November 2, 2023 • 53 mins
The Harlem Globetrotters are an American entertainment institution. Their story may not be quite what you think either. Hint, they didn't originate in Harlem. Tune in now to learn their fun, fascinating story.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, we want to let you know that that
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Right, Yeah, we're in our second pressing, Chuck, that's how
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(00:31):
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Speaker 1 (00:43):
You're welcome, Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
How's that pretty great. Oh are you gonna follow up?
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I was just egging you on.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Okay, I feel like I get a little off key
because it goes in some you know, more subtle directions.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
It does. And what you're referring to is, of course,
the song Sweet Georgia Brown by Brother Bones.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
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
(01:51):
it stuck for seventy years.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, they decided to make it basically their unofficial official
team song. And if you remember, that was my first
forty five record ever?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Was it really?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
All right, Well, let's talk real quick. So you saw
the Globetrotters in what year? Roughly?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
My guess is it would have been eighty two, eighty three.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I mean that's if not, you know, the Golden Era
just sort of it's just after just after the Golden.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Era Curly was still there, but Metal Lark left.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Oh well, they were right up your alley then.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
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,
(03:08):
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.
(03:29):
It's still so much fun.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
What's funny, is, Chuck, is that them being great basketball
players is actually a throwback to their original I guess
kind of iteration.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Look at you bringing it all around.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
I like to do that sometimes, So.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Are we in the nineteen twenties, then.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yeah, at the beginning of the Harlem Globetrotters. It's actually
predates the Harlem Globetrotters, and I think the early to
mid nineteen.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
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
(05:15):
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
(05:38):
exhibition games because there wasn't a league, but they were
you know, competitive, real basketball games.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
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,
(06:07):
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
(06:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
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
(07:01):
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
(07:22):
hired that Wendell Phillips team and they named them the
Savoy Big Five.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
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
(07:47):
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,
(08:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
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
(08:47):
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,
(09:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
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
(10:08):
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
(10:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Yeah, I had nothing to do with Harlem. I don't
think it.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
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
(11:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
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,
(11:58):
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
(12:21):
of America and as you'll see the rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
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
(13:02):
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
(13:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
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,
(13:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
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
(14:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
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,
(15:32):
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
(15:54):
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.
(16:16):
But they loved the game and they were getting paid
to play it.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
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
(16:42):
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
(17:04):
loss ratio for the Harlem Globe Charters was twenty seven
thousand to three and forty five.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, yet not talk about the General Wait everybody, just
wait a second.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
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
(17:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
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
(18:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
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
(19:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
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.
(19:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
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
(20:10):
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
(20:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
If anybody was, it was them, though.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
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,
(21:26):
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.
(21:48):
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
(22:09):
doing it like fifty years earlier.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Yeah. Absolutely, And this was way earlier than Curly Neil too.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Yeah. I mean people didn't take half court three pointers
outside of the Harlem Globe Trotters.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
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,
(22:43):
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
(23:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
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
(23:37):
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
(23:58):
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
(24:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
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
(25:04):
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,
(25:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Those things make people from eight to eighty just laugh,
I know. But if you're seven or you're eighty one,
forget it.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
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
(26:04):
legs and dribbling in circles around people. He was the first,
you know, ball handling master.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
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
(26:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Did you say she?
Speaker 2 (26:50):
I did say she because she is one of three
women on the the Harlem Globetrotter's team.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Okay, that's new. That's a generally new phenomenon that probably
started in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
I would say probably seventies, but sure, okay, but prior
to that, just fifty years.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
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
(28:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
And it works like a charm. It does you want
to take a break or keep going?
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Let's keep going.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
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
(29:06):
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
(29:26):
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
(29:48):
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?
Speaker 1 (30:01):
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
(30:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
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
(30:54):
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.
(31:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
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
(32:06):
better and stood more and more on its own two feet.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
A great cliffhanger, think so too, All right, we'll be
right back.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
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
(32:59):
because Clifton thought he was getting half. Like that's the
kind of stuff he would do.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Yeah, that's not cool. Well, at least Nat Clifton got
to move on.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
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
(33:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
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
(34:21):
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
(34:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
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.
(35:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
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
(35:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
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
(36:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
You know, of course this would be a good movie.
I I say that.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
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
(37:24):
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
(37:46):
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
(38:10):
people just went directly around the Globe Charters and straight
to the NBA.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
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.
(38:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yeah, which is I think below the minimum for a
starting salary in the NBA today anyway, but still.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Yeah, that time a ton of money, and the NBA's
salaries are very high.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
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
(39:29):
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,
(39:52):
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
(40:14):
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
(40:34):
up in the last like twenty thirty years.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
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
(41:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
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
(41:51):
and corporations in general.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
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
(42:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
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
(43:03):
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.
(43:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
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
(44:11):
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.
(44:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
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
(45:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
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.
(45:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
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
(46:27):
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
(46:50):
d and forty five win loss ratio.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
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
(47:14):
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
(47:36):
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
(47:58):
good at that. And this guy was awesome.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
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
(48:21):
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
(48:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
He was in his fifties.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yeah, he took the last shot and he sunk it
and won accidentally one. According to a lot.
Speaker 1 (49:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
Apparently Klatts's quote was, it was like we had just
killed Santa Claus.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
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
(49:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
Game, more slap Shot than Hoosiers.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
Okay, yeah, okay, So but.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
Then Will Ferrell did that basketball movie, and I think
this is sort of around the time we're thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
Oh, is it the same thing?
Speaker 1 (50:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
Yeah, I think that. I think enthusiasm for that particular
movie is cool. Do you guys can probably take a
shot at it again.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
Well, I say you and Scott should get to you
at Chuck.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
All right, maybe it's time that movie has been forgotten
by now.
Speaker 2 (51:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
Yeah, it was a good one. That was That was
a fun episode. I enjoyed that.
Speaker 2 (51:33):
I agree completely. It was a good episode.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
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,
(51:55):
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
(52:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:30):
Does Dany's got us pegged?
Speaker 1 (52:32):
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
(52:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (53:17):
Yeah you are. Thanks a lot, Danny. Those are really
excellent email and we hope you enjoyed the Nashville show.
Speaker 1 (53:24):
That's a good That was a great one.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
If you want to be like Danny and write as
a truly great email, we love those. You can wrap
it up, dribble it on the bottom, and send it
off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
You Know, Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody, we want to let you know that that
great LP, the vinyl record of stuff you should know
about how vinyl works. It's old so well that Born
Losers Records has printed more.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Right, Yeah, we're in our second pressing, Chuck, that's how
great it was. And they're printing five hundred more and
now's the time to go get them. You can order
them now and they're in two new awesome color slash
styles that you can go see. Go check out our
website Stuff youshould Know dot com and click on the
button SYSK Vinyl and it will give you all the
(00:31):
facts and info you need, or just search stuff you
should know Vinyl and Born Losers will come up to
that's the official site. So if you got shut out
from the last press, well, hallelujah, here's pressing too.
Speaker 1 (00:43):
You're welcome, Welcome to Stuff you should Know, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
How's that pretty great. Oh are you gonna follow up?
Speaker 2 (01:16):
I was just egging you on.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Okay, I feel like I get a little off key
because it goes in some you know, more subtle directions.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
It does. And what you're referring to is, of course,
the song Sweet Georgia Brown by Brother Bones.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
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
(01:51):
it stuck for seventy years.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, they decided to make it basically their unofficial official
team song. And if you remember, that was my first
forty five record ever?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
Was it really?
Speaker 2 (02:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:12):
All right, Well, let's talk real quick. So you saw
the Globetrotters in what year? Roughly?
Speaker 2 (02:17):
My guess is it would have been eighty two, eighty three.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
I mean that's if not, you know, the Golden Era
just sort of it's just after just after the Golden.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Era Curly was still there, but Metal Lark left.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Oh well, they were right up your alley then.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
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,
(03:08):
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.
(03:29):
It's still so much fun.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
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.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
What's funny, is, Chuck, is that them being great basketball
players is actually a throwback to their original I guess
kind of iteration.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
Look at you bringing it all around.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
I like to do that sometimes, So.
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Are we in the nineteen twenties, then.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yeah, at the beginning of the Harlem Globetrotters. It's actually
predates the Harlem Globetrotters, and I think the early to
mid nineteen.
Speaker 1 (04:50):
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
(05:15):
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
(05:38):
exhibition games because there wasn't a league, but they were
you know, competitive, real basketball games.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
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,
(06:07):
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
(06:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
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
(07:01):
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
(07:22):
hired that Wendell Phillips team and they named them the
Savoy Big Five.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
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
(07:47):
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,
(08:08):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
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
(08:47):
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,
(09:08):
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.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:45):
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
(10:08):
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
(10:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
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.
Speaker 1 (10:58):
Yeah, I had nothing to do with Harlem. I don't
think it.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
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
(11:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (11:38):
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,
(11:58):
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
(12:21):
of America and as you'll see the rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
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
(13:02):
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
(13:22):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:36):
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,
(13:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
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
(14:34):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
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,
(15:32):
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
(15:54):
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.
(16:16):
But they loved the game and they were getting paid
to play it.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
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
(16:42):
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
(17:04):
loss ratio for the Harlem Globe Charters was twenty seven
thousand to three and forty five.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, yet not talk about the General Wait everybody, just
wait a second.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
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
(17:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:08):
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
(18:28):
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.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
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
(19:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
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.
(19:37):
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.
Speaker 1 (19:47):
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
(20:10):
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
(20:33):
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.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
If anybody was, it was them, though.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
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.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
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,
(21:26):
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.
(21:48):
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
(22:09):
doing it like fifty years earlier.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
Yeah. Absolutely, And this was way earlier than Curly Neil too.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Yeah. I mean people didn't take half court three pointers
outside of the Harlem Globe Trotters.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
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,
(22:43):
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
(23:04):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
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
(23:37):
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
(23:58):
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
(24:21):
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.
Speaker 1 (24:42):
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
(25:04):
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,
(25:27):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:34):
Those things make people from eight to eighty just laugh,
I know. But if you're seven or you're eighty one,
forget it.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
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
(26:04):
legs and dribbling in circles around people. He was the first,
you know, ball handling master.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
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
(26:30):
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.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
Did you say she?
Speaker 2 (26:50):
I did say she because she is one of three
women on the the Harlem Globetrotter's team.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
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.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Okay, that's new. That's a generally new phenomenon that probably
started in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
I would say probably seventies, but sure, okay, but prior
to that, just fifty years.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
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
(28:29):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
And it works like a charm. It does you want
to take a break or keep going?
Speaker 1 (28:45):
Let's keep going.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
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
(29:06):
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
(29:26):
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
(29:48):
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?
Speaker 1 (30:01):
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
(30:21):
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.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
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
(30:54):
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.
(31:15):
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.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
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
(32:06):
better and stood more and more on its own two feet.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
A great cliffhanger, think so too, All right, we'll be
right back.
Speaker 2 (32:37):
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
(32:59):
because Clifton thought he was getting half. Like that's the
kind of stuff he would do.
Speaker 1 (33:03):
Yeah, that's not cool. Well, at least Nat Clifton got
to move on.
Speaker 2 (33:07):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:20):
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
(33:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
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
(34:21):
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
(34:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:56):
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.
(35:18):
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.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
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
(35:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:59):
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
(36:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
You know, of course this would be a good movie.
I I say that.
Speaker 2 (37:03):
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
(37:24):
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
(37:46):
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
(38:10):
people just went directly around the Globe Charters and straight
to the NBA.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
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.
(38:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (38:53):
Yeah, which is I think below the minimum for a
starting salary in the NBA today anyway, but still.
Speaker 1 (39:00):
Yeah, that time a ton of money, and the NBA's
salaries are very high.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
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
(39:29):
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,
(39:52):
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
(40:14):
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
(40:34):
up in the last like twenty thirty years.
Speaker 1 (40:37):
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.
Speaker 2 (40:54):
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
(41:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:29):
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
(41:51):
and corporations in general.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
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.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
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
(42:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
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
(43:03):
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.
(43:24):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:47):
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
(44:11):
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.
(44:31):
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.
Speaker 2 (44:38):
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
(45:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (45:21):
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.
(45:42):
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.
Speaker 2 (46:06):
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
(46:27):
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
(46:50):
d and forty five win loss ratio.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
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
(47:14):
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
(47:36):
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
(47:58):
good at that. And this guy was awesome.
Speaker 2 (48:00):
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
(48:21):
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
(48:44):
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.
Speaker 1 (49:00):
He was in his fifties.
Speaker 2 (49:01):
Yeah, he took the last shot and he sunk it
and won accidentally one. According to a lot.
Speaker 1 (49:07):
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.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
Apparently Klatts's quote was, it was like we had just
killed Santa Claus.
Speaker 1 (49:28):
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
(49:51):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:09):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
Game, more slap Shot than Hoosiers.
Speaker 2 (50:23):
Okay, yeah, okay, So but.
Speaker 1 (50:26):
Then Will Ferrell did that basketball movie, and I think
this is sort of around the time we're thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (50:32):
Oh, is it the same thing?
Speaker 1 (50:34):
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.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
Yeah, I think that. I think enthusiasm for that particular
movie is cool. Do you guys can probably take a
shot at it again.
Speaker 1 (50:49):
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.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
Well, I say you and Scott should get to you
at Chuck.
Speaker 1 (51:12):
All right, maybe it's time that movie has been forgotten
by now.
Speaker 2 (51:14):
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.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
Yeah, it was a good one. That was That was
a fun episode. I enjoyed that.
Speaker 2 (51:33):
I agree completely. It was a good episode.
Speaker 1 (51:34):
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,
(51:55):
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
(52:16):
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.
Speaker 2 (52:30):
Does Dany's got us pegged?
Speaker 1 (52:32):
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
(52:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (53:17):
Yeah you are. Thanks a lot, Danny. Those are really
excellent email and we hope you enjoyed the Nashville show.
Speaker 1 (53:24):
That's a good That was a great one.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
If you want to be like Danny and write as
a truly great email, we love those. You can wrap
it up, dribble it on the bottom, and send it
off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
You Know, Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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