Court clown Meadowlark Lemon found destiny making people happy
Harlem Globetrotter legend Meadowlark Lemon first saw the team who would change his life on a newsreel at the blacks-only Ritz cinema in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1943.
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With his heart racing, Meadow Lemon gazed awe-struck as African American basketballers waltzed around their white opponents, effortlessly dunking baskets.
Although ineligible to join professional white teams, a Chicago team was proving blacks could not only win, but win while clowning around, dribbling on their knees, passing behind their backs and effortlessly baulking opponents.
Lemon, who died on Monday aged 83, would win renown as the Clown Prince of Basketball after joining Chicago’s Harlem Globetrotters in 1954.
He first saw the Globetrotters in a newsreel at the blacks-only Ritz cinema in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1943. At just 11 he was probably unaware the Globetrotters would change the future for black youth across America.
Details are hazy, but Lemon was likely born on April 25, 1932, in Lexington, South Carolina and in 1938 moved to Wilmington, where his father George Meadow Lemon II, a regular gambler, worked for a waste paper company. His mother soon moved to New York, leaving Lemon to spend much of his childhood with his aunt and uncle and cousins.
Recalling vision of the Globetrotters in a cinema newsreel, Lemon explained: “They flew up and down the court, passing, dribbling, shooting, rebounding ... they seemed to make that ball talk. I said, ‘That’s mine; this is for me’. I was receiving a vision. I was receiving a dream in my heart.”
Lemon was also impressed by the teamwork: “It was the joy, the sense of family. It was the most wonderful thing I had ever seen in my life.”
Being too poor to buy proper equipment, Lemon fashioned a basket from a coat hanger, with an onion sack for a net. An empty evaporated milk can substituted for a ball.
When a boys’ club opened in 1944, Lemon played with a real, though flat basketball, dedicating hours to dribbling and ball-handling. Amateur coach Earl Jackson taught him to shoot a right-handed hook. Once perfected, Jackson showed him the left-handed hook shot.
At Wilmington’s all-black Williston Industrial High School, Lemon also excelled at football.
He contacted the Globetrotters during his final year of school, but was drafted into the army for two years. Stationed in Austria, he played with the Trotters during their European tour, earning a tryout when he
came home. Assigned to the Globetrotters’ developmental team, the Kansas City Stars, he joined the Trotters in 1954, married childhood friend Willye Maultsby, took the name Meadowlark and played his first game in 1955.
The Harlem Globetrotters had played their first game on January 7, 1927. Abe Saperstein, a 165cm tall tailor’s son who had attempted professional baseball and basketball, in 1926 began coaching students from Wendell Phillips High, Chicago’s first mainly African American high school, playing as Giles Post in the Negro American Legion League.
Winning sponsorship from Chicago’s new Savoy Ballroom, Saperstein, then 24, renamed them the Savoy Big Five. But with professional teams open only to whites, Saperstein promoted his team’s racial background by naming them after Harlem, New York’s African American suburb.
He also sewed distinctive uniforms for the team line-up of Walter “Toots” Wright, Byron “Fat” Long, Willis “Kid” Oliver, Andy Washington and Al “Runt” Pullins.
The team lost its first professional championship in 1939 to the New York Rens. Undeterred, they began adding silly antics, including ball handling tricks and on-court comedy routines.
Crowds loved it, so Saperstein told them to keep up the clowning, but only when holding a solid lead. The Globetrotters won respect in 1948, beating the Minneapolis Lakers in the newly established National Basketball Association (NBA). Two years later, the NBA lifted its “whites only” ban and drafted black players.
Lemon had four children when his marriage collapsed in 1977, under pressure from playing thousands of games with the Globetrotters as he won stardom.
He quit the Globetrotters in 1979 to start his Bucketeers team in 1980.
He played on several teams before rejoining a short Globetrotters tour in 1994, when he married second wife Cynthia. An ordained minister from 1986, he made motivational speeches for children at basketball camps and youth prisons through Meadowlark Lemon Ministries.
By then father to another six children, last year Lemon’s first wife and an adult son sued him for $250,000 in child support they claim he had failed to pay since 1977.
Inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and the International Clown Hall of Fame, Lemon explained: “My destiny was to make people happy.”
Originally published as Court clown Meadowlark Lemon found destiny making people happy
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