NEW YORK — Red Klotz was a 5-foot-7-inch guard on the 1948 Baltimore Bullets team that won the championship of the Basketball Association of America, the forerunner of the NBA. But for the next seven decades, his teams could be counted on to lose — and that they did, more than 14,000 times — to waves of laughter.
Mr. Klotz, who died Saturday at 93 in Margate, N.J., was the founder, owner, and two-handed-set-shot artist for the Washington Generals, the Harlem Globetrotters’ foils, who owned the worst record in the history of sports. He created the Generals in 1952, naming them in honor of Dwight Eisenhower.
Composed of former college players, his teams were good enough to provide competition and compliant enough to let themselves be victimized by the Globetrotters’ pranks. They had their pants pulled down on the court, endured basketballs wedged into the backs of their jerseys, and stood by watching Marques Haynes in dizzying exhibitions of dribbling.
“I tell my players that our first priority is always the laughter,” Mr. Klotz told Sports Illustrated. “We’re the straight men. Laurel had Hardy, Lewis had Martin, Costello had Abbott, and the Trotters have us.”
Mr. Klotz said that he had never been asked by Globetrotter management to lose.
“We don’t turn the ball over,” he told The Kansas City Star in 2007. “We block out on rebounds. We move the ball around. We may not have as much talent as the world famous Globetrotters, but we don’t back down.”
Mr. Klotz’s teams, usually called the Washington Generals but also known as the New York Nationals, the New Jersey Reds, the Boston Shamrocks, and, more recently, the World All-Stars, managed to beat the Globetrotters only once, when Mr. Klotz hit a set shot in the final seconds of a 1971 game in Tennessee. The fans were stunned.
“They couldn’t believe the game was over,” Mr. Klotz was quoted by Ben Green in “Spinning the Globe.” “Beating the Globetrotters,” he once said, “is like shooting Santa Claus.”
Louis Herman Klotz was born in Philadelphia. He led South Philadelphia High School to city championships in 1939 and ’40, played two seasons for Villanova and for the champion Bullets of 1947-48.
Mr. Klotz first faced the Globetrotters in 1949, when the Sphas beat them a couple of times during a two-week barnstorming tour. Abe Saperstein, the Globetrotters’ founder and owner, eventually asked Mr. Klotz to create a team to provide their nightly opposition.
According to Mr. Klotz, his team beat the Globetrotters for the first time in a 1962 game in St. Joseph, Mich., so far as the official scorebook had it. But the scoreboard operator had missed a few baskets the Generals made near the end, Mr. Klotz said, and the Globetrotters were given the victory.
Mr. Klotz leaves his wife, Gloria, who said the cause of his death was cancer; his sons, Chuck, Glenn, and Kenneth; his daughters, Ronee Groff, Kiki Smiley, and Jody Ferrari; 12 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
Mr. Klotz played against the Globetrotters until he was in his 60s, when he was still seeing considerable minutes of action, according to Ferrari. He coached his teams until 1995. He took pride in being an ambassador of US basketball through clinics in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
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