He founded the basketball team that became the Harlem Globetrotters, and toured the world as one half of the vaudeville singing and comedy duo Brookins and Van.
[1] From 1923, he led the high school basketball team, becoming one of the leading local players by virtue of his speed and aggression, despite being of average height.
In 1928, Brookins and several other players left the Big Five following a dispute, to form the Globe Trotters, and started touring around southern Illinois putting on exhibition matches, with singing and music between the games.
[2] Brookins remained in Europe at the end of the Henderson tour, and met fellow entertainer Sammy Van (Samuel Vanderhurst, 1903–1959), originally from Charleston, South Carolina.
[4] Based in Britain for several years, they became successful, described in one short film they made as "one of America's foremost comedy acts", and toured elsewhere in Europe, and in Australia.
In Denmark, he made recordings of spirituals, issued in 1956,[7] and also worked as a coach with the newly established Danish national basketball team.
[2] In 1964, he was appointed by Mayor Richard J. Daley as acting director of several urban progress programs in Chicago, set up as part of the "War on Poverty".