The Ringmaster
Globetrotter legend Meadowlark Lemon dies at 83 after a long career tweaking basketball conventions
Me a dowlark L e mon, whose half- court hook shots, no- look behindthe- back passes and vivid clowning were marquee features of the feel-good travelling basketball show known as the Harlem Globetrotters for nearly a quarter-century, died on Sunday in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 83.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Cynthia Lemon.
A gifted athlete with an entertainer’s hunger for the spotlight, Lemon, who dreamed of playing for the Globetrotters as a boy in North Carolina, joined the team in 1954, not long after leaving the Army. Within a few years, he had assumed the central role of showman, taking over from Reece Tatum, the Trotters’ long- reigning clown prince.
Tatum, who had left the team around the time Lemon joined it, was a superb ballplayer whose on- court gags — or reams, as the players called them — had established the team’s reputation for laugh- inducing wizardry at a championship level.
This was a time when the Trotters were known not only for their comedy routines and basketball legerdemain; they were also recognized as a formidable competitive team. Their victory over the Minneapolis Lakers in 1948 was instrumental in integrating the National Basketball Association, and a decade later their owner, Abe Saperstein, signed a seven-footer out of the University of Kansas to a one-year contract before he was eligible for the NBA: Wilt Chamberlain.
By then, Lemon, who was 6-feet-3 inches and slender, was the team’s leading light, such a star that he played centre while Chamberlain played guard.
Lemon was a slick ballhandler and a virtuoso passer, and he specialized in the long-distance hook, a trick shot he made with remarkable regularity. But it was his charisma and comic bravado that made him perhaps the most famous Globetrotter. For 22 years, until he left the team in 1978, Lemon was the Trotters’ ringmaster, directing their basketball circus from the pivot. He imitated Tatum’s reams, like spying on the opposition’s huddle, and added his own.
He chased referees with a bucket and surprised them with a shower of confetti instead of water. He dribbled above his head and walked with exaggerated steps. He mimicked a hitter in the batter’s box and, with teammates, pantomimed a baseball game. And both to torment the opposing team — as time went on, it was often a hired squad of foils — and to amuse the appreciative spectators, he laughed and he teased and he chattered and he smiled; like Tatum, he talked most of the time he was on the court.
The Globetrotters played in mammoth arenas and on dirt courts in African villages. They played in Rome before the pope; they played in Moscow during the Cold War before the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. In the United States, they played in small towns and big cities, in Madison Square Garden, in high school gyms, in cleared-out auditoriums — even on the floor of a drained swimming pool. They performed their most entertaining ball-handling tricks, accompanied by their signature tune Sweet Georgia Brown, on The Ed Sullivan Show.
Through it all, Lemon became “an American institution like the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty” whose “uniform will one day hang in the Smithsonian right next to Lindbergh’s airplane,” as The Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray once described him.
Significantly, Lemon’s time with the Globetrotters paralleled the rise of the NBA. When he joined the team, the Globetrotters were still better known than the New York Knicks and the Boston Celtics and played for bigger crowds. When he left, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were about to enter the NBA and propel it to worldwide popularity. In between, the league became thoroughly accommodating to black players, competing with the Globetrotters for their services and eventually usurping the Globetrotters as the most viable employer of top black basketball talent.
Partly as a result, the Globetrotters became less of a competitive basketball team and more of an entertainment troupe through the 1960s and ’ 70s. They became television stars, hosting variety specials and playing themselves on shows like The White Shadow and a made-for-TV Gilligan’s Island movie; they inspired a Saturday morning cartoon show.
In Lemon’s early years with the team, as the Globetrotters took on local teams and challenged college all- star squads, they played to win, generally using straight basketball skills until the outcome was no longer in doubt. But as time went on, for the fans who came to see them, the outcome was no longer the point.
On Jan. 5, 1971, the Globetrotters were beaten in Martin, Tenn., by an ordinarily more obliging team called the New Jersey Reds.
It was the first time they had lost a game in almost nine years, the end of a 2,495-game winning streak. But perhaps more remarkable than the streak itself was the fact that it ended at all, given that the Globetrotters’ oppon- ents by then were generally forbidden to interfere with passes to Lemon in the middle or to interrupt the familiar reams.
Lemon, as the stellar attraction, thrived in this environment, but he also became a lightning rod for troubles within the Globetrotter organization. As the civil rights movement gained momentum, the players’ antics on the court drew criticism from outside for reinforcing what many considered to be demeaning black stereotypes, and Lemon drew criticism from inside.
Not only was he the leading figure in what some thought to be a discomforting resurrection of the minstrel show; he was also, by far, the highestpaid Globetrotter, and his teammates associated him more with management than with themselves. When the players went on strike for higher pay in 1971, Lemon, who negotiated his own salary, did not join them.
After Saperstein died in 1965, the team changed hands several times, and in 1978, according to Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters (2005), by Ben Green, Lemon was dismissed after a salary dispute. He subsequently formed his own travelling teams — Meadowlark Lemon’s Bucketeers, the Shooting Stars and Meadowlark Lemon’s Harlem All-Stars — and continued performing into his 70s.
His website says he played in 16,000 games, an astonishing claim — it breaks down to more than 300 games a year for 50 years — and in 100 countries, which, give or take a few, is probably true.
The facts of his early life are hazy, and evidently he wanted it that way. His birth date, birthplace and birth name have all been variously reported. The date most frequently cited — and the likeliest — is April 25, 1932.
Many sources say he was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, but The Wilmington Star- News reported in 1996 that he was born in Lexington County, South Carolina, and moved to Wilmington in 1938. His website says he was born Meadow Lemon, though many other sources say his name at birth was George Meadow Lemon or Meadow George Lemon. The StarNews said it was George Meadow Lemon III. He became known as Meadowlark after he joined the Globetrotters.
Lemon lived in Scottsdale. His first marriage, to the former Willye Maultsby, ended in divorce. ( In 1978, she was arrested after stabbing him on a Manhattan street.) Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.
In 1986, Lemon became an ordained Christian minister; he and his wife founded a nonprofit evangelistic organization, Meadowlark Lemon Ministries, in 1994.
“Man, I’ve had a good run,” he said at his Basketball Hall of Fame induction ceremony, recalling the first time he saw the Globetrotters play, in a newsreel in a movie theatre in Wilmington when he was 11.
“When they got to the basketball court, they seemed to make that ball talk,” he said. “I said, ‘ That’s mine; this is for me.’ I was receiving a vision. I was receiving a dream in my heart.”