Swish!: The Slam-Dunking, Alley-Ooping, High-Flying Harlem Globetrotters by Suzanne Slade (review)

It didn’t matter how talented the players were on the award-winning basketball team of Chicago’s Wendell Phillips High School; in 1920s America, Black players were not allowed to play on top-tier white teams. Several Phillips alums took to the barnstorming circuit until manager Abe Saperstein suggested a snazzier name that referenced international aspirations and buried their Chicago roots under East Coast cachet—New York Harlem Globe Trotters (as it was then formatted). The travel team was still too good for its own good, and a near perfect record of wins against small-town host teams wasn’t the best way to make friends—particularly in white communities. The flashy ball-handling tricks they introduced were entertaining enough to grow an avid fan base and they developed international fame, though, and in the late 1940s their success caught struggling NBA team owners’ attention: “Suddenly, their ‘whites only’ rule seemed ridiculous.” Slade keeps the narrative positive, emphasizing forward social progress in professional basketball, while balancing the Globetrotters’ crowd-pleasing antics with a nod to the serious strategic impulse behind it. Tate’s digital artwork matches the mood, with a smiling cast of wiry, taffy-limbed showmen whose pace never slows. End matter, however, offers a fuller picture, with Slade addressing contention between Saperstein and his players, Tate commenting on the difficulty of producing color illustrations from often confusingly documented black and white period resources, and endpaper timelines supplying additional context on the team’s history.