Meadowlark Lemon, the court jester of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team who delighted audiences around the world for some 25 years with an array of trick shots, comedy routines and pure charisma, has died at the age of 83.
Lemon, who started a ministry and become a motivational speaker in his later years, died on Sunday in Scottsdale, Arizona, the Globetrotters website announced on Monday.
Lemon was the undisputed master of the long-range hook shot, rubber-band ball and other crowd-pleasing tricks during the years he wore the Globetrotters' star-spangled red, white and blue uniform.
The team's website said he played in 7500 consecutive games - the equivalent of more than 92 NBA seasons - in some 100 countries before audiences that included everyone from Britain's Queen Elizabeth and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to three popes.
He was born Meadow Lemon III in Wilmington, North Carolina, and was unfamiliar with not just the Globetrotters but the game of basketball until he saw a newsreel about the team at a movie theatre at the age of 11.
He was entranced by the sight of black men taking such a joyous approach to a game during a time of segregation.
"They seemed to make that ball talk," Lemon said when inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003.
"I said 'That's mine. This is for me.' I was receiving a vision, I was receiving a dream in my heart.'"
He rushed home from the theatre that day and started fulfilling the dream by fashioning a basketball goal from a clothes hanger and an onion sack and using a tin can for a basketball.
After briefly attending Florida A&M University and serving in the US Army, Lemon's dream would be fully realised when he joined the Globetrotters in 1954.
In 1958 he succeeded Goose Tatum as the team's main clown, a position he held for 20 years.
"I'm an athlete but athletes are entertainers and entertainers can be comedians," Lemon told the Los Angeles Times in 2004. "I'm all of the above."
Lemon left the Globetrotters in 1979 but returned for 50 games in 1994. He also started three comedy-basketball teams of his own over the years but none caught on like the Globetrotters.
In the 1979 movie The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, Lemon played a basketball-playing minister and a few years later started his own ministry.
In 2003 he was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, and cited for making significant contributions to the game.
Lemon was married twice and had 10 children.
In 2015 his ex-wife, who he divorced in 1977, and 48-year-old son sued him for $US250,000 ($A343,400) in child support they said he did not pay.
