Didn't see there was a thread on the M board already, mod can delete this one.

Your thread is fine here Thumb. If you didn't make one, I was going to when I got home.

Meadowlark Lemon was a phenomenal basketball player. imo, it doesn't matter which nba team you root for, everyone loved the Harlem Globetrotters and Meadowlark Lemon.
and he was an even greater person. But for me like everyone else who saw him and the rest of those incredibly talented guys dribbling, shooting, and all the comedy they brought to their basketball, he was a friend to everyone he met.

A couple of years ago on twitter, Meadowlark Lemon followed me!! I tweeted back to him to thank him, and said what so many other people said to him, they loved him and the Globetrotters as kids and had been fans ever since,
I checked out that he was following many other regular people on twitter.
This 80 some year old man and celebrity was tweeting with alot of us. RIP.

http://www.meadowlarklemon.org/biography/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meadowlark_Lemon

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/29/s...ll-and-pranks-with-virtuosity-dies-at-83.html

http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/14449291/harlem-globetrotter-legend-meadowlark-lemon-83-dies

Lemon sure was a showman.. Class act!!! RIP Meadowlark!!

Watching Meadowlark Lemon and Globetrotters was always special. I saw a documentary some years ago, worth watching if you haven't. Probably on YouTube somewhere. If not for the Harlem Globetrotters, the NBA would not have been as popular. Riposa in pace, Meadowlark.

Piece from my hometown paper, which I work for (to be fair), where Meadowlark lived for many years.

http://www.svherald.com/news/sierra...cle_605fd3c2-addd-11e5-8237-5f897b4d8502.html

When I first moved here in 82, my cousin told me the famous Meadowlark Lemon lived here and owned a ranch, real cowboy type of guy. I just knew he was pulling my leg.

A while later a video rental store opened up, and of course I had to go check it out. Video rental was the hot new thing then. I was going inside and the door next to theirs was a place called Globetrotter Travel... which as it turns out he owned, and out he walks. To a 9 year old kid, the man stood 19 feet tall.

I worked for a few summers at the neighbor's ranch, owned by Larry Lee Meyers Sr. and would always see Mr. Lemon out riding the fences and teaching troubled kids in the area how to fix breaks in the fences, feed the animals, and even birth a cow once.

He was a great man beyond being a great basketball player. He left the area quite some time ago, and headed to Scottsdale, AZ for health reasons. But for those of us who grew up on or near his ranch, he is a person we will never forget.

Great story, Ink. I keep hearing how much of a good person he was.

Mitchrapp said:

Great story, Ink. I keep hearing how much of a good person he was.

Click to expand...

I never got to work on his ranch personally, but I knew a lot of the boys who did. Some of them were too far gone for anyone to reach. But I can say he gave it his all.

He didn't just give them a place to be, he tried to teach them how to be men. A ranch will make you a man, or break you a boy.

He was always very nice with Mrs. Meyers as well, who was in the late stages of Alzheimer's. She would wander over to his spread a lot, confused as to where her son was (who had passed away many years before) and he would bring her home very nicely and help find Larry Sr. to get her some help.

If you think of what an Arizona rancher should be like... manly, respectful, courteous, rugged, hard working, caring, stern, tough as nails... Mr. Lemon was all of them. He belonged out here if anyone ever did.

When I think of him, even now, I think of him on horseback with that terrible cowboy hat of his, covered in dust, and loving every minute of it.

That's nice. I like hearing stories like that.