WS Chronicle

AP Photo/Suzanne Vlamis

Meadowlark Lemon (36), of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, offers a pretzel to a referee during a game at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Sunday, Feb. 18, 1978.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (AP) Meadowlark Lemon, the “clown prince” of basketball’s barnstorming Harlem Globetrotters, whose blend of hook shots and humor brought joy to millions of fans around the world, has died. He was 83.

Lemon’s wife and daughter confirmed to the team that he died Sunday in Scottsdale, Ariz., Globetrotters spokesman Brett Meister said Monday. Meister did not know the cause of death.

Though skilled enough to play professionally, Lemon instead wanted to entertain. His dream of playing for the Globetrotters was hatched after watching a newsreel of the all-black team at a cinema house when he was 11. Lemon first contacted the Globetrotters before his high school graduation and joined the team in 1954. What followed was a run, by his calculations, of more than 16,000 straight games that took him to places he never could have imagined.

Lemon ended up becoming arguably the team’s most popular player, a showman known as much for his confetti-in-the-water-bucket routine and slapstick comedy as his half-court hook shots and no-look, behind-the-back passes.

A sign of his crossover appeal, Lemon was inducted into both the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and the International Clown Hall of Fame.

Lemon played for the Globetrotters during the team’s heyday from the mid-1950s to the late-1970s, delighting fans with his skills with a ball and a joke. Traveling by car, bus, train or plane nearly every night, Lemon covered nearly 4 million miles to play in over 100 countries and in front of popes and presidents, kings and queens. He averaged 325 games per year during his prime, that luminous smile never dimming.

“Meadowlark was the most sensational, awesome, incredible basketball player I’ve ever seen,” NBA great and former Globetrotter Wilt Chamberlain said shortly before his death in 1999. “People would say it would be Dr. J or even (Michael) Jordan. For me it would be Meadowlark Lemon.”

Lemon spent 24 years with the Globetrotters, doing tours through the racially torn South in the 1950s until he left in 1979 to start his own team.

He was one of the most popular athletes in the world during the prime of his career, thanks to a unique blend of athleticism and showmanship. Playing against the team’s nightly foil, the Washington Generals, Lemon left fans in awe with the nifty moves he put on display during the Globetrotters’ famous circle while “Sweet Georgia Brown” played over the loudspeaker.

Lemon became an icon in the 1970s, appearing in movies, including “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh,” numerous talk shows and even a stint in the cartoon “Scooby Doo,” with Scatman Crothers doing his voice.

Lemon spent the last years of his life trying to spread a message of faith through basketball. He became an ordained minister in 1986 and was a motivational speaker, touring the country to meet with children at basketball camps and youth prisons with his Scottsdale-based Meadowlark Lemon Ministries.

“I feel if I can touch a kid in youth prison, he won’t go to the adult prison,” Lemon said in 2003.

Born in 1932, Meadow George Lemon III –  he lengthened his name after joining the Globetrotters – didn’t have money for a basketball when he was young, so he rigged up a makeshift hoop in his backyard in Wilmington, North Carolina. Using a coat hanger and onion sack for the basket, he made his first shot with an empty milk can.

“I was one of the most fortunate athletes that ever lived,” he said. “I was able to watch history.’’