David CookRed Klotz died.
Who's Red Klotz?
Exactly.
Klotz was the leader of the Washington Generals. Don't know the Generals? You shouldn't; after all, they're hands-down the worst sports team in American history, which makes Klotz one of America's biggest losers.
Each night, from the West Coast to the East, Klotz and the Generals lost. How could they not?
They were playing the Harlem Globetrotters.
Since the 1950s, Klotz's Generals have been the fall guys and foils for the Globetrotters. More than 14,000 times, the Generals have lost to the Globetrotters, in a predictable yet lovable drama that fans adore. (Like last week, when the two teams played here in town.)
Klotz told reporters the Generals were never asked to lose, and never lost intentionally. Yet each night, they somehow seemed fated to do just that, as if the Generals were stuck on the lowest rung on some sports caste system, and Klotz, the forever butler to the Globetrotter dynasty.
And Klotz didn't just lose, he got embarrassed. Pranked. Pants pulled down. Crowds laughed and roared. Globetrotters, sometimes literally, ran circles around him.
"We're the straight men," Klotz said to Sports Illustrated years ago. "Laurel had Hardy, Lewis had Martin, Costello had Abbott, and the Trotters have us."
One night, things went wrong (or right, I guess) and the Generals actually won. It was 1971 in Martin, Tenn. The Globetrotters were winning 99-98 with seven seconds left. The set-shooting Klotz nailed a 20-footer, putting the Generals up by one.
Meadowlark Lemon got the ball and shot for the win.
And missed.
The buzzer sounded.
The Generals won.
"The sold-out crowd sat silent, stunned," Sam Dolnick wrote in The New York Times Magazine. "Then the booing began."
Dolnick mentioned author Ben Green, whose book on the Globetrotters compared the loss to something like an act of treason.
"Klotz didn't experience it that way," Dolnick wrote. "The Generals raced to their tiny locker room in disbelief. They had no Champagne on hand. So they hoisted Klotz onto their shoulders instead and doused him in orange soda."
Klotz died last summer; I didn't know until recently, and even though his death is technically old news, it's still fresh to me, clinging to the front page of my spirit.
Why?
Well, I'm not quite sure.
I hit 40 a while ago, which puts me squarely in what one friend calls the Household Years: laundry, homework, mortgage, gray hair, my first knee surgery. Yet alongside the ordinariness, one substrata of my spirit seems to be shifting in strange ways: I am drawn to losing more than winning.
The first 40 years? I was shooting for achievement, success, some razzle-dazzle winning; in other words, all the things the Globetrotters represent.
Nowadays, Red Klotz feels more truthful than the Globetrotters. For all their high-flying glitter, they never suffer or lose. Who can relate to that?
Klotz seems like a second-half-of-life kind of guy, a symbol for the next 40 years. It feels dizzying and confusing for me to say this, almost like walking in the door and finding my heart has packed its bags and left a note: Come find me. I'm in a new part of town.
Because in the normal world, we go up the ladder higher and higher. We slam-dunk. We win. In this Klotzian world, we're called to go downward to a place where losing is actually winning and the real stars of the show aren't who you think they are.
"If anyone calls Red a loser, they're missing the whole point," Meadowlark Lemon told Sports Illustrated. "When a Globetrotter game is over, folks never remember the final score. People remember the laughter."
Go, Generals, go.
Contact David Cook at dcook@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6329. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter at DavidCookTFP.