Spinning the Globe by Ben Green

Spinning the Globe by Ben Green

Author:Ben Green [Green, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2005-10-09T07:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 11

All-Stars

On April 2, 1950, in Chicago Stadium, the site of so many decisive moments in Globetrotter history, the inaugural game of the most audacious promotion in American sports history, the World Series of Basketball, was played between the Harlem Globetrotters and the College All-Stars. It was the first of eighteen games on a three-week, 9,000-mile transcontinental tour of America, played in seventeen major cities before 181,000 fans.

Over the next twelve years, the World Series of Basketball would be witnessed by over two million fans and, at its peak, in the mid-1950s, would be the most popular basketball event in America, overshadowing the NCAA and NIT tournaments and the NBA finals. Its impact would still be reflected over fifty years later, in September 2002, when Larry Brown, coach of the 2004 world champion Detroit Pistons, was being inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts—the highest honor in the sport. In his acceptance speech, Brown said, “The greatest day I ever spent in basketball was when I was growing up in New York and my father took me to Madison Square Garden to see the Harlem Globetrotters play the College All-Stars.”

Only the mind of an Abe Saperstein could have conceived it. And only the front office staff he had assembled, led by Marie Linehan, could have pulled it off. It was the culmination of twenty years of promoting games in byways and whistle-stops across the land, now magnified on a grand scale to the largest cites and arenas in America.

The College All-Star tour was daring, and perhaps insane, on many levels. First, the idea of a transcontinental tour—by airplane—was in itself a bold undertaking. Commercial air travel was still fairly uncommon, and many of the players, on both teams, had never flown in their lives. The expenses for such a tour were far beyond anything Abe and Marie had ever incurred. Airfare alone to fly a party of forty people (two teams, coaches, staff, technicians, orchestra, and halftime entertainers), in two chartered DC-3s, to seventeen different cities, one each day, from New York to Los Angeles, cost an estimated $25,000. That was more than the Globetrotters’ gross receipts for an entire season a few years earlier. Once they landed in a city, there were additional costs for ground transportation, hotels, salaries, state and federal taxes, liability insurance, publicity (newspaper ads, billboards, posters), stadium rentals (usually 30–40 percent of the gate, after expenses), lights, microphones, and union electricians. Multiply those headaches times seventeen straight days in seventeen different cities—it was enough to make any other sports promoter blanch. But not Abe.

And the logistics of moving that entourage from one end of the country to the other, and back again, all the while rotating players and coaches in and out, were staggering. That’s where Marie Linehan’s organizational skills came in. She sent each participant a detailed letter listing departure times for the United charter from Chicago to New York, baggage limitations, reservations at the Victoria Hotel on Fifty-first Street, and a reminder not to miss the dress rehearsal in Madison Square Garden.



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.