It’s A Trotters Milestone
The string of white lights snake through fog-shrouded cornfields, a traffic jam five farms long, heading toward a bright marquee in the middle of nowhere.
Trucks and vans and solid blue Chevrolets, driven by careful men in baseball caps, filled with women wrapping babies, edge into the lot.
A wet kid with a flashlight takes their two bucks for parking. Smiling folks in flannel take their tickets.
They duck into the gym on this spitting cold January night to unwittingly partake in one of the last perfect marriages in sports.
The Harlem Globetrotters, basketball’s original barnstorming entertainers, are playing in the franchise’s 20,000th game.
In a town with no stoplights.
Ninety minutes before tipoff, the 3,300-seat gym is full.
“Is this the biggest thing we’ve ever had around here?” asks Joe Broussard, who works in waste removal in nearby Monticello.
“At least since ‘Hoosiers,”’ says his wife Sharon.
When the Globetrotters waltz on to this hardwood floor in the heartland, Georgia Brown has never been so Sweet.
Just so there is no misunderstanding. Not everybody in the nearby northwest Indiana towns of Remington (population 1,200) and Wolcott (the same) was at the game.
“You got tickets?” asks Emmma Hinkle, 71, sitting in Clark and Kathie’s Country Inn in Wolcott. “I seen them a long time ago, would love to see them again, but went down to the grocery store and couldn’t get tickets.”
Just so there is no misunderstanding. The Globetrotters didn’t plan to play their historic game in this place.
Of all the acrobatics that have occurred in the franchise’s 71-year history, nothing jumps around more than the schedule.
The team thought it was going to be played in December at its Disneyland training camp. Only when some games were canceled there did they realize it would be here.
That was a month ago. Some club officials immediately asked that it be moved to some place a little more appropriate … say, New York.
But being a former Globetrotter, owner Mannie Jackson understood this was about more than simply money and exposure. The tiny high school, which had cut a deal for this game nine months ago, was like the place in Hinckley, Ill., where Abe Saperstein’s original Harlem Globetrotters began touring in 1927.
“This was what brought us to the dance, they were our people,” he said. “This was where we belonged.
“I told my players to remember that this was about saying ‘Thank you.”’ he said. “Thank you to the people who built us.”
And the Globetrotters built their record to 19,668-332.