Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

The Harlem Globetrotters Trap 🚫

13 May 2026 · 1 min

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1:13

Cameron Herold and a guest discuss why the Harlem Globetrotters lose audience trust when the outcome feels predetermined. They compare it to Pixar: viewers accept Slinky Dog as real because the illusion holds. Sports audiences need genuine uncertainty to stay invested. Once the fix is obvious, the performance becomes a gimmick instead of a story.

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The fans want to see the Harlem Globetrotters win. They don't expect to go and see them lose. And, and, but you guys are okay with that. You're still okay with losing the game even though you guys are the star. How is that? How do you rationalize that?
I remember hearing some people describe like the Pixar creative strategy. The question, it was way back in the day, they're talking about Toy Story, the plastic soldiers, right? Or Mr. Potato Head, or, you know, the Slinky Dog or whatever. We all know that a Slinky Dog can't talk, and we all know that the army men can't actually march, but what if they did? How would it work? What would they talk like? We believe it now. As humans, we're like, "Yeah, that makes sense." In sports, we've been conditioned to say there's a winner and a loser. And every moment that I see in this performance matters. If we break that, we break that trust and break that story, all of a sudden it doesn't matter. And all of a sudden it's, "Oh, I get it now." Now the veil has been pulled away and it's just a gimmick. And it's just a performance and we all know what's going to happen at the end. We don't want people to know what's going to— we don't even know what we want to happen at the end. We want people to keep following the story because that becomes real.