Harlem Globetrotters

The exact beginnings of the Harlem Globetrotters are uncertain, though the team considers its first-ever road game took place on 7 January 1927 in Hinckley, Illinois.

Despite the team’s name, the squad was born 800 miles west of Harlem, on Chicago’s South Side. In 1926, a group of former basketball players from Chicago’s Wendell Phillips High School reunited to play for the Giles Post American Legion basketball team that barnstormed around the Midwest.

The following year, the team became known as the Savoy Big Five while playing home games as pre-dance entertainment at Chicago’s newly opened Savoy Ballroom. After a pay dispute, several players bolted the Savoy Big Five in 1928 to form a new barnstorming team known as the Globe Trotters.

Abe Saperstein – a white Jewish immigrant from Chicago’s north side – became the manager of the newly formed Globe Trotters.

A master promoter, Saperstein rechristened the team the New York Harlem Globe Trotters, believing the name would make the team a bigger draw in Illinois and Iowa by suggesting they had travelled far to be there.

The shortest member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, Saperstein also thought that attaching Harlem to the squad’s name would help advertise it as an all-black basketball team at the height of the Harlem Renaissance.

The team didn’t play a game in Harlem until 1968.

The Harlem Globetrotters proved to be entertainers off the court as well, starring in two 1950s Hollywood movies, including Go Man Go featuring Sidney Poitier.

In the 1970s, they became Saturday morning television regulars, appearing in two different animated series created by Hanna-Barbera and the Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine, a 1974 live-action variety show.

The team also solved mysteries with Scooby-Doo and played against a team of robots after crash-landing on Gilligan’s Island.

Unlike in America, British kids learned about the Globetrotters through the cartoon. Kids in England were amazed to learn there was a real Harlem Globetrotters.

In recognition of their role as entertainers, the Harlem Globetrotters received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1982.