HAYNES, Marques Oreole

(b. 3 October 1926 in Sand Springs, Oklahoma), star basketball player for the Harlem Globetrotters and the first member of the well-known African-American team elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

The youngest of four children of Matthew and Hattie Haynes of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Haynes focused on sports at an early age. His father, a domestic worker, left the family when Haynes was only four years old. After this loss, he concentrated heavily on competing in sports with his older siblings. He starred in basketball at Booker T. Washington High School, leading the team to a state championship in 1942. That same year Haynes entered Oklahoma's Langston University, an African-American college. Between 1942 and 1946 he was a four-time All-State, All-Conference, and team Most Valuable Player selection. Haynes led Langston in scoring all four years, during which time the team compiled a 112–3 record that included a fifty-nine-game winning streak. Haynes earned a bachelor's degree in industrial education in 1946.

With his amazing blend of quickness and guile, the six-foot, 160-pound athlete caught the attention of the Harlem (New York) Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein in 1946 when Langston defeated the Globetrotters 74–70. After his graduation Haynes hitchhiked from his home in Sand Springs to Saperstein's apartment in Chicago, arriving at the team owner's door at 2:30 A. M. to request a tryout. The tired owner asked him to display his skills, and Haynes obliged by providing a spectacular dribbling exhibition in the hallway of the building. After signing and playing with the Kansas City Stars, an affiliate of the Globetrotters, in 1946, Haynes was promoted to the main squad in 1947.

When Haynes joined the Globetrotters he immediately embarked on one of the most prolific travel schedules in sports history. The game schedule was particularly draining because air travel was not prevalent during this era. In 1949 the Globetrotters played fourteen games in five days during a tour in Alaska. In 1950 the squad toured Western Europe and North Africa, playing games and giving exhibitions. A year later they played in Central and South America; in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, they drew a crowd of 50,000 for one game.

Haynes likened the Globetrotters to basketball's version of baseball's Negro Leagues, which featured outstanding players who were not fully appreciated during their playing days. In the 1940s, before the National Basketball Association (NBA) realized commercial success, the league staged doubleheaders with the Globetrotters out of financial necessity. The New York Rens and the Globetrotters helped to popularize the game to the masses. When the Globe-trotters defeated the NBA's championship team, the Minneapolis Lakers, in 1948 and 1949 and won eleven of eighteen games during a barnstorming tour in 1950, a "World Series of Basketball," NBA owners took notice.

Three years later, upon learning that Saperstein was trying to sell him to the Philadelphia Warriors, Haynes objected and asked for a bump in salary instead. When Saperstein refused, Haynes left to found the Harlem Magicians, who in 1955 recruited the Globetrotter Reece "Goose" Tatum to join him. Before widespread integration, most Globetrotters found themselves at a disadvantage in salary negotiations. With few available options for employment, players were forced to take what Saperstein offered them. Haynes became a symbolic and powerful figure when he launched the Magicians. Proving that an African American could own, operate, and market a major sports organization, he and the team prospered. His contemporaries respected Haynes's ambition and success in creating his own form of opportunity.

On the court Haynes was considered by many observers to be the greatest dribbler ever to play basketball. He often infuriated and baffled opponents with his moves. With one knee on the court, or even lying down, he could maneuver the ball between his legs and behind his back to evade defenders at will, moves that influenced future professional basketball players like Earvin "Magic" Johnson of the Los Angeles Lakers. His ability to keep the ball away from defenders on the court was a potent weapon. During contests with the Minneapolis Lakers in 1948 and 1949, Haynes's ability to nurse a lead at the end of the game with his dribbling was a key to victory. (There was no shot clock in those days.)

Haynes's long and distinguished association with basketball lasted five decades. After his first tour with the Globetrotters (1946–1953), he played for the Magicians (1953–1972). Haynes returned to the Globetrotters as a player and coach after Saperstein's death, working with the squad from 1972 to 1979. He joined Meadowlark Lemon's traveling Bucketeers (1979–1981) before finishing his career with the Magicians. Overall, Haynes played in more than 12,000 games and traveled more than 4 million miles. He visited nearly 100 countries, including Germany, where in summer 1950 the Globies entertained a crowd of 75,000, the largest basketball audience in history at the time. The game was held to ease anti-American feelings in post–World War II Europe and the venue was Berlin's Olympic Stadium, where fourteen years earlier Adolf Hitler had ignored the exploits of great African-American Olympians like the track star Jesse Owens. The basketball event became a sign of American goodwill for thousands around the globe and a source of pride for Haynes and his team-mates.

Haynes was enshrined in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame in 1985, the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1990, and the East Hartford, Connecticut, Hall of Fame in 1992. In 1993 he was inducted into the Jim Thorpe Memorial Hall of Fame, and a twelve-mile section of Oklahoma State Highway 97 was renamed the Marques Haynes Highway one year later. Haynes also was enshrined in the Langston University Hall of Fame in 1995 and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1998. At the twilight of the twentieth century, he joined Wilt Chamberlain and Meadowlark Lemon as the only three players in the history of the Harlem Globetrotters to have their jerseys retired.

After his basketball career was over, Haynes became a full-time resident of Dallas, Texas, where he owned and managed a water filtration company and was a respected member of the local business community. He and his wife, Joan, have two daughters.

Although there is no full-length biography of Haynes, several books describe events during the era in which he played and the impact of the Globetrotters on the professional growth of basketball. Extremely valuable are George Vecsey, Harlem Globetrotters (1973), and Josh Wilker, The Harlem Globetrotters (1997). Several additional works focus on the racist nature of basketball's early institutional management; Robert W. Peterson, Only the Ball Was White (1970), and his Cages to Jump Shots: Pro Basketball ' s Early Years (1990), contain little personal information on Haynes but provide helpful context when analyzing his career. See also Nelson George, Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball (1992). For a summary of Haynes's career highlights, see David L. Porter, ed., Biographical Dictionary of American Sports: Basketball and Other Indoor Sports (1989).

R. Jake Sudderth