Bob Karstens, 89

The first white player under contract with the Harlem Globetrotters died on December 31 of natural causes.

Not just a token pale-faced ball-handler, Karstens contributed much to the game as the Globetrotters played it. He masterminded the team's pre-game Magic Circle ritual, a vicious behind-the-back shot, a yo-yo basketball routine and the ingenious Goofball, a not-so-regulation rock filled with off-center weights that causes an unpredictable bounce.

Born in Davenport, Iowa, Karstens took to the court at the tender age of six, later starring on local teams at the Iowa Central Turner Gym and St. Ambrose College. The war year of 1942-with the Globetrotter roster depleted after the great Reece "Goose" Tatum was drafted into the Army Air Corp.-saw Karstens inducted into their ranks as their first regular, salaried Caucasian. (The Globetrotters' founder and owner, Harlem Jew Abe Saperstein, was an occasional player in the 1920s.)

As the designated "Showman"-with the Globetrotters that's a position as much as power forward-Karstens played in 1942 and 1943, stayed on as a manager until 1954 and, in 1994, became one of a handful of players ever to receive the Globetrotters' "Legends" ring.

It's important to remember that when Karstens joined the ailing team it was still eight years before Nathaniel "Sweetwater" Clifton broke the NBA's color barrier-long before Harlem's boys had their own cartoon show, or played against robots in the best episode of Gilligan's Island ever.

In Karsten's day, "reverse" discrimination came from the outside. Though Karstens was once ousted from the team's all-black railroad car while hanging with Jesse Owens in Texas, and got some PR flack when he couldn't be accommodated in a separate military barrack while playing an Army base in Nevada, his teammates never gave him any shit. In Karstens words, "there was never a problem."

"Hardly anybody even asked about it," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1979. "I had the skills to fit in and do the tricks. Everybody respected that, and that's all there was to it."

Maybe it's an expression of true freedom as Dennis Rodman's PR rep would spin it, but the Globetrotters of the 40s and 50s paid so many terrible dues, and paid them so hard-all those one-nighters in school gymnasiums from town to town-that the later abuse of privileges in the game they fought for, and, in a way, dominated, never would have occurred to them. Indeed, today the Globetrotters are perhaps the last true sports-professionals out there, the very last who care about game over hairstyle and media tie-ins. If you buy all their giving-back-to-the-community stuff, they're the cleanest living athletes in sport.