How Harlem Globetrotters founder Abe Saperstein shaped basketball as we know it today

When basketball superstar Stephen Curry sank a series of three-point shots to help Team USA win the Olympic gold medal in Paris this summer, it’s unlikely the four-time NBA champion was thinking of Abe Saperstein.

But as a new biography of the pioneering Jewish basketball executive suggests, Curry had plenty of reasons to be grateful to Saperstein, who is best known as the founder and longtime head coach of the Harlem Globetrotters.

Saperstein, who at 6-foot-1 is the smallest man in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, is credited with introducing the three-pointer to the game. But his mark on basketball and sports more broadly extends far beyond Curry’s signature long shot.

In a new book, “Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports,” brothers Mark and Matthew Jacob explore Saperstein’s far-reaching legacy, which they say remains underappreciated 58 years after his death. Beyond the three-pointer, they argue, Saperstein played a crucial role in elevating basketball from a second-tier American sport to a professionalized global powerhouse.

“You look at how popular basketball is at the Olympics, and Abe gets the credit for that,” Mark Jacob told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I think he should be considered one of the great innovators in sport, and not just in the sport and the way it was played – although he was – but also in the way sport was marketed and how it was promoted.”

One of the highlights of his career: He pushed the NBA to expand to the West Coast years before the Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles in 1960. And as early as the 1950s and 1960s, Saperstein warned about the slow pace of play in baseball, a live game. issue in MLB debates in recent years, urging team owners to charge more for games against better teams.

“I think if Abe Saperstein could, figuratively speaking, look down from heaven, he would smile to see that the NBA not only has an All-Star Game, but also an All-Star Weekend with the slam dunk- competition. said Matthew Jacob. “He was just a huge supporter of fans, and he wanted sports and sports teams to continually reevaluate how they operated to put fans first.”

‘Globetrotter’, which hit shelves this week, is the result of years of research and writing by the Jacobs. Mark, 69, lives in Evanston, Illinois, and is a former editor at the Chicago Tribune; Matthew, 61, lives in Arlington, Virginia, and is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, the group that revolutionized the game through analytics. (The brothers are not Jewish.) This is the second book they have written together, following their 2010 work “What the Great Ate: A Curious History of Food and Fame,” and the most in-depth published examination of Saperstein’s life and living . influence.

“Globetrotter” authors Mark Jacob, left, and Matthew Jacob. (Courtesy)

Saperstein was born in London on July 4, 1902, the son of Louis and Anna Saperstein, who had left what is now Poland amid rising anti-Semitism. The family moved to Chicago when Abe was five. The Sapersteins were Conservative Jews who attended High Holiday services and spoke Yiddish at home, but were largely secular.

Saperstein’s career in sports began as a booking agent, and in 1926 he became coach of an all-black team then called the Savoy Big Five, based on the South Side of Chicago. Saperstein renamed the team and embarked on a whirlwind tour that the Globetrotters are still on nearly a century and thousands of games later.

When it was founded, the team was not from Harlem nor were they globetrotters. The name was a symbol of Saperstein’s promotional flair: “Harlem” was chosen to signal to Midwestern cities of the time that the team was all-black, and “Globetrotters” was intended to signal the team’s reach and prestige. exaggerate.

The Globetrotters’ famous style of play – an entertaining combination of impressive athleticism, comedy and theatrics – has brought both joy and consternation to the team and its founder. While the Globetrotters are credited with elevating players like Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton — who was one of the first black players in the NBA — and future Hall of Famer Wilt Chamberlain, the team also faced criticism for what some perceived as a racist game. stereotypes.

“I think some people saw the Globetrotters as a kind of minstrel show, as something that depicted black people as childish and jokers and not as serious people,” Mark Jacob said.

But Jacob said the Globetrotters and Saperstein were much more nuanced than the team’s sometimes circus-like style would suggest. There was a reason why black icons, including Jesse Owens and Jesse Jackson, were fans.

“On the other hand, the Globetrotter players conspire with the crowd to fool the referees and the other team,” Jacob added. ‘They are not humiliated. They almost triumph in the whole pantomime of it.

And while the players performed many tricks on the court, they were also remarkably talented basketball players. In 1948, the Globetrotters won an exhibition game against the vaunted Minneapolis Lakers, who won three consecutive national championships in the NBA and previous leagues from 1948 to 1950.

“It showed that black athletes could compete with anyone, at a time when many white people didn’t think that was true,” said Mark Jacob. “A lot of people point to that game as a real boost to (the NBA’s) integration and basically making it inevitable that black players would be allowed into the NBA because they could prove they could play.”

It was Saperstein’s identity as an outsider – a Jewish immigrant from London – that helped him take on the role of mediator for his black players and the still largely white world of professional sports. Mark Jacob said Saperstein fits into broader Jewish-black relations during the period when Jewish leaders played a key role in the struggle for black civil rights.

Saperstein, a proud Jew and Zionist, was no stranger to discrimination himself.

As “Globetrotter” details, Saperstein and his family confronted anti-Semitism again and again, in London, Chicago and as Saperstein traveled the world promoting his Globetrotters, Negro League baseball teams and other black athletes.

Saperstein’s Jewish identity was especially central during the Globetrotters’ first European tour in 1950. When the Globetrotters went to Paris, Saperstein expressed disdain for a particular location, the Palais des Sports, where 30,000 Jews had been held several years earlier. before being deported to Nazi camps.

“When you go into those dark, gloomy locker rooms, there’s a ghost around every corner,” Saperstein said of the Palais, according to the biography.

Saperstein and his 13-year-old daughter Eloise also confronted the deep-seated anti-Semitism of post-war Germany, according to a particularly powerful anecdote from the book told by Abra Berkley, Eloise’s daughter.

While her father held a press conference at a hotel, Eloise, looking for local Jewish food, went to the concierge to ask where she could find the Jewish neighborhood.

As Berkley recounted, the hotel worker spat in Eloise’s face and told her, “Hitler should have gotten rid of you all.” Eloise, with spit still dripping down her face, burst into her father’s press conference, crying hysterically, and told him what had happened.

Saperstein abruptly ended the conference, demanded that the employee be fired, and went to a jewelry store next door to order a Star of David necklace for Eloise, which Berkley said was never taken off by her mother. Years later, Eloise made copies of the pendant for her own daughters.

“The fact that Abe ran off immediately after that incident and had that fixed sends a very powerful message, not only to people today, but obviously to his daughter, who just went through this terrible experience,” said Matthew Jacob. “He said, ‘This is who we are, and we’re going to be proud of it, and I never want you to forget it, because I won’t.’”

The scene, Mark Jacob said, illustrates the boldness that animated Saperstein’s entire career, in which he was never afraid to speak his mind, even when some of his ideas were decades ahead of their time.

“Jews have historically faced terrible challenges and discrimination,” says Mark Jacob. “I think there is this kind of endurance, this ability to rise above circumstances and face challenges rather than avoid them. And Abe was. Abe did that.”