When Steph Curry sank a series of three-point shots to help Team USA clinch the Olympic gold medal in Paris last summer, it’s unlikely the NBA star was thinking about Abe Saperstein.
But as a new biography of the trailblazing Jewish basketball executive suggests, Curry had plenty of reasons to be grateful to Saperstein, best known as the founder and longtime head coach of the Harlem Globetrotters.
Saperstein, who at 5-foot-3 is the shortest man in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, is credited with introducing the three-pointer to the game. But his imprint on basketball, and sports in general, extends far beyond Curry’s signature shot.
In their new book “Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports” (Rowman & Littlefield), brothers Mark and Matthew Jacob explore Saperstein’s far-reaching legacy, which they say is still underappreciated 58 years after his death. In addition to the three-pointer, they contend, Saperstein played a crucial role in elevating basketball from a second-tier American sport to a professionalized global powerhouse.
“You look at how popular basketball is in the Olympics, and Abe gets the credit for part of that,” Mark Jacob said. “He should be considered one of the great innovators in sports.”
Among Saperstein’s career highlights were pushing the NBA to expand to the West Coast years before the Minneapolis Lakers moved to Los Angeles in 1960. And as early as the 1950s and ’60s, he warned about the slow pace of play in baseball, and urged team owners to charge more for games against better teams.
“If Abe Saperstein could be looking down from heaven, he would be smiling to see that the NBA doesn’t just have an All-Star Game, they have an All-Star Weekend with the slam dunk contest,” said Matthew Jacob. “He was just a great advocate for fans, and he wanted sports and sports teams to constantly reassess how they were operating, to put fans first.”
“Globetrotter” is the result of years of research and writing by the Jacob brothers. This is the second book they have co-written, following their 2010 work “What the Great Ate: A Curious History of Food and Fame” (Crown).
Saperstein was born in London in 1902 to Louis and Anna Saperstein, Jewish immigrants from what is now Poland. The family moved to Chicago when Abe was 5. The Sapersteins spoke Yiddish at home but were largely secular.
Saperstein’s career in sports began as a booking agent, and in 1926 he became 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.
The name was a symbol of Saperstein’s promotional flair: “Harlem” was chosen to signal to Midwestern towns of that era that the team was all-Black, and “Globetrotters” was meant to exaggerate the team’s prestige.
It was Saperstein’s identity as an outsider, as a Jewish immigrant, that helped him take on the role of a go-between for his Black players and the still mostly white world of professional sports.
Saperstein was no stranger to discrimination himself. As “Globetrotter” details, he and his family faced antisemitism time and again, in London and Chicago, as well as when Saperstein traveled the world promoting his Globetrotters, Negro League baseball teams and other Black athletes.
Saperstein’s Jewish identity was especially front and center during the Globetrotters’ 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.
“When you get down in those dark, gloomy dressing rooms, there’s a ghost around every corner,” Saperstein said of the Palais.
Saperstein and his 13-year-old daughter Eloise also encountered antisemitism in post-war Germany, according to a powerful anecdote in the book recounted by Abra Berkley, Eloise’s daughter.
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. As Berkley recounted, the hotel worker spat in Eloise’s face and said, “Hitler should have gotten rid of all of you.” Eloise burst into her father’s news conference, crying hysterically, and told him what happened.
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.
The scene, Mark Jacob said, exemplifies the audacity that animated Saperstein’s entire career, in which he was never afraid to speak his mind.
“Jews have historically faced horrible challenges and discrimination,” he said. “There’s this kind of endurance, this ability to rise above circumstances and meet challenges instead of avoiding them. And Abe was that. Abe did that.”
Jacob Gurvis writes for the JTA global Jewish news source.
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