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Globetrotters go for legitimacy
If the natural order of things has returned to basketball, perhaps a new president isn't far behind. The Harlem Globetrotters -- mired in a one-game losing streak as a result of their visit to defending NCAA champion Michigan State on Monday night -- defeated Purdue 74-65 Wednesday to push their all-time won-lost record to 20,359-333. So it's OK to laugh again. But before doing so, we should take a few moments to consider where Globetrotters owner and chairman Mannie Jackson's decision to compete against top-tier collegians fits in the team's history. The Trotters used to be stocked with talent and fired with purpose. They couldn't help but be: For 24 years after the team's founding in 1926, black Americans couldn't play for pay anywhere else. In 1948 and '49 the Trotters left no doubt about the bona fides of black ballplayers by defeating the Minneapolis Lakers and George Mikan, the defending NBA champions. And the following summer they launched the project that helped change the course of the pro game. Owner Abe Saperstein committed the team to a barnstorming tour in 1950, a "World Series of Basketball" against such college all-stars as Paul Arizin and Bob Cousy. (Imagine it: Cousy and Marques Haynes, breaking each other's ankles!) The Globetrotters won 11 of those 18 games, and NBA owners took notice. What happened next happened quickly. One of the Trotters' stars was Nat (Sweetwater) Clifton, the one-time Chicago cab driver whose nickname followed from his taste for soda pop. Clifton found out that each (white) college all-star pocketed more for the tour than each Trotter had, and he shared what he'd learned with his teammates. This enraged Saperstein who, believing he was entitled to first dibs on all black talent, was already furious at Boston Celtics owner Walter Brown for drafting Chuck Cooper of Duquesne back in April. So in a fit of pique, Saperstein punished both Brown and Clifton, selling Clifton's contract to the Celtics' archrival, the New York Knicks. That fall Cooper and Clifton, along with Earl Lloyd, became the first African-Americans to play in the NBA. If Kentucky's loss to Texas Western in the 1966 NCAA title game is the Brown v. Board of Education of college basketball, the series with the Lakers and the World Series of Basketball constitute the Brown decision's NBA equivalent. Three years later, upon learning that Saperstein was trying to sell him to the Philadelphia Warriors, Marques Haynes objected and asked for a bump in salary instead. When Saperstein refused, Haynes left, founded the Harlem Magicians, and two years later lured the Trotters' Reece (Goose) Tatum to join him. For 40 years from that point the Trotters deteriorated steadily, eventually becoming, literally, a Saturday-morning cartoon. It took Jackson, a former Trotter who once had a 43-inch vertical jump, to launch the team on its great leap forward. A former executive with Honeywell, he bought the team in 1993, set straight its wobbly finances, pledged as much fealty to fundamentals as fun, and began burnishing a brand name as gilded as the Celtics'. Since Jackson assumed ownership the team has occupied a kind of magic circle. In 1995 the Globetrotters finally lost a game, to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Legendary All-Stars, but they beat those former NBA players in 10 other meetings. In '97 the Trotters bested a college all-star team with seven NBA first-round picks. (Until their loss to the No. 3 Spartans on Nov. 13, the Trotters hadn't lost to a college team since 1962, when one of the final contingents of all-stars from the World Series of Basketball beat them 101-89.) And at last spring's Final Four in Indianapolis, the Trotters beat a team of college all-stars once again, in the NABC Roundball Challenge, a newly formalized version of the hoary World Series. That rivalry will be renewed at the Final Four in Minneapolis and may well become a fixture of March Madness. Each year college teams are torn asunder by teenagers lighting out for the NBA. NBA teams are destabilized by the annual free-agency merry-go-round. CBA teams are reconstituted anew, it seems, every few months. You could argue that, for all their loosey-gooseyness, the Trotters are the most stable assemblage of pros in the land. They play more games together than any other team, and thus cohere in ways that ought to please a purist. It was no "ream" (Trottertalk for one of their capering routines) that got the Globies back on the beam Wednesday in West Lafayette, Ind., but 20 solid points from former Oklahoma State star Joe Adkins, half of which came when he made all 10 of his free throws. But what cheers me most about the Globetrotters' new desire to mingle with the "legitimate" hoops community are the many incidental benefits of such intercourse. One is the stark way in which the Trotters, with their November tour, have exposed yet more of the NCAA's hypocrisy. NCAA rules have long held that collegians can't play unsanctioned games with pros. Scores of college players have suffered suspensions for just that breach. Yet the NCAA seems to have no problem with collegians playing pros when the Trotters come to campus. After all, there are tickets to be sold and money to be made. That's why, after decades of watching them do minstrel work, I'm so pleased to see the Trotters performing Shakespeare. May these Othellos rip off another 1,270 in a row. A quick welcome to The Hoop Life. This space -- the first in a regular series of reports, vignettes and commentaries on the game -- is devoted to the proposition that basketball is a universal community in which high school and college and pro, and street and women's and international, and even the Globetrotters, bleed indiscriminately into one another. Please join me in exploring the many corners of the 10-foot culture. You can send your comments to awolff@si.timeinc.com. Alexander Wolff is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated. He has written six
books on the game, including the forthcoming Called for Traveling: A Year in
the Country of
Basketball.
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