Courtesy of the Klotz Family

After more than 40 years of bus trips, a little snow shower on Interstate 95 heading north to New Haven doesn't faze Red Klotz. He is on the edge of his seat, telling his companion about some of the natural disasters he has encountered during his 12 circumnavigations of the globe. He has survived three earthquakes, two floods, one avalanche and one appearance on The Arsenio Hall Show! ''I'm definitely living on borrowed time,'' Klotz says.

Klotz has always considered himself the United States Basketball Ambassador to the World. Among the A-list dignitaries before whom Klotz has bowed in the name of goodwill are Queen Elizabeth II; popes Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II; Prince Rainier; Evita Peron; and Nikita Khrushchev. His favorite road story concerns his misadventures after a 1953 game in Syria. The tour was leaving for Istanbul, but the airplane was overweight, so Saperstein ordered Klotz, two Generals and two Trotters to get off. They had to drive 100 miles to Beirut to catch another flight .

. . . so I get stopped at the Lebanese border," says Klotz, "and everybody is running around like crazy with machine guns, getting ready to go to war with Israel for the umpteenth time. I'm trying to identify myself by pretending to dribble and shoot, but the guards just keep looking at my visa list that has 42 names on it, and they want to know where we've buried the bodies of the other 37 guys. It didn't help much that the first two names on the list were Saperstein and Klotz. . . .''

Just then, when it appears he might recount the ultimate loss, the storyteller pauses to point out a favorite landmark along the broad shoulders of the Connecticut Turnpike. Klotz will get you back to Lebanon eventually, but he wonders why you are so anxious because, after all, you both know the hero has lived to tell about it. And besides, if you look out to your right, there's a lovely view of Long Island Sound. Klotz is constantly staring out the window as he dispenses his life and times, and just at the point when he realizes he's losing his audience, he will punctuate an anecdote by saying, ''True story,'' the way baseball clown Max Patkin always did.

You realize that Red Klotz's story is a lot like Patkin's, only with a happily-ever-after attached. Klotz is unaware of Patkin's pathos, so you tell him about how the Clown Prince of Baseball grew to resent the road, how he lost his wife and was driven to the brink of suicide, and Klotz shrugs and struggles to conjure up any angst of his own. You hate to do it, but you ask this father of six about all those Little League games he missed, those graduations, all the prom nights he heard about through a telephone receiver, and you expect maybe even some tears. You are incredulous to learn that Klotz doesn't look at his career as that much of a sacrifice. You are even more incredulous that his kids don't revile him or treat him like some sort of Daddy Dearest but instead revere him. But most of all you are incredulous that after all these years on the road, Klotz still looks out the window

''I'm the greatest three-point shooter on the planet,'' says Klotz, as he buries treys during a shootaround before the start of the day's second game at the New Haven Coliseum. When he is presented with alternative suitors to that title, Klotz points to a similar shootaround in June '92 at The Palace in Auburn Hills, Mich., when he sank 21 straight from behind the old NBA three- point arc. You wonder how he does it with that archaic two-handed style. Klotz attributes his skill to single-minded focus: ''When I shoot the two- hander, I think I'm standing on an island and 10 million people all around me have disappeared.''

It was this two-hander that often kept the Generals within shouting distance in games. Klotz, who scored as many as 37 points in a game, is still the most dangerous marksman the Generals have ever recruited. ''If Red was coming out of school today, he would definitely play in the NBA because he's got one of the best three-point shots I've ever seen,'' says the Trotters' longtime funnyman Meadowlark Lemon. ''He was tough in his day, even though he was this little midget among the giants. It was like David and Goliath, except David wasn't winning.''

But the part of Klotz's game that he developed most was his comedic timing. Nobody executed a triple take like Klotz, who for his art regularly endured having his butt pinched, his armpits sniffed or the indignity of trying a layup while toting a ladies' handbag. And he embodied the classic elements of the oppressed. ''With Red you lose on all sorts of counts,'' says Wilt Chamberlain, a Trotter in his off-seasons in the 1950s and '60s. ''You can't hit a man with glasses, you've got to pick on guys your own size, and you must always respect your elders.''

Although he still carries his uniform in a gym bag to every game, Klotz finally ''retired'' to the sidelines eight years ago at the age of 66. He has since tried to pass on the mantle of chief foil, but, typically, none of his players has quite been able to handle the pass.

In New Haven, Klotz's task is even more challenging than usual because the Generals have picked up two guest players, a pair of local radio deejays, who are both short, paunchy and wearing thick-soled jogging shoes. Nonetheless, the Generals actually take a four-point lead early in the first quarter. Soon, though, order is restored, and the Generals are eventually clobbered by 26 points. What's worse, the time-honored water-bucket stunt bombs when a meddlesome kid announces to all of section 113 that the pail is actually filled with confetti. Says Klotz in summation: ''In coaching and comedy, you're only as good as your material.''

Win No. 1: ''The fifth of January 1971. University of Tennessee at Martin. I remember it like last week. My team played great that night, and we were up 12 with two minutes left, but the Trotters stormed back to take a 99-98 lead with 30 seconds to go. I called timeout and told my team I wanted the final shot. With 10 seconds left I took a two-hander from 20 feet. Swish. Then Meadowlark's final shot rimmed out. We won. Everybody was stunned. Let me tell you, beating the Globetrotters is like shooting Santa Claus. Later the press blamed the loss on the clock operator who hadn't stopped the clock during / Trotter routines early in the fourth quarter. Could be. The timekeeper's name was Chuck Klotz.

In recent years Red Klotz has agreed to take a sabbatical now and then to return to his beach house in Margate City, N.J., where he can make up for lost time with Chuck, his other children and his 12 grandchildren. In Red's absence, his son-in-law John Ferrari coaches the team. The man who stands to inherit the Generals someday doesn't expect that to happen anytime soon. ''I know in my heart that Red will never retire,'' Ferrari says. ''If you pop his car trunk, the only stuff in there is a beat-up pair of sneakers and a basketball. When the car's gone, you know he's at the playground.''

During the summer months when Boston Celtic coach Chris Ford returns to his boyhood home in Margate City, he drives over the tiny toll bridge and down Jerome Avenue past the town park where there is a fixture almost as permanent as the rusty basketball rims and the cracks in the asphalt. There is Red Klotz, like Updike's Rabbit Angstrom, the aging former basketball star who has outlived his competition. He is shooting that crazy two-handed set shot, alone on his island. ''Whenever Red hurls up that two-hander, at first the kids are all taken aback, but after a while they're in awe,'' says Ford, who resides two blocks from Klotz. ''He's a living legend.''

Courtesy of the Klotz Family

Two of Klotz's jerseys -- one General and one SPHA -- have made it to the Basketball Hall of Fame. Klotz has not. Springfield doesn't usually cast busts for busts. ''I guess Red's legacy is in how he's touched my life and the lives of all his players,'' says Sam Sawyer, a General from 1958 to '75, who then became an Atlantic City cabbie and part-time Klotz teammate on the playground. ''It's like Red knows the secret to happiness.''

''Think of it like this,'' says Klotz. ''The other night we played in Fresno, and it was a typical game, we kept it close right to the end, but we lost the game by six. We made it exciting, though, and the fans got a few laughs, and to me that's just as good as a win. If you look at it that way, I have a pretty good record.''

Red Klotz admits he might win again. But he is more concerned about finding new, more exciting places in which to lose. Already he has lost in a bullring. He has lost in the deep end of a swimming pool. He has lost in front of 75,000 German fans. He has lost in front of an audience consisting of just a Paraguayan plantation owner and his family. But as a rational observer, you * still can't help wondering why once, just once, Klotz doesn't tell his guys to look out for the wobble-ball trick? Why? Why? Why? . . .

Then you bite your tongue because you realize you've asked that one a hundred different ways already and he keeps answering it the same way. His way. You are tempted to grab him by the lapels, shake him, tell him that of all the people on earth, he is the one who couldn't be faulted for saying, It is whether you win or lose, and how you play the game is so much poppycock. But you think better of it.

You figure out that Robert and Lena Klotz had nothing to worry about. That Red Klotz has never needed a third dimension, that he has always known that what he lacked in length and width he would not need to make up in depth. He has simply tried to do exactly what other fathers try to do. He is just another working man, a factory foreman who toils every day at the head of basketball's assembly line, mass-producing losses and laughs and lessons, and, unlike most foremen, enduring some hellacious business trips. Suddenly you realize that is his big secret: He is just a guy doing his job, and his job is to make people laugh.

''We have a way in this country of worshiping winners,'' says Klotz, as the bus pulls out of New Haven. ''Kids today are taught from Little League on up that they must win. But only one team can win, so most of us are losers in a way. My team is learning an important lesson about life.

''I guess that's why I don't worry too much about being the losingest coach in history. It's like if you come home at four in the morning and you hear the milkman whistling on the job and you wonder what he's so happy about. It's because he understands his purpose.''

Says Meadowlark Lemon, ''You never lose when you bring joy to people, when you put a smile on a face that lasts forever. People used to come up to me all the time after games and say, 'Hey, Meadow, that little, old red-haired guy is wonderful.' So if anybody calls Red a loser, they're missing the whole point. When a Globetrotter game is over, folks never remember the final score. People remember the laughter.''

Louis Herman Klotz