Chicago sports visionary Abe Saperstein should be more famous

You’ve probably heard of the Harlem Globetrotters, the long-running basketball team that combines athletic talent and humor.

You may have heard of Abe Saperstein, a Chicago native who founded the team.

But you probably don’t know what a visionary Saperstein was in the history of the sport. We certainly didn’t do that when we began researching our just-published book, Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports, a few years ago.

We didn’t know who the pioneer of the three-point shot in basketball was.

It was Saperstein.

We didn’t know who proposed variable ticket prices – teams charging more when popular opponents came to town – decades before Major League Baseball adopted the concept.

It was Saperstein.

We didn’t know who was calling for the expansion of the National Basketball Association to the West Coast years before the NBA finally got around to it.

It was Saperstein.

We didn’t know who brought pitcher Satchel Paige to the major baseball leagues at age 42, when most people thought he was out of the woods.

Yes. It was Saperstein.

The colorful Chicagoan, a 5-foot-10 sporting giant, was instrumental in making basketball a global game. He was an owner and promoter of the Negro Leagues of Baseball. His Globetrotters played doubleheaders with NBA teams that were major moneymakers, allowing the league to overcome its initial difficulties.

3-point players didn’t “die a natural death”

Perhaps Saperstein’s greatest achievement, rivaling his founding of the Globetrotters, was his groundbreaking introduction of the three-point shot to league basketball play. Two New York colleges had experimented with a three-pointer in a 1945 game, but a New York Times writer said the idea should “die a natural death.” Sixteen years later, Saperstein gave it new life when he founded a rival to the NBA called the American Basketball League that only lasted a season and a half.

Saperstein and a friend, DePaul University coach Ray Meyer, went to a gym in Chicago, did a few shots and decided the length should be 25 feet. Saperstein wanted to call it basketball’s “home run,” but his colleagues talked him out of it.

Once the ABL folded, the threesome was no longer used. When Saperstein died in 1966, no major professional or college leagues used it. But the next year, the American Basketball Association was formed and adopted the three-point shot. When the ABA failed in 1976, four ABA teams joined the NBA, but the three-point shot failed. The idea once again seemed destined to become a historical footnote until the NBA introduced the three-point shot in 1979 to create excitement. College play followed in 1987.

Today the threesome is an integral part of the game. Caitlin Clark and Stephen Curry owe Saperstein a debt.

The Globetrotters’ founder grew up in a poor Jewish immigrant family on Chicago’s North Side and befriended black players on the South Side, who began traveling with him around the Midwest in a Ford Model T in the late 1920s. (The Harlem Globetrotters were not from Harlem and were not globetrotters in their early years. The name was Saperstein’s marketing gimmick.)

A complex race record

Why isn’t Saperstein more famous? Partly because his role as the father of the three-point shot is so little known. And partly because the Globetrotters’ comedy act was criticized by some civil rights activists as childish and demeaning.

Saperstein’s own racing record is complicated. He made a lot of money for black athletes and placed blacks in positions of authority in his organization. But he was a man of his time and not always in a good way. When Olympic star Jesse Owens competed in halftime races on the Globetrotters’ outdoor summer tours, Saperstein sometimes had him race against a horse, a stunt that infuriated many.

Still, Saperstein was a key figure in the desegregation of baseball. Five years before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, Saperstein hatched a plan with minor league owner Bill Veeck to buy the Philadelphia Phillies and turn them into an all-black team in the major leagues. It’s unclear whether the idea was blocked by the baseball commissioner or simply abandoned, but Saperstein wasn’t done maneuvering. The year after Robinson entered the majors, Saperstein brought Satchel Paige into the majors and he later discovered another future Hall of Famer, Minnie Miñoso.

Saperstein had his flaws and faults, but he also had a telescope that saw far into the future.

When his American Basketball League went bankrupt in late 1962, he told a reporter, “I can only guarantee you that one day – when pay-per-view is the big thing – someone will make a million playing professional basketball.”

As with many other things, he was right.

Mark Jacob is the former Sunday editor of the Chicago Sun-Times and former metro editor of the Chicago Tribune. His brother, Matthew Jacob, is a health communications consultant in Arlington, Virginia.

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