Asia Times: Public interest RIP

Public interest RIP
By Julian Delasantellis


With the discovery that hard American power could be stopped dead in its tracks with just a handful of desert sand in its Humvee's gearbox, the emphasis has switched to soft power, with Kobe Bryant and American Idol winner Kris Allen carrying the spear of the American ideal the nation's army exhausted itself trying to advance.

For most of the last century, one of America's most powerful wielders of soft power has been none other than a group of talented black men joined together in a uniquely American cultural institution, the basketball team named the Harlem Globetrotters.

Founded in Chicago in 1926, what would eventually become the Globetrotters started out as an opening act for a band at formal dances in the city's Savoy Ballroom. One year later, after failed British-born baseball and basketball player Abe Saperstein bought the team, he sent it out to play exhibition games in Southern Illinois and Iowa with the new moniker of the "Harlem Globetrotters", correctly surmising that associating the team with cosmopolitan and far-away Harlem, then the center of African-American culture in the United States, might sell a few more tickets among the insular but curious in the overwhelmingly white rural communities the team was passing through. The team would not play an actual "home" game in Harlem until 1968.

Prior to World War II, the team mostly tried to play its games somewhat seriously, but with the founding of what would become the National Basketball Association in 1946, Saperstein knew he had to take his franchise in a different direction. From then on, the team's matches became more exhibition and comedy friendlies than actual sport, with players demonstrating more amazing feats of ball control and shotmaking skill rather than the team integration necessary to win actual games. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KF18Dj02.html