The book cover of Mark and Matthew Jacob’s Abe Saperstein biography (Courtesy).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Saperstein was born on July 4, 1902, in London to Louis and Anna Saperstein, who had left what is now Poland amid a rise in antisemitism. The family moved to Chicago when Abe was 5. The Sapersteins were Conservative Jews who attended High Holiday services and spoke Yiddish at home but were largely secular.<\/p>\n
Saperstein\u2019s career in sports began as a booking agent, and in 1926 he became the coach of an all-Black team then called the Savoy Big Five, based on the South Side of Chicago. Saperstein renamed the team and began a barnstorming tour that, nearly a century and thousands of games later, the Globetrotters are still on.<\/p>\n
At its inception, the team was neither from Harlem, nor were they globetrotters. The name was a symbol of Saperstein\u2019s promotional flair: \u201cHarlem\u201d was chosen to signal to Midwestern towns of that era that the team was all-Black, and \u201cGlobetrotters\u201d was meant to exaggerate the team\u2019s reach and prestige.<\/p>\n
The Globetrotters\u2019 famous style of play \u2014 an entertaining combination of impressive athleticism, comedy and theatrics \u2014 has earned the team, and its founder, both celebration and consternation. While the Globetrotters are credited with elevating players such as Nat \u201cSweetwater\u201d Clifton \u2014 who was one of the first Black players in the NBA \u2014 and future Hall of Famer Wilt Chamberlain, the team also took heat for what some considered to be playing into racist stereotypes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that some viewed the Globetrotters as kind of a minstrel show, as something that depicted Black people as childlike and pranksters and not as serious people,\u201d said Mark Jacob.<\/p>\n
But Jacob said the Globetrotters, and Saperstein, were far more nuanced than the team\u2019s sometimes circus-like style would suggest. There was a reason Black icons including Jesse Owens and Jesse Jackson were fans.<\/p>\n
\u201cOn the other hand, the Globetrotter players are conspiring with the audience to make fun of the referees and the other team,\u201d Jacob added. \u201cThey\u2019re not being demeaned. They\u2019re almost triumphing in the whole pantomime of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
And while the players performed plenty of tricks on the court, they were also remarkably talented basketball players. In 1948, the Globetrotters won an exhibition game against the vaunted Minneapolis Lakers, who won three consecutive national championships from 1948 to 1950 in the NBA and its predecessor leagues.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat showed that Black athletes could compete with anyone, at a time when a lot of white people didn\u2019t think that was true,\u201d said Mark Jacob. \u201cA lot of people point to that game as a real impetus for the integration [of the NBA] and making it, in fact, inevitable that Black players would be allowed in the NBA because they could prove they could play.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was Saperstein\u2019s identity as an outsider \u2014 a Jewish immigrant from London \u2014 that helped him take on the role of a go-between for his Black players and the still mostly white world of professional sports. Mark Jacob said Saperstein fits into broader Jewish-Black relations in the period, when Jewish leaders played a key role in the fight for Black civil rights.<\/p>\n
Saperstein, a proud Jew and Zionist, was also no stranger to discrimination himself.<\/p>\n
As \u201cGlobetrotter\u201d details, Saperstein and his family faced antisemitism time and again, in London, in Chicago and as Saperstein traveled the world promoting his Globetrotters, Negro League baseball teams and other Black athletes.<\/p>\n
Saperstein\u2019s Jewish identity was especially front and center during the Globetrotters\u2019 first European tour in 1950. When the Globetrotters went to Paris, Saperstein was vocal about his disdain for a particular venue, the Palais des Sports, where just years earlier 30,000 Jews had been held before being deported to Nazi camps.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you get down in those dark, gloomy dressing rooms, there\u2019s a ghost around every corner,\u201d Saperstein said of the Palais, according to the biography.<\/p>\n
Saperstein and his 13-year-old daughter Eloise also encountered the deep-seated antisemitism of postwar Germany, according to a particularly powerful anecdote from the book recounted by Abra Berkley, Eloise\u2019s daughter.<\/p>\n
While her father conducted a news conference at a hotel, Eloise, in search of local Jewish food, went to the concierge to ask where she could find the Jewish neighborhood.<\/p>\n
As Berkley recounted, the hotel worker spat in Eloise\u2019s face and told her, \u201cHitler should have gotten rid of all of you.\u201d Eloise, with spit still dripping down her face, burst into her father\u2019s news conference, crying hysterically, and told him what happened.<\/p>\n
Saperstein abruptly ended the conference, demanded the employee be fired, and went to a jeweler next door to order a Star of David necklace for Eloise, which Berkley said her mother never took off. Years later, Eloise made copies of the pendant for her own daughters.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe fact that Abe went off and had that made right after that incident is just a very powerful message, not only to people today, but obviously to his daughter, who\u2019s just gone through this very horrible experience,\u201d said Matthew Jacob. \u201cHe is like, \u2018This is who we are, and we\u2019re going to be proud of it, and I don\u2019t ever want you to forget it, because I won\u2019t.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The scene, Mark Jacob said, exemplifies the audacity that animated Saperstein\u2019s entire career, in which he was never afraid to speak his mind, even when some of his ideas were decades ahead of their time.<\/p>\n
\u201cJews have historically faced horrible challenges and discrimination,\u201d said Mark Jacob. \u201cI think that there\u2019s this kind of endurance, this ability to rise above circumstances and to meet challenges instead of avoiding them. And Abe was that. Abe did that.\u201d<\/p>\n
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