Free Spinning the Globe by Ben Green Page A

winning 33 of their 37 regular season games. One of those losses was to the legendary New York Rens, who made their first visit to Chicago in early February. Inman Jackson was getting more playing time this year, but the big fellow was still a second-teamer, a backup player to the Savoy’s big guns.
    As for Tommy Brookins’s Globe Trotters, after that initial announcement in November, they completely disappeared from the pages of the Defender for two and a half months. Finally, on February 9, 1929, a lengthy article appeared, accompanied by a photo of Brookins, which previewed two upcoming games against Morgan College of Baltimore, to be held at the Eighth Regiment Armory.
    There were two intriguing items at the end of the article. First, before the Globe Trotters took the court against Morgan College, a preliminary game was gong to be played by Runt Pullins’s All-Stars. Second, there was news that the Globe Trotters had “recently returned from a trip through southern Illinois, where they made an excellent showing, winning seven games and losing two.”
    Now the story gets really interesting.
     
    Thirty years ago, in the early 1970s, Tommy Brookins was living in St. Martin, in the French Antilles, a speck of an island in the Caribbean that is jointly owned by the French and the Dutch. Atthat time, Brookins owned an Italian restaurant called Portofino on the island, but in the 1930s and ’40s he had been a celebrated singer and vaudevillian, entertaining all over the world. In his heyday, he had performed at the Palace Theater in New York, the Palladium in London, and had owned the Cabin in the Sky nightclub in Chicago with his partner and lover, Ethel Waters. His glory days as a basketball player on the South Side were far behind him.
    Walking on the beach one day, he came upon Michael Strauss, a sportswriter for the New York Times, who was in his bathing trunks, strolling in the opposite direction. Strauss was there visiting his daughter, who lived on the island. A loquacious and outgoing type, Strauss had a habit of greeting everyone he met.
    “How ya doing?” he called out as Brookins approached.
    “Fine,” Brookins replied. “You new to the island?”
    Strauss said he was just visiting.
    “What do you do?” Brookins asked.
    “I’m a sportswriter.”
    With that, Brookins stopped walking. “What do you know about the Harlem Globe Trotters?” he asked.
    “I’ve covered them a few times,” Strauss replied. He had been at the Times since 1930, and in his five decades of reporting had covered the entire gamut of sports, including major league baseball, football, boxing, horse racing, snow skiing, college and professional basketball—and the Harlem Globe Trotters.
    For the next few minutes, standing there in the sand with the waves lapping at their ankles, Tommy Brookins told an incredible story to this total stranger on the beach. But Strauss was intrigued by what he heard. In addition to his regular job at the Times, he was a prolific freelancer, writing articles for over thirty different magazines. He was always looking for a story—about sports, travel, skiing, anything that caught his fancy. And this story definitely caught his fancy. Strauss had known Abe Saperstein personally (by then Abe was deceased), he knew all about the Globetrotters, and his initial reaction was one of incredulity—that this tale could not possibly be true—but the more he listened, the more intrigued he became.
    He arranged to meet Brookins at his restaurant, Portofino, fordinner, to continue their conversation. When he got there, Brookins told him more details about the story and pulled out old photos to make his points. Strauss was convinced enough to write a freelance article, but he knew the story would be controversial—and still had doubts himself—so he didn’t offer it to a top-tier magazine, like Esquire, but sold it instead to a small Philadelphia-based basketball periodical, where it was published with no