Harlem Wizards
The trick-basketball team that came to YOUR school gym, not the arena on TV. The Wizards turned your gym into a spectacle: alley-oops, rim hangs, teachers dunked on, and an entire night of chaos that somehow raised money for your school while you forgot there were adults in charge.
Sports promoter Howie Davis created the Harlem Wizards in 1962, inspired by a moment in 1943 when his Dayton Dive Bombers upset the Globetrotters at the World Professional Basketball Tournament in Chicago. Davis saw the blueprint for exhibition entertainment and built his own touring squad with a different circuit in mind—not NBA arenas, but American school gymnasiums.
The Wizards' format became a 1990s staple: they'd roll into your school, play the teachers and staff in a fundraiser game, and spend the evening doing what seemed like a remix of basketball and gymnastics. Rim hangs, trick-shot layups, comedy bits, audience participation where kids swarmed the court—it was chaotic and thrilling and it somehow raised actual money for the school. The team has played over 10,000 games across five continents and 22 countries and reports raising millions of dollars for schools and charities, and it claims the second-longest known winning streak in professional sports—over 5,000 games—behind only the Globetrotters themselves.
Howie Davis died in 1992, and his son Todd Davis took over as president; he still runs the team, now based in Fairfield, New Jersey. The childhood conflation was nearly universal: the Globetrotters were the ones you saw on TV at night, the iconic team in the big arena; the Wizards were the ones dunking on your PE teacher, and somehow that made them feel even more legendary.
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