When it comes to professional sports, I can’t even really claim to be a fair-weather fan. I followed the Niners off and on through the Steve Young years (regularly watching them lose the NFC championships to Dallas and, when Dallas ran out of steam, Green Bay), but when I left San Francisco I lost interest.

I watched a reasonable number of Sharks games in those days, too, but the NHL just doesn’t grab me the way it did in the early 90s, when the vets from Red Army and Dynamo Moscow first turned up in North America to remind fans there could be more to hockey than the fights.

As for baseball, I’ve always found the mythology of baseball more compelling than the modern-day reality of robber-baron owners and mercenary players and TV advertising revenues. I wouldn’t mind retiring to a small town with a scrappy A-ball club I could take my hypothetical kids to see on a summer afternoon, but as for the majors, I only make it to a game or so a year despite living in a town with one of the league’s more likeable teams, and that’s mostly for the hot dogs.

And basketball — well, I’ve never been able to get interested in basketball.

Which is funny, considering that my grandfather was a high school star — Bob “Spook” Imig, Seward High class of, oh, ‘45 or so (a couple of years before the Bluejays won back-to-back state championships, but they can’t have been that bad) — and my dad can still make baskets.

I blame the Clippers and the Warriors, personally. (And — for different reasons, obviously — the Dream Team.)

But it looks like by missing out on basketball I’ve missed out on some good stories. For instance, though it seems dead obvious in hindsight, till I read this story in the Washington Post it never occurred to me that the Harlem Globetrotters had started out as a team of hotshot black barnstormers, in the days of an all-white NBA.

The unspoken point of this tale is that if white crowds were going to pay to see the Globetrotters and not get angry when hometown squads lost, they would have to be distracted by displays of bright smiles, dim wits and other features of an archetype that was a fixture of vaudeville and early cinema. “We have to remember that Saperstein’s Trotters played and were hired in a world where the lynching of Black males for ‘reckless eyeballing’ of white women was still commonplace,” Nelson George wrote in Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball.

Even as they became famous entertainers, the Globetrotters became a bastion of black athletic excellence. In 1940, at the World Tournament in Chicago, they defeated the New York Rens, who had survived the ‘30s without resorting to clowning. A decade later, after the Globetrotters had twice defeated the NBA's Minneapolis Lakers, led by dominant center George Mikan, the Globetrotters’ Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton joined the New York Knicks, becoming the first black player to sign an NBA contract and breaking Saperstein's monopoly on African American talent. Even so, NBA teams limited the number of black players to keep from alienating their white fan base, which saw behind-the-back passes, dunks and other flamboyant plays as undisciplined and unsportsmanlike. For many black players, the Globetrotters remained their best chance at a real paycheck; Wilt Chamberlain and Connie Hawkins passed through on their way to the big leagues.

That doesn’t excuse the Scooby-Doo guest appearances — actually, it kind of exacerbates them — but it gives me a new respect for the men who’ve worn the Globetrotters uniform in real life.

The team’s current owner, former Globetrotter Mannie Jackson, wants to make them one of the world’s ten best basketball teams again. I hope he finds a way to pull it off.