Where did the Harlem Globetrotters get started?
It’s a classic trick question for the classic trickster basketball team. While New York’s Harlem neighborhood seems the obvious answer, it’s as wrong as guessing Jupiter.
The Globetrotters first called Chicago home, a fact you’d be hard-pressed to learn by traveling around the city. Most venues the team played in now exist only in memories.
Bronzeville’s Savoy Ballroom, the glitzy nightspot where the Globetrotters dribbled up and down the dance floor for decades, was paved over as a parking lot in the 1970s. The old armory gymnasium at South Giles Avenue and 35th Street, another frequent Globetrotters shoot-around court, now hosts the Chicago Military Academy.
Chicago Stadium, where the team, in 1948 and 1949, defeated the all-white Minneapolis Lakers — then considered the best team in the world — met the wrecking ball in 1995.
Younger Chicagoans, especially, have no memory of the team’s rich hometown history.
“I didn’t know until I got on the team,” said Jermaine Brown, a 1998 Proviso West High School graduate who now plays with the Globetrotters.
Historical markers or not, the Globetrotters have never let up, taking their smooth and somewhat saccharine brand of basketball everywhere from Appalachia to Albania. And for nearly 40 years, the team always came home to the South Side.
In fact, this month marks the 80th anniversary of the Harlem Globetrotters’ first road game, which took place Jan. 7, 1927, in Hinckley, a town about 15 miles west of Aurora.
So goes the story, anyway.
“Pretty much the entire official version of how the Globetrotters started is baloney,” said Ben Green, author of “Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters.”
Green said the team went through so many hands and changes, there’s really no way to determine when a “first game” occurred.
“The short version is that there was a black basketball team on the South Side, and they wanted to play outside of Chicago, and they needed a white face to book the team,” Green said.
That face belonged to Abe Saperstein, a London-born, Chicago-raised child of Polish immigrants, who transformed a group of former Wendell Phillips High School standouts into international barnstorming sensations. He didn’t create their playing style of mixing talent with showmanship, but he surely cultivated it.
It was also Saperstein, who in a bit of P.T. Barnum-like brilliance, added “Harlem” to the team’s name in the late 1920s to associate them with the famous neighborhood 800 miles away that was in the middle of its renaissance at that time.
“The guy was simply genius,” said Mannie Jackson, the former Fighting Illini starter and captain who graduated from the University of Illinois in 1960 and played for the Globetrotters before joining Honeywell, Inc.
In 1993, Jackson led a consortium that bought the Globetrotters and he’s now the team’s chief executive officer and chairman.
Jackson admitted that he, too, has a hard time separating fact from fiction in the team’s timeline — and he lived a part of it.
“I don’t know if [the 1927 Hinckley game] did or did not happen. Reports are very vague on it, but that’s history,” he said. “The concept though, of the Globetrotters traveling around in Saperstein’s old car, barnstorming games in any small town, is definitely true and accurate.
“And they were so good on and off the court, Chicago just fell in love with them.”
Indeed, and the team meant more than simply basketball, especially to black area youth, said Timuel Black Jr., a Chicago cultural historian.
“For those on the South and West Sides of Chicago, they were symbol of the possible. They were like our big brothers.”
Also, the fact that the Globetrotters almost always beat white teams — this when African-Americans lived as second-class citizens — was a sweet and satisfying sight.
“We saw hopes and dreams,” said Black, who remembers leaving a “Trotters” game having had an epiphany.
“If you get to be good enough, we could beat anybody,” he said.
So whatever did happen to all the love between Chicago and their Globetrotters?
Saperstein’s death in 1966 and quick sale of the team had a lot to do with it, Green said. “When Abe was still alive, Chicago was very supportive of the Globetrotters because Abe was such a presence. He just worked the press so well. But when Abe died, the Globetrotters moved away and the whole thing kind of faded away.”
By the time Jackson and a group of investors bought the Globetrotters and moved the headquarters to Arizona, the team had gone through several owners and lean periods.
At a 1993 ceremony announcing the Jackson-led takeover, he, alongside former players and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, declared a return to the team’s glory days and the revival of an “American treasure.” Thousands on hand applauded such exciting news happening in their neighborhood, which was just beginning to experience its own revival.
The ceremony’s location?
Harlem.
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jageorge@tribune.com
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Spanning the Globetrotters’ history
1927: According to the team, Abe Saperstein’s Harlem Globetrotters debut in Hinckley, Ill., before a crowd of about 300. Several historians say the game took place two years later. Records are unclear.
1942: Reece “Goose” Tatum joins theteam, and proceeds to develop many of the team’s signature comedic routines.
1945: Boid Buie, who has only one arm, signs with the team. He averages 18 points per game.
1948: The Chicago Stadium packs 18,000 fans who see the Globetrotters defeat the highly favored Minneapolis Lakers, 61-59. The Globetrotters repeat their victory the next year, too, but never again.
1950: The National Basketball Association racially integrates, and Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, a Globetrotter stand-out, becomes one of the first three African-Americans to sign with the NBA.
1957: George “Meadowlark” Lemon joins the Globetrotters. For the next 23 years, he is a fan favorite, delighting audiences with his talented play and comedic timing.
1959: Wilt Chamberlain joins the Globetrotters for one full season before heading to the NBA. Chamberlain continues to play with the team on apart-time basis for several more years, traveling during the NBA off-season.
1966: On March 15, Abe Saperstein, the team’s owner and visionary, dies at age 63. The Globetrotters are sold the next year to three businessmen, but the team stays in Chicago.
1970: CBS premieres the “The Harlem Globetrotters Show,” a popular Saturday morning cartoon.
1976: Team is sold to Metromedia Inc. and relocates to Los Angeles.
1986: International Broadcasting Corp. purchases the Harlem Globetrotters.
1993: Mannie Jackson, a former Globetrotter who grew up in downstate Edwardsville, leads a group of investors to purchase the team, which has fallen on hard times.
2000: Wilt Chamberlain becomes the first former Globetrotter to have his Globetrotter jersey retired.
2001: Honorary street block “Harlem Globetrotters Way” is declared along West Madison Street, site of the former Chicago Stadium and current United Center.
2002: The Globetrotters are inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
2005: Shamrock Capital Growth Fund, headed by Roy Disney, Walt’s nephew, acquires 80 percent ownership of the team. Mannie Jackson maintains 20 percent, and the titles of CEO and chairman.
Sources: Harlem Globetrotters; “Spinning the Globe,” Ben Green (Amistad); “Tricksters in the Madhouse,” John Christgau (University of Nebraska Press)
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Not everyone’s a winner. Who are those other guys?
Louis “Red” Klotz formed the Washington Generals in 1953 to play as the opposition team.
Since then, the Generals have been known as the Boston Shamrocks, the Baltimore Rockets, the Atlantic City Seagulls, the New Jersey Reds and the New York Nationals.
No matter what you call them, though, don’t call them winners — losing is just part of the job.
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Once-in-a-lifetime hoops experience
INDIANAPOLIS — Tanner Flack said he waited his entire life to see the Harlem Globetrotters play basketball in person, which probably isn’t too heavy a hardship when you consider he’s only 6 years old.
Nevertheless, the painful wait ended Monday, when Tanner got his chance to witness the Globetrotters defeat their perennial patsies, the New York Nationals, at the Conseco Fieldhouse.
Shaking pink pompoms of cotton candy, Tanner and his brother Trenton, 4, appeared edging toward nirvana as the game began, although no one looked more pleased than Mom.
“They’re big basketball fans, and they love the Globetrotters on `Scooby-Doo,'” Tina Flack said, adding that she, too, saw the team play and watched those early ’70s cartoons when she was a child.
In 2007, the Globetrotters still fill a 90-minute performance with well-worn shtick, including tossing a bucket of confetti, grabbing kids from the crowd and forgetting to dribble.
Kids and parents filled about a third of the fieldhouse seats Monday. Basically, little has changed through the decades in the Globetrotters’ aim to entertain at all costs, and that’s what makes the performance so ageless, said George “Sonny” Smith, who played with the team from 1948 until 1954 and attended Monday’s game with his son and grandsons.
“It’s the same show, but the guys are bigger now,” said Smith, 78, who also played Negro League baseball with the Chicago Giants.
Cleveland Harp, 72, works as a security guard at the fieldhouse on most days, but on Monday, he came to watch the game, sign autographs and recall the days he played with the Globetrotters for the 1953-54 season.
The former player, known as “The Deacon,” said he thinks he has figured out why the Globetrotters work so well.
“It’s an infectious thing, man,” he said, surrounded by players signing autographs and posing for pictures. “And it just gets better and better.”
–Jason George
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If you go . . .
The Globetrotters are playing three games in the Chicago area this weekend:
United Center
1 p.m. Saturday
Tickets are available at the United Center box office and through Ticketmaster (312-559-1212), or online at www.ticketmaster.com.
Sears Centre, Hoffman Estates
2 and 7 p.m. Sunday
Tickets are available at the Sears Centre box office, by phone at 888-SEARSTIX (732-7784)or online at www.searscentre.com.
