Earl the Pearl

by Earl Monroe

  Our new house was a two-story storefront with large windows on both sides of the double-door entrance. The house had three bedrooms in the family area upstairs on the second floor, a bathroom, and a back room next to the bathroom that led to the porch over the garage. We used to sit out there and relax. In the summer we used to lean over the rail and pick pears from the big tree next door; we also used that porch as a storage space. Downstairs there was a large living room, a dining room, and a kitchen, and the garage behind it, but no backyard, which was a drag. The house was much bigger than the one on Alter Street, as was my room—and everybody else’s, too—and I really liked that.

  When I was a kid I had the same close neighborhood feeling being in church that I did sitting around my home. I remember sitting in Zion Hill Baptist Church down on 39th and Walnut, and Reverend Spence was preaching. I remember feeling something, you know, this surge in my body. I didn’t know what it was and I told my Aunt Nicey, who was sitting next to me, about it.

  “Well, what do you think it is?” she said.

  I told her I didn’t know.

  “It must be the Holy Ghost,” she said.

  Whatever it was, it spurred me to go up to the altar when they were calling for candidates for baptism. I think I was 14 or 15, but maybe I was younger. I don’t exactly remember when it was because it was like a dream. The funny thing about the day of my baptism was that as I was walking down the aisle in the white sheet they gave me, I started to get very nervous, because the preacher was going to baptize me and I couldn’t swim. Maybe I was afraid of death, of drowning like my friend Billy. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I know getting baptized really scared me. Especially when I got up to the altar and Reverend Spence guided me up to the baptismal waters behind the pulpit and put his hand on my head and started to dunk me under the water, saying, “Now I baptize you, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost!”

  I got really scared. Then he dunked me under the water again, and it seemed like this time I was down there for an hour, you know? That really scared the shit out of me and I came up gasping for breath. I really thought I was going to drown. After that I started sitting in the back of the church, and it was only a matter of time before I stopped going altogether.

  One of the reasons I stopped going to church was that I could never really understand the Bible, you know what I mean? I could never fully understand the language that was used in the Bible when I read certain passages. I had to go back and read them three or four times to get an understanding of what was really being said. I used to always wonder why they couldn’t just use simple, straightforward English.

  I guess that’s the reason why people go to Bible study, to get the interpretation of the words. Maybe that’s the reason why I never understood that much of the Bible, because I never went to Bible school in church to get that interpretation. Like I said, I was afraid of death by this time, though I never really knew why. Maybe it had something to do with me seeing that man being stabbed to death in front of my eyes right by my house when I was growing up. Maybe it was because I had no control over death, you know, how or when it came. I’ve always wanted to be in control of everything that happened in my life, and I knew I had no control over death. Maybe that’s why I was so afraid of it. I just don’t know and have never been able to explain my fear of dying. Or maybe I was just growing more mature, starting to have my own beliefs about living in the world. Even today, I believe that going to church and reading the Bible does not make you a righteous person. Believing in God and trying to live right is the most important thing to me.

  Going to church also bothered me because I could never exactly grasp what the minister was talking about, or why the congregation always believed everything the minister said. But it was mostly reading the Bible that turned me off. Reading it made me feel very self-conscious and I was always afraid afterwards, even of going to see biblical movies like The Ten Commandments. Even in school at Audenried, when the teachers would bring up religious subjects around Easter—when they talked about Jesus being nailed to the cross and him dying like that—it just disturbed me, made me feel very weird. All that talk of “fire and brimstone,” even in my history classes at school. I do know my mother wanted me to go to see that Ten Commandments movie because she was religious, but I never wanted to see it and wouldn’t go with her. So she took my sister Theresa instead. And that was one of the first times I went against my mother’s wishes and she didn’t punish me for doing so. Like I said, it was strange going to church, but I always lived by the old-school teachings, because no matter what my beliefs were I was still basically driven by old-school religion.

  Like, for instance, I always believed since I was small that there were certain ways I was supposed to act, certain things I was supposed to do, like not talking about or back to my elders. I believed in opening doors for women, treating them with respect. Just basic things I learned as a kid. I believed there was a certain amount of respect I had to give people, always believed I had to give folks who had accomplished something important their due. I’ve always tried to live my life by these rules, which are close to the spirit of the teachings of the Bible.

  I have also never believed anyone should mistreat other people just because they don’t like them. I always thought I had to give people their space to do and be what they wanted to be, because I always wanted to be treated the same way. But we weren’t totally a religious family, even though my mother would go to church. As I got older and started playing basketball, that became my religion on Sundays. I was a very shy person when I was growing up, didn’t like to express myself by talking too much with people I didn’t know, but I would discover later that I was a people person and that I could express myself creatively out on the basketball court.

  The driving force in my life behind all of this, everything in my life, was always my mother. Ma would go to church when she could and then come home and we’d have a big, good meal that she’d gotten together before she left to go to morning service. On Sunday mornings, before she left for church, I’d have pancakes. And when I started playing basketball on Sundays I’d have a lot of pancakes, because I knew I would be coming home late. So I’d have a very big meal: pancakes, scrambled eggs and ham, scrapple, maybe some bacon, baked beans, hot dogs and rice left over from Saturday. Then I’d put syrup over everything and eat all of that. My plate would be piled high, but I’d eat all of it and I’d be good for the rest of the day. Sometimes, when I got home later, there’d be chicken or roast beef that I would eat.

  I used to love my mother’s cooking. She cooked most every day, things like thinly sliced steak smothered in gravy and onions. And because I loved rice it was always served with every meal. There were certain Fridays when she didn’t cook. On those Fridays she would just go and pick up already-cooked silver trout and french fries from the fish store. Usually the trout was fried and served in sandwiches. But my favorite meal was on Saturdays when I ate baked beans, hot dogs, and rice with a lot of sugar in it, served with homemade corn bread. That was my favorite meal. Even today, whenever I get sick, the first thing I do is go get me some baked beans—vegetarian beans, though—chicken franks, and white rice. I fix me some Jiffy corn bread and I’m good to go. That’s what I eat to combat sickness. We never drank milk in our house. Never. But I drank a lot of sodas—grape, orange, red—back then; any kind of soda, you name it, and I drank it. Later, when we had the grocery store, my mother would say, “Earl, stop drinking up all the sodas, because you’re drinking up all the profits.”

  But I never stopped; I’d sneak and do it. Then I’d drink juices—orange, grape juice, stuff like that—and Kool-Aid. But I never gained weight until my second year in the pros. I guess I had a high metabolism and I just burned all that food and soda off.

  It was around this time that organized basketball saved everything—including my studies—and gave me a focus for the rest of my life. Up until this time I had loved soccer and baseball, and I wanted
to be Willie Mays after I saw him make that great catch in the 1954 World Series. I became a catcher on a team at Oakford playground, though, because all the other positions were filled. My friend Smitty played third base and my other friend, Edwin “Wilkie” Wilkinson, played center field, like Mays. I didn’t wear a catcher’s mask because it was too heavy for my head, and of course one day this batter hit a foul tip that sailed over my catcher’s mitt and nicked me in the eye. Boy, did that hurt, and scared the holy shit out of me, too! That was the end of my career as a catcher. Right then and there I took off all of my equipment, threw it on the ground, dropped my catcher’s mitt, and walked off the field. I played first base after that.

  I still loved baseball and wanted to become a pro baseball player at the time, and after seeing Willie Mays make that amazing catch I got more serious about that. But I could never root for the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team because I was under the impression that Connie Mack was the owner of the Phillies and it was said that he would never have a black player on his team. It turns out Connie Mack never owned the Phillies (he owned the Philadelphia Athletics), but in the community we assumed the Phillies were his team because the stadium the two teams shared was called Connie Mack Stadium. As a result, I just always rooted for Baltimore, the New York Giants, the Brooklyn Dodgers, or the Milwaukee Braves because of Hank Aaron.

  After I had been at Audenried for a while, something happened that changed all of this, my love for soccer and baseball especially (even though I kept playing both sports). What happened was that one day I met Audenried’s basketball coach and started playing ball. After that I dropped my dream of becoming a baseball player like a hot potato. It all started in 1958, when I was 14 years old. One day I was walking down the hallway (and I was basically the same height I am today, about six feet three and a half; I hardly grew any as I got older, except I’ve gained more weight) and the junior high school basketball coach, Monroe Barrett, saw me and asked if I played basketball. I said, “No, sir.”

  So he said, “Well, you come down to the gym this afternoon,”

  And I did. That’s where it all started. I don’t know, but I think the reason I started to get into the game of basketball so much back then was because all the guys I hung around with played. I wasn’t very good at first—in fact I was terrible—so I really started to focus on the game. I wanted to be good, to get revenge on all the people who used to outplay me, beat whatever team I was on, and then laugh at me. And there were a whole lot of those guys, including, at first, some of my friends. So I know revenge was a factor in fueling my determination to get better.

  I used to come home after practice complaining because everyone was so much better and far ahead of me. But it was when I started playing on Oakford playground that guys started really making fun of my game. I complained so much about being made fun of that my mother got tired of hearing me whine. So she gave me a little blue notebook and told me to write down all the names of the people who were better than me and were teasing me, and I did. Then she told me that as I started beating those guys I should cross out their names in the book. So I started keeping notes about all those guys who beat and made fun of me. And as I beat them, I crossed their names off my list. The exhilaration of crossing them off the list really motivated me to get better at basketball, and eventually I did.

  Around this time I thought back to September 29, 1954, to that day in the Benson Elementary School library when I was watching the New York Giants play against the Cleveland Indians in Game One of the World Series at New York City’s Polo Grounds with a bunch of classmates. I remember the game was in the eighth inning and a batter—I think his name was Vic Wertz—hit a long high drive to dead center field that everyone thought was going to be a home run or at least hit the wall. Then I remember watching Willie Mays, who had been playing shallow, take off and run like a bat out of hell after the ball that nobody thought he had a chance of catching. All of a sudden, on the dead run, Mays reached out his arm and his glove and made this astonishing over-the-head catch out on the warning track, in dead center field, 420 feet from home plate.

  After Mays caught the ball, he spun around so fast he lost his cap and made this clothesline throw from deep center field to the infield, preventing the runner on second base from scoring on a tag-up play. Everybody—people in the library and even the announcer on television—was shouting and screaming about how Willie Mays caught up with that baseball, let alone made the catch, which after this was known simply as “the Catch.” It was the greatest catch I ever saw—I have never seen one as great since then—and one of the most incredible athletic things I have ever seen in my life. After that, Willie Mays became a hero of mine and I really started playing baseball a lot at Oakford playground at 30th and Oakford Streets.

  It was only after Coach Barrett asked me to come down to the junior high school gym and I started playing with the team that I started seriously going down to Oakford playground to play basketball and get better. That’s where I started playing with Smitty, Wilkie, Clisby, Leaping John, and Ronald Reese. We started playing together all the time, and they were all much better than I was at first. We called ourselves “the Trotters” and nicknamed the playground we played at “Trotters Ground.”

  We named ourselves the Trotters, short for the Harlem Globetrotters, because they were a famous black team back then—still are today—and played a flashy-style city game we tried to imitate (we patterned our squad after the Boston Celtics, our favorite team back in those days). Although none of us had even ever watched the Globetrotters play (I didn’t see them play in person until I was in the pros), older guys on the playground had watched them, styled their games after them, and told us how they played. We wanted to model our game after the style the old heads played, but only on the playground, because Coach Barrett was teaching fundamentals and the traditional game at Audenried and he allowed no flashy playground stuff on his team.

  Because I was six three, Coach Barrett made me play center. Having never played organized basketball before, I’d never been in a situation in which someone was trying to tell me what I should or shouldn’t be doing, you know what I mean? On the playground we were our own coaches. But Coach Barrett would tell me really little simple things like “Earl, catch the ball with two hands,” or “Earl, keep the ball up high, over your head,” or “Earl, get the rebound out.” He’d say, “Earl, get your hands up so you can catch the ball” or “Catch the ball with your back to the basket.” He said these things to me to help me better understand the fundamentals of the game. I didn’t like being told what to do at first, but in time I grew to appreciate Coach Barrett and the things he taught me.

  I was already big for a 14-year-old, though I was really skinny, just arms and legs. People—including Coach Barrett—thought I was going to get even bigger, maybe grow to be six eight or six nine. So Coach Barrett taught me basic things he thought I needed to know to play against bigger centers, and that’s one of the reasons I started developing the little spin shots off the backboard and little moves and whatnot that let me get my shot off against bigger opponents. I learned to touch whoever was defending me, even if they were bigger, so I could create just enough space to get my shot off.

  Coach taught me that using my body was very important to get in position to get rebounds, or to back an opponent underneath the basket where he couldn’t really jump because his head would be up in the net if he did. So playing center—and guard, too—was all about getting a feel for who’s guarding you, being able to get in position to do whatever it was you had to do to be effective. Like in junior high I developed little fadeaway jump shots right in front of the basket, little hooks. I learned to fake my shot to get my opponent up in the air, so when he was coming down I would be going up for my shot. The other thing I learned from Coach Barrett was to go directly at my opponent’s body because it was harder for them to block my shot that way without fouling me. He also made me shoot a lot of free throws, so I could score that way, too. And
, perhaps most importantly, he taught me to develop good footwork, to always be in a position to take good shots against taller players without walking with the ball, you know, getting a traveling call whistled against me. So these were the things I was learning from Coach Barrett—the fundamentals of the game—and these skills really helped me to better my game.

  Still, even if I was beginning to become consumed with playing basketball, I was still just a teenager and I was thinking about other things, too, like wanting to drive cars. So around this time, when I was fourteen years old, I started trying to teach myself to drive through trial and error. Now, I knew I shouldn’t have been trying to do this, but I always saw myself being behind the wheel of a car. I remember one time, when I was supposed to just be washing my aunt Mary’s car, I took it for a spin and sideswiped a whole bunch of cars on Ellsworth, which is a very narrow street one over from Alter. I did that a lot for a while. I didn’t think I was being mischievous or anything; I just wanted to learn how to drive a car and eventually I did, like I said, through trial and error, which meant I would have accidents from time to time. But that’s the only way I knew how to do it, even if it pissed Ma off. But because she loved me so much and let me get away with murder—I was really spoiled by my mother growing up—she didn’t do anything to me for messing up her sister’s car. (When I was older and finally got a car, my driving was still so bad my guys used to almost fight to sit in the back seat. No one wanted to ride shotgun up front beside me, they were so afraid that I’d have an accident.)