Doyel: Andrew Chrabascz's dad, Carl, gained a lot as a professional loser

Before he sold polyethylene storm sewers, Carl Chrabascz played professional basketball and lost every game.

Every single game. For months on end. He lost in Japan and he lost in Guam. He lost in Hong Kong and he lost in Singapore and he lost in New Zealand. He lost to a guy carrying a cat, and he lost to a guy wearing a hat. No, really.

Carl Chrabascz lost in front of a crowd in China that booed when a player on the other team, the winning team, pulled down Carl’s pants. Apparently they frown on public displays of underwear in China. One of those things Chrabascz learned when he lost and lost and …

Well, you get the point.

He played for the Washington Generals. They played the same team every night, on every continent but Antarctica, and they lost every night.

Before he became the father of a baby boy who would be named Andrew and become a basketball player himself — Andrew Chrabascz averages 11.8 points per game these days for Butler — Carl Chrabascz was the butt of jokes on a nightly basis. He had a hell of a time. You think it’s fun watching the Harlem Globetrotters?

Carl Chrabascz got to play them.

He’s always been able to laugh at himself. That’s fun, too.

* * *

The Globetrotters bring their rich history to Bankers Life Fieldhouse on Monday night. Don’t have a ticket? Get one. Take your kid. Do like my dad did for me years ago in Oxford, Miss., where he tells me I saw Kyle Macy of Kentucky and Dominique Wilkins of Georgia and Allan Houston of Tennessee play my Ole Miss Rebels — but where I remember seeing Meadowlark Lemon and the Globetrotters.

Do like Andrew Chrabascz’s dad did in the late 1990s, when he took his son — Andrew, the Butler center — to Providence, R.I., to watch his former team play the Globetrotters.

The Chrabasczes sat near the court, best tickets Carl could buy, and the Globetrotters’ master showman of that era, Matt “Showbiz” Jackson, noticed him after draining one of his patented behind-the-back shots from halfcourt. Showbiz invited father and son to the locker room after the game. There was Andrew, no more than 8 or 9 years old, hanging out with the muscular, majestic clown prince of the Globetrotters. And so this is what Andrew said to his dad in the car after the game.

“You played against Showbiz?” Andrew said. “No way, Dad. You weren’t that good.”

But he was. Before he had his pants pulled down in China, before he was mocked in Australia by Louis "Sweet Lou" Dunbar for having the same last name as a character in "Bewitched" —  actually it sounded like Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor from the 1960s-70s TV comedy that was big in Australia — Carl Chrabascz was a Division I player for Lehigh and then Penn State in the mid-1980s, then a pro in Luxembourg, England and Ireland.

He averaged close to 45 points per game in Luxembourg in 1988 — look, someone had to score — and was spotted by a Globetrotters connection in Cork, Ireland, and was told the Globetrotters (well, the Generals) needed some bodies. There was a tryout in Los Angeles. You interested Carl?

“I wanted to use my basketball as a vehicle to see the world,” Carl Chrabascz says. “And those guys were my heroes.”

Which guys?

“The Globetrotters,” he says.

Remember the era. He grew up in the 1970s, before ESPN. Back then there was one televised college game a week, and once a year the Harlem Globetrotters were shown on ABC’s "Wide World of Sports." Carl Chrabascz had never seen the Globetrotters in person, but he never missed them on ABC.

He went to Los Angeles.

* * *

The last time he played a meaningful game of basketball, it was in the driveway, and Carl Chrabascz was beating his son in the matchup. Andrew was just 12, but the cartilage in Carl’s right knee was gone. The pain was enormous. And so Carl used that rear end of his to back down his kid, score, win.

“And then he retired!” Andrew is shouting at me. “I wanted a rematch right then. I asked him to play every day for months. Never again. He’s the champ, and he holds it over my head to this day.”

Carl’s career with the Generals, and ultimately in professional basketball, ended because of that knee. He made just one tour with the Globetrotters, but it was glorious, a world tour that spanned late 1988 and early ’89. Games every day, two on weekends, and Carl Chrabascz’s knee couldn’t take the pounding. It went bad somewhere in Asia, he left the Generals to get better, and then his roster spot was gone. He played a little for a pro team in Mexico and hung it up. Coached a bit, then listened to his buddies telling him it was time to grow up.

“Got a job selling polyethylene storm sewers in Allentown, Pennsylvania,” he says. “It was a heck of a move financially. Lot of people wanted this stuff.”

Right.

So anyway, he and the Generals almost beat the Globetrotters once. Scared the hell out of him, if you want to know the truth. Carl Chrabascz says his team never threw games, was put together because it had size and 3-point shooting ability, but he knew the crowds weren’t there to watch the Generals beat the Globetrotters. So one night the Trotters — whose last defeat to Red Klotz's Generals had come more than 10,000 games ago, in 1971 in Martin, Tennessee — had the ball in the final seconds, trailing by one, and they started throwing the ball off the backboard as the game clock approached zero.

One after another, the Globetrotters threw it off the backboard. The next guy in line grabbed it, threw it off the glass, and so on. The clock kept ticking down.

Dunbar rose and grabbed the ball with one second left. He didn’t throw it off the backboard. He dunked it. Game over. Trotters win.

“We’re all thinking, ‘If this misses, we’re going to be on 'The Phil Donahue Show,'’” Carl Chrabascz says.

America would have loved Chrabascz. Or at least, this story he tells from his post-basketball career: He was selling mechanical devices, and a nurse recognized his unusual last name. She said it with a perfect Polish accent and then asked, “You know what Chrabascz means?”

“I’m thinking 'Lion King,' something like that,” Chrabascz says. “She says, ‘Little bug.’

“I go, ‘Is it a scary little bug? Does it have at least pinchers or anything?’ Nope. Chrabascz means ‘little bug.’”

You can’t win them all. Sometimes you can’t win any.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at@GreggDoyelStar or atwww.facebook.com/gregg.doyel

See the Harlem Globetrotters

The famous team is on a 90th anniversary world tour. The Globetrotters will play at 2 p.m. Monday in Bankers Life Fieldhouse. Tickets start at $23 at Ticketmaster.com.