An excerpt from “Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports” by Mark Jacob and Matthew Jacob. (Rowman & Littlefield):

Abe Saperstein, who would one day boast that he had traveled five million miles by air, began his barnstorming career bouncing down country roads in a Model-T Ford, trying to get from one small Midwestern town to the next before his jalopy gave out.

It must have seemed like a fool’s errand to some: a Jewish guy and five Black athletes rolling into predominantly white rural towns where some residents had never even seen a Jew or a Black person face-to-face. Would the townspeople actually pay good money to watch them play basketball?

Not so much, at first.

“The terms were very meager—maybe a twenty-five-dollar guarantee plus ten percent of the gate,” said Abe’s brother Harry. “They were lucky to get thirty-five bucks.”

One game in the early 1930s took place in Waterloo, Iowa, on “a cold, bitter night. No one came to see the game. I mean no one,” recalled Dell Raymond, a player on the opposing team. The Globetrotters had been promised whatever was left after expenses, but the gym rental fee and the referee’s pay took everything.

“They didn’t have anything and begged us to give them $5 although we had no contractual obligation,” Raymond said, and indeed his team’s manager gave them the $5. Raymond felt so sorry for them that he handed over another sixty cents out of his own pocket.

Housing was not guaranteed. Sometimes the team slept in the car. Or in small-town jails. Or on the floor of a local Black family’s home. Finding hotels that would accept the Black athletes was a challenge. One time in Des Moines, Saperstein got a room at a whites-only hotel and the players quietly climbed up the fire escape and slept in his room to avoid hassles at local restaurants, the Trotters would buy roasted corn and vegetables from roadside stands.

Another common dinner was salami and crackers, “with canned sardines for dessert—sometimes,” Saperstein said. “Once we had so little to spend that the team played three games in two days with only a single meal of hamburgers to keep us going.”

“We never missed a meal,” he said, “but we sure postponed a lot of them.”

They played in some ridiculous venues, including an empty swimming pool. And then there was the hayloft incident.

“One night in Wheatland, Iowa,” Saperstein said, “we’re playing in a hayloft upstairs in a barn. The big door at the end, where they load the hay through, was boarded up. There was some pretty fair body contact in those days, and somebody hit one of our boys, Lester Johnson, and Lester crashed right through the boards and into the night. We thought he was killed for sure. We all ran outside. He wasn’t hurt, but he wasn’t happy.”

Johnson had landed in a pile of manure, earning the lasting nickname “Luscious Lester.”

In the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, the Globetrotters were booked in a converted ballroom featuring six pillars in the playing area. The Trotters “changed their style to fit conditions,” according to Esquire magazine. “They caromed balls off the posts, threw curves around them, and finally disconcerted the home team completely by hiding the guards behind pillars nearest the basket and popping out as the forwards came confidently past.”

The barnstormers’ cars took a beating as they toured through Illinois and Iowa at first, then added Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, the Dakotas, and the Canadian province of Manitoba in the next several years.

Their primary ride was described as a Model-T with side curtains that Saperstein had purchased from a funeral parlor.

“The car looked like it had come out of a meat grinder,” he said. “Six of us traveled in it and carried all the baggage too.”

The team’s revenue, accommodations, and transportation were pitiful, and their timing was even worse. The Great Depression soon descended upon the nation, leaving a quarter of the workforce unemployed.

It was not a good time to persuade people to shell out hard-earned money on a traveling show. Decades later, Saperstein had a shoestring framed in his office with the words: “This is the shoestring I started on.”

But from the start Saperstein was upbeat, energetic, optimistic. Not because of the circumstances, but because he knew himself and what he could accomplish. Saperstein had faith in his product, and in himself.

At the start, his full name for the team was the New York Harlem Globe Trotters. “New York” was apparently intended to make the team seem big-time. Saperstein put “Harlem” in the name as advance notice to white people that a Black team was coming to their town. “Globe Trotters” was a way to convey experience and sophistication. (“Globe Trotters” gradually morphed into the single word “Globetrotters” in the 1940s.)

Saperstein soon got rid of “New York” in the name. Saperstein’s brother Harry said he did that to reduce the word count for the Western Union night letters he sent out to coordinate appearances. Harry, then in high school, was the team’s secretary, and their office was in Saperstein’s coat, where he kept scraps of paper, and in a bedroom of the family’s home on Hermitage Avenue, where Harry typed out contracts. Harry said he was taking a typing class at Lake View High School, and “I needed the practice.”

The operation rested on the force of Saperstein’s personality and the talent of his team.