Abe Saperstein

Abraham Michael Saperstein (אברהם מיכאל סאפערשטיין; July 4, 1902 – March 15, 1966) was the founder, owner and earliest coach of the Harlem Globetrotters.

His family moved from London to Chicago in 1907, when Abe was five years old.

They settled just north of the city's Jewish area, often called the “Poor Jews' quarter” because of the many struggling immigrants living there.

Saperstein's father, Louis, who had been an apprentice tailor in Poland, saw an ad for a tailor on Chicago's North Side in a predominantly German, Irish, and Swedish neighborhood.

The ad warned “No Jews allowed” so Louis changed his surname to the more German-sounding Schneider, which is German for "tailor".

After buying the business from the owner several years later, Louis dropped the façade and changed the name of the store to Louis Saperstein's Tailor Shop.

At age 10, Saperstein discovered a lifelong love of sports, playing basketball at the Wilson Avenue YMCA and second base for a parochial school team, though he attended the public Ravenswood Elementary School.

At Lake View High School, he played nine different sports, including baseball, basketball, football, boxing, and track.

Saperstein attended the University of Illinois, but dropped out to help support his family.

He decided not to follow his father into tailoring.

Instead, his dream was to pursue a career in sports, though he realized that his athletic abilities and height were not going to take him far.

Saperstein eventually landed a position working for the Chicago Park District as a playground supervisor at Welles Park, on Chicago's North Side.

There, after hours of watching kids play basketball, he decided to create his own team, the Chicago Reds.

The Chicago Reds were a semi-pro lightweight (135 lb limit) basketball team, and Saperstein played point guard.

As player, manager, and coach of the Chicago Reds, Saperstein met Walter Thomas Ball, a legendary baseball player in the Negro leagues, who had a black baseball team he wanted to send on tour in Illinois and southern Wisconsin.

He hired Saperstein as his booking agent.

Saperstein was a leading figure in black basketball and baseball from the 1920s through the 1950s, primarily before those sports were racially integrated.

Saperstein revolutionized the game of basketball and took the Globetrotters from an unknown team touring small farm towns in the Midwestern United States during the height of the Great Depression to a powerhouse that went on to beat the best team in the all-white National Basketball Association.

He also introduced the three-point shot, which went on to become a mainstay of modern basketball.

Saperstein went on to become booking agent for several basketball teams as well, until branching out in the late 1920s to form his own team with some of the members of the Savoy Big Five.

He called the team the New York Harlem Globetrotters.

When a player was injured in a 1926 game, for example, Saperstein substituted into the game, prompting the Winona (Minnesota) News to report: "Four clean-limbed young colored men and a squat bandy-legged chap of Jewish extraction ... styled the Harlem Globetrotters, beat the Arcadia Military police ... 29 to 18."

During the early seasons, the Globetrotters needed to play every night just to make ends meet, because the team often netted less than $50 a night.

Accommodations on the road were sparse and hotels often would not allow blacks.

On one occasion, when the players could not find a hotel in Des Moines, Iowa, they sneaked up the fire escape and slept in Saperstein's room.

Saperstein was relentless in booking games; in the team's first seven years, the Globetrotters played more than 1,000 games, with Saperstein driving the players to tiny towns throughout the Midwest in his unheated Ford Model T.

From early on, the Globetrotters blended basketball with showmanship and ball-handling wizardry, but they were also extremely talented basketball players, winning most of their games.

In 1940, the Globetrotters beat the legendary black basketball team, the New York Renaissance.

An even bigger achievement came a few years later in the 1948 Globetrotters–Lakers game, when the Globetrotters defeated the Minneapolis Lakers, the best team in the all-white NBA, a league that had been formed two years earlier.

The star of the Lakers was six-foot-ten George Mikan, nicknamed "Mr. Basketball."

Despite the Lakers' significant height advantage and the team's billing as the best basketball team in the country, the underdog Globetrotters won the game 61–59, thanks to a dramatic long shot at the buzzer by Globetrotter Ermer Robinson.

Afterward, in the locker room, the players hoisted Saperstein triumphantly on their shoulders.

Although Saperstein's team had nothing to do with Harlem (they wouldn't play there until 1968), he chose the name to indicate that the players were black, as Harlem was the epicenter of African-American culture.

Many of the towns where the Globetrotters played in their first few years were all white, and Saperstein did not want other teams or spectators to be surprised that his team was black.

The Globetrotters played their first game in Hinckley, Illinois.

The team netted a grand total of $8, which was split evenly among the six members of the team, including Saperstein.

Over the next several years, in the midst of the Great Depression, Saperstein served as the team's coach, driver, booking agent, PR director, and occasional substitute player.

Saperstein was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1971 and, at 5ft 3in, is its shortest male member.

In 1979, he was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and 2005 was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame.

Saperstein was born in the East End of London, England, to a Jewish family originally from Łomża, Poland.