Louis “Red” Klotz, an outstanding basketball player and scorer at South Philadelphia High School, Villanova University and the Baltimore Bullets, is probably best known an the losingest coach in basketball. As coach/player/owner of the Washington Generals, the perennial opponents of the Harlem Globetrotters for many years, Klotz boasts to losing more than 13,000 games during his coaching career.
The son of Jewish Russian immigrant parents, this mighty little red-headed, set-shot artist from South Philly, has lost basketball games against the Trotters in front of four popes and queens, kings and princes, lost on an aircraft carrier, lost in a leper colony and lost in 113 countries and 1,341 towns throughout the United States.
He practiced and perfected his set shot and dribbling at South Philadelphia High School where he led the team to city basketball championships in 1939 and 1940, both times earning Philadelphia Player of the Year honors.
After attending Villanova on a basketball scholarship and a stint in the Signal Corps during World War II, Klotz joined the Philadelphia SPHAS of the American Basketball League. After the war, Klotz joined the Baltimore Bullets midway through the 1947-48 season in which the team defeated the Philadelphia Warriors in six games to win the NBA title.
In 1953, Abe Saperstein, owner of the barnstorming Harlem Globetrotters, offered Klotz the opportunity to put a team together and play the Globies on a regular basis. The rest is history.
He has coached thousands of basketball clinics around the globe and has influenced and helped introduce the sport to millions of people throughout the world. His face and basketball style are known to millions of fans who have seen him play on basketball courts in arenas, prisons, bull rings, soccer fields or almost any flat surface.
Red Klotz is a legend in the field of sports entertainment. And anyone throughout the world who has ever come in contact with him knows that Lewis “Red” Klotz is anything but a loser.
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