Night of Reckoning

At Chicago Stadium last week, extra switchboard operators kept up a singsong chant: "Sorry, no tickets." On the big night, 21,866 fans jammed into the big arena while 5,000 waited outside, unmindful of rain and sleet. It was the largest crowd ever to watch a professional basketball game. The attraction: the amazing Harlem Globetrotters, a razzle-dazzle Negro team which was riding a 113-game winning streak, v. the Minneapolis Lakers, rated the best white team in existence and sparked by towering (6 ft. 10 in.) George Mikan, the basketball player of the half-century.

When the Harlem Trotters' tricky, little (5 ft. 7 in.) Marques Haynes scuttled in to score the first basket, the gallery buzzed. No one had forgotten what happened the first time the Trotters played the Lakers last year. After rolling up a comfortable lead over the Lakers, the Globetrotters had nonchalantly started playing for laughs--passing between their legs, setting up a mock pitcher-catcher act, spinning the ball on their fingertips. A newsreel cameraman had recorded the whole humiliating burlesque and Minneapolis never lived it down. Mikan & Co. wiped out part of the humiliation by beating them later in the season, but the Trotters still led the series, 2 games to 1.

For the first five minutes of last week's game it was nip & tuck. Then, when the score reached gall, Minneapolis spurted ahead. Two of its big guns--Mikan and Vern Mikkelsen--were seesawing the Trotters dizzy from a double pivot. At the half, Minneapolis was breezing along in front, 40-29. Although the Globetrotters put two and sometimes three men on Mikan, they could not stop the big fellow, and loose-jointed "Sweetwater" Clifton, the Trotters' pivotman center, fouled out trying.

In the last quarter, Minneapolis gave the bewildered Trotters some of their own medicine by pointedly running in its second team, coasting on to a 76-60 victory. In the Globetrotters' dressing room after the game there was silence except for the sobbing of their long-armed forward, "Goose" Tatum. Down the hall where the Minneapolis Lakers were showering there was a raucous celebration. Said Mikan, who had scored 36 points himself: "This is the next best thing to winning the national championship."

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