By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN
The New York Times
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 N.B.A. 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.
Klotz, who died on 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 D. 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’ signature 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,” Klotz told Sports Illustrated in 1995. “We’re the straight men. Laurel had Hardy, Lewis had Martin, Costello had Abbott, and the Trotters have us.”
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