Marques Haynes, who handled a basketball better than anyone to ever lace up a pair of high-tops (Courtesy Harlem Globetrotters International, Inc.)

Marques Haynes, long considered basketball’s greatest ball-handler and the first Harlem Globetrotter inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, died at 4:35 a.m. today in Plano at the age of 89.

Haynes got paid to play ball for five decades, beginning in 1948, when the Sand Springs, Oklahoma, native signed on with the Globetrotters for a mere $400 a season. He had two stints with the Globetrotters, and was still in the game even at this late date: In 2011 Donnie Nelson hired the point guard to work in the Texas Legends’ front office as an executive advisor.

Marques Haynes poses for a portrait, shot through the glass of a trophy from the Basketball Hall of Fame, at his home in Plano on Tuesday, January 26, 2009. (Vernon Bryant/The Dallas Morning News)

“The game of basketball has lost one of its most iconic figures,” says Globetrotters CEO Kurt Schneider in a prepared statement. “Marques was a pioneer, helping pave the way for people of all races to have opportunities to play basketball and for the sport to explode on a global scale. His unique and groundbreaking style of play set the tone for modern basketball as we know it; anyone involved with basketball worldwide is indebted to Marques. He was the consummate Globetrotter.”

Schneider says the team will wear a commemorative patch in the coming season to “salute the significant contributions he made to basketball and the Globetrotters.”

And it was an enormously significant contribution, so much so that Haynes is often considered among the greatest basketball players never to have suited up in the NBA. A decade ago Sports Illustrated named Haynes the 10th-best point guard of all time, behind Magic Johnson, Oscar Robertson, Bob Cousy and Isiah Thomas. Jack McCallum wrote that “for five decades he entertained millions of fans around the world as the game’s first dribbling and passing wizard, and, further, on two occasions captained a ‘Trotter team that beat the George Mikan-led Minneapolis Lakers.”

But as Robertson told me in 2007, when I spent weeks with Haynes at his Plano home, Haynes wasn’t an influence — not on him or anyone else. The simple reason, said the man known as The Big O: “It was impossible to copy what he did.”

And vintage clips make his case — the man did beautiful, wild, inexplicable things with the basketball. He was “as much hummingbird as he was rabbit,” wrote historian John Christgau in his book Tricksters in the Madhouse. And he made it look effortless. And, he did it for decades.

Marques Haynes and boxer Joe Louis (Courtesy Marques Haynes)

He also did it in two of the most famous basketball games every played: In 1948 and 1949, Haynes led a Globetrotters team that defeated a Minneapolis Lakers team that went on to capture the first-ever NBA title in 1950. For years Hollywood and Broadway have toyed with turning that tale into a film or musical.

“He and the ‘Trotters played in front of 19,000 at Madison Square Garden, almost causing a mass riot, and 50 years later nobody knows who they are,” said Ben Green, author of Spinning the Globe: The Rise, Fall, and Return to Greatness of the Harlem Globetrotters, when we spoke in 2007. “Nobody makes the connection between where did Magic Johnson and ‘Showtime’ and playing above the rim come from. But they are a black ball team, and America just doesn’t care that much. They always just saw the Globetrotters as clowns, a cartoon.”

Despite the admiration, despite the honors, he’s among the greatest athletes you’ve likely never heard of. There’s a reason for that: In 1950 Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein refused to allow Haynes to go to the NBA as the league’s first black player. It wasn’t the first time Haynes and the Globetrotters clashed over the years. There were several lawsuits, in fact, culminating with a 2004 dispute over the sales of jerseys bearing the names of some of the team’s best-known players, among them Meadowlark Lemon, Curly Neal and Haynes, who didn’t receive a cent from their sales.

The greatest of all time (Courtesy Harlem Globetrotters International, Inc.)

In 2007 Haynes told me he didn’t mind not playing in the NBA. If nothing else, he sounded like he meant it.

“I don’t think it would have been that big a deal for me,” Haynes said. “You see, I had played against at least two of the top players who were drafted into the NBA — maybe even three or four. A guy asked me a long time ago if I ever thought I’d get into the NBA Hall of Fame. You know what my answer was at that time? This was just four or five years before I retired. My answer was: ‘The world is my Hall of Fame.’ Because I played all over the world — 106 countries, if you count the United States, Mexico and Canada. As far as ability was concerned, I never doubted my ability against any of them. I never had any reason to.”

According to the Globetrotters, Haynes died peacefully, surrounded by family and friends. Funeral services are pending.