"have been made about the Globetrotters, ""The Harlem Globetrotters"" (1951) and ""Go, Man, Go"" (1954), the latter starring Dane Clark and Sidney Poitier. Several documentaries have also told the Globetrotters’ story, including ""The Harlem Globetrotters: The Team That Changed the World"" (2005), which featured Geese Ausbie, Larry Brown and Bill Bradley. Saperstein was a leading figure in the black baseball leagues as well. At various times, he owned the Chicago Brown Bombers, the Birmingham Black Barons, and the Cincinnati Crescents baseball teams. He also created several new leagues, including the Negro Midwest League and, in partnership with Olympic track and"
"which went on to become a mainstay of modern basketball. Saperstein was elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1971 and, at 5 ft. 3 in (1.65 m), is its shortest male member. In 1979, he was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and 2005 was inducted into the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. Saperstein was born in the East End of London, England, to a Jewish family originally from Łomża, Poland. His family moved from London to Chicago in 1907, when Abe was five years old. They settled just north of the city's Jewish"
"in 2008 by the Los Angeles Times, on playing two professional sports in tandem. ""I think I was having so much fun that it kept me going. I can't remember a teammate I didn't enjoy."" When Abe Saperstein's American Basketball League was born in 1961, Tuck Tape Company owner Paul Cohen purchased a franchise, gave it the Tapers name, and placed it in Washington. Conley signed with the team. With the Tapers, Conley often accompanied Cohen on sales calls for his company and gained industry experience. After his retirement from professional sports, Conley started working for a duct tape company"
"Chicago Crusaders The Chicago Crusaders were an all-black barnstorming basketball club whose history ran from 1933 through 1947. Commonly billed as the ""Western World's Colored Champions"" the team's roster over the years featured about a dozen players who also were members of the better-known Harlem Globetrotters and New York Renaissance, both enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame. In the 1933-34 season Dick Hudson, who had previously managed the seminal Giles Post Legion and Savoy Big Five squads that had helped birth Abe Saperstein's Globetrotters, converted his Hottentots into the Chicago Crusaders as something of a travelling name for the"
"served as its commissioner, as well as owner of the league's Chicago Majors team. To differentiate the ABL from the NBA – and to promote the new league – Saperstein introduced a widened free throw lane and the three-point shot, both of which were later adopted by the NBA, although the ABL lasted only a season and a half. The NBA adopted the three-point shot in 1979. In a time of racial segregation and bigotry in professional sports, Saperstein proudly showcased the talents of the nation's best black basketball players. Four years after the all-white National Basketball Association (originally called"
"Pittsburgh businessman. All of the team's home games were played in the Pittsburgh Civic Arena. Connie Hawkins, Pro Basketball Hall of Fame Pittsburgh Rens The Pittsburgh Rens were an American basketball team based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that was a member of the American Basketball League. The founder of the ABL, Abe Saperstein, was the owner of the Harlem Globetrotters who had competed for many decades against the New York Rens and eventually bought the rights to the Rens' name. Because of the Pittsburgh Renaissance urban renewal project, it was convenient to coin the ""Rens"" as an instantly-recognizable name for this"
"the Chicago District Park as a playground supervisor at Welles Park, on Chicago's North Side. There, after hours of watching kids play basketball, he decided to create his own team. The Chicago Reds were a semi-pro lightweight (135 lb limit) basketball team, and Saperstein played point guard. As player, manager, and coach of the Chicago Reds, Saperstein met Walter Thomas Ball, a legendary baseball player in the Negro leagues, who had a black baseball team he wanted to send on tour in Illinois and southern Wisconsin. He hired Saperstein as his booking agent. Saperstein went on to become booking agent"
"Philadelphia Tapers The Philadelphia Tapers were an American professional basketball team that played a partial 1962–1963 season and traces its history to the 1950s AAU New York Tapers. Originally the amateur New York Tapers, the team played in the NABL and was sponsored by Technical Tape Corporation, makers of Tuck brand adhesive and recording tapes. The Tapers were a top AAU club team in the 1950s featuring many former collegiate stars and pro players. When Abe Saperstein's American Basketball League was born in 1961, Tuck Tape owner Paul Cohen purchased a franchise, gave it the Tapers name, and placed it"
"undergraduate comedy troupe, the Compass Players. In 1959, alumnus Paul Sills, who many consider the father of improvisational theater, founded The Second City along with Bernard Sahlins, also a graduate of the University. Since its founding, The Second City Theater has inspired other comedy troupes such as Saturday Night Live, as well as serving as an incubator for artists such as Alan Arkin, Mike Nichols, Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Stephen Colbert, Tina Fey, Jack McBrayer, and Steve Carell. In 1964, Professor Ralph Shapey founded the University of Chicago Contemporary Chamber Players, one of the oldest and most successful"
"design"", at least at the annual Chicago Auto Show, but he was bothered too much by doubters who were sure he was on stilts and set out to prove it with ladies' hatpins. He was approached by Abe Saperstein, an owner and coach of the Harlem Globetrotters, a professional novelty basketball team that toured the world; he was to be a player with the team, but declined the offer. He found instead a job that allowed him to lead a more normal life as a salesman for Big Joe Hydraulic Lifts. Granted, he was billed as their biggest salesman, but"
"in one game), and Ron Cavenall. Dempsey Hovland, founder of 20th Century Booking Agency and himself owner of several barnstorming teams was recruited to book the Harlem Magicians' games. In late 1961, Abe Saperstein, founder and owner of the Harlem Globetrotters opened a lawsuit against Lon Varnell for alleged violation of Harlem Globetrotters' registered trademarks, ""Harlem Globetrotters"" and ""Magicians of Basketball"" by promoting a basketball team known as the ""Harlem Magicians"". In 1964, the parties settled the litigation by entering a consent decree approved by the District Court for the Southern District of New York. Harlem Magicians Harlem Magicians was"
"been denied a room and told to find a room in a ""South Side hotel for colored people"". A record number of fans showed up at Chicago Stadium to watch the Lakers face off against the Globetrotters. It was an exhibition game played right before the official Basketball Association of America contest between the Chicago Stags and the New York Knicks. Still in its infancy, professional basketball had never attracted more than 9,000 fans in Chicago. That day, nearly 18,000 filled the stadium. The Globetrotters starting lineup, a combination of the best players from Saperstein's East and West units, featured"
"was intrigued by this event, and twenty years later, he decided to create his own show basketball team, the Harlem Wizards. Before Davis got into sports management and promotion, Howie Davis played semi-professional baseball for a couple years. He eventually managed the Brooklyn Dodgers football team, the Staten Island Stapes, and the Kokomo Clowns, who actually played in clown outfits. Before creating the Harlem Wizards, he was also a scout for the San Francisco Giants. In 1962, Davis created the Wizards, wanting to expand on Saperstein's idea of the Globetrotters. Davis wanted the Wizards to be an even more competitive,"
"Abe Saperstein was repeatedly denied a NBA expansion team. The NBA later fought off the challenge of the American Basketball Association from 1967–76, in part by expanding from nine to eighteen teams. The NBA then absorbed four of the ABA's most successful franchises in a 1976 merger, and adopted several of the ABA's rule variations, most notably the three-point shot. The NHL began its existence competing with the Western Canada Hockey League and its predecessor, the Pacific Coast Hockey Association; both had folded by 1926, leaving the NHL as the sole major North American hockey league. The NHL fended off"
"Wizards, but also to participate in the show. The Wizards get the crowd involved, often bringing children out onto the floor to be part of a basketball trick or a comedy act. Their antics are similar to those of the Harlem Globetrotters, who were created in 1926. The Wizards, Flight Squad Basketball and the Globetrotters are comedy basketball teams that tour the country. The theme for the Wizards' 2010-2011 campaign was the ""Basketball and Beyond Tour."" They hold the second longest known winning streak in all of professional sports - over 2,800 games after the Harlem Globetrotters 24-year, 8,829 game"
"as a team and the team performs worldwide. Each player has a nickname that they are known by during shows: Acrodunk has performed in the television show America's Got Talent. America's Got Talent, season 4 Acrodunk ACRODUNK is a basketball performance squad founded by Jerry L. Burrell in 1994. ACRODUNK started out as The High ""Impact"" Squad with members of ACRODUNK still performing for The High ""Impact"" Squad. ACRODUNK is also formerly known as TEAM ACRODUNK. ACRODUNK's primary mission is to inspire and impress audiences with variations of the slam dunk. The group performs shows for college and professional basketball"
"Acrodunk ACRODUNK is a basketball performance squad founded by Jerry L. Burrell in 1994. ACRODUNK started out as The High ""Impact"" Squad with members of ACRODUNK still performing for The High ""Impact"" Squad. ACRODUNK is also formerly known as TEAM ACRODUNK. ACRODUNK's primary mission is to inspire and impress audiences with variations of the slam dunk. The group performs shows for college and professional basketball games, corporate meetings, festivals, fairs, theme parks, TV shows and schools. The squad made an appearance twice on the television show America's Got Talent. Members of ACRODUNK have set numerous Guinness World Records individually and"
"for the American Basketball Association's Virginia Squires. He played for 1960 USA Olympic basketball team, all the players of whom -including Smith- was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Akron Wingfoots The Akron Wingfoots are one of the oldest basketball teams in the United States. They were founded in 1918 by the workers at the Goodyear Tire Company in Akron, Ohio. The teams, while giving workers recreation, also helped to promote one of the first canvas/rubber based shoes made specifically for athletics, the wingfoot. The Wingfoots joined the National Basketball League for the 1932-1933 season playing against"
"With the 1946 advent of the Basketball Association of America, the immediate predecessor of the NBA, the ABL became a minor-league, and the Sphas would remain there as a semi-professional team until 1949. Gottlieb sold the team in 1950 to Red Klotz, a former Spha. 1949 would be the last year the Sphas were affiliated with a league, but thanks to Gottlieb's friendship with Abe Saperstein, president and owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, the Sphas lived on as one of the exhibition teams that the Globetrotters would play, although they would retain only the franchise name, not the Jewish makeup"
"of the team. Despite popular wisdom, the Sphas did not directly evolve into the Washington Generals. Instead, Saperstein had asked Klotz to create a separate exhibition team because the Sphas had beaten the Globetrotters on more than one occasion. After creating the Generals, Klotz sold the Sphas to one of his players, Pete Monska, who coached the team ""for a year or two until it disbanded [in October 1959.]"" The Sphas played their last game as the original team on October 17, 1959, losing to the Globetrotters in a double-header exhibition game. The Sphas were then reconstituted as the Baltimore"
"M.I.'s Westside Comedy Theater M.I.'s Westside Comedy Theater (Formerly Westside Eclectic ) is a comedy club, theater, bar, and comedy training center located in Santa Monica, California. In 1998, six improvisers from the improv group Mission IMPROVable at UMASS Amherst moved to Chicago, Illinois to train and perform. By the year 2000, the group began touring their short form comedy show and in 2001 they performed at NACA (National Association for Campus Activities). They began performing shows at colleges all across the country. Soon thereafter, the group grew, hiring more improvisers so that they could perform more widely, travelling in"
"The Playground Theater The Playground Theater, founded in 1997, remains the only continuously operating non-profit theater in Chicago dedicated to an art form invented in Chicago - Modern Theatrical Improvisation. The Playground was founded in 1997 by its original member companies. The Playground theater exists as a non-profit co-op, governed by its member companies, or ""teams."" The Playground currently is home to over 12 house teams in addition to guest teams, and members of the theater's Incubator Program. Located at 3209 N. Halsted Street, The Playground features performances every night. From time to time the theater holds auditions for its"
"he [Abe] didn't see it as a racial game"", Gerald Saperstein, a cousin of Abe Saperstein's who was at the game, told the Associated Press. But to many team owners in the young and struggling basketball leagues, there was a clear message: Not only were black players as talented and capable as white players, they added a level of excitement to the game that appealed to both white and black audiences. To black basketball fans, it was a moment of empowerment. ""It just revitalized so many of us, from the fact that [it showed] what we can be"", said John"
"comprehensive. NBA Halftimes CBA Halftimes GBA Halftimes Hockey Games Quiddlers The Quiddlers are a physical comedy group formed in Southeastern Michigan. They are known to audiences worldwide as ""The International Ambassadors of Physical Comedy."" The Quiddlers began in the spring of 1986 as a group of five college students and friends in their early 20s under the name ""The Marauding Miners"". The group first appeared on a public access program called Waterford Tonight, on Comcast Cablevision Channel 45 in Waterford, Michigan. Later that spring the Miners performed at Eastland Mall near Detroit for the production staff of the syndicated game"
"Bud Light Daredevils The Bud Light Daredevils were an American acrobatic basketball show that performed during the halftime of college and NBA basketball games from 1983 to 1998. The show combined gymnastics, trampoline, acrobatics, and basketball. The team was started by University of Mississippi cheerleaders Ty Cobb, Sam Martin, Robert Kirby, Tyler Hubbard, John White, and Ty Cobb's younger brother Guy Cobb. In 1980, Ty Cobb, along with fellow cheerleaders Sam Martin, John White, and Jeff Hubbard (as Ole Miss Rebels mascot Colonel Reb) began performing ball handling skits and acrobatics which incorporated a mini-trampoline during the time-outs and half-time"
"Cosby (1972) and Magic Johnson (2003) were each signed to honorary $1-a-year lifetime contracts with the Globetrotters. When Cosby's nominal association with the team was the subject of criticism following sexual assault allegations, the Globetrotters stated that they had had no association with him for decades. Harlem Globetrotters The Harlem Globetrotters are an exhibition basketball team. They combine athleticism, theater, and comedy in their style of play. Over the years they have played more than 26,000 exhibition games in 123 countries and territories. The team's signature song is Brother Bones' whistled version of ""Sweet Georgia Brown"". Their mascot is an"
"figures in the development of improvisational theatre are Viola Spolin and her son Paul Sills, founder of Chicago's famed Second City troupe and originator of Theater Games, and Del Close, founder of ImprovOlympic (along with Charna Halpern) and creator of a popular longform improv format known as The Harold. Other luminaries include Keith Johnstone, the British teacher and writer–author of ""Impro"", who founded the Theatre Machine and whose teachings form the foundation of the popular shortform Theatresports format, Dick Chudnow, founder of ComedySportz which evolved its family-friendly show format from Johnstone's Theatersports, and Bill Johnson, creator/director of The Magic Meathands,"
"above the knee. Over the course of his life he had 36 operations on the leg. He had a series of wooden legs and, as an inveterate smoker, cut holes in them to use as an ashtray. Veeck had been a fan of the Negro Leagues since his early teens. He had also admired Abe Saperstein's Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, which was based in Chicago. Saperstein saved Veeck from financial disaster early on in Milwaukee by giving him the right to promote the Globetrotters in the upper Midwest in the winter of 1941–42. In the fall of 1942, Veeck met"
"Go Man Go (film) Go, Man, Go! is a 1954 sports film directed by James Wong Howe, starring Dane Clark, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Patricia Breslin, The Harlem Globetrotters and Slim Gaillard. Clark plays Abe Saperstein, the organizer of the Globetrotters. Poitier's character is Inman Jackson, the team's showboating center. Breslin plays Sylvia Saperstein, the love interest, and Abe's daughter. Gaillard plays himself. The film tracks the Globetrotters from humble beginnings through a triumph over a major-league basketball team, as they struggle to overcome racial discrimination. Actual Harlem Globetrotter players portray the team in basketball action throughout the picture. The"
"BATS Improv BATS Improv (formerly known as ""Bay Area Theatresports"") is a non-profit improvisational theatre company in San Francisco. Founded in 1986, their unique style of acting-based improvisational theatre is well known in improv circles around the world. BATS is the largest improvisational theatre company and school in Northern California. BATS takes its inspiration from the work of Theatresports creator Keith Johnstone and from San Francisco's own tradition of experimental improvisation. BATS is known for the quality, depth, scope and variety of its improvisational theatre programming. Since 1986, BATS helped create and define a unique San Francisco style of long-form"
"ImprovBoston ImprovBoston is a nonprofit improvisational theater, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It offers shows five nights per week at its theater in Central Square and training programs in improvisation, stand-up comedy and sketchwriting. In 1982, Ellen Holbrook, a former student at Second City in Chicago and a producer of the Chicago Improv Olympic, moved to Boston with the idea to found an improvisational comedy troupe similar to Second City. Holbrook had the encouragement of former members of The Proposition, an earlier improv-comedy troupe, and Director David Shepherd, the founder of the Compass Players and the Improv Olympic. In the beginning,"
"Rockets, another Globetrotters exhibition team. Philadelphia Sphas The Philadelphia Sphas, also stylized SPHAs or SPHAS, were an American basketball franchise that existed in professional, semi-professional, and exhibition forms. They played their home games in the ballroom of Philadelphia's Broadwood Hotel. The team's name is an acronym, derived from South Philadelphia Hebrew Association (the group that initially funded the team), and the team's players, at least in its earlier years, were primarily Jewish. Future Philadelphia Warriors owner Eddie Gottlieb founded the team as an amateur group shortly after he and some close friends graduated from high school, and it later became"
"return for his years of supporting the NBA with doubleheader games featuring his Harlem Globetrotters. When Minneapolis Lakers owner Bob Short was permitted to move the Lakers to Los Angeles, Saperstein reacted by convincing National Alliance of Basketball Leagues (NABL) team owner Paul Cohen (Tuck Tapers) and Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) National Champion Cleveland Pipers owner George Steinbrenner to take the top NABL and AAU teams and players and form a rival league. Saperstein was secretly planning the new league since 1959 but it is unclear whether he would have abandoned these plans were he granted the NBA franchise. In"