RIP, great Meadowlark. You inhabit one of my favorite childhood memories.
This, from a story I wrote for Mountain Xpress in Asheville, when I was working there back in 2001:
An 8-year-old kid gapes from the stands as the great George “Meadowlark” Lemon stomps over courtside to hurl a bucket of water on the ref — that intolerable striped-shirted thorn in Meadowlark’s side! The ref promptly ducks.
And then that wide-eyed boy — and all the other expectant spectators in those San Antonio, Texas, bleachers — has a split-second of gleeful horror, tensed for the inevitable. And, oh, Sweet Georgia Brown, but what comes flying into our cringing faces? Confetti. Of course.
What else could it be when the Harlem Globetrotters are in town?
I remember it was Lemon at the bucket because he was the Globetrotters to me, even there toward the end of his 24-year, nearly 10,000-game reign as basketball’s supreme courtside jester, a red-white-and-blue blur of soulful swagger and athletic prowess who retained his sugar-coated sense of cool even after he was turned into a Saturday-morning CBS cartoon alongside goofy Scooby Doo. But maybe I was actually 7, after all. And it could have been Greenville, N.C., and not San Antonio where my dad took me to see basketball’s irrepressible, irreplaceable comedy troupe of athletic all-stars, which also then included copper-domed dribbling impresario Fred “Curly” Neal and ebullient cut-up Hubert “Geese” Ausbie.
Details, schmetails. What matters is that I saw the Harlem Globetrotters as a kid. And so did everyone else sitting courtside with me that day, adults included. The team, now three-quarters of a century old and counting, weaves style and substance into something grander — call it spectacle — inevitably reducing adults to tow-headed tykes at the front row of the circus, mouths agape. …
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