The helicopter hovered over Berlin’s Olympic Stadium and slowly descended toward the infield. The place was packed on that August day in 1951 with 75,000 fans who had come to witness the legerdemain of the Harlem Globetrotters.
That is still a world record for attendance at a basketball game, but it will be broken Saturday at Detroit’s Ford Field, where 77,000 are expected to watch Michigan State play Kentucky. But Saturday’s crowd will be far different from the one in Berlin, where many of those in attendance still remembered what happened in that same Olympic Stadium during the 1936 Summer Games.
There, in the face of Nazi propaganda, the African-American son of an Alabama sharecropper gave lie to Hitler’s twisted philosophy of Aryan superiority. Over the course of one Olympics, Jesse Owens won the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, the 4×100-meter relay and, most dramatically, the long jump.
Owens won the long jump only after receiving a tip from Luz Long, a blond, blue-eyed German who was his greatest rival. After Owens’ victory, Long hugged him in congratulations, but Hitler refused to shake his hand.
When the helicopter landed in the Olympic Stadium 15 years later and Jesse Owens emerged, the place erupted.
The track star stood on a piece of ground once known as the “Reich Sport Field Adolf Hitler,” bowed slightly and started a lap around the track. As he went through each turn, a deafening roar washed over him from that area of the stands.
“Then when he got all around, he took a long jump, but when he landed, he hurt his ankle,” remembered Marques Haynes, who was playing for the Globetrotters that day. So Owens motioned to Haynes and Sam Wheeler, another Trotter, and together they helped him up some stadium steps and to the box of German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.
“Mr. Owens,” Adenauer said, “in 1936, Hitler refused to give you his hand. Today, Mr. Owens, I give you both my hands.”
“When they heard that, the crowd went wild,” Haynes said, his awe still evident all these years later. “It was the loudest ovation I’ve ever heard. I don’t think there will ever be another ovation like [that] one.”
The ovation lasted a full 15 minutes.
An international phenomenon
Marques Haynes refuses to give his age, but around 80 is a good guess. He will be at Ford Field on Saturday, and so will some of the current Globetrotters, who will appear at the United Center in mid-January. In the second half, when the official attendance is announced, Trotters President/CEO Mannie Jackson will present Michigan State officials with a golden turnstile to commemorate the record-setting afternoon, which will be remembered far more than the game itself.
“It will be a fun environment,” Kentucky coach Tubby Smith said. Far different from the one that surrounded the Trotters back in 1951.
World War II’s end had brought on the ideological battle that came to be known as the Cold War. Stalin still ruled Russia, Europe still was recovering from the war’s devastation, and governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain were looking for ways to trumpet their form of life.
The Globetrotters were celebrating their 25th anniversary and were well established as an international phenomenon. They had Haynes, who revolutionized the art of ballhandling, and Goose Tatum, the clown prince.
“No matter how popular they were here, they were more popular overseas,” said author Ben Green, who is writing a history of the Trotters. “Most of the people in this country think of the Globetrotters as Meadowlark [Lemon] and Curly [Neal]. They have no idea of the impact they had around the world.”
Unofficial ambassadors
That impact did not go unnoticed in Washington. U.S. officials enlisted the aid of Abe Saperstein, the Trotters’ founder and president.
“There was a clear cooperation between the Trotters and the State Department for a number of years,” Green said. “They saw the Trotters as great propaganda to counteract the Soviet claims of blacks as slaves in America.
“There’s tremendous irony in that. They were treated like royalty when they went to Europe, but they couldn’t eat in [many] restaurants when they came back home.”
Jackson, who grew up in Edwardsville, Ill., played for Illinois in the late 1950s and the Trotters in the 1960s. He said Saperstein, “because of his travels and the respect the team had, was so close to the State Department it was as if he were an agent. It was routine then that the State Department oversaw where the Globetrotters played as opposed to today. We knew that. We knew we were sanctioned, and one of the things we did [on an overseas tour] was visit the embassy. We were treated like VIPs.”
The Globetrotters kicked off their silver anniversary tour by beating the College All-Stars before a then-U.S. record crowd of 31,684 at the Rose Bowl. In late April they made their first trip to South America, where they played before 50,041 in Rio de Janeiro, and later it was on to Europe, where there were few indoor courts and they performed under extreme conditions.
“It rained 25 out of the 33 days we played out of doors in France, but the show went right on,” Haynes told the Stars and Stripes’ European edition in August 1951. “In the French city of Nimes, we played in a bullring built by the Romans almost 2,000 years ago. And in the bullfighting city of Barcelona, we played on a tennis court.”
In Munich, they played before 9,000 on a puddle-filled concrete court, and from there they would go on to Mannheim and to Frankfurt, to Wiesbaden and to Breman, and finally, on Aug. 21, to Berlin. The Communists had a giant youth rally scheduled for East Berlin. The Globetrotters were the West’s response.
The weather, Haynes remembers, was perfect, and that nearly everyone in the stands used binoculars.
“There were so many people in the place, people all over, people everywhere,” he said. “I think after they gave out all the tickets, they let other people in. It was a mad thing but very orderly. I heard later, on the other side, that a lot of people heard what was going on and tried to come over, but they weren’t letting them out.
“It was a great affair, and I don’t think we’ll ever know how many people actually saw that game. It was far in excess [of 75,000].”
The game itself was held up until the cheering for Owens subsided, and then the Trotters went out and defeated the Boston Whirlwinds. The fans reacted to every slick pass, to every sleight-of-hand, to every one of the dribbling exhibitions that eventually earned Haynes a place in the Basketball Hall of Fame.
“We got response to everything,” he said. “It was something they’d not seen before.”
The significance is not lost on Jackson.
“It’s hard for this generation to realize how important that game was, but it was far from just another game,” he said.
“The event itself, realize the area’s still war-torn, the so-called losers are still pretty adamant, there’s still animosity, there’s still racial and ethnic divides. Then that nation, as part of its healing, steps out and accepts a group of black ballplayers from this country owned by a Jew and celebrates. It was probably one of their more significant healing points.
“When I was a kid, I’d hear Marques talk about it and get chills. I’d think, `Oh, my. Imagine that.’ It was a very symbolic moment. The attendance was one thing and the Michigan State thing will be cool. But the real story is what that game meant.
“The emotions were so high, the scene was so surreal, it was one of those great American moments. One of those special American moments. The symbolism of it all.”
Missing passenger
The moment did not end with the game. The fans wanted autographs. As the Trotters walked to their bus, they were engulfed in a surging and pleading mass of humanity. Two hours passed before the players made their way to safety.
Once on the bus, they took a last look around and realized they still were missing one member of their troupe.
“Jesse,” Marques Haynes remembered with a soft chuckle. “Everyone was on but Jesse. We looked out the window and he was still out there signing autographs and taking pictures.
“He was out there for another hour.”
Other record crowds
Soccer
199,854 Brazil vs. Uruguay, World Cup final, Rio de Janeiro, July 16, 1950.
NFL
112,376 Dallas vs. Houston in Mexico City (exhib.), Aug. 14, 1994
College football
112,118 Ohio State at Michigan, Nov. 22, 2003
Major League Baseball
92,394 White Sox at Dodgers, World Series Game 5, Oct. 6, 1959 (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text)
Hockey
74,554 Michigan vs. Michigan State, at Spartan Stadium, Oct. 6, 2001
Sources: Guinness Book of World Records, news accounts.
