On January 7, 1927: Without much ado, the Harlem Globetrotters play their first game. Traveling from Chicago (not Harlem) to Hinckley, Ill. — a trip of 48 miles — they get their show on the road. They receive $75 for the game. “Abe Saperstein, a portly little man with big basketball ideas, took five players, a ramshackle flivver (automobile) and a tattered road map and started one of the most amazing careers of the sports world,” Wendell Smith of the “Pittsburgh Courier,” one of the nation’s prominent African-American newspapers, will write many years later. “This was the unheralded and humble beginnings of the Harlem Globetrotters.” That first winter, according to “The Official NBA Basketball Encyclopedia,” the Globetrotters will win 101 of 117 games before audiences whose exposure to the sport was minimal.
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