotter sweatshirts, T-shirts, basketballs, wristbands, headbands, figurines, pennants and programs.

Business is brisk, and so is the game. The Generals try on offense, but don’t do much on defense except to try not to get in the way. Nobody in the stands seems to care.

This is entertainment, after all. The Globetrotters play with a basketball, but they aren’t really playing a basketball game.

“We are still a special team,” Wallace says. “We play basketball for comedy. The NBA, it’s all salary and seriousness.”

Laker General Manager Jerry West, for one, likes the Globetrotters for what they are.

“They’ve been tremendous for basketball,” he said. “They’ve shown there can be an entertaining side to the game other than our NBA game. People shouldn’t start making too many judgments on their relevance.”

Tumblers, dancers and drill teams entertain at halftime. Then the Globetrotters come back to finish off the Generals to keep Klotz’s 21-year losing streak intact.

In the locker room afterward, Dunbar wraps his sore knees. He has put on another funny show in his 14th year of performing, one worthy of at least a crown prince. He still has the after-effects of flu, however, and there is another show in a couple of hours.

“I’m fixing to eat some Tums right now,” Dunbar says.

He is still smiling.