Great times they were. I remember them from the 70’s. They even had a Saturday morning cartoon, and a pinball machine! They were on a lot of times on Saturday afternoons on ABC’s Wide World of Sports whupping up on the Washington Generals. Meadowlark Lemon would pull the shorts down of the General at the free throw line, and Curly Neal would steal the ball and run down for a layup!

Gosh that was fun stuff. One of them would get in a pretend tiff with another Globetrotter, he’d grab the bucket of water that was for some reason beside the bench, run after him, the one being chased would duck and the confetti would fly into the audience! The crowd would be relieved. Then 30 minutes later it would happen again. The crowd where the bucket was about to thrown would think okay here comes the confetti, then this time it would be a real bucket of water!

Their basketball skills were incredible. “The Harlem Globetrotters is an American exhibition basketball team. They combine athleticism, theater, and comedy in their style of play. They have played more than 26,000 exhibition games in 124 countries and territories. The team’s signature song is Brother Bones’ whistled version of “Sweet Georgia Brown.” – Wkipedia (founded 1926)

The lineup from around the time I remember was: Meadowlark Lemon, Curly Neal, Hubert Ausbie, Marques Haynes, Goose Tatum, Louis Dunbar, Twiggy Sanders. Apologies for not finding all the names from the right period. Data is actually hard to find for specific periods. I imagine the act is a bit harder to put on today with the political correctness requirement.

An interesting note from their history was they played real basketball on a “barnstorming circuit” up through the 1950’s, then when the NBA started to take in black players they had to put more of the focus on the comedy routine and play for fun. “In 2000 the team returned to competitive play with a series of exhibition games against top collegiate teams.” That would have been fun to see.

The Globetrotters came to mind recently with the current political happenings in Washington. Rush a few years back started using the analogy of the Republicans as the Washington Generals, the Globetrotters hapless opponent. The GOP always loses and the Democrats make them look stupid along the way. Its a perfect analogy.