Meadowlark Lemon
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Meadowlark Lemon

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Meadowlark Lemon

Meadowlark Lemon (born Meadow Lemon III; April 25, 1932 – December 27, 2015) was an American basketball player, actor, and Christian minister. For 22 years, he was known as the "Clown Prince" of the touring Harlem Globetrotters basketball team. He was a 2003 inductee into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Ordained in 1986, in 1994 he started Meadowlark Lemon Ministries in Scottsdale, Arizona.

In one of his final interviews, basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain described Lemon as "the most sensational, awesome, incredible basketball player I've ever seen." Fellow Wilmington great Michael Jordan called Lemon a "true national treasure" and a personal inspiration in Jordan's youth.

Lemon was born in Wilmington, North Carolina and attended Williston Industrial School, graduating in 1952. He then matriculated at Florida A&M University, but was soon drafted into the United States Army and served for two years in Austria and West Germany.

Lemon made his first basketball hoop out of a coat hanger, using an onion sack for a net and an empty Carnation milk can for a ball, with which he made his first shot.

Lemon first applied to the Globetrotters in 1954 at age 22, finally being chosen to play in 1955. In 1980, he left to form one of his Globetrotters imitators, the Bucketeers. He played with that team until 1983, then moved on to play with the Shooting Stars from 1984 to 1987. In 1988, he moved on to "Meadowlark Lemon's Harlem All Stars" team. Despite being with his own touring team, Lemon returned to the Globetrotters, playing 50 games with them in 1994.

In 2000, Lemon received the John Bunn Award, the highest honor given by the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame outside induction. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003.

In the 1970s, an animated version of Lemon, voiced by Scatman Crothers, starred with various other Globetrotters in the Hanna-Barbera animated cartoon series Harlem Globetrotters. The animated Globetrotters also made three appearances in The New Scooby-Doo Movies.

Lemon appeared alongside Fred "Curly" Neal, Marques Haynes and his other fellow Globetrotters in a live-action Saturday-morning television show, The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine, in 1974–1975, which also featured Rodney Allen Rippy and Avery Schreiber.

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