On the Shoulders of Giants

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  A newly formed Celtics team continued the rivalry just where they had left off. The two teams battled back and forth season after season, with neither one being fully dominant. Despite the intensity, the two teams respected each other. “The Rens learned a lot from the Celtics,” admitted John Isaacs. “They played with their heads. And when we played other teams, we instituted a lot of their stuff—playing smart basketball, setting each other up.” Because they played so many games in dance halls on highly waxed floors that were dangerously slippery to run on, both the Celtics and the Rens adjusted by developing a passing game, for which they both became famous. Bounce passes were to be avoided because the large thirty-two-inch circumference balls were held together with lumpy stitches that made the direction of the ball’s bounce unpredictable.

  Celtics-Rens matchups were so popular that on Thanksgiving Day of 1934 they played each other twice, once in the Bronx and again at the Renaissance Casino (with the Rens winning both games). Because both teams realized how necessary the other was to their financial success, they both considered taking the show on the road through the South, traveling to play against each other in other states. That idea was eventually rejected because they feared the South wouldn’t accept the black-versus-white rivalry. “Once you passed D.C.,” recalled John Isaacs, “you weren’t known by what your name was, you became ‘nigger’ or ‘boy.’” Nevertheless, the Rens added most of the Southern states to their schedule and took to the road with renewed gusto. With Douglas managing the casino, Eric Illidge became the Rens’ financial manager while they toured, and “Fats” Jenkins became the player-coach. By the late thirties, the Rens were each earning about $150 to $250 a month (with $3 a day for food), with Fats Jenkins pulling in between $1,500 and $2,000 per season. Beating the Celtics brought a bonus of $25 to $50.

  The Southern tour proved vastly successful. Traveling over three thousand miles on their bus, the Old Blue Goose, the Rens took on all challengers, including college, club, and professional teams—provided they were black—and beat every team on the tour. In order to be invited back for rematches, the Rens devised the formula of running up the score in the first half, then allowing the opposing team to get within ten points by the end of the game. Even though they didn’t play white teams, their games were attended by both blacks and whites. By silently letting their athleticism do the talking, the Rens became the best spokespersons around for promoting equal rights. Romeo Dougherty praised the Rens, saying, “The good will the team established has done much to establish the outfit as one of the greatest basketball aggregations yet assembled.” That goodwill sometimes translated into breaking longtime racial barriers: after winning an unprecedented eighty-eight consecutive games in 1933, the Rens were invited to spend the night in the all-white York Athletic Club.

  Following the tour of the South, the Rens barnstormed through the Midwest, running off win after win. When they played the St. Louis All-Star team, they came up against the highest-paid player in the National Basketball League in the 1930s, John Wooden. Wooden would go on to become the first person enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach. Many still believe Wooden to be the greatest college coach in history, having won a still unparalleled ten National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) National Championships, while coaching at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Years later, Wooden described his experience playing against the Rens: “I played many games against the New York Rens in the thirties and continue to feel that they were the finest exponents of team play that I have ever seen…. To this day, I have never seen a team play better team basketball.”

  The barnstorming years tested the Rens, not just as basketball players, but as black men. While they were often warmly welcomed by the black communities, they also faced the worst kind of racism. After traveling as many as two hundred miles to play in a game, they would be banned from restaurants and hotels, often eating cold sandwiches and sleeping on their tour bus. Sometimes even the bus wasn’t a refuge, when gas station owners would stand at their pumps with rifles rather than sell gas to the Rens. “Bruiser” Saitch recalled how the Rens sometimes “slept in jails because they wouldn’t put us up in hotels…. We sometimes had over a thousand damn dollars in our pockets and we couldn’t get a good goddamn meal.”

  The Rens were usually able to channel their rage and frustration into the game. Maybe it was the daily fires of racism that forged their skills, motivated them to prove something to the world. Gerry Archibald, owner and manager of professional teams in Warren, Pennsylvania, recalled one such incident with the Rens. Whenever the Rens came to Warren, an all-white town of fifteen thousand, they always stayed in Jamestown, New York. But one time they showed up without having made reservations and Archibald called a local hotel to book them rooms—without telling the hotel the team was black. Archibald drove the team to the hotel and went inside with a couple of the players. “I’ll never forget the look in the poor girl’s face at the desk when he opened the door,” Archibald remembered. “She turned white as a sheet and she said, ‘Mr. Archibald, I just can’t do it,’ and she burst out crying. Just like that, the Rens turned around and said, ‘Okay, Gerry, we’ll find some place.’ And, boy, did they ever put on a show that night! I beat ’em a couple of times, but not that night!”

  The fans often weren’t any more hospitable; those who sat courtside sometimes stabbed players in the buttocks with hatpins or burned them with cigarettes. Those fans out of reach threw cigarettes, cigars, and bottles or shined lights in the eyes of shooters. In mining towns, the miners would wear their helmets and focus the lights into the eyes of the visiting team. Sometimes, if a heckler was particularly obnoxious, a Ren would stand in front of the offending fan and call for the ball. When a teammate whipped the ball to him, he would jump aside and let the ball smash into the fan’s face. Recalled “Pop” Gates, “After that, they got the message and kept quiet.”

  Racism didn’t come just from fans and local proprietors, it also came from the other teams and promoters. During play against the all-white House of David, a player hurled racial insults at Fats Jenkins. Rens manager Eric Illidge complained to the House of David management, who promptly dismissed the offending player from their team. To make sure the Rens weren’t cheated by promoters, Illidge carried two important tools: a tabulator and a gun. Because the Rens were often paid a percentage of the gate, Illidge used the tabulator to personally count heads at every game. The gun was used to make sure they got paid up front. He instructed the Rens, “Never come out on the court unless I have the money.” As he later explained, “We would not let anyone deny us our right to make a living.”

  While the Rens were on the road, Bob Douglas continued in his role as community leader in Harlem. He spent $15,000 renovating the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom, where he launched many new bands that went on to become top entertainers. In an effort to bring youth off the streets and away from crime, Douglas started two amateur teams, the Rens Cubs and the Rens Juniors, which he personally coached. The teams served as training grounds for future Rens, such as John Isaacs. In recognition of his role in the community, Douglas was appointed an honorary member of the board of trustees of Sing Sing prison. For his efforts, in a 1935 contest sponsored by the New York Amsterdam News, Smilin’ Bob Douglas was selected the second most popular person in Harlem.

  Year after year, the Rens amassed astounding win-loss records. Even their few losses were avenged with interest. In the 1932–33 season they had a record of 120–8, having lost once to Yonkers, once to the Jewels, and six times to the Celtics. But in rematches, the Rens beat both Yonkers and the Jewels twice, and defeated the Celtics eight times. The Chicago Defender praised them as “the nearest thing to sports perfection that you’ll ever see. They are the one team that does everything right. They simply make no mistakes.” The Rens used those abilities not just to amass wins, but to support causes, playing various fund-raising games for such causes as the Scottsboro Boys (nine black youth
s falsely convicted of rape) and the American Jewish Congress Fund. Romeo Dougherty expressed Harlem’s appreciation for their basketball skill as well as their skills as African-American ambassadors: “Bob Douglas has just reason to be proud of his team which sported the royal colors of blue and gold, for they were the very cream of basketball’s royalty.”

  It was official. The Rens had become the crown princes of Harlem.

  The Rens—Harlem Globetrotters Rivalry: Crown Princes Versus Clown Princes

  During this time, another team arose to challenge the Rens’ supremacy. In 1926 in Chicago, twenty-four-year-old Abe Saperstein, a five-feet-three-inch white man who’d played basketball in high school, formed and coached the all-black Savoy Big Five, named after the Chicago Savoy Ballroom. With the Depression cutting into the Savoy’s business, the owners agreed to permit basketball games. When that failed to significantly increase business, the Savoy dropped basketball altogether. But Saperstein did not drop basketball. He created a new team, Saperstein’s New York Globetrotters. Even though the team was from Chicago, he felt that putting New York in the name would emphasize to the fans that they were a black team. When he thought that wasn’t obvious enough, he replaced New York with Harlem and the team became known as the Harlem Globetrotters.

  Like the Rens, the Globetrotters took to the road, with the whole team crammed into Saperstein’s Model T Ford. They traveled through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa, maintaining the same nightly schedule of games that the Rens did. And their win-loss record was nearly as impressive. They finished their 1933–34 season with an astounding 152–2 record. As their reputation grew, so did demand for the team. Their touring radius began to extend farther and farther, until they’d pushed all the way to Puget Sound, Washington. Naturally, everyone expected a Rens-Globetrotter matchup.

  Bob Douglas had reservations. There was no doubt that the Globetrotters were talented players, maybe as talented as the Rens players. “This is a fallacy that people have, that the Globetrotters were not good ballplayers,” explained Rens star Pop Gates. “They were excellent ballplayers.” But Douglas’s approach to basketball was to play the opponents straight up, show the world that black basketball players were the equal of white players. This would demonstrate to those who watched that, if they had been wrong about the black man’s athletic ability, maybe they were wrong about other biases about blacks. For Douglas, maintaining dignity was as important as winning.

  Abe Saperstein’s approach was to present a more docile, less threatening image of the black player. So, to make themselves more acceptable to the white audience, the Globetrotters began incorporating tricks and comic routines. In Smashing Barriers, author Richard Lapchick describes why the Globetrotters were so successful:

  The Harlem Globetrotters had become white America’s image of what a black basketball team should be. As long as blacks were clowns, tricking rather than outsmarting their opponents while speaking barely recognizable English, they were allowed to succeed. This was especially true if the profiteers of their showmanship were whites like Abe Saperstein, owner of the Globetrotters. The players were merely his field hands.

  A similar approach was adopted by a black baseball team, the Zulu Cannibal Giants, who dressed in grass skirts, wore tribal paint on their faces, played in bare feet, and batted using what looked like African war clubs.

  Part of the message of the Harlem Renaissance was that the time for such stereotypes had passed and a “New Negro”—educated, confident, professional—would be promoted. If the New Negro had any chance of emerging from the crowd of Jim Crow and Aunt Jemima images branded in white American’s minds, then those old, comfortable images had to be erased. In 1931, the publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier started a public campaign to have the popular radio show Amos ’n’ Andy taken off the air. The longest-running show in radio history, Amos ’n’ Andy featured two black men, played by white actors, who spoke in faulty grammar and were surrounded by stereotypes of weak, lazy, crooked, and stupid blacks. The Courier urged its readers to protest the show to the Federal Radio Commission: “In this way you will be helping to end a nightly program of ridicule and reflection upon the Negro group.” (Though this campaign failed, a similar campaign against the TV version helped get the show yanked in 1953 after only two seasons.)

  For Douglas, the Harlem Globetrotters’ approach seemed more like a minstrel show in the odious tradition of Amos ’n’ Andy rather than straight basketball and threatened to set back black sports—and blacks in general—erasing everything they’d accomplished in the last few years. This sentiment was echoed by journalist Ryan Whirty in March of 2005: “Looking back, the Harlem Globetrotters did more harm to the cause of racial equality than good…. They [became famous] by reducing themselves to clowning, by exploiting racial stereotypes…. And perhaps the most unfortunate result of the ’Trotters success has been the overshadowing of the team that truly deserves recognition as perhaps the most important and influential basketball squad in history: the New York Renaissance Big Five.”

  Douglas himself told Sports Illustrated in 1979, “Abe Saperstein died a millionaire because he gave the white people what they wanted. When I go, it will be without a dime in my pocket, but with a clear conscience. I would never have burlesqued basketball. I loved it too much for that.”

  Despite their different approaches, both teams were formidable. Though there was plenty of chest-beating about who was better, with public announcements of challenges, the two teams would not meet until the Chicago World Championship Tournament in 1939.

  That Championship Season: The Rocky Road to the World Championship

  By 1937, the Rens were firmly established as one of the best basketball teams—black or white—in the country. But the Depression was still so severe that Douglas kept them on the road rather than face low attendance at home in the Renaissance Casino. Having put on 150,000 hard-earned miles, the Old Blue Goose finally broke down, and Douglas purchased a custom-made, specially equipped $10,000 bus for the team. This was a relief to John “Boy Wonder” Isaacs, who, because he was the rookie, was forced to ride the old bus on a folding chair. But even the newer bus had its hierarchy. Aside from driver, Tex Burnett, the ten passengers—Eric Illidge, eight players, and trainer Vincent “Doc” Bryant—sat in the bus according to seniority and stature. Illidge and player-coach Fats Jenkins sat at the front. The rookies sat at the back. “But Tarzan Cooper,” Pop Gates remembered, “he had the choice seat because he was the tallest, the biggest, the baddest, and the strongest and so-called best ballplayer on the team. He was at the front where all the legroom was…. And anything that came into the bus had to go by Tarzan Cooper first before it got to the rear. If my mother or wife or sister sent a big cake out to me, before the cake gets to me it had to go by Tarzan. He had to get his slice first.”

  By now, the Rens’ status was so great that, this time when they toured the South, they were able to play some white teams, including the Celtics. The Cotton Curtain was tearing, but still hung stubbornly in place. Because the Rens still faced being barred from hotels and chased out of restaurants by shotgun-wielding cooks, they stayed on black college campuses or with black families. But, no matter how circumspect they were, many whites refused to accept a black team, especially one this good. Sometimes when they played the Celtics or another white team, there were race riots afterward and police had to escort both teams to safety. In Springfield, Missouri, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) took legal action to stop the segregation of fans at the Rens game and put an end to the practice.

  The Rens’ fight against racism got some welcomed support from none other than their longtime rivals the Celtics. Before each game against the Celtics, popular Celtics center Joe Lapchick would hug Tarzan Cooper in front of the crowd, letting them know how the Celtics felt about the Rens—and racism. Given the time, this demonstration of affection was more than a casual gesture, and it resulted in years of vitriolic epithets and death threats for
Lapchick. Bob Douglas described his relationship with the Celtics as one of mutual respect: “We always played in a war, but often it was a race war. When we played against most white teams, we were colored. Against the Celtics, we were men. Over those last years a real brotherhood was born out of competition and travel.”

  The Rens continued their tour through the Midwest, traveling over eighteen thousand miles and establishing record attendances at some games. Often, to avoid racial confrontations, they were forced to stay in areas where they would be welcome, then travel two hundred to four hundred miles to play their game that night. But the strategy worked: despite the scorched-earth devastation of the Depression, the Rens were attracting record-breaking crowds five times as large as the Celtics were drawing. Not only were they a financial success, but their style of play—very little dribbling, fast passes, quick cuts to the basket—was being imitated everywhere. White and black college coaches from the South and Midwest attended Rens games for tips and strategies.

  In 1938, the season that would lead them to compete in the world championship, the Rens added two new players, Clarence “Pop” Gates and Clarence “Puggy” Bell. For Bell, this was a dream come true: “The idols of the basketball world whenever they have played, the Rens, to Harlem, their hometown, are veritable demigods of the court, and it is the dream of nine out of ten promising young basketball players in the community to get a chance to play with them.” Gates was signed for $125 a month, which was significantly more than the $17 a month his father was making doing odd jobs.

  Now the roster was finalized, and standing ready to face the 1938–39 season were eight men whom Harlem was counting on: terror of the court and the team bus Charles “Tarzan” Cooper (6′4″); rebounding expert William “Wee Willie” Smith (6′5″); Eyre “Bruiser” Satch (6′1″), one of the country’s first black tennis stars, having twice won the National Negro Tennis Championship (and considered by female fans to be the handsomest member of the Rens); youthful John “Boy Wonder” Isaacs (6’); William “Pop” Gates (6′3″); Zack Clayton (who would one day turn boxing referee); and Clarence “Puggy” Bell. Finally, there was player-manager Clarence “Fats” Jenkins, who, at five feet seven inches and 180 pounds, was not fat, but at forty-one, and already a veteran of twenty-five years of professional basketball, was the team’s oldest and most experienced player. This was the team that Harlem, and many African-Americans across the country, were pinning their hopes on for this to be the year they would put an end to the waiting. Waiting for white America to recognize the black athlete as an equal. Waiting for just one chance to play on a level playing field against the best white teams.