Basketball is losing an iconic team — the key word being “losing.”
After 63 years, the Washington Generals, a woebegone professional team, has been disbanded. It has lost for the last time.
The Generals — who were also known at various times as the New Jersey Reds, the New York Nationals and the Atlantic City Seagulls — had a winning percentage of roughly .0001875.
As best anyone can tell, they won three games and lost more than 16,000. And you thought our local baseball team was bad.
The Generals were primarily a foil for the Harlem Globetrotters, the famous and beloved touring team formed in 1927. And the Generals proved to be great “foil-ures.”
As the team’s “star” player, Louis (Red) Klotz once noted: “Like Fred Astaire had Ginger Rogers, the Globetrotters have always had a dance partner, but I’ve always been dancing backwards.”
The Globetrotters will continue to perform their basketball/comedy routines, but they have dumped the Generals, perhaps still smarting over their lone loss to the long-time straight men. That came on Jan. 5, 1971, in Martin, Tenn., when Klotz hit one of his relic two-handed set-shots in the final seconds for a 100-99 Generals win.
“The crowd looked at us like we killed Santa Claus,” Klotz said. He was 50 years old at the time, and he played for Generals until age 62, possibly because he was also the coach and because Red Klotz Sports Enterprises owned the team.
Even Klotz, who died last year at age 93, couldn’t keep track of the team’s losses. “It’s easier for me to count the wins,” he said.
The Globetrotters won and the Generals lost in thousands of games all over the world. They played in bullrings, on the deck of an aircraft carrier, on ice rinks and ballroom dance floors, and even in a leper colony in the Philippines.
Everyone assumes that the Generals lost on purpose, but Klotz and other players insist that wasn’t the case. They did admit to not interfering with the Globetrotters’ comedy routines, which took up perhaps 70 percent of a game and usually resulted in an uncontested basket for the crowd favorites. Otherwise, the Generals claim they did their best to win. But they couldn’t, except for that one time.
The Globetrotters were perhaps the first team to recognize that fans want entertainment as well as the game — a fact recognized by all professional sports today.
In the 1950s, the Globetrotters played a series of games each year against a team of college all-stars, some of the very best collegians. One of those games was at the Denver Coliseum, which held a capacity crowd. When Globetrotter star Marquis Haynes performed his famous dazzling dribbling exhibition at mid-court, a college all-America from LaSalle, Tom Gola, became fed up with playing the role of a pseudo-Washington General.
He walked up to Haynes, stole the ball and scored with an easy lay-in.
Boos rained down upon the court. People wanted to see Haynes do his act, not a real game.
Maybe that helps explain why Klotz is the only player in history to have his jersey number retired by an opposing team: the Globetrotters.
Dick Hilker (dhilker529@aol. com) of Arvada is a retired suburban newspaper editor and columnist. He writes twice a month for The Denver Post.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit or check out our for how to submit by e-mail or mail.
