Marques Haynes, whose dazzling ball-handling skills, exhibited for more than 40 years as a member of the Harlem Globetrotters and other barnstorming black basketball teams, earned him a place in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and an international reputation as the world’s greatest dribbler, died on Friday in Plano, Tex. He was 89.
A spokesman for the Globetrotters, Brett Meister, confirmed the death. Haynes had lived in Plano.
Haynes was a stellar cog on the Globetrotter squads of the late 1940s and early ’50s, when the team was as competitive as any team anywhere, including those in the professional leagues that in 1949 merged to form the National Basketball Association.
Indeed, the Globetrotters were basketball’s biggest attraction, not only in the United States — where their popularity was a societal sneer at segregation and bigotry even though they were victims of it — but also around the world, where their signature mix of sport and showmanship made them ambassadors of American good will. But his career extended far beyond his peak playing days.
<figure id="media-100000003700209" class="media photo embedded has-adjacency has-lede-adjacency layout-large-horizontal media-100000003700209 ratio-tall" data-media-action="modal" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/05/23/sports/23HAYNES2-obit/23HAYNES2-obit-articleLarge.jpg" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"> Photo
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description"> Haynes in 2008 in Plano, Tex., where he died on Friday. In his prime, he could dribble the ball at a height of an inch or two. Credit Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press </figcaption> </figure> In two stints with the Globetrotters (his second was in the 1970s, a more showmanlike incarnation of the team), over decades with his own team, the Harlem Magicians (also called the Fabulous Magicians) and with a few other squads, Haynes traveled an estimated four million miles and played in an estimated 12,000 basketball games in 100 countries, give or take a few — in racially hostile Southern towns, in dim school gyms, on dirt courts in dusty African villages, in bullrings, soccer stadiums and emptied swimming pools, not to mention in Madison Square Garden, the Rose Bowl and other celebrated arenas all over the world.
Haynes was a brilliant player — a fine shooter, a tenacious defender and an expert passer. But as a dribbler he was nonpareil, and it was that skill that made him an ace entertainer.
Able to bounce a ball three times a second, to control it just an inch or two off the floor, to tease defenders with a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t legerdemain, he befuddled opponents and thrilled fans night after night with his dexterous displays — dribbling from his knees, lying on his side or sitting, and weaving in and out of court traffic, playing a solo game of keep-away within the larger game.
Once, at a game in Chihuahua, Mexico, when two teammates fouled out in the third quarter and only four men were left on the floor, he dribbled out nearly the whole fourth quarter to exhaust the clock.
Haynes often played against local teams around the world that could not match the Trotters’ skills, and against hapless opponents whose very haplessness was the point. But he also played in the Globetrotters’ victories over the all-white Minneapolis Lakers and their star center George Mikan in 1948 and 1949, games that helped prompt the integration of professional basketball. (One of the first black players in the National Basketball Association, Sweetwater Clifton, who joined the Knicks in 1950, came from the Globetrotters.)
And Haynes played on a European tour in 1951 that ended at Olympic Stadium in Berlin, where 75,000 people welcomed the Globetrotters and a special guest: Jesse Owens, who in 1936, in the same stadium, won four Olympic gold medals, to Adolf Hitler’s dismay.
In a Germany recovering from World War II and divided by ideology — a Communist-sponsored youth festival was taking place in Berlin when the Globetrotters arrived — the appearance of the team and Owens turned into a triumph of American diplomacy.
“We roomed together, Jesse and I did,” Haynes recalled in a 2011 interview with Voices of Oklahoma, an oral history archive. “We played in Berlin stadium, we had to charter a bus, we went in on a bus, and Jesse wasn’t on the bus with us. You know how he came in? A helicopter brought him in. He got out of that helicopter, and there was an announcement: Jesse Owens has just arrived. Boy, that stadium went wild. You had to put some cotton or something in your ears.”
Owens took off his suit to reveal that he was wearing his Olympic running togs underneath, Haynes remembered, and he jogged triumphantly around the stadium. “And they invited him over to the chancellor, the top man’s box, to greet him” — it was actually Walter Schreiber, the acting mayor of West Berlin — “and he said to Jesse, ‘In 1936, Hitler wouldn’t give you his hand; today, Mr. Owens, I give you both of mine,’ ” Haynes said. “Boy, that crowd went wild.”
Haynes’s professional career began after he graduated from Langston University in Oklahoma, where he was the leading scorer on a team that went 112-3 and at one point won 59 games in a row. He was invited to join the Globetrotters in 1946 after Langston played against them and he scored 26 points (some sources say 28), leading Langston to a surprise 74-70 victory. But he put them off until he finished college, and then briefly played for the Kansas City Stars of the Black Professional Basketball League.
The Globetrotters, who began life on the south side of Chicago — they didn’t play a game in Harlem until 1968 — had been playing competitively since the 1920s. But when Haynes joined them, in either 1946 or 1947 (sources are divided on when he made his first appearance), their reputation as basketball entertainers was still emerging.
It was in 1941 that the star player Reece Tatum, better known as Goose, joined the team and made trick routines and comic antics (not to mention the hook shot, which he is widely credited with inventing) central to its games, essentially creating the exuberant razzle-dazzle that subsequent generations of fans have come to expect from Globetrotter basketball.
Haynes was a natural partner for Tatum, and his tour de force ball-handling was a staple of any game he played in, for the Globetrotters or anyone else.
“He started to dribble,” the magazine Boys’ Life began, in describing a Haynes performance in 1968, when he was 41. “The player guarding him darted for the ball and presto, the ball and the dribbler were gone, working their magic on another victim across the court. In and out of the pack he moved, dribbling high and low, quickly and slowly, on his knees and sitting, searching out victims and conquering them. In 22 seconds, he dribbled 57 times before driving in and sinking a layup.”
<figure id="media-100000003700244" class="media photo embedded has-adjacency layout-large-vertical media-100000003700244" data-media-action="modal" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/05/23/sports/23HAYNES-3-obit/23HAYNES-3-obit-blog427.jpg" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"> Photo
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description"> A 1963 poster. Haynes left the Globetrotters and formed the Harlem Magicians in 1953. </figcaption> </figure>
Marques Oreole Haynes liked to keep his age a secret, and sources have differed about his birth date, but as he finally acknowledged in his oral history interview, he was born in Sand Springs, Okla., on March 10, 1926. He grew up in a three-room house without electricity or plumbing. His father, a railroad worker, left the family when Marques was 3 or 4, and he was raised by his mother, Hattie, a domestic worker and laundress.
The youngest of four children, he learned basketball from his siblings. His sister, Cecile (some sources say Cecil), taught him to shoot, he said, his brother Joe to pass and his oldest brother, Wendell, to dribble.
“We’d take economy-size food cans and cut the bottoms out and tack them to the outhouse, then ball rags and tie them together and shoot baskets,” Haynes recalled in a Sports Illustrated interview in 1985. “Sometimes we’d find a barrel hoop on an empty lot and tie a feed ’n’ grain gunnysack to it for a net and use that for a basket. Everywhere I went — the backyard, vacant lots — I practiced dribbling with a tennis ball. Or a rubber ball.”
He played for the Booker T. Washington High School basketball team, which won the black national championship, held at Tuskegee, Ala., in 1941. At Langston, Haynes was already a virtuoso dribbler, but he kept his skills under wraps during games because his coach, a local legend named Zip Gayles, was a disciplinarian who preached teamwork.
Haynes unveiled his gift publicly for the first time in a tournament game against Southern University in February 1945. In a previous round of the tournament, Haynes had watched Southern humiliate an outmanned squad from a tiny school, Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson University), whose coach, fresh out of the Army — before he signed with the Dodgers, but after he had achieved fame as an athlete at U.C.L.A. — was Jackie Robinson.
Langston whipped Southern, and for the game’s last two minutes or more, to pay Southern back for its poor sportsmanship and to avenge Robinson, Haynes dribbled out the clock.
“He dribbled behind his back and between his legs, dribbled the ball two inches off the floor and higher than his head,” Ben Green wrote in his 2005 history of the Globetrotters, “Spinning the Globe.” “Two Southern players chased him, but he dribbled right through them. He circled around the key in one direction, then back the other way, weaving in and out of the Southern players. Just when they seemed to have him boxed in, he would feint in one direction and slam on the brakes so suddenly that they’d slide right past him, falling over themselves.”
The crowd of 2,500 bellowed and cheered, rose to its feet and showered the floor with programs and small coins. “They threw their hats, and even their shirts,” Mr. Green wrote. “No one had ever seen anything like this before on a basketball court. And, in truth, there had never been anything like this on any basketball court. Not on any court, anywhere, since Dr. Naismith invented the game. What Marques Haynes was doing with a ball had never been done.”
After graduating from Langston, Haynes played for the Globetrotters for several years, a time when the team was so popular that the fledgling N.B.A. often scheduled games on the same bill as Globetrotter games in order to help draw fans. In 1953, however, he left the team in a dispute over money with the Globetrotters’ owner, Abe Saperstein, and starred for his own team, the Harlem Magicians. Goose Tatum came with him.
The Magicians were successful enough in the early days that Haynes turned down two offers to play in the N.B.A., from the Philadelphia Warriors in 1953 and the Lakers in 1955.
After his second stint with the Globetrotters, from 1972 to 1979, when the franchise was in disarray, he played for the Bucketeers, a team formed by another former Globetrotter, Meadowlark Lemon, as well as for the Harlem Wizards and a reconstituted version of the Magicians.
Haynes founded a clothing company specializing in Italian knitwear in 1973, and though it eventually failed, he met his wife, Joan, a Wilhelmina model, when she auditioned for a fashion show. He declined to hire her, he later said, because it was his policy not to date his employees, and he wanted to ask her out.
They had two daughters. She survives him, but information on Haynes’s other survivors was not immediately available.
In 1998, Haynes was the first Globetrotter inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. He did not retire from playing until the early 1990s, and into his 60s he was still crisscrossing the country by bus — driving, often enough — sleeping in motels, eating cheap restaurant buffets and swishing 30-foot set shots and dribbling behind his back and between his legs for crowds of hundreds or thousands.
“I’ve been in basketball for as far back as I can remember,” he said in Charleston, S.C., on a road trip with the Magicians in 1985. “After you’ve traveled so many years, you don’t pay it any mind. After one stop, it’s on to the next. You get lonely on the road, sure. It gets boring. It gets tiring. Sometimes you wonder why you’re out here, out on the road, but then you remember you’ve been here all your life and how you enjoyed it so.”
A spokesman for the Globetrotters, Brett Meister, confirmed the death. Haynes had lived in Plano.
Haynes was a stellar cog on the Globetrotter squads of the late 1940s and early ’50s, when the team was as competitive as any team anywhere, including those in the professional leagues that in 1949 merged to form the National Basketball Association.
Indeed, the Globetrotters were basketball’s biggest attraction, not only in the United States — where their popularity was a societal sneer at segregation and bigotry even though they were victims of it — but also around the world, where their signature mix of sport and showmanship made them ambassadors of American good will. But his career extended far beyond his peak playing days.
<figure id="media-100000003700209" class="media photo embedded has-adjacency has-lede-adjacency layout-large-horizontal media-100000003700209 ratio-tall" data-media-action="modal" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/05/23/sports/23HAYNES2-obit/23HAYNES2-obit-articleLarge.jpg" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"> Photo
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description"> Haynes in 2008 in Plano, Tex., where he died on Friday. In his prime, he could dribble the ball at a height of an inch or two. Credit Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press </figcaption> </figure> In two stints with the Globetrotters (his second was in the 1970s, a more showmanlike incarnation of the team), over decades with his own team, the Harlem Magicians (also called the Fabulous Magicians) and with a few other squads, Haynes traveled an estimated four million miles and played in an estimated 12,000 basketball games in 100 countries, give or take a few — in racially hostile Southern towns, in dim school gyms, on dirt courts in dusty African villages, in bullrings, soccer stadiums and emptied swimming pools, not to mention in Madison Square Garden, the Rose Bowl and other celebrated arenas all over the world.
Haynes was a brilliant player — a fine shooter, a tenacious defender and an expert passer. But as a dribbler he was nonpareil, and it was that skill that made him an ace entertainer.
Able to bounce a ball three times a second, to control it just an inch or two off the floor, to tease defenders with a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t legerdemain, he befuddled opponents and thrilled fans night after night with his dexterous displays — dribbling from his knees, lying on his side or sitting, and weaving in and out of court traffic, playing a solo game of keep-away within the larger game.
Once, at a game in Chihuahua, Mexico, when two teammates fouled out in the third quarter and only four men were left on the floor, he dribbled out nearly the whole fourth quarter to exhaust the clock.
Haynes often played against local teams around the world that could not match the Trotters’ skills, and against hapless opponents whose very haplessness was the point. But he also played in the Globetrotters’ victories over the all-white Minneapolis Lakers and their star center George Mikan in 1948 and 1949, games that helped prompt the integration of professional basketball. (One of the first black players in the National Basketball Association, Sweetwater Clifton, who joined the Knicks in 1950, came from the Globetrotters.)
And Haynes played on a European tour in 1951 that ended at Olympic Stadium in Berlin, where 75,000 people welcomed the Globetrotters and a special guest: Jesse Owens, who in 1936, in the same stadium, won four Olympic gold medals, to Adolf Hitler’s dismay.
In a Germany recovering from World War II and divided by ideology — a Communist-sponsored youth festival was taking place in Berlin when the Globetrotters arrived — the appearance of the team and Owens turned into a triumph of American diplomacy.
“We roomed together, Jesse and I did,” Haynes recalled in a 2011 interview with Voices of Oklahoma, an oral history archive. “We played in Berlin stadium, we had to charter a bus, we went in on a bus, and Jesse wasn’t on the bus with us. You know how he came in? A helicopter brought him in. He got out of that helicopter, and there was an announcement: Jesse Owens has just arrived. Boy, that stadium went wild. You had to put some cotton or something in your ears.”
Owens took off his suit to reveal that he was wearing his Olympic running togs underneath, Haynes remembered, and he jogged triumphantly around the stadium. “And they invited him over to the chancellor, the top man’s box, to greet him” — it was actually Walter Schreiber, the acting mayor of West Berlin — “and he said to Jesse, ‘In 1936, Hitler wouldn’t give you his hand; today, Mr. Owens, I give you both of mine,’ ” Haynes said. “Boy, that crowd went wild.”
Haynes’s professional career began after he graduated from Langston University in Oklahoma, where he was the leading scorer on a team that went 112-3 and at one point won 59 games in a row. He was invited to join the Globetrotters in 1946 after Langston played against them and he scored 26 points (some sources say 28), leading Langston to a surprise 74-70 victory. But he put them off until he finished college, and then briefly played for the Kansas City Stars of the Black Professional Basketball League.
The Globetrotters, who began life on the south side of Chicago — they didn’t play a game in Harlem until 1968 — had been playing competitively since the 1920s. But when Haynes joined them, in either 1946 or 1947 (sources are divided on when he made his first appearance), their reputation as basketball entertainers was still emerging.
It was in 1941 that the star player Reece Tatum, better known as Goose, joined the team and made trick routines and comic antics (not to mention the hook shot, which he is widely credited with inventing) central to its games, essentially creating the exuberant razzle-dazzle that subsequent generations of fans have come to expect from Globetrotter basketball.
Haynes was a natural partner for Tatum, and his tour de force ball-handling was a staple of any game he played in, for the Globetrotters or anyone else.
“He started to dribble,” the magazine Boys’ Life began, in describing a Haynes performance in 1968, when he was 41. “The player guarding him darted for the ball and presto, the ball and the dribbler were gone, working their magic on another victim across the court. In and out of the pack he moved, dribbling high and low, quickly and slowly, on his knees and sitting, searching out victims and conquering them. In 22 seconds, he dribbled 57 times before driving in and sinking a layup.”
<figure id="media-100000003700244" class="media photo embedded has-adjacency layout-large-vertical media-100000003700244" data-media-action="modal" itemprop="associatedMedia" itemscope="" itemid="http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/05/23/sports/23HAYNES-3-obit/23HAYNES-3-obit-blog427.jpg" itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageObject" role="group"> Photo
<figcaption class="caption" itemprop="caption description"> A 1963 poster. Haynes left the Globetrotters and formed the Harlem Magicians in 1953. </figcaption> </figure>
Marques Oreole Haynes liked to keep his age a secret, and sources have differed about his birth date, but as he finally acknowledged in his oral history interview, he was born in Sand Springs, Okla., on March 10, 1926. He grew up in a three-room house without electricity or plumbing. His father, a railroad worker, left the family when Marques was 3 or 4, and he was raised by his mother, Hattie, a domestic worker and laundress.
The youngest of four children, he learned basketball from his siblings. His sister, Cecile (some sources say Cecil), taught him to shoot, he said, his brother Joe to pass and his oldest brother, Wendell, to dribble.
“We’d take economy-size food cans and cut the bottoms out and tack them to the outhouse, then ball rags and tie them together and shoot baskets,” Haynes recalled in a Sports Illustrated interview in 1985. “Sometimes we’d find a barrel hoop on an empty lot and tie a feed ’n’ grain gunnysack to it for a net and use that for a basket. Everywhere I went — the backyard, vacant lots — I practiced dribbling with a tennis ball. Or a rubber ball.”
He played for the Booker T. Washington High School basketball team, which won the black national championship, held at Tuskegee, Ala., in 1941. At Langston, Haynes was already a virtuoso dribbler, but he kept his skills under wraps during games because his coach, a local legend named Zip Gayles, was a disciplinarian who preached teamwork.
Haynes unveiled his gift publicly for the first time in a tournament game against Southern University in February 1945. In a previous round of the tournament, Haynes had watched Southern humiliate an outmanned squad from a tiny school, Samuel Huston College (now Huston-Tillotson University), whose coach, fresh out of the Army — before he signed with the Dodgers, but after he had achieved fame as an athlete at U.C.L.A. — was Jackie Robinson.
Langston whipped Southern, and for the game’s last two minutes or more, to pay Southern back for its poor sportsmanship and to avenge Robinson, Haynes dribbled out the clock.
“He dribbled behind his back and between his legs, dribbled the ball two inches off the floor and higher than his head,” Ben Green wrote in his 2005 history of the Globetrotters, “Spinning the Globe.” “Two Southern players chased him, but he dribbled right through them. He circled around the key in one direction, then back the other way, weaving in and out of the Southern players. Just when they seemed to have him boxed in, he would feint in one direction and slam on the brakes so suddenly that they’d slide right past him, falling over themselves.”
The crowd of 2,500 bellowed and cheered, rose to its feet and showered the floor with programs and small coins. “They threw their hats, and even their shirts,” Mr. Green wrote. “No one had ever seen anything like this before on a basketball court. And, in truth, there had never been anything like this on any basketball court. Not on any court, anywhere, since Dr. Naismith invented the game. What Marques Haynes was doing with a ball had never been done.”
After graduating from Langston, Haynes played for the Globetrotters for several years, a time when the team was so popular that the fledgling N.B.A. often scheduled games on the same bill as Globetrotter games in order to help draw fans. In 1953, however, he left the team in a dispute over money with the Globetrotters’ owner, Abe Saperstein, and starred for his own team, the Harlem Magicians. Goose Tatum came with him.
The Magicians were successful enough in the early days that Haynes turned down two offers to play in the N.B.A., from the Philadelphia Warriors in 1953 and the Lakers in 1955.
After his second stint with the Globetrotters, from 1972 to 1979, when the franchise was in disarray, he played for the Bucketeers, a team formed by another former Globetrotter, Meadowlark Lemon, as well as for the Harlem Wizards and a reconstituted version of the Magicians.
Haynes founded a clothing company specializing in Italian knitwear in 1973, and though it eventually failed, he met his wife, Joan, a Wilhelmina model, when she auditioned for a fashion show. He declined to hire her, he later said, because it was his policy not to date his employees, and he wanted to ask her out.
They had two daughters. She survives him, but information on Haynes’s other survivors was not immediately available.
In 1998, Haynes was the first Globetrotter inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. He did not retire from playing until the early 1990s, and into his 60s he was still crisscrossing the country by bus — driving, often enough — sleeping in motels, eating cheap restaurant buffets and swishing 30-foot set shots and dribbling behind his back and between his legs for crowds of hundreds or thousands.
“I’ve been in basketball for as far back as I can remember,” he said in Charleston, S.C., on a road trip with the Magicians in 1985. “After you’ve traveled so many years, you don’t pay it any mind. After one stop, it’s on to the next. You get lonely on the road, sure. It gets boring. It gets tiring. Sometimes you wonder why you’re out here, out on the road, but then you remember you’ve been here all your life and how you enjoyed it so.”
