The Real General ...

The nickname of "The General" in the basketball world is usually associated with the one and only Bobby Knight. There is no question, the nickname fits the person. Knight won the nickname for all the wrong reasons. He bullied his way to the name and tarnished his career as a coach and mentor at the NCAA level. Knight made Patton look like a choir boy.

In my mind, Knight is no general. He lacks the character and has lost the respect of all sports fans outside of the state of Indiana.

The real "General" in sports is a Washington General. While Boston Celtics legend Red Auerbach might be the winningest sports team executive to ever hail from Washington, the real "General" might be the losingest. Red applied his trade and winning ways in Boston and the NBA cities he visited as a coach, general manager and team president. The real "General" has lost more games than any coach or player and he's lost them everywhere in the world.

Check out today's NYT and this story on Red Klotz, the real Washington General:

When the Generals Lose to the Globetrotters, Everyone Wins

By JOHN BRANCH

MARGATE CITY, N.J. — Red Klotz was not at the game in White Plains the night before, so he did not see his Washington Generals make another spirited comeback against the Harlem Globetrotters, only to fall short for something like the 10,000th time in a row.

Klotz was here, at his beachside brick house of 47 years, the true home of the wayfaring Washington Generals, a team he founded in 1952 and named in honor of Dwight Eisenhower. Someone surely would have called if his team had won.

“It’s not a matter of winning and losing,” Klotz, 88, said on Wednesday.

Good thing. Klotz stood in an upstairs room filled with the mementos of a globe-trotter, if not a Globetrotter. There were posters and photographs of Klotz with famous basketball players, politicians, even popes. There were framed magazine and newspaper articles about him on the walls. Clippings filled notebooks on the shelves.

Outside, the waves fell against the shore, one after another, each quickly forgotten and left uncounted, like so many Generals losses.

Klotz long ago came to grips with his basketball legacy: that of the victim, the foil, the loser. He is the founder, owner and longtime player (until the late 1980s) and coach (until 1995) of a team that must have the worst record of any in history.

As the Globetrotters prepared for a weekend of performances in and around New York, including two on Friday at Madison Square Garden (the Globetrotters and the Generals simultaneously have a West Coast tour going, too), Klotz was just happy to see his Generals in their familiar green-and-yellow uniforms again.

When Kurt Schneider became chief executive of the Globetrotters in 2007, he immediately asked Klotz to change the name of his team back to the Washington Generals, not the New York Nationals, the New Jersey Reds, the Boston Shamrocks or any of the other monikers that Klotz had created, at the Globetrotters’ behest, over the years.

“I brought back the Washington Generals because, first of all, the Globetrotters have to play the Washington Generals,” Schneider said on Tuesday evening as the Westchester County Center in White Plains filled with fans. “This is the team that has been playing against them since the early ’50s and ’60s and ’70s. They are almost as big in pop culture as the Globetrotters are, albeit for different reasons. One wins and one loses.”

The Globetrotters and the Generals have a long and often misunderstood relationship. They are separately owned and operated, bound together as opponents through a contract. Klotz’s son-in-law, John Ferrari, is the general manager of the Generals, collecting unsung former college players willing to play the straight men for the Globetrotters’ time-tested bag of tricks.

The teams do not travel together. Behind the arena on Tuesday night, two buses idled: one an intricately painted tour bus for the Globetrotters, the other a standard-issue charter bus for the Generals.

And never, Klotz said, has his team been asked to lose.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “Not with anybody. None of these owners have told me to lose. Whatever obstacles they’re going to do, that’s their business. I’ve been against the Harlem Globetrotters for 50-some years, and I know nothing about their business. I don’t ever bother about their business. That’s their business. I have my own team.”

Klotz, a 5-foot-7 sharpshooting guard at South Philadelphia High School and Villanova, won an N.B.A. championship with the Baltimore Bullets in 1948. (A fit and ebullient great-grandfather, he still plays halfcourt pickup games several times a week, draining two-handed set shots, but he is temporarily sidelined because he threw out his shoulder throwing a baseball.)

The first time he played the Globetrotters, as a member of the American Basketball League’s Philadelphia Sphas in the 1940s, his team won.

“I dribbled out the clock, like Marques Haynes,” Klotz recalled.

He led teams over the Globetrotters a couple more times. Abe Saperstein, the owner of the Globetrotters, eventually called.

“He said, ‘I want you to get a good team together to play us every night,’ ” Klotz said. “I said: ‘I’m going to beat you.’ And he said, ‘You’re going to try.’ ”

It happened once, officially, and twice, in Klotz’s mind. The controversial one was in 1962, when the scorer’s book said the Generals had won but the scoreboard disagreed, and no one was in the mood to set things straight.

In 1971, in Martin, Tenn., the Generals — playing as the New Jersey Reds — won in overtime. Klotz made a shot, Meadowlark Lemon missed one. The Generals celebrated in the locker room by spraying soda on one another. To fans, though, Klotz said it was as if his team “killed Santa Claus.”

“It’s the worst thing in the world that can happen, to beat them,” Klotz said.

He walks a fuzzy line. On one side is the desire to win, to earn an audience’s respect, to allow his players a chance to exhibit their skills so that they may find other basketball jobs, maybe even with the Globetrotters, which is not uncommon. On the other is the recognition for why fans come: to watch the Globetrotters, not the Generals.

The teams get nervous when asked about the legitimacy of their games. The biggest trick has been to make the Globetrotters look invincible while the competition appears formidable.

The Generals know their place. They play a utilitarian, under-the-rim style, all layups and jump shots. They play man-to-man defense, following their men through the renowned weave (“If they slip up and make a mistake, they’re going to lose the ball,” Klotz said) and falling for the backdoor alley-oop every time.

When the Globetrotters go into one of their many routines, where the rules of the game are suspended (along with the clock, sometimes), the Generals never upstage the stars. Night after night, they have their shorts pulled down or the ball stuck into the back of their jerseys, which do not have their names on them. They patiently watch the confetti-in-the-bucket trick and gamely play defense during the Globetrotters’ football sketch. When the game ends, they slip from the court practically unnoticed.

Antoine Maddox is in his second season with the Generals. He played at LaGrange College in Georgia, and hoped to land a professional basketball job. From December to April, he plays more games than he would anywhere else (about 120 in 115 days), travels the world (100 cities), and is paid about what he would make in the Continental Basketball Association or the N.B.A.’s Development League.

“I love being part of this,” Maddox said. “But my hoop dreams do go beyond this — hopefully, one day. But right now this is just a blessing, and I love it.”

The Generals have become more of the shtick than ever, rebranded as the Globetrotters’ rival and painted as the rare unlovable underdog. The crotchety coach taunted the fans, eliciting boos. Several routines involved him cheating, which would seem to contradict Klotz’s hope that the legacy of the Generals is that of “good sports.”

One bit involved a bet between the coach and a Globetrotters star, Special K Daley. If the Generals won, the Globetrotter showman had to switch teams and become “a dreaded Washington General,” the announcer explained.

The idea was to build suspense in a game where there really is none.

“Can we win again?” Klotz said. “If they turn around instead of doing some of the routines, we’d have a chance. You know what I mean. But those routines are what people want to see. They’re giving the audience what they want to see.”

His team has been good for the Globetrotters, and the Globetrotters have been awfully good to him. There is no doubt which side of the won-lost column Klotz sees himself on.

“It turned out to be the greatest experience of my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Out the window, the waves pounded the shore, over and over, and over again.