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Tuesday, November 11, 2003
SWEET GEORGIA WHO??
 I am sitting here with ESPN on my TV, wondering what the hell has happened to the team that was once the Harlem Globetrotters.
The Harlem Globetrotters used to be a wonderfully amazing thing for me as a kid. Coming from a big basketball family, these dudes were truly magicians on the court. I loved any opportunity I got to watch them play. The first few whistled notes of "Sweet Georgia Brown" could conjure up images in my mind in a split second... There were guys who could spin basketballs on their fingers, skulls, feet--you name it. They could "thread the needle" and pass like no others I had ever seen. Basketballs seemed to have minds of their own, travelling up one arm, behind the neck and down the other arm, only to come to a rest in the palm of the guy's hand. Sometimes it looked like they had those basketballs on strings, they could do such amazing tricks with them. They never lost a game. Those Washington Generals could NEVER seem to defeat the Globetrotters. They had some kind of crazy win streak that was like 25 years, and yet the Generals kept coming back for more humiliation. And I DO mean humiliation. (After all, with names like "Curly," "Reece," and "Meadowlark," the Globetrotters needed to be able to "walk the walk," so to speak...) Let's not forget that they got seriously spanked by the Globetrotters virtually every time they played. And, as if being beaten wasn't humiliation enough, they also had all the little "pranks" that they would pull during the course of the game to entertain the crowd, and make the Generals and the officials look like asses. My favorite was the "bucket of confetti/bucket of water" trick. A Globetrotter would fake out a person in the crowd by threatening to throw what appeared to be a bucket of water on him or her. Of course, after several minutes of hyping up the "bucket" it would turn out to be filled with confetti. The trick would be applied again to the ref, who would play along and pretend to be unafraid--having seen the confetti version earlier--only to be doused with a (gasp!) real bucket of water. Crowd participation was huge, too, with these guys. I would love it when they would pull a little kid from the crowd, bring him or her out onto the court, stand him or her at the foul line with a basketball in hand, and say, "We want you to make a basket..." Then they would turn said tyke around 180° and say, "Down THERE," and point at the hoop at the opposite end of the court. The look on the kid's face was always priceless. *sigh* Good times. So, anyway, my point is, what the hell has happened to those days? Where have all the Globetrotters gone? Tonight, ESPN was televising the 'Trotter's game v. Syracuse University, the defending national champs. The Globetrotters beat the Orangemen, as would be expected, but what was definitely not expected was the lack of any entertaining whatsoever on the part of the contingent from Harlem. I may as well have been watching Syracuse play UConn, because there was no difference. Isn't the whole point of watching a Globetrotter game to see the shenanigans and tom foolery that goes on? After all, isn't that what got them the guest spots on "Scooby Doo, Where Are You?" and "Gilligan's Island"? What is this world coming to? ¶ Ξ PDawg Composed at 10:06:00 PM |
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