Meadowlark Lemon was renowned for his hook shot and his sense of humor. But for himself, his later years as a born-again Christian and ordained minister took center court in his life.
But you wouldn't know it from the Washington Post's obituary on the famed member of the Harlem Globetrotters. The newspaper relegates Lemon's spiritual life nearly to the status of a footnote.
The Post starts with his inspiration after seeing a newsreel on the Globetrotters, skilled sportsmen who were "all black men. The same color as me." It notes drily that Abe Saperstein, the owner of the Globetrotters, "embraced the novel idea, missed by many of his contemporaries, that some black people could actually play basketball."
Like other mainstream media reports, WaPo recalls an amazing endorsement from the late Wilt Chamberlain, himself a former Globetrotter, that Lemon "was the most sensational, awesome, incredible basketball player I’ve ever seen" -- even more than Dr. J or Michael Jordan. And it has other fun parts, like how the future sports star practiced as a boy: with "a basketball hoop fashioned out of an onion sack and a wire coat hanger nailed to a tree behind a neighbor’s house. His ball was an empty Carnation evaporated milk can salvaged from the garbage."
The obit includes a frank accounting of the cost of basketball stardom: neglecting his 10 children while playing basketball and divorcing his first wife, who was arrested after stabbing him in 1978. He even apologized this family when he was inducted into the basketball hall of fame in 2003, the Post says.
Finally, the story gets around to something that, by its own admission, loomed large in his life: