Free Spinning the Globe by Ben Green

some older South Side stalwarts, and Lillard and Anderson returned in time to crush Evanston, 33–12.
    The season ended with the Savoy Big Five in complete disarray. Of the players who had seen action in their first game, barely three months before, only Joe Lillard remained. This dramatic breakup at the end of the first season would have repercussions that would haunt Dick Hudson for years.
     
    For Abe Saperstein, 1928 had to have been a disappointing year. His initial bookings for Hudson’s Giles Post tour of Wisconsin, a year earlier, had ended in controversy over the inflated college attributions, and once that tour ended, he was out of the picture.
    He may have continued to book some Negro League baseball games for Walter Ball, but his promotional career was apparently floundering so badly that he took a job with the city. A regular job— not in sports. He was able to wrangle a patronage job from his local ward boss, working as a forester in Chicago’s massive Lincoln Park.Abe had once hoped to study forestry at the University of Illinois, and this job involved hiring tree surgeons to maintain Lincoln Park’s canopy of trees. He even got his younger brother Harry a job with one of the tree surgeons.
    Whatever he had going in sports, it wasn’t enough to quit his day job.
     
    The 1928–29 basketball season brought many changes to the Savoy Big Five, which began preseason workouts in early November. First, Dick Hudson was gone, having been replaced as coach by Al Monroe, who was also a sportswriter for the Defender . Then Monroe scored a major coup by luring Specs Moten, a former New York Ren who was one of the best players in the game, to sign with the Savoy. And due to the success of the Big Five’s initial season, Savoy owner Faggen had even organized a Savoy girls’ team and had invited black college teams to play their home games at the ballroom.
    The biggest change of all, however, was that Tommy Brookins and his insurgents had not returned. Apparently, their grievances about money had not been resolved over the summer. In fact, Brookins had gone so far as to form his own team. That announcement was made, with no fanfare, in the November 24, 1928, issue of the Defender in a minuscule four-sentence article that was sandwiched between a story about boxer Baby Jo Gans and ads for Kidney Plaster that promised to “End Lame Back!” and eczema medication guaranteed to “Stop the itching in one hour!”
    The name of this new team was the Globe Trotters.
    The article described how Brookins, Toots Wright, and Randolph Ramsey—the old triumvirate from the 1925 Wendell Phillips heavyweights—along with Inman Jackson, Bill Watson, Willis “Kid” Oliver (another former Phillips player), and Bobby Anderson (the previous assistant coach for the Savoy Big Five) had formed their own team called the Globe Trotters, which would be opening its season on the following Thursday, November 29, against a white team from Milwaukee. Interestingly, they would be playing at the Eighth Regiment Armory, their old stamping ground from the Giles Post days. Although his name was not listed in the article, it is very likelythat Dick Hudson also was involved with the new venture, which would explain his departure from the Savoy.
    Brookins, who was clearly the leader of the team, also predicted that he had lined up the services of Joe Lillard and Rock Anderson, in effect stealing the heart of the Savoy team. But when the Savoy Big Five opened its season (with a redemptive 29–21 victory over the Chicago Bruins), Brookins’s prophecy proved false: Lillard and Anderson were both in the lineup, as were Bill Watson and Inman Jackson, who had apparently had second thoughts about going with Brookins and had returned to the fold. Brookins’s defection certainly didn’t hurt the Savoy at the box office, as more than two thousand fans, white and black, showed up for this interracial matchup.
    The Savoy Big Five had a terrific second season,