Harlem Globetrotters 45 Review: Lou Waxman on Collecting, Memory, and the Thrill of the Hunt

Sitting on the sidelines on the Wall of 45s was a copy of a Harlem Globetrotters promotional platter looking like a grizzled veteran.  It was on the IR.  Rough shape.  “Sweet Georgia Brown” on the A-side with “Black Eyed Susan Brown” on the flip.  Performed by Brother Bones on the Harlem Globetrotter label.  Dropping the needle on this was like taking a hit of acid.  Flashbacks, my man.  

The memories were not so much about the Globetrotters themselves, although Lou has plenty of those.  As Lou remembers it, the Trotters were on the Wide World of Sportsduring the weekends with Meadowlark Lemon, Curly Neal, Geese Ausbie, and Sweet Lou Dunbar.  This would be in the late 1970s/early 1980s around the time this 45 was released.  Seeing the Trotters play was a treat, appointment television for sure, but was it as great as seeing the Globetrotters cartoon in re-runs or the Globetrotters on Scooby-Doo or on Gilligan’s Island?  Like the Savannah Bananas of today, the Globetrotters of Lou’s youth were a phenomenon.  

But seeing this 45 did not transport Lou back to his days in front of the TV.  No, this piece of sports memorabilia took Lou back to the antique malls of this youth.  Lou’s father was a collector.  Lou has probably mentioned this before.  He tried diligently to get Lou to collect something.  Anything.  There were coins and there were baseball and football cards.  Let’s face it coins were rather boring.  And the cards put Lou in contact with the collecting equivalent of chickenhawks.  These guys, like comic book dealers, saw young collectors strictly as innocents to exploit.  For Lou, it was a series of ripoff after ripoff.  These dealers gave Lou a case of the icks, and after a few years Lou just lost interest in being exploited.

To be honest, Lou collected stupid shit anyway when it came to sports.  Lou was a trivia and history guy, so he was attracted to sports statistics and facts.  Instead of collecting Bobby Bonilla rookie cards by the dozens like his friend (who took a bath on that investment) or vintage Bowman cards of baseball legends like most collectors, Lou was attracted to cool stories.  Like Roy Face, a Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher from the late 1950s and early 1960s, who went 18-1 in 1959.  That seemed interesting to Lou,so Lou got Face’s 1959 Topps card.  Not worth shit.  Lou was also fascinated with Herb Score, a rookie phenom for the Cleveland Indians in 1956, who won twenty games and was then hit in the face with a batted ball and never recovered.  That was tragedy.  A good story.  Lou bought Score’s rookie card.  Not worth shit.  In1959, there was something about the late 1950s, Harvey “The Cat” Haddix pitched twelve innings of perfect ball and then lost the game in the thirteenth inning.  Again, more pathos on the diamond.  Lou bought the 1959 Haddix card.  Worthless.

As Lou mentioned he eventually soured on sports collecting.  To this day, it seems like a big scam.  This should be a pastime for kids and dork adults and corporations have destroyed it.  All these 1 of 1 collectibles and swatches of jerseys and all this bullshit could only be devised by executives looking to make a buck.  Sports memorabilia is not for adults.  This is not like collecting art or playing the stock market.  The dorks and the corporations suck the fun out of everything.  They have done it with sport collecting, just like they have with the games themselves.  

Book collecting seemed different to Lou.  When he got started in his early 20s, it was like a 10-year-old collecting baseball cards.  Being in your 20s was very precocious in the book collecting game, and unlike with the sports shit, Lou did not feel that the book dealers were circling him like the predators haunting the Greyhound bus station in downtown LA.  This is not to say that they, and book collecting, were not intimidating.  There was a ton of inside baseball shit to learn, but in Lou’s experience the book dealers he dealt with and got to know on a personal level, went out of their way to teach Lou the rules of the game.  They also made suggestions on what to collect that may have been outside of Lou’s line of vision.  It was book dealers who got Lou into collecting the publications of the Mimeo Revolution.  Lou did not feel the book dealers were shaking Lou down, but instead, helping him build a collection.  Sports collecting, like professional sports itself, is all about bleeding the last possible dollar out of the consumer.  Fuck that guy who convinced Lou to trade his Earl Campbell rookie for a bunch of All-Pro card trash.  

Lou does not collect vinyl; he just accumulates it.  Lou suspects that vinyl dealers are somewhere between the sport guys and the book guys.  Lou could be wrong.  There are predators in all forms of collecting for sure.  In Lou’s experience, the vinyl dealers he has dealt with are great people and have become friends.  It reminds Lou of some advice that his father gave him when Lou was just getting serious about book collecting.  Lou told his father that the major book shows were really intimidating and Lou’s father said that these people are your friends and they are going to become your friends, because they are the only people in the world as interested in this stuff as you are.  They are the only people that know about it as much as you do.  They are the only people who want to talk about it as much as you do.  This has proven true.  The book and vinyl dealers in Lou’s experience have not been corrupted by the business.  The sports guys, who also happen to be Star Wars and Lord of the Rings guys, are like Gollum.  They have been destroyed by the pursuit of rings.  And Lou’s cash.

This Globetrotter 45 isn’t worth anything in collectible terms, but in terms of generating memories it is worth quite a bit more.  At the Vogue it is around one dollar which is about the price of the toll on the Maine Turnpike.  Not bad for a trip down Memory Lane that will get you to a much more interesting destination in the long run.

Suggested Sites and Sounds:

The Globetrotters on Wide World of Sports:  ABC Wide World of Sports - "Harlem Globetrotters in Nashville" (Complete Broadcast, 1/14/1979) 📺 🏀

Scooby-Doo:  When Scooby-Doo! Met the Harlem Globetrotters | The Forgotten Hanna-Barbera Series

Gilligan’s Island:  The Harlem Globetroterrs On Gilligan's Island (1981) : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

The 1950s Pirates:  Impossible Pirates 1950s

Herb Score:  Herb Score Tribute

 — Lou Waxman