All members of the Harlem Globetrotters descend on Atlanta this weekend ahead of the team’s ’18 “Amazing Feats of Basketball World Tour,” and Globetrotters President HOWARD SMITH says it traditionally is one of his favorite weekends of the year. Smith: “It’s the biggest family reunion you’ve ever been to. We have multiple units of Globetrotters teams and most of our stars don’t live in the Atlanta area. They live all throughout the country. This is the only time of year where we get our veterans, rookies and staff together in one place. For five days, everybody’s together.” Smith, who married into a Georgia Bulldogs family long ago, will even be passing up tickets to Saturday’s SEC Championship to make sure everything goes smoothly with camp. He spoke to THE DAILY about his approach to the weekend, what makes a Globetrotter and how he spends his free time in Atlanta.
COME TOGETHER: This is one our best weekends of the year as well as one of the busiest. It starts Thursday with all of our coaches and showmen coming to town. Friday we start to rehearse the big components of the show for next year and that will take up most of the day. We grab a handful of our stars, walk through our experience top-to-bottom and make sure we’re not missing anything. This show has been in development now for about six months, so we’re not looking to re-invent the wheel here this weekend, more just get it down to make sense from a timing point of view. We have all Globetrotters veterans and rookies coming to town, along with the sound technicians, announcers and other parts of our crew. Friday evening we'll have a welcome dinner, and then Saturday we have our first true full-show rehearsal. We do this at Lakepoint Sports Complex just north of Atlanta. It’s a beautiful brand-new facility, one of the best in the country. It has 12 continuous basketball courts and we take over six of them. We start each morning with stretching, then straight into practice, break for lunch, then have presentations from different areas of the company. We’ll play about 30 countries around the world next year, and in total we’ve played in around 123 in our 92-year history. We play 450 games next year so our guys need to know what countries they’re going to!
CRUNCH TIME: It’s a five-day training camp, so it’s crucially important to welcome our rookies and teach them about our Globetrotter history. It’s a homecoming of sorts. We’ll rehearse up until Tuesday, then we host our first game next Wednesday night at Lakepoint in front of our first paid audience of the tour. Then we have four units going out from camp this year immediately following its conclusion.
KEEP IT FUN: We get asked all the time where we find our stars. Virtually every Globetrotter has played NCAA basketball, so there are always initial skills there whether they’re a dribbler, long range shooter or rim finisher. But they also have to be entertainers, and a lot of athletes just are not that. They don’t want to wear a microphone, they don’t want to entertain crowds.
IN THE MEANTIME: I’m a self-described golf fanatic, I really enjoy getting out on the course. My dream one day is to play a round with STEPHEN CURRY. I actually saw him a couple groups ahead of me this summer up in Rhode Island. One day maybe we can make that happen. My wife and I also travel quite a bit. My daughter lives in N.Y. and my son lives in Austin, so we visit them every chance we get. My favorite restaurant in Atlanta is a Japanese place called Tomo, the most elegant Japanese sushi you’ll find anywhere, along with the most gracious hosts. TV-wise we’re big “WALKING DEAD” fans and like everyone else we’re patiently waiting for the next “GAME OF THRONES” season.
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