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Globetrotters' savior stresses its historic role
Tuesday, May 23, 2000 By Paul Zeise, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
Like Melvin Adams, the Harlem Globetrotters have achieved unprecedented success after a rebirth of sorts. In 1998, Adams participated in the team's 20,000th game, but just five years earlier, the team looked as if it would never see 18,000.
The organization, which began as a Midwestern barnstorming team called the Savoy Big Five in 1927, was left for dead in the late 1980s and on the brink of declaring bankruptcy in 1993. Years and years of mismanagement and poor financial decisions had destroyed the organization's financial structure, and the team's trademark shtick had worn thin.
Most people in the world of sports believed the team had run its course and was ready to become a part of folklore the way that the Negro Leagues and the ABA had.
Everyone, that is, except for Mannie Jackson, an ex-Globetrotters player who had become a successful entrepreneur and was then the senior vice president of Honeywell Inc. Jackson was a visionary who saw the brand name Harlem Globetrotters as marketable and profitable, so he made plans to buy the organization, fold the actual team and create an entertainment company using the name.
Finds magic in the name
However, once he began putting together a group of investors, he found that not only was there a market for the brand name, there was a large group of fans worldwide who still wanted to see the Globetrotters on the court. So Jackson altered his plans and saved one of America's most famous institutions in the process.
"I had no idea that the response from the fans would be so favorable towards keeping the team alive. And me being an ex-player, I had a deep appreciation for the history of the club, so I decided I'd see if I could save the entire franchise."
Jackson and his investment group bought the team, which was millions of dollars in debt, for $5.5 million. They rebuilt the organization from top to bottom, starting with the business side of the operations. Jackson found a lot of fat that needed to be trimmed and completely reworked the team's marketing strategies. His main goal: return the team to its roots of being one of the best basketball teams in the world. Once the talent was in place, he reasoned, the team would again have credibility worldwide and the crowds would soon follow.
"People over the years had drawn up this image of the team as a bunch of clowns like those cartoons of Curly Neal and Meadowlark Lemon," said Jackson, who is the chairman of Globetrotters Inc. "That's an insult and an embarrassment, because this team was the best team in the world when blacks weren't permitted to play in the NBA and the white leagues that preceded it. What I wanted to do was restore the pride and heritage of this team, make them champions again. Make an organization and a team that young African-Americans can look up to as a role model."
"I want black people to look at our history the same way many white people look at the history of the New York Yankees. The Globetrotters were champions, not cartoon characters and caricatures."
Jackson's strategy has recently been validated by USA Basketball, an organization that for years looked down on the Globetrotters as not being a legitimate team. USAB, the governing body for the sport in the United States, approved the Globetrotters as an associate member of its organization on May 2, meaning the team is now officially recognized as an organization that conducts programs in or allied to basketball as a competitive sport.
Within three seasons, Jackson had tripled the team's revenue and for first time in nearly two decades, the organization turned a profit. Its annual attendance is more than 2 million fans. By 1998, Jackson had quadrupled revenues and had paid off the bank and all but two of the original investors the team owed money to.
Within the past two years, the Globetrotters have continued to add to its list of corporate sponsors and partners. The team has million-dollar deals with Disney, Reebok, Warner Brothers, Northwest Airlines and many more. And the demand for the team has even required Jackson to create two touring squads, which together have played more than 320 games per year over the past three years.
On the court, the team has also been successful. It has beaten national teams from countries all over Europe, has gone 13-0 against U.S. college All-Star teams over the past two years and has won several international tournaments with top professional teams from overseas. Last summer, the team competed in the Los Angeles Summer Pro-League, probably the strongest such league in the country, and went 10-1.
Wants to be in top 10
Jackson looks for late developers who may have fallen through the cracks of the NBA draft and for players with good character and personalities to perform for the crowd. So what about the tricks and jokes?
Those are still a big part of the team's appeal to fans, but they are back in the context of a competitive game, as they were in the old days. Like the Globetrotters of the pre-segregation era, this team plays hard competitive basketball until they have the game well in hand and then begin their shtick.
"Abe Saperstein [the original owner of the Globetrotters] was a master marketer," Jackson said. "I mean think about a short, white Jewish guy who was able to sell a Negro basketball team in the 1930s and '40s. People came to see them, however, because they were the best team in the world and everybody knew it. But they began their clowning act because they wanted to keep the scores close so that the teams who invited them in to play would book them for another date."
Saperstein was from Chicago and the original Savoy Big Five consisted of a bunch of players from Chicago. However, he wanted to give the impression that the team, which never actually left the Midwest until the early 1930s, was a big-time barnstorming team. So he renamed them the New York Globetrotters.
After one season, Saperstein realized that the fact that the players were black was actually a marketing point. So he renamed them the Harlem Globetrotters.
The Globetrotters barnstormed for 20 years and beat almost everyone they played. But it wasn't until 1948, when they knocked off Hall of Famer George Mikan and the Minneapolis Lakers, that people began to acknowledge they were the best team in the world. In 1949, the Globetrotters again beat the Lakers and the next year, the NBA became an integrated league.
It was those roots that Jackson, who was born in Illmo, Mo., in a railway boxcar, wanted to return to and those roots he wants to make sure never are forgotten.
"Those guys went through a struggle to open the doors for NBA players today," Jackson said. "They haven't received their due the way that the Negro League players in baseball have. We're changing that and people are beginning to realize that who we are today is who we were when we began. We just have more opportunities and our players have more choices."
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