The Information Is Out There

This Web thing of ours sure moves quickly. A couple of years ago, I had a disagreement with a friend of mine about the opponents of the Harlem Globetrotters. He made a reference to the Washington Generals, but I said that the one time I saw the Globetrotters as a child, they’d played the Boston Shamrocks. He’d never heard of such a team, but I knew what I remembered. I went online to confirm my recollection and could find nothing. Lots about the Washington Generals, but the Boston Shamrocks? Nada. I don’t remember the last time I looked, but I checked at least another couple of times and got no hits.

The Harlem Globetrotters are playing around town this weekend (coming home—despite their name, they were always a Chicago-based team until they were sold after the death of Abe Saperstein), and the Chicago Tribune had a handful of articles about them. One of the sidebars mentioned that the Washington Generals were also sometimes known as the Boston Shamrocks. I was going to write to thank the Trib for finally confirming my memory, but before I did, I did another Google search to confirm that there was still no information on the Web. This time, though, in searching Boston Shamrocks and Globetrotters, I got 127 hits, and you can get through 46 of them before it shuts down on account of repetitive results. As a result, I’ve really got nothing to write about. The Trib is just repeating what anybody could’ve found on Wikipedia, and I look incredibly lame for not having long since confirmed the existence of the Boston Shamrocks as an opponent of the Harlem Globetrotters.

Oh, well. I guess the experience wasn’t a complete loss. In looking around the Web, I discovered that the Globetrotters have a particularly unsavory connection to politics. In 1976, they added their very first honorary team member, Henry Kissinger. Eeeeew.