Harlem Globetrotter wows Wichita school with basketball skills, teaches life lessons
The Harlem Globetrotters are internationally famous for their crowd-pleasing basketball comedy, but on Wednesday, a member of the team brought a serious message to Wichita children — don’t pick on other kids.
La’Keisha Sutton — Globetrotter nickname “Swish” — told about 500 students from Washington Elementary School about how she went from being a child in a single-parent home in a rough part of Trenton, N.J., to college and then on to play internationally in five countries before landing with the Globetrotters.
“I come from the projects,” she said. “I used this basketball to take me all over the world.”
The ‘Trotters are scheduled to play March 13 at the Intrust Bank Arena. Sutton’s appearance at Washington School and later, the Wichita Boys and Girls Club, was part a warm-up for that event and part of the team’s ongoing campaign to take an anti-bullying message to cities where they perform.
“What made me so different from a lot of my friends, I wasn’t a bully,” Sutton said.
Sutton led the children letter-by-letter through the Globetrotters’ anti-bullying program “T.E.A.M. up at School.”
Briefly, the T stands for talk to someone; E is for empathy; A for ask a question and the M is for mobilization.
Sutton also gave a short history lesson on the team, formed in the 1920s when African Americans were barred from playing in the segregated all-white leagues that later formed the nucleus of the NBA.
“That’s pretty unfair, right?” Sutton asked. “So our founder, Abe Saperstein, made a basketball team. He said you know what, they won’t let you play. I’ll make a team, and then you guys can play on my team.”
Initially a serious team, they later developed ball tricks and crowd-pleasing antics that became part of the Globetrotter brand.
For decades, they had their pick of the best black players in America and in 1948, they proved their basketball bona fides by beating the Minneapolis Lakers — later to become the Los Angeles Lakers.
“Everyone thought that when we beat the Lakers, it was an accident,” Sutton said. “So you know what we did the next year? We beat the Lakers again.”
A year later, in 1950, Globetrotter Nate Clifton became the first African-American to sign to an NBA contract.
After her talk, Sutton led a group of students and teachers in the “Magic Circle,” the Globetrotter’s traditional pregame demonstration of ball-handling tricks to the tune of “Sweet Georgia Brown.”
Teacher Leslie McEntire said it was exciting to meet Sutton and fun to be in the circle, although she had a few false starts on her trick, a complicated through-the-legs move leading into a one-hand, over-the-back flip pass.
“I think I’ll stick to teaching for now,” she joked after completing the trick.
Sutton, the ninth woman to play for the Globetrotters, said her basketball career began with developing ball-handling skills in the projects.
“We didn’t have enough money for a basketball court, so I used to dribble all the time,” she said.
A high school standout, she was recruited to the University of South Carolina on a basketball scholarship. In her college career, from 2008 to 2012, she scored more than 1,300 points and dished more than 350 assists for the Gamecocks.
After college, she played professional ball overseas in Taiwan, Finland, Ecuador, Germany, and Bulgaria before auditioning for and winning a spot on the Globetrotters two years ago.
She earned her college degree in broadcast communications and is the author of a book, “From the Projects to Fan Favorite.”
This story was originally published February 26, 2020 at 5:49 PM.
