'Clown Prince’ of the Harlem Globetrotters who combined athletic prowess with a gift for comedy
Meadowlark Lemon, who has died aged 83, was a basketball player for the Harlem Globetrotters whose comic prowess and dazzling half-court hook shots saw him crowned the “Clown Prince” of the sport.
Though, at a slender 6ft 3in, Lemon was not among the most imposing players, his feats of grace and his talent as a comedian were unrivalled. He would smuggle a ball attached to a rubber string on to the court and make a pass that would then rebound, in slapstick fashion, into his face. He would douse the referee with water and threaten to do the same to fans – only to empty a bucket of confetti over their heads. “I’m an athlete, but athletes are entertainers and entertainers can be comedians,” he told an interviewer in 2004.
Some pundits felt his stunts were demeaning to the sport and to black players in particular. Lemon was accused of acting as an “Uncle Tom” for the Globetrotters’ Jewish founder, Abe Saperstein. Yet during the Cold War , the team’s popularity transcended cultural borders. Audience members included the Queen, two popes and Nikita Khrushchev. Meanwhile, Lemon became one of a handful of players to achieve celebrity in his own right. In 1978, a nationwide poll named him the fourth most popular personality in America – behind John Wayne, Alan Alda and Bob Hope.
Bob Hope and the Harlem Globetrotters in 1977 (Meadowlark Lemon is second from the left)
He was born Meadow George Lemon in Wilmington, North Carolina on April 25 1932, “into a world of racism and segregation”, as he later put it. After his parents divorced he was sent to live with his uncle and aunt. While his father, also called Meadow but known as “Peanut”, continued to live nearby, his mother left to pursue an ultimately unsuccessful modelling career in New York.
The younger Meadow’s passion for basketball was first ignited at the local cinema when, after seeing a newsreel on the Globetrotters, he rigged up a basketball hoop from a coat hanger and made his first shot with an empty milk tin. After leaving Florida A&M University he was drafted into the army and stationed in Austria, where the Globetrotters happened to be touring. He secured a trial and joined the team officially in 1954.
Apart from a single missed game the following year – the result of eating a bad bowl of goulash – Lemon would play consistently for the team for the next 24 seasons, touring more than 100 countries and averaging more than 300 games a year. He became a central figure in the Globetrotters’ pre-game “Magic Circle” routine, performing choreographed ball tricks to the whistled tune of Sweet Georgia Brown. He spent so much of his time travelling that one daughter told her teacher that her father lived at the airport. His first marriage to Willye Maultsby broke down, and in 1978 she was arrested after stabbing him in the back with a steak knife.
In 1979 Lemon left the Globetrotters to form his own comedy basketball teams and to try his hand at acting. A role as a preacher in The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh presaged a later calling. He was ordained as a Christian minister in 1986 and went on to found Meadowlark Lemon Ministries, an evangelist organisation, with the support of his second wife Cynthia. Available services included nutritional advice, a basketball camp and education programmes in schools and prisons.
Meadowlark Lemon was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003 and received the International Clown Hall of Fame’s Lifetime of Laughter award. He is survived by his wife Cynthia, and by five sons and five daughters from his first marriage.
Meadowlark Lemon, born April 25 1932, died December 27 2015
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