by Earl Monroe
To my mother, Rose; my sisters, Ann and Theresa; my father, Vernon; my aunts, Nicey and Mary; Mr. Sam; my grandmother, Mom; my cousins, Joe, Bobby, Jimmy, and Margie; my heart, Marita; my children, Sandy, Rodney, Danielle, and Maya; my grandchildren, Harvey (Champ), Carlia, Darian, and Monroe; and my relatives, the Allens, the Halls, and the Chapmans
–Earl Monroe
To Margaret Porter Troupe
—Quincy Troupe
CONTENTS
Foreword by Senator Bill Bradley
Prologue
Part One
GROWING UP IN SOUTH PHILLY: 1944 TO 1959
Chapter 1: EARLY LIFE IN SOUTH PHILLY
Chapter 2: COMING OF AGE, JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, AND MY INTRODUCTION TO BASKETBALL: 1956 TO 1959
Chapter 3: HIGH SCHOOL YEARS: 1959 TO 1962
Part Two
STEPPING ON THE GAS: RUNNING OVER POTHOLES ON THE ROAD TO GLORY
Chapter 4: BECOMING A STAR IN SOUTH PHILLY: THE TURNING POINT, SUMMER 1962
Chapter 5: A LOST YEAR: 1962 TO 1963
Chapter 6: LESSONS FROM MY FIRST YEAR AT WINSTON-SALEM: 1963 TO 1964
Chapter 7: REUNITING WITH MY FATHER: SUMMER 1964
Chapter 8: REACHING FOR STARDOM IN MY SOPHOMORE YEAR: 1964 TO 1965
Chapter 9: BECOMING “BLACK JESUS” IN MY JUNIOR YEAR: 1965 TO 1966
Chapter 10: BECOMING “EARL THE PEARL” IN MY SENIOR YEAR AND THE PAN AMERICAN GAMES DEBACLE: 1966 TO 1967
Part Three
MY HUNGER FOR NBA RESPECT AND A CHAMPIONSHIP RING
Chapter 11: A PARADIGM SHIFT IN PRO BASKETBALL: MY ROOKIE YEAR, 1967 TO 1968
Chapter 12: PRESSING PEDAL TO THE METAL, FULL SPEED AHEAD: 1968 TO 1969
Chapter 13: REACHING FOR THE DREAM OF AN NBA CHAMPIONSHIP: 1969 TO 1970
Chapter 14: THE PAIN OF GETTING CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR: 1970 TO 1971
Chapter 15: LEAVING BALTIMORE AND GOING TO PLAY FOR THE “ENEMY”: 1971 TO 1972
Chapter 16: THE DEATH OF MY MOTHER AND THE NBA HOLY GRAIL: 1972 TO 1973
Epilogue: MY TAKE ON NBA BASKETBALL AND THE FUTURE OF THE GAME
Photo Insert
Acknowledgments
Index
FOREWORD
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN a basketball player like Earl Monroe. He wasn’t the quickest guy in the league or overpowering physically, standing six foot three with a minimum of musculature on his frame, yet he was a uniquely great player. What set him apart was his control of the ball, his sense of the court, and his uncanny ability to gauge the distance between himself and anyone who could block his shot. When he had the ball, each part of his body seemed to move independently, controlled by a single command center. Among his manifold skills, his spin move became unstoppable. He drove toward the defensive man only to turn his back on him at the last possible second before collision, pivot with his left foot, and head away at a forty-five-degree angle. What was different from any other player’s spin was Earl’s one-handed control; it was as if the ball were attached by a short string to his fingers. When he was in a playful mood, he spun, let the ball hang suspended in air, crossed his hands like an umpire calling a runner safe, looked one way and touch-passed it in the opposite direction. At such moments, a murmur would ripple through the crowd and burst into an explosion of shouting, clapping, laughing, and stamping of feet. It was thus that Earl became “The Pearl,” and, more appropriately, “Black Magic,” because he made things happen with the ball that defied explanation.
Someone once asked Earl how he decided what to do on the court. He replied that he didn’t know what he was going to do until he’d done it. Like a great jazz artist, he created in the moment.
When Earl was traded from Baltimore to New York in the early seventies, people said that the Knicks would need two basketballs to satisfy the scoring ambitions of its new backcourt duo, Earl Monroe and Walt Frazier. It didn’t turn out that way. What people didn’t know was the strength of Earl’s dedication to winning. In New York Earl changed his game. In a sense, he sacrificed superstardom for his team. He learned to play within a much more structured offense and demanding team defense. He never complained; he made himself fit in. Still, there were nights when the magic could not be contained.
I remember a game against Milwaukee in the 1972–1973 season. The Knicks were behind by 19 points with about 6 minutes to go. The fans were already starting to leave Madison Square Garden. Then suddenly Earl took over the game and scored repeatedly. At one point in those closing minutes, he jumped, changed the position of the ball three times, and floated it over the outstretched hand of Milwaukee’s center, seven-foot-two Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. On his next two forays he drove directly at his man, then spun left, took two more dribbles, and made each shot from the baseline. The same thing happened in the final game of the 1973 NBA Finals against the Los Angeles Lakers. When our stalwart forward, Dave DeBusschere, went down with a badly sprained ankle, Earl would not let us lose. We took energy from his play and elevated our game that night down the stretch, winning our second NBA title in four years and giving Earl what every player, deep down, yearns for—a championship.
For all of Earl’s athletic achievements, what sets him apart is his character: He grew up in a tough Philadelphia neighborhood, but without becoming “a tough” himself; he encountered persistent racism, but he never turned bitter; he was well aware that he had special basketball skills, but he never gave in to arrogance. There is a remarkable peace at the core of his personality. The flamboyance of “The Pearl” exists right alongside the gentleness of “off-court Earl.” People are always glad to see him. He never complains. He smiles easily. Even as he went through five hip operations, five back operations, eleven sinus operations, and countless stomach problems from all the ibuprofen he took in his playing days, he exuded his own brand of joie de vivre. His quiet strength made him unselfish as a player and continues to make him cherished as a friend. In my twenty years in politics, I asked Earl to come to many of my political events and share the memory of his magic with my supporters. He never once refused.
At the end of the day, Earl seems to know that kindness is more important than on-court heroics and that those who love him count for more than those who applauded him. He accepts life’s ups and downs; neither overwhelm him. Balance on the court and balance in life—this seems to be his motto. In Earl the Pearl, you will read his story in his own voice. The quiet man has finally spoken. It is a story worth reading, as his life has been a life worth leading.
Bill Bradley
New York City
PROLOGUE
WHEN I WAS 17 YEARS OLD, during the summer of 1962, after my senior year at John Bartram High School, there was a certain guy a couple of years older than me that I played against in a one-on-one game for the title of best young basketball player in all of South Philadelphia.
During my junior year in 1961, Matt Jackson, a senior at Bok Technical High School, was considered hands down the top basketball player in the city. That year he was the top high school scorer in all of Philadelphia, and after graduating he left the city to go play at South Carolina State College. Matt was a forward with a great body—about six feet five, six feet six inches tall and 220 pounds—a close-cropped, quo vadis haircut, and a light brown complexion. He was what some would call a classic basketball player, you know, because he would back you down, shoot a turnaround jump shot over his opponent, or a little right-handed or left-handed hook shot in the lane or on either side of the basket. Though he wasn’t fast or quick, he was a deadly shooter when he got his shot off, and he looked like a pro when he played the game.
On the other hand, I was six three and skinny, had long arms, and weighed around 170 pounds. My game was honed in the schoolyard, playground style, you know. I had slick move
s and a crossover dribble in my bag of tricks, plus a pretty good jump shot from anywhere on the floor from 20 feet in and a lightning-quick spin move that got me anywhere on the floor and to the rim for layups or for tricky spin shots high off the backboard. But I had a game in the paint, close to the basket, too, because I played center, with my back to the basket, in high school. I had learned and honed my craft on playgrounds with the best opponents Philadelphia had to offer, and I felt I was ready to play anyone from anywhere, any place, anytime. In other words, my confidence level was very high at this time.
But my confidence hadn’t always been this great. In fact it was during the summer before this showdown, in 1961, that I began to put the building blocks into place that would help me elevate my game to another plateau. At first, when I was growing up, I was a baseball and soccer player. Basketball didn’t become my great love until I was 14 years old, when I was attending Audenried Junior High School. I was already six three by then, and I started playing with a group of guys from Audenried that included Steve “Smitty” Smith, George Clisby, “Leaping” John Anderson, Ronald Reese, and Edwin “Wilkie” Wilkinson. Later, on the 30th and Oakford Street playground, we formed a team called the Trotters. Not that we played like the Globetrotters, because we actually fashioned our team game style after the Boston Celtics.
Soon we had a stellar five, and we learned to play the game together. Smitty was my main man, my best friend to this day. We went through junior high, high school, and college together. He was five foot nine. Wilkie was also five nine and could dunk. George Clisby, “Clis” to us, was about six two. Leaping John was about six four and could really jump. Then there was Ronald Reese, who was smaller, about five eight. Everyone on our team was really a guard back then. Leaping John played center, I played center and forward, Clis was a forward, and the other three guys were guards, but everybody played interchangeable positions.
I credit the guys I played with on the Trotters with helping me improve my game. Wilkie was the catalyst, though, because he was the guy who dreamed up certain shots. He’d go home and come back to the playground with things like right-handed and left-handed jump hooks, or a fake to the right and shoot with the left hand move. We didn’t get what he was doing at first, but after a few days we’d all get it. Then he’d go home and dream up something else. He was very creative, very innovative. I got a lot of stuff from just watching him and trying to imitate the moves he made.
Wilkie taught me never to be afraid to try something different, because unless you tried things, you’d never know whether you could do them or not. So I started interjecting a lot of new moves and shots into my game, like double-pump hanging shots in the lane and twisting layups with either hand. And it got to the point where I had perfected a lot of those moves, like coming down and putting a little dipsy-doo move on my opponent, then crossing him over, putting a spin move on him, and going to the basket hard to make a floating layup, or spinning the ball in off the backboard with my left or right hand. I always tried these moves in practice first so when I was in a game it just came natural to me, rather than trying something for the first time in a game when I might not be comfortable doing it.
But even my friends on the Trotters were able to get picked to play in games before me, and at one point they were all better ball handlers, rebounders, and shooters than I was. They just knew how to play the game and I didn’t yet. So I decided I was going to be a star while I was sitting on the sidelines watching them and all those other players get all the runs. I was 15 or 16 when I decided I was going to be as good as or better than any player getting picked ahead of me. Getting looked over made me want to succeed really badly, so I practiced harder until I got better. But the guys I played with and against from my neighborhood got better, too, and that just meant I had to work even harder on my game.
My game really started to come together when I started playing against college guys, when I was around 16. Everyone on the Trotters got better around the same time, too, but I just made more progress. On the playground we never had a coach, so we coached and taught ourselves to understand how to play. That was one of the main things in Philadelphia: to understand how to play the game. When we started playing against college guys and beating them, that gave all of us a lot of confidence, especially me.
But I still had to really work on my dribbling, because I played forward and center, and I already knew that no college coach was looking to recruit a six-foot-three center. I understood I would have to play guard at the next level, which meant I wasn’t going to be able to play unless I improved my ball handling. So I went to the courts at Oakford Street playground and started dribbling all around it with my left hand. Then I would turn around and do the same thing with my right. Then I would dribble in circles, dribble the figure eight, left-handed and right-handed. I practiced like this for hours. When I was finished with this, I would shoot. Dribble and shoot, all kinds of shots, all summer, all day, from 10 in the morning until 10 at night, when the lights went out on the street and on the playground. Then I would go home. My mother, the rock in my life, who would do anything for me, rubbed me down and gave me a massage each and every day that summer. I did this routine 12 hours a day, every day, until I began seeing signs of improvement in my outside shooting and my dribbling.
Because I shot so much, my shoulders got all this tension and knots in them, and they hurt really bad, too. But I knew the only way to get better and to reach my goal was through constant practice. By then I had also realized I had to become a special basketball player. This fact became clear to me during my final year in high school when my coach, Tony Coma, sent out footage of me to various colleges.
After looking at my tapes, the coach at Southern Illinois University—where Walt Frazier went after high school—wrote back and said I “couldn’t handle the ball.” That wasn’t true because I could do that very well by then! But I was playing center, with my back to the basket and making my moves from down low, close to the basket, and couldn’t show that I could dribble and shoot like a guard, and there was no footage of my ability to do all these things. Had I played guard and had to drive to the basket for layups, or shoot pull-up jump shots on my high school team—like I did when I played on the playgrounds—there would have been evidence that I could dribble and “handle the ball.” But there was no film of me playing on the playground, so I was just out of luck.
Then racism raised its ugly head when a white coach from a white southern school who had heard of me asked Coach Coma for my transcript. Now, John Bartram was an integrated school and Coach Coma was white, as were three of the starting players on our team. So maybe the southern white coach thought I was white, too. But when he asked for my picture and Coach Coma sent him one and he saw I was black, we never heard from him again. That was in late spring 1962, and during that time, there weren’t a lot of black players playing basketball for southern white schools. That incident just made me more determined than ever to succeed.
After I got my dribbling handle together, I knew I could get to any spot on the floor for whatever shot I wanted to take. And that’s what it’s all about in basketball: being able to get from one spot to another on the court. Then I was able to come out and play better. After that, it was just a matter of playing all the time and executing the repetition in games like I did in practice. I also improved my overall game and my passing to help my teammates score more points. I knew these were skills I had to practice hard at to improve, to be able to do them all the time against top-flight competition, to execute in real time, you know, in games, in order to be better than my opponents.
I have this thing about just being practical. Seems like I’ve always had it. I’ve always felt that if I put my mind to something, I could do it, that if I could see it in my mind, in my imagination, I could accomplish it. I believe you have to visualize what it is you want to do, and once you see it in your mind, you can do it. That’s just the way I feel. I have always felt that’s where I was ahead of a lot of g
uys during my time, because I saw myself succeeding, knew how to get there, saw the game in my head, and saw myself being better than the guys I was playing with and against.
Plus, I’d always known I needed to understand what my own physical gifts and limitations were, you know, my mental attitude toward the game; this was always important for me. Then, I had to compensate for the deficiencies I found in my game. For example, I always knew I wasn’t a fantastic leaper. I could jump, but not out of the gym like some other guys. So I didn’t try to do those kinds of leaper things that guys who could really jump did, like high-flying windmill dunk shots à la Dr. J or Michael Jordan. I never attempted any shots like that. My game was closer to the floor, making magical, mind-bending moves with the ball.
When you play a game like basketball—or any other game, for that matter—you might not be the best all the time, because there’s always somebody out there that’s as good as or better than you some of the time. On any given day, someone can be better. But you’ve got to understand what you have, what you can do best against that player to be effective. If that person is a good defensive player and you know you can’t get around him, then what is your recourse? You’ve got to understand what you can do against him that will keep him back on his heels and allow you to be effective. Maybe it’s shooting jump shots, or dipsy-doo spin shots off the backboard, little left-handed shots instead of right-handed ones around the basket. Maybe it’s twisting your body while hanging in the air under the basket and shooting off the glass on the other side, with the rim acting as the protector for your shot. You know what I mean? A little magic and a little creative dipsy-doo can take you a long way. Maybe you become a thinking player if you can’t jump over a guy. So what do you do? What’s your recourse? Maybe out-think him is what you can do. Basketball, for me, is like playing a game of chess: You have to stay several moves ahead of your opponent if you’re going to be successful.