Marques Haynes, whose dazzling ball-handling skills, exhibited for more than 40 years as a member of the Harlem Globetrotters and other barnstorming black basketball teams, earned him a place in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame and an international reputation as the world’s greatest dribbler, died on Friday in Plano, Tex. He was 89.

A spokesman for the Globetrotters, Brett Meister, confirmed the death. Haynes had lived in Plano.

Haynes was a stellar cog on the Globetrotter squads of the late 1940s and early ’50s, when the team was as competitive as any team anywhere, including those in the professional leagues that in 1949 merged to form the National Basketball Association.

Indeed, the Globetrotters were basketball’s biggest attraction, not only in the United States — where their popularity was a societal sneer at segregation and bigotry even though they were victims of it — but also around the world, where their signature mix of sport and showmanship made them ambassadors of American good will. But his career extended far beyond his peak playing days.

In two stints with the Globetrotters (his second was in the 1970s, a more showmanlike incarnation of the team), over decades with his own team, the Harlem Magicians (also called the Fabulous Magicians) and with a few other squads, Haynes traveled an estimated four million miles and played in an estimated 12,000 basketball games in 100 countries, give or take a few — in racially hostile Southern towns, in dim school gyms, on dirt courts in dusty African villages, in bullrings, soccer stadiums and emptied swimming pools, not to mention in Madison Square Garden, the Rose Bowl and other celebrated arenas all over the world.