The Harlem Globetrotters are fun, great athletes and good guys, just like they were 64 years ago, according to Alan “Rookie” Wright of Victoria. And he should know.

Wright was a forward on the famed Victoria Dominoes basketball team that handed the Globetrotters one of their rare losses. During the 83 years the Globertrotters’s have been enthralling basketball fans, the team boasts a record of 345 losses and 23,206 victories.

“They were very nice, and very sportsmanlike,” Wright said, recalling the game played in front of an exuberant crowd of about 2,000 packed into the gym at Victoria High School in the 1945-46 season. The 85-year-old, the only surviving player from that team, will be in the crowd on today, as the Globetrotters take to the floor at Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre. Tip-off is 2 p.m.

“It’ll be good just seeing them again. They’re so entertaining, along with a great ability to put the ball through the hoop,” said Wright, who still carries the nickname “Rookie” after being late to a baseball practice in the sports-rich 1940s era in Victoria.

A member of the Oak Bay Alumni Association Sports Hall of Fame, Wright is also an inductee of the B.C. Hall of Fame as a member of the Dominoes, who were named the province’s basketball team of the century in a media poll. The season they beat the Globetrotters, the Dominoes went undefeated in league play, then hopped a train for a three week trip across the country. It was the second cross-Canada trip with the Dominoes for Wright, who had previously never been east of Vancouver.

En route, the Dominoes blew away playoff teams in Vancouver, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, all without a loss, before beating the Windsor Assumptions in Toronto for their fifth national title.

The team included Art and Chuck Chapman and Doug Peden — the trio that represented Victoria on Canada’s silver-medal winning squad at the 1936 Olympics. Wright recalled people saying Canada did so well playing on the muddy outdoor court in Berlin, because Peden was a rugby player and liked playing in the mud.

Also on the Dominoes was the legendary Norm Baker, once described by Globetrotters founder and manager Abe Saperstein as “one of the greatest natural basketball players I have ever seen.”

“You put the basketball in his hand, and he knew exactly what to do with it,” said Wright, who couldn’t remember how many points Baker scored in the Dominoes 57-44 win over the Globetrotters, but it was plenty.

Since his Dominoes days, Wright has remained a hoops fan, and regularly watches the NBA action on television, especially when Victoria’s Steve Nash is playing. The game is different now, he noted, but it’s still basketball.

“It was a good game then, and it’s a good game now.”