Meadowlark Lemon: The Clown Prince

| published December 31, 2015 |

By Earl Perkins, Thursday Review features editor

All great stories start somewhere, and this one begins with an onion sack, a wire coat hanger nailed to a tree and a dream.

And that's about all Meadowlark Lemon started with. Born into a 1930s Jim Crow South, and following the breakup of his parents, the duty of raising Meadow George Lemon fell to his aunt and uncle, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

The skinny boy with a funny name looked forward to splurging a quarter on westerns and adventure, until one day in the early 1940s he entered the Ritz Theatre in Wilmington, N.C. He was 11 years old, but when he exited that theatre, Lemon knew how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

"The newsreel on this particular Saturday was about a new kind of team—a basketball team known as the Harlem Globetrotters," he later wrote. "The players in the newsreel were unlike any I had ever seen...they laughed, danced, and did ball tricks as they stood in a 'Magic Circle' and passed the ball to a jazzy tune called Sweet Georgia Brown. How they could play!" He added: "There was one other thing that was different about them, though. They were all black men. The same color as me."

The world became a lesser place when Lemon passed away Sunday at 83. His dream was to play for the Globetrotters and see the world, and he would eventually tour with the team for more than two decades, playing in more than 16,000 games before being inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003. Lemon was also known as an actor and minister, but fans across the globe knew him as the Clown Prince of Basketball.

"Meadowlark was the most sensational, awesome, incredible basketball player I've ever seen," Wilt Chamberlain, Lemon's onetime teammate, said in a television interview shortly before his death in 1999. "People would say it would be Dr. J or even Jordan. For me, it would be Meadowlark Lemon."

Lemon started his career with the onion sack and coat hanger, which were nailed to a tree behind a neighbor's house. His ball was an empty Carnation evaporated milk can scrounged from the garbage.

When you spend enough time perfecting your craft and becoming a legend, many fans won't care that you were immodest. A coach pulled Lemon out of a pickup game because of the youth's potential, teaching him the game's fundamentals, including his trademark hook shot.

"I learned to perfect the hook shot because I was taught by the very best coach I've ever known," he wrote in a 2010 memoir. "...It was me."

Anyone who ever saw Lemon when he toured with the Globetrotters will recall his spectacular hook from half court, which almost always caught nothing but net. It was a crowd-pleaser guaranteed to bring down the house.

An all-state prep player, Lemon returned to Wilmington after a brief stop at Florida A&M. He almost enlisted in the Army during the Korean War, but a high-school coach landed him a tryout with the Globetrotters in Raleigh. Lemon scored 12 points in a quarter-and-a-half, wowing a crowd of 15,000, but the team didn't pick him up. He then enlisted and was serving his country in Austria when the Globetrotters toured Europe, giving him another tryout opportunity. A 40-game contract for a European tour eventually turned into a career, but not before Lemon realized he would need to prove his skills before becoming a ham.

"The comedians were the ones who got cut first," he said in 1977. "You first had to prove that you could play basketball, then you had to show that you could be funny."

The 'Trotters were much more than a novelty act when Lemon joined in 1954, six years after the NBA integrated. The team was owned by the very white and very Jewish Abe Saperstein, who used the Globetrotters to showcase black players. Chamberlain even played with Lemon for a year. The team's buffoonish image was sometimes criticized, but even during the heart of the civil rights era, the 'Trotters had numerous defenders.

"I knew when I joined the team that they were one of the most important institutions in the world," Lemon wrote. "They had done more for the perception of black people and for the perception of America than almost anything you could think of." He added: "Some people say that the Globetrotters kept the NBA in business in its early years."

Inundated by stories on race and politics, fans just wanted to be distracted and enjoy some entertainment. The Globetrotters vaudevillian gags were known as "reems," which allowed them to torture referees, fake injuries, line up in football or baseball formations, or douse each other with water. Lemon became the circus' ringmaster, leading his team to 10 games per week and 2 million paying customers.

Lemon's 'Trotters, and a subsequent comedy basketball team he formed, would play in an East German swimming pool and a Mexican bullfighting ring. Along with meeting President Ronald Reagan, he also played before two popes.

However, his career left little time to form a solid personal life. He divorced his first wife, who was arrested following a 1978 car chase when she stabbed Lemon at 53rd Street and Second Avenue in New York.

"I have a lot of people I need to apologize to," Lemon said upon his Hall of Fame induction, when he told his family he was sorry for the Globetrotters punishing tour schedule.

And believe it or not, Lemon was prouder of himself for becoming an ordained minister in 1986 than for anything he accomplished on a basketball court.

"I have been called the Clown Prince of Basketball, and an Ambassador of Good Will in Short Pants to the world, which is an honor," he wrote on his website. "To be a child of God is the highest honor anyone could have."

But in the end, Lemon credited the Almighty with all his accomplishments—on and off the court.

"God planted that dream in my heart as I sat right there in the Ritz Theater," he wrote. "He gave me a relentless desire, determination, energy, and the talent to make my dream come true."

Related Thursday Review articles:

When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It: A Few Words About Yogi Berra; Kevin Robbie; Thursday Review; October 4, 2015.

The Joy of an Old Media Guide; Earl Perkins; Thursday Review; May 20, 2015.