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Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you shoul no the problem Globe Trotter Edition. It's a little on the nose as far as edition names go, but it is what it is.
How's that pretty great. Oh are you gonna follow up?
I was just egging you on.
Okay, I feel like I get a little off key because it goes in some you know, more subtle directions.
It does. And what you're referring to is, of course, the song Sweet Georgia Brown by Brother Bones.
Right, Brother Bones, who was a halftime musical act for the Globetrotters. And as the story goes, it was like, Hey, I got this banging whistled version of Sweet Georgia Brown that I'm doing during your little magic circle routine and it stuck for seventy years.
Yeah, they decided to make it basically their unofficial official team song. And if you remember, that was my first forty five record ever?
Was it really?
Yeah? After seeing the Globetrotters, that's that song. So my dad took me to probably Peaches Records in Toledo and I got the forty five.
All right, Well, let's talk real quick. So you saw the Globetrotters in what year? Roughly?
My guess is it would have been eighty two, eighty three.
I mean that's if not, you know, the Golden Era just sort of it's just after just after the Golden.
Era Curly was still there, but Metal Lark left.
Okay. I loved watching the Harlem Globetrotters on Wide World of Sports or wherever they played them on Sunday afternoons. I thought it was the best thing ever. I loved basketball, I love comedy. I thought it was funny.
Oh well, they were right up your alley then.
But I did not see the Harlem Globetrotters, my friend until last year. Oh really, yep. I took Ruby and Emily and my father in law Steve and Scotty who you know, sure of course, and we went and saw the Harlem Globetrotters here in Atlanta, and I gotta tell you, dude, I was like a kid all over again. It was so much fun. All those old bits they did, and it was genuinely funny, like it wasn't like, oh well, this is quaint and sort of old fashioned, like I was.
Scotty and I were dying laughing, and we just had the best time. I highly recommend you anyone should still go. It's still so much fun.
Yeah, I would after doing this research, I would definitely go to see them. And they have a twenty twenty three, twenty four World tour plan, which I think is pretty much par for the course with them every year.
Yep.
But if you look, you're like, wow, they're in three different cities on this one day. And it's because, which is a long standing tradition with the Globetrotters, they have so many great players that they'll split them into multiple teams and just send them out around the country. So there is one hundred percent chance essentially that they are coming within probably twenty miles of whatever town you live in.
Yeah, go see him. It's a lot of fun. I mean, they still just have so much personality. I can't remember the guy's name, at least at the one I saw who sort of is the metal Arclemit who sort of is the ringleader, But he was just he had so much charisma. And they're great basketball players. So it's modernized a little bit, but it's still what it always has been, and it was just so much fun.
What's funny, is, Chuck, is that them being great basketball players is actually a throwback to their original I guess kind of iteration.
Look at you bringing it all around.
I like to do that sometimes, So.
Are we in the nineteen twenties, then.
Yeah, at the beginning of the Harlem Globetrotters. It's actually predates the Harlem Globetrotters, and I think the early to mid nineteen.
Twenties, that's right. So we're going to set up sort of basketball at the time, which is to say, basketball is pretty new. It was not hugely popular as far as if you want to compare it to football and baseball, it was well into third place if that behind you know, horse racing and I'm sure a lot of other things are more popular at the Why the NBA didn't even come around until forty nine, so this was quite a
while before that. And what they did have though, and we've seen this in other sports and other sort of entertainment, it was touring. But they called it barnstormy. It was when you traveled around to different small towns and they would get teams together to go on these little tours and barnstorm and play each other and you know, essentially exhibition games because there wasn't a league, but they were you know, competitive, real basketball games.
Yeah, they'd be like, hey, you, hay Seeds, look at this exactly. Sometimes also like there wouldn't even be a team, but like some of these teams would go play locals, like local groups of farmers or whatever would take these teams on. And I don't know why, but I think think it was maybe like how sometimes wrestlers will take on any comers at like some small town or whatever. Yeah,
But so that's the beginnings of basketball. And it's really interesting that like there were people out there who loved the game enough that they made a career for themselves for they figured out how to do it. And this was really really close to the beginning of the Harlem Globetrotters.
And in fact, the group that originally formed the first Harlem Globetrotter started out as players at Wendell Phillips High School and All Black High School in Chicago that said, hey, we're pretty good, let's go start a barnstorming team ourselves.
That's right. And this is either in twenty five or
twenty six. They didn't have a name at first. They were sponsored by the South Side Giles Post of the American Legion, so there are some sources that'll say they were they were called the Giles Post American Legion quintet Okay, But then another thing happened the Savoy Ballroom and Chicago in Bronzeville, it was a black owned entertainment venue, very popular, and on the weekends they would have these big dances, and they thought, well, hey, why don't we have a
little opening act and have a basketball game before these dances. Maybe it'll sell some more tickets and at the very least it'll be fun and sort of get people going before the big dance. And in nineteen twenty six they hired that Wendell Phillips team and they named them the Savoy Big Five.
Yeah, and I don't know how long they played for this dance hall, the Savoy Ballroom, but I don't get the impression knows very long, because I think that they weren't moving tickets like the owners thought they would, and so they moved on to something else. I can't remember what it was, but they basically got rid of the basketball team, which left them essentially free agents. And it's
kind of lost to history exactly how this happened. But a guy named Abe Sapperstein came in and attached himself to the Savoy Big Five, scooped them up after they were fired, took them away from the Savoy Who knows, but this is about the time in the mid to late nineteen twenties, about the mid nineteen twenties where Abe Sapristine comes in, and you can say, like without qualification that had it not been for Abe Sapristine entering, there would be no Harlem Globetrotters.
Yeah, for sure. He was born in London, but he was raised in He was Jewish and raised in an Irish German neighborhood in Chicago. And he was a little guy. He loved basketball. But they say he was like, you know, five three, five four or something like that, so really small to be playing basketball, even at the time when guys weren't super tall playing basketball generally. Yeah, or you could be, you know, a little shorter and still get by,
but he would play a little hard out. He tried out for the University of Illinois team and did not make the team, and then dropped out and worked for the Chicago Park Department as a playground supervisor. And if you you know, listen to him sort of tell his own story of the lore, he's going to say, like, you know, I saw these guys playing basketball on the playground.
I'd never seen basketball played like this before, and I knew right away that you know, I had to get these guys and you know, make them like the best team that they could be.
Right, that's the that's the lore. Again, it's kind of lost to history, but the I think by the nineteen like nineteen twenty six, nineteen twenty seven, Abe Sapristein was attached to this group of players from Wendell Phillips High School that would become the Harlem Globetrotters.
Yeah, and one of the first thing he did was changed that name because he wanted to take them barnstorming. Yeah,
He's like, I can make some money here. So he named him the Harlem Globetrotters right out of the gate because he was a savvy marketing guy, and he's bringing this team on the road in the He's like small towns and Kansas and Indiana who had never you know, who knows how much interaction they had with black people in rural Kansas at the time, they at the very least they probably hadn't seen an all black basketball team
come through town. So he was like, this is a sellable thing, you know, to turn these people onto this, and so Harlem, like everybody knows what Harlem represents, it's the center of black culture in the nineteen twenty So if I put Harlem on the name, it's they're immediately
going to know this is a black team. And if I call them the Globetrotters, even though we're really not globe trotting yet, they're gonna you know, it's just it's gonna guss him up to where they sound like this sort of worldly team that's been everywhere playing this sport and it just has a nice ring together and it should sell some tickets.
Yeah, and I mean he was right, definitely does have a nice ring. But it's ironic that this the Harlem Globetrotters originated in Chicago, Yeah, and apparently didn't play their first game in Harlem until nineteen sixty eight.
Yeah, I had nothing to do with Harlem. I don't think it.
Took forty years for them to finally get to play in Harlem, right, but it was it was you could almost call it today, a dog whistle that would would guarantee that no, you know, Kansas Farmer would show up at this game thinking he was coming to see a white basketball team and giving like racially angry that he had been tricked into giving his money to a black
basketball team. In addition to just kind of signaling that, it also did say like, but not only is this like a black team, this is like a black team from the greatest black city in America. Yeah, so it's prestigious too, but it also was a signal.
Yeah, absolutely so, Saprosine. He coached. He was with the team for a long time. He coached them into his sixties. And he was, you know, criticized many times throughout the years for being too controlling, for underpaying his guys, for not giving them any say and like what they did or how they did it, kind of like I'm the boss, and you do what I say, for perpetuating racial stereotypes.
He was not some perfect guy. But he also, you know, as we'll see, in his own way, eventually led to you know, the integration of the NBA and putting black players on a stage that no one had ever done before in sort of elevating their perception to the rest of America and as you'll see the rest of the world.
Yeah, and he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in nineteen seventy one. And I don't dispute the impact that he had on it, but it is he definitely it wasn't like mischievous or like in the gray area he swindled some of his players.
Oh yeah.
He told one star player later on, Marcus Haynes, that he believed black players didn't deserve or didn't need as much money as white players. They just didn't. Black people just didn't need as much money, and that was why he underpaid his black players. Apparently they found out once that a group of college all stars that was touring as a warm up act for the Globetrotters was getting paid more than the Globetrotters. He did a lot of
really shady, underhanded stuff. So he's a good study in one of those things that's like, okay, this he was not like a sterling example of somebody even for his time, but he also did do some really amazing things that benefited a lot of black people during his lifetime and well beyond today actually, because you can kind of give him credit for giving the NBA the stability it needed to take off on its own too.
Yeah yeah, And you know that's also and this is not defending him, but this is also the history of pro sports ownership, right, Like in a nutshell. This is how it was almost with everybody as far as not integrating the leagues and sort of the ownership aspect. And I mean that's why players still complain about this stuff. That's why they formed players' unions and banded together for like, you know, better treatment and better pay and where you're not going to just pay us a little bit amount
of money and you take everything else. Right. Uh, it's interesting we should I don't know, maybe there's an episode in there somewhere about like the history of sports ownership, because it's fraught with stories like this.
I could totally see that. I could totally Yeah, I think that's a great idea. But to kind of wrap up Sapirsteine at least his introduction, he owned the Globe Trotters, not just the team, not just the name like the Globetrotters. He believed not he believed that that if you wanted to play on his team, he was the boss. He was in charge, He called the shots, he was not to be questioned. He even called himself coach to these players that did not need a coach, but they kind
of humored him and played along. But he was in charge and his whole jam was I'm creating a place where if you're a black basketball player and you're good, this is the team you want to be on.
Yeah, he created that absolutely. Uh, good time for break, I think, good setup. And we'll come back and talk a little bit about what you were talking about earlier, the fact that they were not comedians at first. All right, so we are back with promise to talk about the Harlem Globetrotters as a serious basketball team, because that is what they were for many years. They did not come out of the gate doing you know, the confetti and
a bucket trick. They came out playing some really good basketball, to the tune of a record reportedly of one hundred and one and six over their first one hundred and seventeen games or so, and they traveled throughout the thirties. They would pile apparently into Abe Saperstein's giant model t and they would play eight games a week for twenty five bucks a game for the entire team, sapristein they would split it up at Sapristine would get two shares, and back then that wasn't even a lot of money.
But they loved the game and they were getting paid to play it.
No today, they would be making five hundred dollars a week. So you had to love the game to be doing that for sure, because there was a lot of it was hard work in addition to traveling constantly too, So the people who are playing like really love to play, and this is the one place they could play and
make any money at it. And by the way, that winning percentage, it's zero point eight sixty three win percentage in their first year, and only the twenty fifteen sixteen Warriors and the ninety five ninety six Bulls have better win percentages and they each only played eighty two games. These guys played one hundred and seventeen. And it's kind of joky now because everyone knows the Generals aren't supposed
to win. But as of twenty twenty two, the win loss ratio for the Harlem Globe Charters was twenty seven thousand to three and forty five.
And by the way, if you don't know, the Generals are the team that they always play now on their road show, right, we kind of assume people know that, but we'll talk about them.
Yeah, yet not talk about the General Wait everybody, just wait a second.
So they're traveling around the country. When they play in the North, they're playing against white teams and black teams. There was a team called the New York Renaissance, the Wrens. They were the first all black professional basketball team. When they went to the South, this was the Jim Crow South. They would play in front of black crowds and only
against black teams. And it was rough. You know, they were in a South that was obviously segregated, not treating them equally, not letting them stay in hotels, not letting them eat in restaurants. There was one story. Dave Ruse helped us with this. He dug up that in Nebraska they had to sleep in the county jail because they could not find a hotel that would house them. Yeah.
They also they would play two games a night in the South because they would play in front of a black crowd and then they would go across town and play in front of a white crowd, so they would
play two a day. I'm not sure if they got paid for both games or not, but yeah, it was in addition to riding around in a Model T with five other people and getting twenty five bucks a game, you also had to just face blatant, horrible racism every day of your life, basically, especially when you were touring the South.
Yeah. Absolutely. They were a really good team though, and they wanted to prove that they were among the best of any color in the country. And they entered the World Basketball Championship in nineteen forty and won this tournament was a fourteen team tournament in Chicago, and beat the hometown Chicago Bruins to win the title. And this was again pre NBA. This is when the only thing that was around was the It was called the National Basketball League at the time, the NBL.
And it was white teams only, right, All black teams were independent. And there were other good black teams too, like the New York Renaissance, the Wrens. They were like the Globetrotters, but they were serious. They only played serious basketball. There's no clowning whatsoever. And they actually were huge rivals, not just on the court, but off the court as well for players, for advancing their team, for getting crowds.
Like it was, they were both trying to carve out a place for themselves in the same space and there was not really enough space for both.
Yeah, for sure. As for how the clowning around started and the comedy element. It sort of depends on who you ask. Some people will say that barnstorming in the forties started losing steam, and so Sapristine, as the sort of SPINALI, came up with this idea to keep the
show going by incorporating these funny bits. Other people say that it just sort of kind of slowly evolved from the fact that they were even before the clowning around, they were playing a different style of basketball than what white teams were playing at the time, which is a lot of like, it's kind of funny to look at old basketball clips, these little two handed, flat footed set shots and lots and lots and lots of passing, not a lot of dribbling. All of a sudden, these guys
come in and they're running fast breaks. Dave said, they dunked. I looked into the history of the dunk and it's I think that the first dunk was in nineteen thirty six, So it is plausible that they were dunking the basketball, because immediately I was like, I don't think people were dunking it all back then.
If anybody was, it was them, though.
Yeah, well the first person who dunk wasn't a Globetrotter, but it was, you know, it wasn't. I think it was looked at it as kind of a rude thing to do in a basketball game.
Early on, well, it also seemed to be taken as wrong, like the right way to do was to pass five times and then you took your shot. And the Globetrotters weren't playing like that at all. They were playing like what you see when you watch a modern basketball game. And in fact, there was a twenty twenty one letter open letter from the Globetrotters to the NBA saying, you know, we basically created the style of play that is like the NBA, Now, why don't you let us in and
give us a franchise. Of course, the NBA just I think, completely ignored it, but they make a really good case that, like the style of play today dates back to the Globe Trotters starting this stuff in the thirties and forties. And if you watch like clips of say like Curly Neil in like the seventies, shooting like a half court three pointer, he looks exactly like Steph Curry does today when you watch when you watch stuff, Curry do the
same thing. They have the same exact motion, everything about that shot is the exact same, but Curly Neil is doing it like fifty years earlier.
Yeah. Absolutely, And this was way earlier than Curly Neil too.
Yeah. I mean people didn't take half court three pointers outside of the Harlem Globe Trotters.
Yeah, and that was sort of when things started getting a little more interesting. Another story is that they were blowing people out so much they started getting bored and kind of just messing around and they would do no look passes and they would take these super long hook shots and people went crazy for it. Supposedly, one of the original Savoy Big Five, this guy, Big Jack Johnson, was the guy who kind of started developing these tricks.
He was a big, giant of a man, and he's the guy who would put another player on his shoulders to go in and dunk the ball. He's the guy who started drop kicking it from the free throw line. And so you know, this is sort of the err version of what we would later see to be followed by Reetatum Goose Tatum, who is known as the clown Prints of the Globetrotters. He's a guy that really ramped up the antics.
Yeah, he apparently got his clowning start on the Indianapolis Clowns, which was a baseball team which were essentially the Globe Trotters of baseball at the time in the Negro Leagues, and he was sixteen when he started playing for them, so he kind of was already exposed to the idea of joking around while you're playing serious professional sports by the time he got to the Globetrotter, so he was
like kind of a natural person to bring that. So it makes a lot of sense that he would have been kind of like the real kernel that created that. I don't think that those stories of where it came from it evolving over time, and Abe sapristein saying we need to do some clowning because the crowds are getting
bored are mutually exclusive. I think that they could have happened together, because apparently the crowds were getting bored, they would just blow out the opponent so much that it was like, what's what's the point of seeing these games?
So when they figured out that when they were clowning, though, the crowds really responded to it, and eventually, over time that would come to serve them well, because as other basketball players in like the NBA got better and better and sorted adopting more and more Globetrotters techniques, all the tech all the Globetrotters had left was the clowning aspect.
So that's kind of what they became. So it's a really neat evolution that it makes sense that this all took place over coming up on one hundred years.
Yeah. Absolutely, And interestingly, Gouse Tatum was, you know, sort of an early example of a two way sports star. I believe the Globe Shrotters had ended up having four different former professional baseball players on their team. Wow, So there were you know, the Bo Jackson's, the Deon Sanders way back then doing their things. So Goose was the one who came up with some of these gags that they still hues today, Like they're still doing the same stuff. Man, Well,
if it's funny, it's funny, I guess. So that the spying, like going over in the other team's huddle, he came up with that they still do that, hiding in the crowd from the ref they still do that. It still kills hilarious when you faint on the court, and someone waves, takes off your shoe and puts it over your nose and you, you know, you start up. They still do that, and that all came from Goose.
Those things make people from eight to eighty just laugh, I know. But if you're seven or you're eighty one, forget it.
Yeah. Marcus Haynes was another guy in nineteen forty six, he came along. He was a former college basketball star and he's the guy that kind of was the inspiration for Curly Neil. He's the guy that first started doing like the insane dribbling and sliding around on his knees and keeping that dribble alive and dribbling between other people's legs and dribbling in circles around people. He was the first, you know, ball handling master.
Yeah, that's kind of like one of the Globe Charter characters that they always kind of filled at one time or another. And like today it's Cherrille George, known as Torch, and apparently she holds the world record for most under the leg tumbles in a minute. So it's where you're dribbling real load to the ground and then you you basically do a sumrsault while you dribble the ball between your legs and then when you come up on the sumrsault,
the ball goes right back to your hand. She did thirty two of those, one after the other in one minute, and that's I buy that being the world record for sure.
Did you say she?
I did say she because she is one of three women on the the Harlem Globetrotter's team.
That's right.
And think about that. If the Globetrotters did somehow get their own franchise in the NBA, the NBA then would be integrated among the sexes as well. How nuts would that be if they not only pushed the NBA to integrate racially, but also by sex as well.
Well. I think if they said, you get a franchise, they wouldn't just bring over these players. They would start fresh and draft players. And I don't do man get any other expansion team because these players are great, but they're not NBA. They'd be in the NBA if they were NBA caliber. It's true, Okay, no, I mean that's where they get these players, their players from college that were really good that couldn't go any further.
Okay, that's new. That's a generally new phenomenon that probably started in the eighties.
I would say probably seventies, but sure, okay, but prior to that, just fifty years.
But prior to that, the Harlem and this is significant, the Harlem Globe Trotters were a place where you would go, you could go and and create a career for yourself, be as good, if not better than the best people in the NBA. And the Globe Chartters prove that over and over and over again.
Yeah, I mean this was pre NBA, so it wasn't even a thing yet still at this point. Okay, So the magic circle we mentioned with Sweet Georgia Brown, that's another thing they're very famous for. It's when they pregame. They'll are in at halftime, they'll stand around in their circle. Sweet Georgia Brown plays on the loud speakers and they do that thing where they're going behind their back. They're doing all these ball tricks. They're spinning it on their finger.
It's just a little little fun warm up to get everybody excited.
And it works like a charm. It does you want to take a break or keep going?
Let's keep going.
Okay. So one of the biggest watershed moments in Globe Charter history was in nineteen forty eight when the Globe Chartters challenge the Minneapolis Lakers, whose name makes way more sense than the las Ai Angelus Lakers, as I've said multiple times on this show, who were the champions of the World Basketball or National Basketball League at the time,
challenged them to a game. And the Lakers were all white, and their team was centered around a guy named George McCann or Miken, and he was six feet ten, wore glasses and could just he just took shots whenever he wanted and he made basically all them. There's just nothing you could do to stop him. And he was a huge reason that Minneapolis were the champs. And in February of nineteen forty eight, the Globetrotters played the Lakers and they beat them, and they beat them like at the buzzer.
It was like a really dramatic, really amazing game that showed the world like, whoa, these guys, who the sports writers consider clowns and not serious, just beat the champions of a very serious basketball league. What's going on here?
Yeah, And in the pre shot clock era, you could dribble the ball around at the end of the game, until somebody fouled you. And in this case they could not catch Marcus Haynes, the ball handling master, So with less than a minute left in the game was side. He was dribbling all over the court, nobody could get to him. He finally, as the time is expiring, gets the ball over to Elma Robertson, who drains a twenty
footer and they beat the Lakers. And just to show like, hey, this wasn't some fluke, are actually a good team, they played them again in nineteen forty nine and beat them again.
Yeah the following year, and in the Lakers defense, the Lakers were leading by ten at the half and the Globe Charters were doing zero clowning. They were playing straight basketball. Oh yeah, and they still almost lost, but they won. So by winning those two back to back championships, I guess the not just the Globe Charters, but also like the Wrens and other black teams showed like we've got
better players over here. And for you basketball associations that are eventually going to become the NBA, like you're shooting yourselves in the feet by staying segregated, Like why would you do that? Why wouldn't you just want to put together the best team you possibly could, regardless of race. And the Basketball Association said racism, and the Globetrotter said, yes,
clearly that's why, but stop doing that. And very quickly shortly after those two wins against the Lakers, they did start integrating basketball leagues.
Yeah. One of the first guys they signed, actually in nineteen fifty was a Globetrotter, Sweetwater Clifton. And so you know that what Abe Sabertine set out to do to prove they were as good or better than anybody in the pro leagues worked right away.
Yeah, and so he so this was actually like a double edged sword that gave Abe Ceperstein like boasting rights, which he did a lot about how the NBA wanted his players. The first player to ever be signed who was black, and the NBA came from the Globe ttris at the same time, though it would start to become a problem later on as the NBA got better and better and stood more and more on its own two feet.
A great cliffhanger, think so too, All right, we'll be right back.
That Sweetwater Clifton, by the way, was one of the people who was swindled by Abe Sapristine. He sold his contract to I think the Knicks for five thousand dollars and gave half of it to Clifton, the player. And it turns out he had sold the contract for twenty thousand dollars and only gave Nat Clifton twenty five hundred because Clifton thought he was getting half. Like that's the kind of stuff he would do.
Yeah, that's not cool. Well, at least Nat Clifton got to move on.
He did move on for sure, and he was ready to move on too. They were having disputes over things like pay and everything yea, and just treatment of players, and yeah, Nat Clifton was one of the first black greats in the NBA.
Yeah. Absolutely, So early days of the NBA, they're it's not Gangbusters right away. They're sort of this new league that's struggling to get going. The Globetrotters are huge stars, way bigger stars than people in the NBA. At the time. They were in movies. They were in a movie called the Harlem Globetrotters, another one called Go Man Go, and so Sapristine, you know, ever, the businessman in nineteen fifty said all right, we're We're named the Globetrotters. We're gonna
start trotting the globe. And so set off on a five month around the world tour. Took places like Rome and Paris and London, and they ate it up everywhere they went.
Oh yeah, they were treated like celebrities everywhere, Like they would just sell out tens and tens of thousands of seats in every city that they played a game in. People just hadn't seen anything like it over there, and they were just totally wild and blown over by the Globetrotters.
The State Department actually got in touch with Abe Saperstein and said, hey, you know, we're in a cold war with the USSR, and they like to basically point out how poorly black Americans are treated back home, and the Globe Trotters kind of suggest otherwise, So what if we make the Globe Trotters goodwill Ambassadors? And so from that point on, I think in the early fifties they were
essentially on the State Department team. They were playing in part at the best of the State Department, who was I don't know if they were helped funding their travels or what, but they were definitely good Will ambassadors for the United States.
Yeah. One of the first things they did was they played in West Berlin at the Olympic Stadium. There the very stadium where Jesse Owens made his name in nineteen thirty six at the Berlin Games when Hitler very famously refused to shake his hand. He came in, was helicoptered in. Jesse Owens dropped in there on the field and he ran a ceremonial lap to sort of just get everybody pumped up before this basketball game in front of seventy six thousand people.
Yeah, and the mayor of West Berlin used it as an opportunity to reconcile with Jesse Owens on behalf of Germany. And I was reading a description of that event, and supposedly the Globetrotter's game post was delayed by ten fifteen minutes because the ovation giving to Jesse Owens and the mayor was so long. It just kept going and going. So it was neat just to even read about it. I can't imagine being there at the time.
Oh man, So they're on this world tour, they are celebrities and they're treated as such, and they're having a blast. I imagine they come back home to an America that is still segregated, and Dave found this one just this
is hard to believe and so shameful. In Jacksonville, Florida in the early fifties, a hotel refused them service, and that same hotel allowed a chimpanzee named Judy, a celebrity chimpanzee that bowled on television like Bowling, set Judy up in the presidential suite, yet denied the Harlem Globe trotters.
Yeah, that was an eye opening thing for a lot of the globetrotters at the time. It was just that bad. On the one hand, they had, like the rest of the world to go be received by, and they were, but just the idea that to have to come back home to that, yeah, I mean it just had to be doubly bitter after being treated so well outside of the United States outside home.
You know, of course this would be a good movie. I I say that.
Totally for sure. So the late nineteen fifties that the NBA started to really come into its own And one of the reasons why I was saying, Abe Sapristin can take a lot of credit for the NBA being around today. Is he agreed to help this fledgling NBA make a name for itself by playing double headers with them, either having the Globetrotters play NBA teams or having the NBA be like the second the NBA teams were like the
second game on a double header bill. Yeah, and apparently most of the time the crowd would just leave after the Globetrotter game, wouldn't stick around for the NBA game, But enough people did that the NBA started to catch on, and it took about ten years, but it was largely thanks to the Globetrotters and Abe Sebristin for getting the NBA to a place where it could stand on its own.
And then once it did, now Abe Sepristin and the Globetrotters had a problem because no longer were they the place where a great black basketball player would aspire to go play. They were away station sometimes and then other people just went directly around the Globe Charters and straight to the NBA.
Yeah, you know, it was sort of be careful of what you helped create, because not only like you said, are they stealing or not stealing players, but just you know, signing players away from the Globe Trotters. The Globe Charters weren't necessary anymore as this sort of very high profile minor league. In a way, Wilt Chamberlain was a Harlem Globetrotter.
He played for the nineteen fifty eight season. I don't think a lot of people realize that, you know, one of the all time great NBA players, Will the Stilt was paid six supposedly sixty thousand dollars to play for the Harlem Globetrotters for that one season, which would be about six hundred thousand dollars today.
Yeah, which is I think below the minimum for a starting salary in the NBA today anyway, but still.
Yeah, that time a ton of money, and the NBA's salaries are very high.
So that brings up something that has nothing to do with this, but that came up twice in research when they were talking about what the what the Globe Chritters made. Initially that like three dollars and fifty cents each per game, and how little amount that was is like sixty two fifty I think a player a game, and that's a small amount of money in today's today's like money in today's dollars, right, yeah, but that seems to indicate a trend that even adjusted for inflation, things today are eye
poppingly more expensive. Like I looked up how much those players could have gotten for their three dollars and fifty cents, and I came across to like a nineteen twenty eight menu for like what seems to be a pretty nice restaurant, and you could get an amazing dinner with dessert and like a couple of soups and salad and all that stuff for like fifty sense right, Yeah, today, even in today's dollars, that would be something like eight dollars or
something today. Imagine like having a nice center for just eight dollars today. So what happened is my question. I'm trying to figure out how to how to come up with the right question to go research what happened? Like why did things get more expensive? Why did people start throwing more money at like basketball players, even adjusted for today's dollars, Like, what happened? Why did money just blow up in the last like twenty thirty years.
Well, in the case of sports, is because players stood up at one point and we're like, wait a minute, the owners are making that kind of money we're the ones out here that are putting people in the seats, and we're making this kind of money. And so they unionized and were able to make great deals over the year every time they sat down to the negotiating table.
Okay, but let's say that restaurant that was charging eight dollars in today's dollars for a really nice, good dinner. Sure you would say, okay, well, maybe there's like more demand for that. More people have more money to go out to dinner, so they're doing that. So the restaurants are going to charge more because of supply and demand. There's a higher demand and thus less supply. I would
argue there is not less supply. I would say that the supply has increased even more than the demand has, and yet that same dinner probably costs three to four times what it should adjusted for today's dollars.
Why, yeah, I see what you mean. I'm sure that somebody will ride in and say, well, guys, it's just research the last forty years of the corporatization of whatever or something like. There's probably something you can point to that made things go really out of whack. And it wouldn't surprise me if it was the consolidation of wealth and corporations in general.
But that's exactly what I'm hoping for bringing this up. I hope somebody who knows what I'm saying but just don't know how to say it.
Yeah, like, how can we research this speak exactly? Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. Thanks back to the Harlem Globetrotters, though the NBA is getting these players from the Globetrotters, you know, kind of one after the other, and so the Globetrotters are like, all right, well, you know what that means, Our days are numbered unless we
really lean into this comedy stuff. And from sort of the mid nineteen fifties on, it really became the Harlem Globetrotters like basketball, fun time comedy show that we all know and love today. Starting with their leader who you mentioned, metal ark Lemon, who was there from fifty four to seventy eight, and he was kind of the central figure.
Yeah, they lucked out that metalw ark Lemon saw a newsreel when he was eleven in nineteen forty five at his movie theater in Wilmington, North Carolina, and decided like he was going to grow up to be a Harlem Globetrotter. That was his life's pursuit, and he made it happen. I think in his twenties he joined the team and became like kind of the ring master of the whole thing. He became far and away their greatest star, not just
of his era, but of like all time essentially. Meadow arc Lemon is well known even outside of exactly for sure, he was the one who led the crew on Scooby Doo. He was at the heart of the Harlem Globetrotter Saturday Morning cartoon like that kind of stuff. Like it was all meadow Lark all the time. And I get the impression that some of the other members of the team were not super happy about exactly how inequitable things were.
But he definitely brought the crowds and he was a huge crowd pleaser for sure.
Yeah, he's the guy who invented the confetti bit, which is you're chasing a referee down with what everyone thinks is a bucket of water and he throws it into the stands and misses the referee and everyone goes crazy, but it's really confetti still works somehow. He's the one that started pulling everyone shorts down and pantsing everybody, referees, fellow players, Washington generals. He's a guy that started doing that half court hook shot, which a guy still does
that now they're keeping that traditional alive. But I think it was they have a guy from Atlanta because at least in the one I saw, because it was you know, played up that it was a hometown show for him and he was the guy that was shooting the half court hook shot, and he didn't make any of them, but he came really really close. It's very hard to do. Supposedly metal Arc Lemon was so good at it that he would nail it seventy percent of the time. I'm not so sure about well.
He has a lot of legend around him, like he even on the Hall of Fame Basketball Hall of Fame website, he's credited with playing sixteen thousand games as a Globe Trotter, And all you have to do is the math and you'll see that that's basically impossible. He would have had
to have played. He would have had to have played two games a day every day for twenty one years to reach that number, and he was only with the Globetrotters for twenty four years and I'm quite sure the math still isn't wash out, but it just kind of goes to show like how willing everybody is to go along with it. That's how good of a ballplayer. He was that they're like, yeah, that's probably not that far off.
Yeah. Absolutely. As far as sort of the perception and legacy of the Globetrotters at the time, some looked down upon them from the civil rights community and said that, you know, you guys are perpetuating these stereotypes. You're sort of doing a basketball version of a traveling minstrel show. Other people said, no, that's not what's going on. No less than Jesse Jackson would stand up for them, and his quote was the Globetrotters did not show blacks as stupid.
On the contrary, they were shown as superior. He was like, they're you know, they're bringing this to an audience who maybe has never seen something like this. It's fun. They're really good at what they do, and stop with all that.
Yeah, So they made it through that really rough time. They'd navigate that because they definitely were old school black comedy in a time where that was increasingly looked upon as offensive. To the black community. So they navigated that. They managed to and I think I don't know how much they changed. I think they made They just weathered that criticism and came out the other side, you know. So one of the reasons they were superior, though, is because there was almost always a team in the Globe
chartter history that was paid to lose to them. Yeah, which kind of explains their twenty two thousand to three d and forty five win loss ratio.
Absolutely, they went by different names over the years, the Boston Shamrocks, the New Jersey Reds, the Atlantic City See Goals. But in modern times we all know and love them as the Washington Generals. They used to be an all white team. Now the Generals are integrated as well. And you know, it's a it's a gig where you get to keep playing basketball and you get to get paid for playing basketball. You gotta be okay with being the you know, the sucker sometimes and to be pants and
to lose. But these guys can play like they always could play. But you know this team that I just saw last year, like these guys were good. They had this they had this point guard that was just draining really really long jump shot three pointers like Steph Curry style six to seven, Trey Young style eight feet behind the three point line, and like, you can't. You can fake and script things, but you can't, you know, make that ball go in nothing but net unless you're really
good at that. And this guy was awesome.
So yeah, a handful of them have gone on to play in the NBA. So it's almost like the no, I'm not giving up yet, I'm going to play for the Generals and then get back into the NBA, almost like playing in Europe. How a lot of people do that, whether it's like then doesn't take them up for a year, so they go play in Europe somewhere and then try again the next season. I think that's kind of what
the Generals were for a while. But there was one instance where the Generals won, And if you go back and read the details of this game in January of nineteen seventy one, it's not clear whether it was purposeful or accidental, but the Globe Triters weren't paying attention to the score they didn't need to normally, and the Generals were starting to creep up on them, and it came down to I think a one point deficit, and somebody took a shot, a guy named Lewis Herman Klotz, who
helped put the Generals together.
He was in his fifties.
Yeah, he took the last shot and he sunk it and won accidentally one. According to a lot.
Of people, Yeah, amazing. It's like sort of at the end of a modern NBA All Star game, when everyone's goofing off and having fun until like the last two or three minutes, and then they're like, all right, we want to win, apparent and things get serious.
Apparently Klatts's quote was, it was like we had just killed Santa Claus.
I that's funny. You know Scottie and I who you know, a friend of ours. He was the DP for our TV show and a very old friend of mine. We had written some stuff here and there, screenplays and like partnered up here and there, and at one point we were writing a script on a Washington General's team. As the centerpiece, like thinly veiled, there would be a Globe Trotters.
They wouldn't be called the Globetrotters or the Generals, but we just thought it was a really funny idea to follow this team that always has to lose and be the sucker of this getting pants, and then they come up with this plan to like win the game one time.
So is it gonna be more like a sports movie where like it's really about the game, or is it gonna be like slap Shot where it's more about the lives of the people playing the.
Game, more slap Shot than Hoosiers.
Okay, yeah, okay, So but.
Then Will Ferrell did that basketball movie, and I think this is sort of around the time we're thinking about it.
Oh, is it the same thing?
No, but it was just I don't know, it was sort of like, all right, well, no one's gonna want to make this movie because this one just came out and did I don't think it did very well.
Yeah, I think that. I think enthusiasm for that particular movie is cool. Do you guys can probably take a shot at it again.
Yeah. I mean there's not a lot of great basketball movies. Hoosiers is one of the all time great sports movies period, but there's not a whole lot else. The Fish that say Pittsburgh what you remember that though this is a basketball movie, Doctor j was in it called the Fish Who Save Pittsburgh. I remember that from when I was a kid. But yeah, not a lot of great basketball movies.
Well, I say you and Scott should get to you at Chuck.
All right, maybe it's time that movie has been forgotten by now.
Well, since Chuck agreed to get back to producing his basketball movie with Scott, I think that means that this episode's over and it's time for listener man.
Yeah, it was a good one. That was That was a fun episode. I enjoyed that.
I agree completely. It was a good episode.
Check. Yeah, that was fun. And again go see him everybody. It's a lot of fun. They're not filling arenas anymore, which it makes me sad, but they had a pretty good crowd. Good all right. This is just a really lovely thank you. We like to read those every now and then. Hey, guys, you've been by my side for fifteen years. You shared your voices, your stories, your laughter,
and your curiosity with me. You've been with me through the highs and the lows of my life, during my journey of moving multiple times, changing careers, surviving an accident where walking after was painful for many years, recovering slowly from those injuries, hiking again, and coping with divorce. You've inspired me to keep exploring the world, to keep learning new things, and keep finding joy. And every day you make me feel like I'm a part of your family,
even though we've never met. Look for an episode on that coming soon, Danny. You are some of my favorite teachers. Sometimes silly, sometimes serious, sometimes wrong, but always genuine and generous.
Does Dany's got us pegged?
I know he didn't have to mention that, but that's fine. For fifteen years, you have opened your hearts, your minds, under your arms to all of us who listen. For fifteen years, I've been lucky to know two amazing dudes who make the world a better place. I hope you never stopped making the show because I don't want to stop listening. I know that life is unpredictable, that nothing lasts forever, So I'm excited to finally see you both
at Nashville. In Nashville on the sixth, So Danny was at our show and he just finishes out by saying, thank you. Thank you so much for being the stability some of us need, the platform of knowledge that help us leap into a land of wonder and learning, and just for being there for fifteen years. Seriously, thank you. Yeah, and that is Danny Westfall. Danny, you, my friend, are the MVP.
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That's a good That was a great one.
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