They’re Winners Around the Globe

What’s the winningest sports aggregation of all time? The 1927 Yankees? Hey! They lost 44 games.

The Lombardi Packers? Naw! They lost five games in 1959 and again in 1964. Knute Rockne’s Fighting Irish? 5-4-0 in 1928. The Auerbach-Russell Celtics? 59-16 was their best season, although 62-18 was close. The Chamberlain Lakers? 69-13 is pretty good. But not awesome.

I’m talking a team that was 512-0 in 1977-78, a team whose worst record ever was 63-12 and that was 1927, the year the team was founded. The team has won 16,898 games since then, and lost only 300.

How about a team that hasn’t lost a game since Nixon was President?

The Harlem Globetrotters are more than a team, they’re an American institution. They brought more goodwill to this country than the Marshall Plan. You can’t say it without smiling. Try it. H-a-r-l-e-m G-l-o-b-e-t-r-o-t-t-e-r-s. See! You’re grinning. Soon you’ll be laughing.

It’s like seeing the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy in one. Their humor is as universal as music. It not only plays in Peoria, it plays in Ankara. Yet, it is as uniquely American as the Mississippi showboat.

It brings another dimension to comedy. Because these guys doing shtick out on a basketball court are not Catskill tummlers, they are the best athletes in their business. It’s like watching the Ruth Yankees do pratfalls.

Wilt Chamberlain played here. So did Bob Gibson, the Hall of Fame pitcher.

Can anyone seriously doubt Meadowlark Lemon, Goose Tatum and Marques Haynes could have lit up an NBA court?

The Globetrotters pick their players if they like people. Other outfits check their players’ jump shots. The Globies check their smiles. Magic Johnson could have been a Globie. Kareem, probably not.

You take Curly Neal, who is now the advance man for the Globetrotter tour after 22 years in the backcourt (if the Globies can be said to have anything as mundane as a backcourt). Curly was born to be a Globetrotter. He shaved his hair off at the age of 12 because he thought it made him look older. He’s been shaving it ever since. Now, he thinks it makes him look younger. As I say, a perfect Globie.

Curly played for Johnson C. Smith College in North Carolina and was good enough--a 25-points-a-night shooter--that three NBA franchises--the New York Knicks, Baltimore Bullets and Detroit Pistons--were after him. He picked the Globetrotters because they sent the air fare.

Pro basketball was not the financial cornucopia it was to become, but did Curly Neal ever regret he didn’t set out to become another Isiah Thomas, Dennis Johnson, or even Byron Scott or John Stockton? Curly laughs. Curly laughs a lot. “I’ve met three Popes and four Presidents. I’ve been to five continents. In the NBA you get to go to Milwaukee and Minneapolis. I’ve been there, too.”

The Globetrotters are more than a job, they’re a calling, Curly feels. The Globetrotters are the only team in the Smithsonian Institution--right alongside the airplane Lindbergh flew the Atlantic.

The team didn’t start out doing baggy-pants, seltzer-bottle routines. When the late Abe Saperstein formed the group in 1927, barnstorming athletic teams were all the rage. Everyone knew Satchel Paige’s teams of traveling Negro All-Stars were probably the equal of the New York Yankees. At least they were when Paige was pitching.

There was good money to be made on the road in those days, and the Globetrotters used to go around the country like carnival fighters, taking on all comers, sometimes spotting them points. A clue may be found in the early records that the games were contests, not situation comedy--63-12 in 1927, l45-13 in 1928, 151-13 in 1929.

The Globies were actually good enough for the established league teams to duck them. Like Archie Moore, they couldn’t get anybody to fight them. In the ‘50s, the Lakers--then in Minneapolis--played them a four-game series that ended up 2-2. The NBA was relieved.

No one is quite sure when it became a sitcom. Probably in 1942 when Reece (Goose) Tatum joined the troupe. Tatum could do anything with a basketball Houdini could do with handcuffs or Blackstone a deck of cards--pull a live dove from it, if necessary.

The show played as well in Cairo, Egypt, as Cairo, Illinois. “There was no language barrier,” recalls Curly Neal. What the Globetrotters did, didn’t need subtitles. It was a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. It was as funny in Poland as it was in Portland.

It played in countries as small as Andorra and as big as Australia. It played on an aircraft carrier. It played in wheelchairs. Most teams when they play wheelchair teams play them on foot. The Globetrotters climbed into wheelchairs, too. “We got beat,” laughs Curly Neal. “By the Toronto Spitfires. Have you ever tried to push a wheelchair up and down court for 48 minutes? Our arms were like noodles.”

The act was almost a bigger hit overseas than at home. “One night in Wembley Stadium in London, England, our plane was two hours late coming from Italy. We thought the game would be canceled, but when we got there, we found 20,000 people still waiting. We gave them a great show,” notes Curly.

Even in America, a crowd sat in Kansas City in a snowstorm for two hours waiting for the Trotters.

The team that was formed by Saperstein on the running board of a 1925 tin lizzie Ford last sold--in a package with the Ice Capades--for $30 million, to International Broadcasting Corporation.

Basic Americana is in trouble in today’s market. The circus has all but disappeared. Vaudeville is dead. The minstrel show is history. But the Globetrotters go on forever. Smiles sell. They are an event. And they bring the event to the Forum on Jan. 21, to the Long Beach Arena on Jan. 23 and to the Irvine Bren Center on Jan. 24-25.

Bet them to win. They are the biggest winners in the history of sports--in more ways than one.