Is This Georgia Brown?

Maybe it's the ice-cold gym, or the five-hour bus ride across the northern Great Plains, or the hopscotching 168-game season, or the fact that they haven't lost to their stooge team in 15 years, but tonight in Sioux Falls, S. Dak., the Harlem Globetrotters are not hot to trot. Sweet Lou Dunbar, the team showman, looks vaguely bored and remote. He's grabbing at gags as if they were life preservers on the Titanic.

"Please put your arm down," he instructs his stooge-team opponent. "I'm trying to shoot."

"I'm trying to play some defense," answers the stooge.

Dunbar leans over to sniff the stooge's armpit. "That's de-fense all right," he says.

The spectators are sinking like leaky lifeboats. But then, at the start of the second quarter, Lynette Woodard, the first woman Globie, enters the game. She takes the floor with the flash and dash of an understudy leaping into a starring role in 42nd Street. Caressing the ball with long, sleek fingers, the 6-foot Woodard arches her body toward the basket, plows through a phalanx of towering men and scores a layup with a crash of elbow and forearm. The audience revives. Woodard's teammates are resuscitated.

The Globetrotters needed resuscitation after 59 years of playing the same game with the same jokes. "The road is hard," says James (Twiggy) Sanders, a Globie in his 10th season. "If you're in the NBA and you don't feel good, you don't have to hide it on the court. But Globetrotters don't just play, they've got to have fun and project that fun into the crowd. Lynette really helps break the monotony. She comes to play, and she comes to have fun. And I'm not going to let her have more fun than I'm having."

Woodard not only brings a feminine touch to the spin dribble, she also brings 1985 basketball to the Globetrotters, who have lost some of their luster over the last 10 years. The Trotters hadn't really updated their game since 1927, when Abe Saperstein, the team's Great White Father, sausaged five young blacks into a Model T Ford for their debut in Hinckley, Ill. Their routines were O.K. when basketball was played by white guys who stood with both feet on the floor and launched two-hand set shots. Nowadays any kid on an asphalt court can do a passable imitation of Trotter routines.

On the hardwood, the show was competing with collegians and pros like Pearl Washington, Julius Erving and Michael Jordan. The team compensated with tired vaudeville. "The comedy had become frayed and stale," says Earl Duryea, the new team president. "I just saw too much Stepin Fetchit stuff. We had become a show that the black audience couldn't relate to." The whites were dribbling away, too. "If we didn't change direction quick," Duryea says, "there was a good possibility we'd be out of business in a couple of years."

Duryea, who spent 12 years with the Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Circus, was installed last February by the team's owners, Metromedia Inc., to make the Globetrotters a center-ring act, if not the greatest show on earth. He shortened some of the reems, as the bits are called, and eliminated others. He pared the staff and hired a college coach, Russell Ellington of Savannah State, to remind the Trotters that they were playing basketball. He brought in the ABA's old red, white and blue ball, put a mike on Dunbar and phased out old standbys Curly Neal and Geese Ausbie—the latter, ironically, a cousin of Woodard's—who had 46 years on the squad between them. Neal and Ausbie have since sued the Globetrotters over the circumstances of their departures.

Woodard was hired, among other things, to pitch the show toward women and teens. A few token whites have appeared with the Globetrotters over the years, but the only female was a thick-skinned, 9-foot, 8,000-pound walk-on who pounded the parquet in four humongous red sneakers—Bertha the Elephant, a trunk-dunker. Duryea wanted a woman with a good perimeter shot. A woman with a working knowledge of the fundamentals. "A woman," as he puts it, "who could go to France and know the difference between Perrier and Mitterrand."