@Ragman,
Most fun to watch...
Has to be Meadowlark Lemon.
Meadowlark Lemon obituary
Undisputed star of the Harlem Globetrotters, the team that brought barnstorming basketball as entertainment to the world
Michael Carlson
Meadowlark Lemon, who has died aged 83, was billed as the Clown Prince of Basketball, but deserved to be called its king. During the almost 25 years that he was the undisputed star of the Harlem Globetrotters, the most successful barnstorming sports outfit in history, they reached the zenith of their worldwide popularity.
The Globetrotters lived up to their name; for decades the world learned basketball from their antics. Crowds in more than 100 countries saw Lemon at the centre of the team’s “Magic Circle”, performing tricks with the basketball to the whistled strains of their signature tune, Sweet Georgia Brown. He embarrassed referees, tormented opponents, showered fans with a bucket of confetti masquerading as water, and sunk half-court baskets with his old-fashioned hook shot. Each stunt was completed with a cackling, trash-talking strut, as if he were entertaining himself as much as the fans.
“First you had to prove you could play basketball, then you had to show you could be funny,” Lemon said, and play he could. Wilt Chamberlain, who played a season for the ’Trotters before becoming a superstar in the National Basketball Association, called Lemon “the most sensational, awesome, incredible basketball player I’ve ever seen” – and he had seen Michael Jordan.
He was born Meadow George Lemon (he adopted “Meadowlark” for the bird’s “sweet happy song”) in Wilmington, North Carolina. His first basket was fashioned from a coat hanger and onion sack; he used an empty tin for a ball. But when he was 11, he watched newsreel footage of the Globetrotters on tour, and set his heart on joining them. He was among the best high school players in the state, but failed an audition with the Globetrotters when they played in the nearby city of Raleigh. After leaving college at Florida A&M, Lemon was drafted into the US army and was stationed in Austria when the Globetrotters arrived on tour. He wangled another try-out, and wound up playing on the tour.
Starting with their Kansas City Stars developmental team in 1954, Lemon progressed so quickly that he became the big team’s star clown when Goose Tatum left in 1955. At that point the Globetrotters could still compete with NBA teams; although the pro league integrated in 1948, most teams adhered to an unwritten rule, using “two blacks at home, three on the road, and four when you’re behind”. But as the NBA and its competitor leagues became hungrier for the best black players, the Globetrotters’ emphasis on showmanship increased.
Tatum had worked with the dribbling maestro Marques Haynes, Lemon had Curly Neal; they became the sporting equivalent of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Even in Moscow, playing in front of Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the cold war in 1959, Lemon won over a crowd at first silently puzzled by the anarchy on court, leaving them laughing and clapping for more.
In the 1960s their vaudeville antics were called stereotypically demeaning; Lemon was accused of “Tomming for Abe”, acting as an “Uncle Tom” for the team’s Jewish founder Abe Saperstein. He replied that the Globetrotters had “done more for the perception of black people, and the perception of America, than almost anything you could think of”. After all, the team they beat every night, most often called the Washington Generals, was predominantly white.
Television increased their popularity. Their appearances on ABC’s Wide World of Sports were holiday events; in the early 70s they inspired two animated TV series (for which Scatman Crothers provided Meadowlark’s voice) and a live-action show, The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine, in which Lemon starred alongside Neal and Haynes.
The strain of touring, sometimes for more than 300 days a year, took its toll on Lemon’s marriage. He was divorced from his wife Willye after a 1978 car chase in New York which ended with her stabbing him with a steak knife. In 1979, following a business dispute, Lemon left the team.
He joined the cast of a TV comedy, Hello, Larry (1979-80), and played a preacher in the movie The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979). The following year he started his own team, the Meadowlark Lemon Bucketeers, which became the Shooting Stars, then the Harlem All-Stars. In 1993 he returned to the Globetrotters for a 50-game farewell season. By that time he had been ordained as a minister, with a divinity degree from Vision International University, California.
He founded Meadowlark Lemon Ministries in Scottsdale, Arizona, offering television evangelism, outreach ministries in schools and prisons, a basketball camp and even nutritional guidance provided by his second wife, Cynthia, also a minister.
On the team’s 75th anniversary in 2001, Meadowlark joined the Globetrotters’ Legends Ring; his number, 36, was one of only five retired by the team, along with those of Chamberlain, Neal, Tatum and Haynes. In 2003 he became the only member of the International Clown Hall of Fame also elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame. At his induction ceremony he said: “My destiny was to make people happy.”
He is survived by Cynthia, and by the five sons and five daughters of his first marriage.
Meadowlark Lemon (Meadow George Lemon), basketball player, born 25 April 1932; died 27 December 2015
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/dec/29/meadowlark-lemon
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