History
According to harlemwizards.com, in 1943, Harlem Wizards creator Howie Davis was working as a Sports Promoter and the Sergeant and Recreation Director at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. The World Championship of Basketball Tournament in Chicago asked Davis to provide an emergency 8th team to compete in the tournament. Within one week, Davis assembled the Dayton Dive Bombers. The Dive Bombers' first round opponent in the tournament was the previous World Champion, the Harlem Globetrotters. The Dive Bombers pulled the upset and the Globetrotters' manager, Abe Saperstein, refused to even shake Davis' hand after the game. Davis was intrigued by this event, and twenty years later, he decided to create his own show basketball team, the Harlem Wizards.
Before Davis got into sports management and promotion, Howie Davis played semi-professional baseball for a couple years. He eventually managed the Brooklyn Dodgers football team, the Staten Island Stapes, and the Kokomo Clowns, who actually played in clown outfits. Before creating the Harlem Wizards, he was also a scout for the San Francisco Giants.
In 1962, Davis created the Wizards, wanting to expand on Saperstein's idea of the Globetrotters. Davis wanted the Wizards to be an even more competitive, creative, and entertaining team than the Globetrotters.
When Howie Davis died in 1992, his son, Todd Davis, took over as the President of the Harlem Wizards organization.
Since 1962, the Wizards have played over 6,000 games, both in the United States and abroad. They have played on five different continents and in 22 different countries.
Read more about this topic: Harlem Wizards
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)