All-World in Basketball and Comedy

What would you have to guess is the greatest basketball team of all time? The Bill Russell Celtics of the 1960s? Perhaps. The Chamberlain-Baylor-West Lakers of the ‘70s? Possible. Won 33 consecutive games. Or the Kareem-Magic-Jamaal Wilkes Lakers of the ‘80s? A case could be made.

OK, but what of the Harlem Globetrotters men of all seasons? An annual record of 250-0. An all-time record of 17,515 or so victories vs. 331 losses? A winning streak once of 2,495 games? Is that any good?

How about a basketball team that once drew 75,000 fans? In Berlin, yet.

While we’re on the subject, what would you guess is the greatest comedy team of all time? Burns and Allen? Laurel and Hardy? Martin and Lewis? Rowan and Martin? The Keystone Kops?

How about the Harlem Globetrotters? They might have made more people laugh than all of the rest of them put together. And there was never a blue line or double-entendre in their routine. And their humor transcends boundaries. They find it as funny in Bombay as they do in Booth Bay.

You mention the Harlem Globetrotters and everybody smiles. Revolutions have been stopped in countries while they appeared. They have played before kings and convicts. In palaces and in prisons. They have played on the top of roofs and the bottom of swimming pools. They have played in the burning sands of Africa and the ice floes of Alaska. They have played on camelback, horseback, and on a court made of desktops.

No team in history has done more for their sport, not the ’27 Yankees, the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame, the Dream Team or the Lombardi Packers.

Who did more for the game of basketball? Who popularized the game in more places all over the globe? Before there were Dream Teams, before even there was an NBA, the Globetrotters were.

Did you know there was a time in this country, not too long ago, when the Harlem Globetrotters played in a double-bill with NBA teams--and the Globetrotters were on last, the headline act? The Knicks-Lakers would be on the undercard. People didn’t come to see them. They came to see Meadowlark Lemon, Goose Tatum, Marques Haynes or the great ballhandlers. The dunk shot might have originated with the Globies, the fast break.

Were they merely clowns? Hardly. They beat the reigning professional champions (the old George Mikan Minneapolis Lakers) once in two head-to-head games--and the professionals never again ran up against them. They annually trounced a college All-Star team for a dozen years in a series of matchups against the cream of America’s graduating classes. And beat them 146-56. And, in the last season, the total was 15 of 16.

They are as much a part of Americana as a harvest moon. Globetrotter memorabilia hangs in the Smithsonian along with Lindbergh’s airplane and Lincoln’s handwriting.

It is ironic that this historic group that came to symbolize the seven-foot jumpshooter was founded by a guy barely 5-3 and so round that, when someone dubbed him “Mr. Basketball,” they didn’t know whether that was a nickname or a description.

Abe Saperstein was as legendary as his team. He always hankered to be a sports entrepreneur, to own a baseball team but he began small, forming this all-black barnstorming basketball team in 1927 that he immediately set about to having it tour the sticks for pass-the-hat money.

Blacks were not barred from pro basketball. There was no pro basketball.

They were as deadly serious as the Boston Celtics at first. Until one night in a game in a frigid meeting hall in Iowa, a player accidentally backed into a red-hot potbellied stove and took off whooping and hollering with a trail of smoke curling off his backside. The crowd thought it was funny. So the Globetrotters added comic turns to the game. Chaplin was never funnier.

Like a prizefighter who tours with his chauffeur, the Globies went out and got a team of, so to speak, chauffeurs, a foil for their hilarious comedy and deadly shooting. Flouting entrepreneurial fears, they picked an all-white (or largely white) “opponent” and it was so accepted, it was a lesson for the promoters that Americans don’t care what color excellence comes in, they want it.

It was only one lesson in promotion the Globetrotters were to teach the sports world.

Their participation in NBA doubleheaders definitely helped establish the league, which had struggled in near-bankruptcy on its own.

It was quite evident to any spectator that the Globetrotters’ dexterity, quickness and magnificent coordination was gifted basketball, and there is no question their demonstration of prowess accelerated integration and broke down barriers. No pro team ever inspired the devotion and affection the Globetrotters could. They were as popular in Moscow, Russia, as Moscow, Ida. The Trotters introduced basketball all over the globe.

Wilt Chamberlain began his pro career with them. So did the Hall of Fame pitcher, Bob Gibson, who was an All-American basketball player at Creighton and had played against the Globies as a collegiate all-star.

The Globetrotters are in our neck of the woods this week, playing in the Anaheim Arena on Saturday and in the Sports Arena on Sunday afternoon. They are still America’s Team, and were long before the Dallas Cowboys preempted the title.

They are in their 68th year as an organization, and home is wherever they hang a basket and clear a floor. For the Globetrotters every basketball court in the world is home. Charles (Tex) Harrison was commenting on this quality in advance of the team’s visit the other afternoon. A longtime player and onetime coach of the Globies, Tex says “You can be in Timbuktu but, even if the person speaks no English if the music starts up to our theme song, Sweek Georgia Brown, his eyes will light up and he’ll say ‘the Globetrotters!’ ”

Their legacy is unique. Almost every sportswriter in the country has, at one time or another, faced the query, “How do you think the Globetrotters would do against a regular NBA team?”

Says Harrison: “At one time, the answer was easy: beat them bad. We have to get back to that level. There’s no doubt that integration hurt us. We used to get first pick of all the great players. Now the NBA grabs them. But we’re just glad to have contributed to that state of affairs.”

It’s just one of the many legacies these citizens of the world bequeathed to society. They were 45 years ahead of their time. Part circus, part sitcom--but basketball for the ages. A slam-dunk show business.