by Earl Monroe
On October 18, the day before the Celtics game, I was surprised to learn that the Bullets had traded Kevin Loughery and Fred Carter to Philadelphia in exchange for Archie Clark. So we were a bit shorthanded against Boston. Our next game was scheduled for October 22 in Baltimore against the Knicks. Larry Fleischer had opened up negotiations with the Bullets for my next contract back in the spring, after the finals. When the Bullets dug in, he let them know that I wanted to be traded and provided them with a list of teams I’d be willing to play for. But now it was several months later and it still didn’t seem like they were going to pull the trigger on anything just yet. Instead, management traded to get Archie Clark. The Bullets said they were going to have the best backcourt in the NBA, just like Archie and I had talked about up at Baker. But without a new contract or a trade imminent, Larry advised me to sit out the game with the Knicks and not to let anyone know where I was. He told me he would talk to me later and I decided to follow his instructions. So I sat out the Knicks game to see what was happening. Archie Clark didn’t show up either, and New York kicked the Bullets’ ass real good in that one, 110–87.
I just stayed in my apartment while the phone rang off the hook. I didn’t answer it. After a day of that it got too hot for me in Baltimore, so I drove up to Philly and stayed at my mother’s house. But I was talking with Larry constantly (our calls were prearranged) during this time and I remember him saying, “Well, Earl, there’s no trade on the table yet, but some other teams are interested in you.”
So I asked him, “Who?”
“The Indiana Pacers in the ABA have been calling. They definitely want to try and work out something with you. Why don’t you take a flight out there to Indianapolis and just talk to them? Don’t say anything definite. Just listen to what they have to say. See what’s it’s like, see if you like it.”
So I agreed to do that and the next day I flew out to Indianapolis. Bobby “Slick” Leonard, who was the coach out there, met me at the airport, took me to the hotel, and dropped me off. Then someone from the team came back a while later and picked me up and took me to the game. The Pacers had some very good players on their team, like George McGinnis, Roger Brown, Freddie Lewis, and a few others. So I surmised that this was a team I could play on. The only negative thing about the situation was that I didn’t want to play in the ABA, because I thought the competition was better in the NBA. But I thought to myself, If push comes to shove I can do this. But I don’t think it’s going to happen. The most significant thing was that I didn’t like the arena where the Pacers played their games in Indianapolis. It wasn’t like the Baltimore Civic Center or Madison Square Garden. But I did like the team and the fact that they were a winning franchise.
So I went to the game and the Pacers won. Then, after the game, I went back to meet the Pacers’ players in the locker room. I liked them, too. But then, after they had showered and dressed, all the black players reached up over their lockers and starting bringing guns down. I was shocked to see this and asked, “Why do you guys have guns?”
“They got Ku Klux Klan everywhere around here outside Indianapolis and in the city, too,” one of the players said. “So we got guns to protect ourselves.”
That did it, just took me and that situation to another level. That’s when I knew for certain that Indianapolis wasn’t the place for me. Obviously I hadn’t thought about the KKK being such a presence out in Indianapolis, and now that I knew they were, it was a deal breaker. I had already been through that scenario down in Virginia and in North Carolina when I was at Winston-Salem, and I wasn’t about to put myself in that situation again. The next day I thanked everybody. Slick said management was trying to work out a deal with Larry because they wanted to sign me, and I said I would speak to Larry and he would get back to them. Then they took me to the airport and I flew back to Philadelphia and went home.
By this point it had been almost two weeks since I’d spoken with anyone with the Bullets, and it was clear that I had played my last game there. Archie Clark, after working out a new contract, had reported to the team and was playing well for them in a starting role. But the team was losing and I was getting itchy because at the time I really didn’t want to leave Baltimore. I had grown to like the city and had great friends there, not to mention Cookie. So I was starting to think to myself, Hey, my future is at stake here. What’s going to happen to me? Where am I going to wind up? I had given Larry a short list of places I wanted to play in if I had to leave Baltimore. The list included only three cities: Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Chicago. But none of those teams, that I know of, had been in touch with Larry, so I was really antsy when Larry called me around November 7 and said, “I’ve got a deal on the table for you.”
“Really,” I said. “Where? What’s up?”
“New York,” he said.
“New York? Shit! Are you kidding me?”
“No,” he said. “It’s legitimate. What do you think?”
After a few seconds of thinking about it, I said, “I don’t think I can go play there. We’ve been playing against those guys for so long and so hard, plus they’re our mortal enemies.”
Then I heard myself talking, saying, “They’re our mortal enemies,” not my mortal enemies. I was still thinking like a Bullet! When I realized that, it kind of stopped me in my tracks and allowed me to listen objectively to what Larry was saying.
“I’m going to be honest with you,” he said. “I’m prejudiced. I want to see you playing day in and day out. And I want to see you playing in New York City.”
“Well, shit,” I said. “I’m going to have to think about that, Larry.”
And we left it like that. I told him I’d get back to him in a day or so. He agreed with this and we hung up. I immediately had a talk with my mother and she said, “Whatever my baby wants is cool with me. Just be sure you know what you’re doing.”
Then I called up Sonny Hill to talk it over with him and he said, “Earl, all those individual things that you told me you wanted to accomplish in the NBA—all the goals you set for yourself—like scoring 20,000 points over your career, making so many All-NBA teams, All-Star teams—that’s not going to happen if you go to the Knicks. Because in Baltimore you are the man, you are the franchise player, everything revolves around you. With the Knicks it will be very different. They play a different style and their team will not revolve around you, or how you play. You will have to adapt yourself to their system and fit in with their more conservative, traditional approach to the game. Five guys moving the ball, moving without the ball. Setting screens for each other. It’s pick-and-roll basketball, not the kind of game you’ve been playing with the Bullets, running and gunning. Fast-breaking all the time. Now can you do that and still be ‘Earl the Pearl’?”
What Sonny said stunned me for a moment and I thought hard about it. Then I told him, “Sonny, I’m a basketball player. I’m from Philadelphia and I believe in the ‘science of the game’ approach.” When I said that it made Sonny happy, and he gave me his blessing to make whatever deal I thought was best for my future. Then we got together in person and Sonny told me he thought it would be difficult for me to fit in with the Knicks and that Baltimore was also a winning team. When we talked about changing my style I told him, “Sonny, I can do this, because in Philly we can play any style. I can adapt to their style. I’m willing to sacrifice and not score points. But I’m going to think it through and call Larry in an hour or so.”
As I left to get in my Rolls to drive around Philly for a while, I thought to myself, I’ve alienated Baltimore and I haven’t even thought about going back there for a while. I also knew that Bullets management was pissed at me because Abe Pollin, who I had grown to like very much, was telling people that he had given me money for the down payment on my house in Germantown. Now, they were underpaying me in the first place anyway, and as far as the “down payment” Abe was talking about goes, I looked at that as a bonus, something between him and me. Now he had gone public with that shit a
nd I felt betrayed. So that’s when I made up my mind to go with the Knicks’ offer. I decided right then and there I wasn’t going back to Baltimore. It was the principle of it all. I was still young and rather naïve, but I knew I didn’t have to take that kind of shit. Then I thought about being arrested by the cops back there at Dunbar High School and being falsely accused. Thinking about that just pissed me off even more. So I went back home, made a quick call to Larry, and told him I would accept the offer from the Knicks. I knew I had to change myself completely and become a new person, so to speak, if I was going to be successful in New York City. So from that moment on, that’s what I set out to do, only I didn’t know what kind of person I would become. I’d find out through trial and error, a kind of instinctive shift.
Larry called me the next morning to tell me everything was cool and to come on up to New York. He told me I would be staying at the New Yorker Hotel and that he would come and pick me up from there. I think this was November 9, 1971. I woke up the next morning, ate breakfast, and kissed my mother. She wished me good luck and told me everything would be okay, which was reassuring coming from her. Then I got in my Rolls and went and saw Wilkie and Smitty. Later that day I hit the road for the drive up to the Big Apple. Even though I had decided to become a Knick, it still didn’t set well with me, you know, the prospect of becoming one of the enemy. But I had committed to it and just had to suck it up. I crossed the Benjamin Franklin Bridge to take the turnpike through New Jersey and just moved on north, thinking all the way. The reason I like to drive, especially when I’m driving alone, is that it allows me to think a lot of difficult things through. So that’s what I was doing while I was driving up the turnpike. I thought about all the recent things that had happened to me in Baltimore, like getting arrested trying to help blacks at Dunbar. I thought about the fact that I had just stopped playing like I did and forced the trade. Things like that. I knew I had to prove myself all over again as I had at Bartram, on the playgrounds of Philadelphia, at Winston-Salem, at the Pan American trials, and as a rookie in Baltimore. Up to that point I had been very confident in my decision, enjoying listening to my music, you know what I mean? But then doubts started to creep into my mind.
Although Sonny and I had talked about all the changes I had to make in my game—different sacrifices and whatnot—I was still adamant that those were things I could do. However, as I got closer to New York I started to have apprehensions about what I was actually getting myself into. A lot of times when I’m by myself my thoughts start to form themselves a little differently than they do when I’m around other people. Things began to enter my mind, like wondering how I would react to something or other, or if things went wrong. I really didn’t know what to expect from Coach Holzman, since he hadn’t played me as much as I had expected in the All-Star game the year before, even though I was a starter. All that stuff kept eating at me and as I approached New York City I suddenly pulled off the turnpike at the Jersey City exit and rode around there for quite a long time. After a while I calmed down and convinced myself that I had made the right decision. Then I said to myself, Well, I got to go. So I made my way into New York City through the Lincoln Tunnel, went to the hotel, and chilled. As I was making my way to the hotel, I got turned around and found myself on West Street. I made a right turn on 40th Street going east, back toward the tunnel, and then stopped for the light at the corner of 11th Avenue. There was a police car sitting on the corner with two policemen in the front seat. I just happened to look toward the backseat of the police car, and saw a pair of legs sticking straight up in the air. I was kind of puzzled but I played it off as if I didn’t see anything at all (later I was told that the area was where the hookers worked). I just drove on and said to myself, I think I’m gonna like it here. Earl, welcome to New York.
The next day I went to see Coach Holzman and to sign my contract with the Knicks, a two-year deal worth $300,000. Believe it or not, I hadn’t even known how much I was signing for until the contract was put in front of me. I just trusted Larry to make the best deal he could for me, and he did.
I told Red that I didn’t want to start, but instead wanted to earn my way into the lineup. Besides, Dick Barnett was the starter and was a very good player, even at this part of his career. Coach told me that was okay with him, that he just wanted me to feel comfortable. Then he asked me what number I wanted to wear, but I knew I couldn’t wear my old number 10 because Clyde was wearing that. So I asked him what was available and he told me a bunch of numbers. I think I wore number 33 at first, before settling on number 15, which was the number I wore for the rest of my career.
Then I said to Red, “I think I need an operation to fix bone spurs because they’ve been hurting real bad. They’re on the top of my left foot, so when I run or jump the spurs hit each other and it’s very painful.”
So Red said, “We’ve just made this trade for you because we need and want you with us. Willis is out and we need to have you on the floor. Plus, we don’t want to have any letdown at the guard position. That’s why we brought you in. So you might have to just play through the pain this season.”
That’s when I told him, “Well, Coach, I’m cool with that. Let me go slowly at first.”
He looked at me and nodded his head. I could see he had respect for me for saying that. I didn’t want any controversy coming in here. I knew I had to accept being a reserve. And even when I got into the game, my intention was to be passing the ball. I wouldn’t be looking to score at first, because my mind-set was to get the ball to the established scorers on the team, guys like Clyde Frazier and Jerry Lucas, Dave DeBusschere, Willis Reed, and Bill Bradley. I knew my scoring would be down until I had surgery on my left foot anyway, and that even then it would be a slow process. I couldn’t make hard cuts because of the pain, couldn’t do the things I was used to doing out on the floor. I knew going in that it wouldn’t be a very productive year for me, offensively speaking, because of my foot. I had learned from my experience playing through all that knee pain two seasons before that there would be ups and downs, that there would be times when I could bear the pain because it might not be as inflamed as on some other nights. So I would just have to take it one game at a time. But at the same time I knew this season was going to be a learning process for me and, as a player who hadn’t yet turned 27, I knew there was a lot I could learn from playing with a veteran ball club like the Knicks. This kind of thinking helped to calm me down and made me feel better about my chances of playing and meshing well with my new teammates. I’d be learning new lessons about “the science of the game.”
So then we went down to the press conference, where I was introduced to the media. I remember there was a lot of press there. The first question someone asked was “Since you were the superstar of the Bullets, why did they trade you?”
I knew why they had to trade me (because I had forced them to), but I didn’t want to open up a bag of worms, so I just said, “I don’t know why, they just traded me. You might want to ask them that question.” (I always used to quip to reporters that the Bullets got Dave Stallworth and Mike Riordan and $450,000 in cash from the Knicks in that trade for me, but they could’ve just given me that money and I would’ve stayed in Baltimore.)
The next question was “Can you play with Clyde?”
“I can play with anybody,” I said, “especially someone as good as Clyde.”
“How many balls will the Knicks need to keep you two satisfied?”
“One,” I said and smiled. “I don’t think we play the game with two.”
“Who’s going to start?”
“The same five players that have been starting,” I said. “I’ll be coming off the bench.”
That first day in New York was like a whirlwind, you know, between signing the contract and meeting with Coach, then the press conference, then taking pictures in my new uniform before, finally, doing a bunch of one-on-one interviews with the local beat reporters. That was painstaking stuff. I felt really strange at
that moment because I knew I had to learn how to be another type of player, even another person in New York, since I had been used to starting for a long time. Plus I would have to learn to play coming off the bench, you know, the nuances of what to do, how to move with the pace of the game when I went in to play. Now, I could intellectually feel I could do this, but I had to emotionally go through it every day I didn’t play. So I had to deal with that, too.
In Baltimore the game for me was in a rhythm and I knew that when I came into a game with the Knicks it wouldn’t be the same rhythm. So I had to learn what the Knicks’ rhythm was. In the past, the rhythm was determined by how I played and what I did, and things just flowed naturally from there. But here in New York I had to really think about the game in another way and I could see that the cadence of it wasn’t the same. Here it was determined by Clyde’s cadence and rhythm and I had to learn how to fit myself into that cadence—which I wasn’t used to—and adapt to it. It was like trying to play to Miles Davis’s cadence, or a trumpet’s rhythm, when I was used to being the lead trumpet myself. I had to learn how to play inside a different rhythm. And coming off the bench and trying to implement my own rhythm, my own cadence, within the structure of a completely different style of play, that was hard, harder than I imagined it would be. But it also gave me the opportunity to become a student of the game once again. Because all the things I had been able to do as a Bullet, and as a Ram at Winston-Salem, I now had to learn to do as a Knick. It was different and it was frustrating. It would keep me up nights trying to figure out why I couldn’t do this or that.