Harlem Globetrotters Basketball Team

They were like trees among shrubs -- three gargantuan Harlem Globetrotters standing waist deep in screaming schoolchildren, all of them holding out shoes and shirt sleeves for an autograph. The setting: An outdoor basketball court at Chatsworth's Sierra Canyon elementary school. The 'Trotters: "Clown Prince of Basketball" Geese Ausbie, "World's Fastest Dribbler" Curley Boo Johnson and Eugene "Edge" Edgerson, known as much for his Afro as his ball-handling skills.

An investment fund led by Roy E. Disney has purchased an 80% stake in the Harlem Globetrotters, the parties said Tuesday. Shamrock Holdings' Capital Growth Fund, based in Burbank, said it hoped to develop merchandising and other new revenue sources for the Globetrotters, who have blended basketball and entertainment for nearly 80 years.

Orlando "Hurricane" Antigua knows all about overcoming adversity. During his senior year of high school in New York, he and his family were homeless. Later, he played his first two seasons of college basketball at the University of Pittsburgh with a bullet lodged in his head, the result of a street shooting in which he was an innocent bystander.

Students visiting the Los Angeles Children's museum Tuesday received a lesson in art, basketball and success--all rolled into one. Two representatives of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team, including the legendary Curly Neal, demonstrated ball-handling tricks to a group of kindergarten through 4th-graders. He then led the group in the creation of a mural. The students rolled basketballs in red and blue paint and then across a canvas.

The string of white lights snake through fog-shrouded cornfields, a traffic jam five farms long, heading toward a bright marquee in the middle of nowhere. Tri-County Middle-Senior High School 1-5 BB Winomac 1-9 BB Rossville 1-12 Harlem Globetrotters. Trucks and vans and solid blue Chevrolets, driven by careful men in baseball caps, filled with women wrapping their babies, edge into the lot. A wet kid with a flashlight takes their two bucks for parking.

Wun Versher could barely believe it. The Harlem Globetrotters had called. He had tried out. He had made the team. Now the former Dominguez High and Compton Community College standout was racing home to tell his family, thinking all the way that this was unbelievable. His family felt the same. "They didn't believe me," Versher said. "My grandparents were the worst. Not until I put a uniform in front of them, and even then I think they had doubts." No one is doubting Versher now.

As a basketball player, Wun Versher always expected to generate a vocal response from enthusiastic fans. But \o7 laughs?\f7 Laughs are part of the game since the former Arizona State player joined the dazzling Harlem Globetrotters. Take Versher's fourth-quarter shtick in which he holds onto the net to keep the opposing Washington Generals from scoring. When the referee orders him to let go, the ball drops through the net and hits the ref on the head.