by Earl Monroe
I knew I had to be twice as good as many of my counterparts in everything, especially Caucasians, but light- and brown-skinned black people, too. I knew this after my sister Ann hipped me to it and by the way people treated me, even in the black community, where the color thing can be even worse because you have that separation of class along skin-color lines there. So I had to deal with that problem, also. It was only then that I was able to appreciate what my talent laid out for me. And playing ball gave me the opportunity to understand this.
Beating Matt Jackson was the culmination of all the things I had gone through, and then, reflecting back on that journey, I was able to appreciate just how far I had come. I was thankful, spiritually speaking, and I felt blessed.
Chapter 5
A LOST YEAR: 1962 TO 1963
I DIDN’T KNOW IT AT THE TIME, but beating Matt Jackson in that grudge match etched my name onto the list of all the best basketball players in Philadelphia. But because I only had two scholarship offers that I knew of, and because my dream of going pro straight out of high school ended when the Tapers franchise (and the entire ABL) crashed and burned, I found myself at a crossroads of sorts.
After that huge disappointment, I decided in the fall of 1962 to enroll at Temple Prep, which I thought would prepare me academically to attend LaSalle College, Temple University, or New York University (my grades at Bartram hadn’t been high enough to allow me to enroll at major universities). Then one day this guy named Leon Whitley came and interviewed me. I knew him from his having been around at some of the games I played. In those days, recruiters were guys who had played at their respective schools and looked for players who they thought would be good for their school teams. Leon was about 10 years older than me, and he had gone to a black college down in the South called Winston-Salem Teachers College (now Winston-Salem State University), in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Leon asked me if I wanted to go to school.
I told him I was going to prep school to play basketball and pull my grades up so I could go to a major school.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll check back with you later.”
Smitty and I both had applied and gotten accepted into Temple Prep, so in the fall of 1962 we started attending classes there and practicing with their basketball team. Besides pulling my grades up, I had chosen Temple Prep because I wanted to see how I would measure up against the top-flight competition of the highly rated freshman teams of the Big Five, which consisted of LaSalle, the University of Pennsylvania, Saint Joseph’s, Temple, and Villanova University. Back in those days freshmen couldn’t play on the varsity level, so they had their own teams. That’s who we would be playing against, as well as against some other squads.
I found out very quickly that I was out-and-out the best player on my Temple Prep team, and against all the freshmen I played against that season. No question. Smitty also played well. We beat up on all the freshman teams we played, whacking them all by wide margins. As for my own personal play, I was busting all those teams out, meaning that I played very well against all of them, scored a lot of points, dished out many assists, and just generally led my team to wins. I played for Temple Prep until I saw that I could dominate against highly rated competition. For me, it was all about competition whenever I played the game of basketball.
Around this time there was some talk of my possibly enrolling at Rider College (now Rider University) because someone told me they were considering offering me or another ballplayer a basketball scholarship. I always liked Rider and thought I might want to go there to study and play basketball. So Temple Prep and Bartram sent them my transcripts and a photograph, but we never heard back from them. Later, through the grapevine, I heard they selected the other guy, who happened to be white.
Maybe it was my grades, which weren’t as good as they could have been. The funny thing about the Rider incident is that Digger Phelps, who went on to coach Notre Dame for 20 seasons, was a graduate assistant coach there at the time, having graduated the year before. Now, I don’t know if Digger had any say in who they recruited, or if he had any power at all at that time, but I would have loved to have played on a team that Digger was coaching.
By the time I found out that Rider had chosen another player over me, I had already proved that I could be successful against the competition the freshman teams of the Big Five provided. So I dropped out of Temple Prep after the basketball season, in February 1963. I found myself a job and went to work at Tartan Knitting Mill to think things through and earn some needed money. But the negative effect of dropping out of Temple Prep was that it killed my chances of improving my grades to a level that would qualify me to enter elite universities. The job I took paid $1.15 an hour, which was about 30-some dollars a week (I got Wilkie a job there, too). It bought me a little time to try to figure out a game plan for my future, and that’s what I focused on doing. No big thing. I just rolled with the punches, because, like I always say, “it is what it is.”
Then, later on during the summer of 1963, Leon Whitley came back to see me and asked if I wanted to go to school at Winston-Salem. This time, after what had happened at Temple Prep, I said, “Yeah, why not?” But then I added, “I’ll go if my man Smitty can go with me.”
“Okay,” Mr. Whitley said. “I’ll pass that information on to Coach Gaines and I’ll get back to you.”
So Whitley spoke with Coach Gaines and Coach agreed to arrange work-study scholarships for Smitty and me for our first year down in Winston-Salem, provided we scored high enough on our SATs and he liked us as ballplayers. The work-study scholarships provided us with part-time jobs to help pay for our books, tuition, and food, and the school paid for the rest, like room and board. This arrangement, according to Coach Gaines, would begin with the fall 1963 semester. After that, the deal was if we played well then we would get full scholarships the following year. Leon told me Coach Clarence Gaines, better known as “Big House,” would pick us up at the train station. Then, later in the summer when we were ready to go, he came by and gave us money for the train fare and a little extra money for meals. That was that. The day Smitty and I were to travel on the train, I went to work wearing a suit. When he saw me dressed like that, my boss knew something was up.
“Why are you wearing that suit?” he asked.
I told him I was going off to attend college later on that afternoon. He looked at me and said, “You might as well go home now, because there’s no sense in you being here half the day.”
So I left and that afternoon around three or four, my mother and stepfather took Smitty and me down to the train station and put us on a train bound for Winston-Salem. It was so cold on that train that we huddled up together because we only had one trench coat between us. Man, we spread that trench coat out across both of our bodies and still froze our behinds off all the way down to Winston-Salem. Man, that was the train ride from hell! I don’t remember much about that ride except how cold it was and that we had to move to the back of the train with all the other black people once we passed Washington, DC. Me and Smitty sat in the last seats of the train car on the left side and we saw fields and farms and gardens passing by. Then, when another train would pass us going north, there would be this big whooshing sound and our train would shake like nobody’s business.
This was my first time going south of Washington, DC, and when we were somewhere in Virginia, I looked out the window and, because the train was moving slow, I saw these huge fields of white balls on the tops of vines. Black people were picking the balls with their hands and stuffing them into sacks. Now, I’m a city guy and had seen collard greens, tomatoes, vegetables, and whatnot growing in my grandmother’s garden and around the neighborhood. I had also seen peach trees and some other fruit that looks like grapes. But I had never seen anything like this.
“Look, Earl, people pickin’ cotton!” Smitty said.
“Is that really cotton?” I said.
“Oh, yeah. That’s cotton,” he says.
“That’s what the clothes
we wear are made from?”
“Yeah,” he says, “that’s where they come from.”
Smitty had obviously seen people picking cotton before, perhaps even picked some himself. But the only picking I had done was when I picked blueberries in New Jersey one summer when I was thirteen or fourteen. The owners of the fields would come and pick us up off street corners in South Philly and load us up in trucks early in the morning. Then, after we arrived on the farms, we’d pick blueberries all day at 10, 15 cents a bushel. After we finished picking we’d get back on the trucks and they’d drive us back to South Philly. I would get home around five or six o’clock in the evening with two dollars and 50 cents in my pocket. Man, that was hard work.
After we left the huge cotton fields in Virginia, and right before it got real dark, I saw all these expansive meadows with large-leafed plants growing everywhere. And an older black man, the Pullman porter, said, “Look at that, look at that. Look at all them tobacco fields.”
Then he looked at us and asked us where we were going.
“We going to college,” Smitty said, because I was too shy to speak.
Then the porter just laughed. But soon after that he got off the train and another Pullman porter got on. When we arrived in the Winston-Salem train station after a 12-hour trip, it was late at night, after midnight, maybe two or three in the morning. It was pitch black and nobody was there to greet us. Plus, we didn’t have any numbers to call anyone. We knew the coach’s name was Clarence E. “Big House” Gaines, but we didn’t know what he looked like. When we got to Winston-Salem we were the only ones who got off at that stop and the platform was totally empty. It was just the hawk, you know, the cold wind cutting through us like a razor blade, and it was so cold!
So we stood there, shivering at one end of the platform, looking down to the other end as the train left the station and continued choo-chooing south. We stood there shivering, huddled up against a wall, looking down the platform. After a while we saw coming toward us this little figure that kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger until it got right up on us. It was Coach Gaines. He came up, introduced himself, and we shook hands.
“You boys from Philadelphia?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said, “Leon Whitley sent us down.”
“Okay,” he said. “Is this all your bags?”
We nodded our heads and said in unison, “Yes, sir.”
“Okay,” he said, “bring them on upstairs and I’ll take you to the campus.”
Then Coach Gaines turned around and walked away. We followed him upstairs, dragging our bags, and put them in his car, which was a brown Mercury station wagon. He drove off and took us to the campus, which was about three or four minutes away. By this time light was starting to come up. Coach Gaines took us to the downstairs part of the gym and we bunked down there, sleeping with the football team. That’s where we stayed for a while. It was something. A real wake-up call, sleeping alongside a bunch of football players, who are much more physical guys, more aggressive then basketball players are. I think basketball players deal with things with a little more finesse than football players do. But that’s how I started my college career in Winston-Salem. In the end it all turned out for the good.
School hadn’t started yet and the football team was practicing in the gym and out on the football field, which was why they were staying there. There were a lot of rooms in the gym, and in the basement there was one large room. That’s where Smitty and I stayed, both sleeping on small cots. I had brought down a bag with my clothes, toilet articles, and a .25-caliber automatic silver gun in it. The gun was so small I could put it in my pocket and nobody would know I had it.
I’d taken the gun from a young guy in Lawnside, New Jersey, that past summer when me and my guys had gone over there one Sunday to a liquor store to get some wine (you couldn’t buy alcohol in Philadelphia on Sundays in those days). When we came out of the liquor store, this young black guy pulled a gun on us, asking for money. I just took it from him, pushed him aside, and told him to get on up out of there. He left, in a hurry. Now I’m not a gangster or nothing like that per se, but I was very apprehensive about going down south to Winston-Salem. Because first of all it wasn’t someplace I knew anything about. I knew it was in the South and I had heard about the KKK, so I wasn’t going to be down there without any protection, you know what I mean? I was going down there sight unseen, so I took my little gun with me just in case I might need it. I wasn’t about to take any stupid stuff from racist white people if I could help it, you know what I mean? After all, I was black and this was North Carolina and I knew by then how a lot of whites down there really felt about black people. So I had my little gun in my bag when I got there and when I went to sleep at night, while I was staying in that big room in the gym, I always slept with my arm across the spot in the bag my where my little gun was. (Later, Coach Gaines heard about the gun and took it out of my drawer.)
There were two bathrooms down there that we all shared and where everyone showered. After being there a while we started getting to know the football guys a bit. So one day Smitty and me were throwing a football back and forth to each other and one of the football players said, “Oh, you guys are football players? I thought you were basketball players.”
“No,” I said, “we are basketball players.”
“But y’all throwin’ around a football.”
“Yeah,” I said, “we’re just doing it for fun.”
Then they all laughed and joined in throwing the football with us. And over time, because we stayed down there for a couple of weeks, we got to know certain guys on the football team very well. We hadn’t enrolled in school yet, so we couldn’t get a dormitory room, and they couldn’t, either. We had a little money our parents had given us, but we ate with the football team. If we got hungry after that we could get a big sandwich, you know, baloney and cheese, for something like 10 cents. I didn’t know what was going to happen because we were waiting on the results of our SAT tests. So we played a little basketball in the gym and off campus and waited. Coach Gaines would come by from time to time and watch us shoot around, or while we were scrimmaging with each other to see if in fact he liked our game and was going to keep us. But he never said anything.
One day after one of our shoot-arounds Coach Gaines, who did everything matter-of-factly, came by to see us.
“We got your SAT scores and they were good,” he said. “I’m going to go see the admittance people in the office and from there, they are going to assign you dormitory rooms. Okay?”
“Cool, let’s do it. Let’s get on out of here,” I said.
“Get your stuff together and I’ll be back shortly,” he said. Then he left.
Our SAT results made us really happy, so Smitty and I went upstairs to the gym and pretended to announce each other to the imaginary crowd as members of the Winston-Salem basketball team.
I would say, “And starting at guard, Number 7, Steve Smith!” Then, after we faked applause and screams, Smitty shouted, “And starting at the other guard, Number 5, Earl Monroe!” We gave ourselves another round of applause, then imitated the crowd screaming their approval. After this we trotted out to the middle of the court and took our bows, waving our arms in the air, with big grins on our faces. Nobody was in the stands, but we were overjoyed that we were not going home and that we were going to be enrolled in school.
When Coach Gaines came back, he took us to a large dormitory building called Bickett Hall, where we were assigned rooms. Coach had decided he liked what he saw in us as players and that he wasn’t going to send us packing back to Philadelphia. I was assigned to room with a guy named George Weldon and Smitty got assigned to a room with a football player named John “Night Train” Lane. “Night Train” was his nickname because one of his relatives was the famous football player with the same last name. We had formed good relationships with some of the football players staying in the gym, so it was kind of sad to leave them behind. But we were also happy to go becaus
e we knew our future was ahead of us now and what we’d make of it was in our own hands. I know I was confident that I was going to do well, especially on the basketball court, and I also knew that Smitty felt the same way.
The only thing I was sad about now was that I had missed going up to Washington, DC, on August 28 for the March on Washington. More than 200,000 people had crowded into the National Mall to hear Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. give his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I had planned to go with some friends from Philly, but I got stuck in Winston-Salem getting ready for college and the upcoming basketball season. By this time Dr. King was a hero of mine and I really wanted to hear him speak in person. So I made a vow that if Dr. King was ever close by to where I was, I’d be there to hear him. Unfortunately that opportunity never came and it’s haunted me all my life that I never heard him speak in person. Still, I embraced the spiritual essence of his message—love, peace, freedom, and justice for everyone—and wove those principles into the guiding philosophy of my life.
Smitty and I both had a great feeling about our futures that day and I, for certain, was ready to embrace with a passion whatever challenges came my way. I also felt in my heart that I would succeed on this next level. In my mind there was no doubt about it.
Chapter 6
LESSONS FROM MY FIRST YEAR AT WINSTON-SALEM: 1963 TO 1964