by Earl Monroe
I made All-City that year and that was cool. I appreciated the honor and all of that, but I had expected to make that team because I had earned it. Still, my Bartram team hadn’t won the city championship during the two years I played on the varsity, so that was a downer, and perhaps tempered the honor of even having made the All-City team. Because in the end it’s all about winning championships as a team, and that’s always been my goal, even though individual honors are important, too.
There were some real good players who made the All-City team that year, too. Guys like Billy Oakes, who went to Bishop Neumann and later became an NBA referee. Another guy named Matt Guokas made it, too, and he later played with the 76ers. He went on to coach the 76ers, was the first coach of the Orlando Magic, and later became a commentator for the NBA. Then there was George Mack, who played for Edison High School and went on to play guard for North Carolina A&T, where we went up against each other many times. There was also a guy named Tom Duff, who went to Saint Joseph’s Prep and then on to LaSalle College, on that team; it was a pretty decent class.
There were other good high school players around then also, like Cliff Anderson, who played with George Mack at Edison and went on to play at Saint Joseph’s University and in the NBA with the Lakers for four years. Fred Carter (who later played pro ball with me with the Baltimore Bullets and is now an announcer for some NBA games) was at Franklin High School; Frank Card played for West Philadelphia and I think scored 24 points when we lost to them in the Public School League final. The All-City team from Philadelphia always went to Allentown, Pennsylvania, to play in the Allentown tournament, and I played pretty well up there, too.
After I graduated from high school I only had two scholarship offers, so I really didn’t know what to do with myself. But this was the beginning of a kind of lost year, one where I hung around Philadelphia playing ball in the summertime, working some, and trying to get my feet up under me. It was kind of weird finding myself in this situation, but it was also kind of good because I started to do a lot of thinking about my life, you know, where I was going and whatnot, so in the end that was good for me going forward. I knew I had become a really good basketball player, that my skills had improved greatly. I was also beginning to marry the playground game to the more structured traditional one.
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
AFTER I GRADUATED FROM HIGH SCHOOL IN 1962, I really didn’t want to go to college at first. I thought instead that I was going to play pro ball with the Philadelphia Tapers of the ABL (American Basketball League), but the league folded that December, in the middle of its second season. That really disappointed me and forced me to start thinking about my future, you know, weighing my options. I had been thinking about going pro right away because in my head I thought I was ready. By this time I just had total confidence in myself, in my game, and in my ability to make the jump and play with the big boys. Looking back now with the knowledge I possess of the pro game, it’s clear to me that I wasn’t ready, as far as my talent was concerned. But that’s what I wanted to do, what I had in my head at that time. So I stayed out of college for a year. Instead I went to a prep school affiliated with Temple University with the idea that I would then go on to Temple University, New York University, or one of the other schools in the East that had shown interest in me.
Somehow I didn’t receive as many scholarship offers as some of the other top players in Philadelphia. I knew I had two offers, one from Western Michigan, in Kalamazoo, and the other one from Montana State. But I didn’t want to play at those schools because they were too far away and I didn’t think either would prepare me to play professional basketball, which was my ultimate goal. But guys like Matt Guokas and Cliff Anderson, who both graduated the same year I did, received major scholarships.
Then, in 1963 I found out that my high school coach, Tony Coma, had kept a lot of college scholarship offers from me. He just didn’t show them to me. I never did understand why he did this, because I thought I had a very good relationship with him. I don’t know if it was racial or not, but I never went back to see him after I found out, until Bartram held a dinner in his honor in 1995, about a year before he died. I didn’t talk to him much at that dinner, so I didn’t get a chance to ask him why he did that to me. So until this day I don’t really know the reason why he did it. We were cordial at that dinner but that was all. As I said earlier, I can be a vengeful person when someone does something I feel is wrong to me. I felt that Coach Coma had wronged me by not letting me know about those other scholarship offers, so I just kept my distance from him from then on.
After leading the city in scoring in 1962, I felt that my whole game was coming together. I had played center in high school, but I knew I would have to play guard at the next level. So I intensified practicing my floor-game skills, you know, my ball handling, passing, and shooting skills, with constant workouts. My guys Smitty, Wilkie, Clis, Leaping John, and me used to gather at Landreth schoolyard to play against the guys from across 25th Street, which was actually the dividing line between the territories of the Road gang, led by my cousins Jimmy and Joe, and the 24th Street gang, which was on the north side of South 25th Street. A train trestle ran straight down 25th Street and became a bridge about a block away from where I used to live and two blocks from Landreth schoolyard.
On a very hot July day, my guys and me went over to play rise and shine basketball at Landreth. We won all of our games that morning, and as we were walking off the court, the team we had just beaten started jawing at us—a player named Matt Jackson in particular. Matt had been the leading high school scorer in Philadelphia in my junior year, scoring about 23 points a game playing for Bok Technical. He had made All–Public League and All-City, and he was considered the top high school player in South Philly. Matt was about six foot five, with a sweet jump shot and a velvety touch around the basket. He had the body type of a pro forward. I was six three and about 170 pounds at the time, but what he didn’t know—because he had been away attending South Carolina State College—was that I had some shit for his ass that wouldn’t wait.
When all the jawing started we were right outside the schoolyard, so I just turned to Matt and said, “Hey, why don’t we settle this one-on-one?”
He looked at me kind of shocked and then said, “You got it. Let’s do it!”
When Matt and I went back into the playground to get it on, word went out like crazy on the community drum. Suddenly, while we were warming up to play, the entire schoolyard filled up, like a wildfire spreading. It seemed like everywhere I looked, even outside the fences, there were people, some I had never seen in my life! That was amazing. Everybody there was egging us on—my guys for me and his guys for him.
We agreed the game should be played to 22 points and that the first one there would be the winner. We didn’t shake hands or nothing like that, but flipped a coin to determine who would get the ball first. Like I said, I bet five dollars on the game and when I said that Smitty looked at me in amazement, knowing I never bet on a game. I looked back at him and just winked. I figured I’d give Matt a little something else to think about, let him know I was confident. So he said, “Okay.”
Matt won the coin toss, got the ball, and hit the first bucket on a nice jumper. Then he took me down low and hit another. Then he made another jumper. Before I knew it, the score was 6 to 0. We were playing “make it and take it,” which meant that if you made the basket you kept the ball. My rooting section was silent, but I wasn’t worried because I knew I could score bunches in a hurry. Then Matt missed a jumper. I grabbed the rebound and took the ball to the foul line, which is what you do in one-on-one if the ball touches the backboard or the rim.
I looked Matt in the eye and he looked me back in mine. He was bigger than me but wasn’t quicker, so I
faked a jump shot and when he jumped out at me I went around him for an easy layup. When I got the ball back, I looked him in the eye again and he didn’t move, so I pulled up and hit a jumper from the free throw line. Now I had him on a string, because he didn’t know what I was going to do. This made it easier for me to go to the rest of my stuff, my “la-la” moves going to the basket. I had options now. I could go up in the air and spin the ball off the backboard, or as I floated in I could switch hands and lay it in. Or I could ball fake and score. Either way, by the time I finally missed I’d run off 10 straight points to make the score 10 to 6 in my favor.
When I missed, Matt got the rebound, took the ball to the foul line, backed me down, and made a short jump hook. Ten to 8. Then he missed his next shot and I got the rebound. I took it to the foul line, faked a jump shot, and when he went for it I spun around him to the left and banked in the shot off the backboard with my left hand. The crowd started going wild and my juices were flowing. I proceeded to hit two more jumpers over Matt, which made the score 16 to 8. Three more baskets would end the game. At this point I thought I could do no wrong and, knowing that I had an audience out there that was going crazy, I started toying with Matt like a child plays with a yo-yo. I made another nice move to the basket and scored. Matt was looking worried now, but I was overconfident and on my next possession I tried a flukey-duke spin shot off the top of the backboard and missed.
Matt was a year or two older than me and had a big reputation to protect. He was angry by this point, and after grabbing the rebound off my missed shot he started to bull me with his stronger body, running off 6 straight points. Then he looked at me and said, “It’s all over!”
The score was 18 to 14. He made another nifty move, a running bank shot off the board, to close to within two at 18 to 16. A hush fell over the crowd. I started recounting all the moves he had made in my mind and realized that he was always going to his right. If he went left he would pull up and shoot a jumper. So on his next possession I played up on his right hand, forced him left, and as he pulled up to shoot the jumper as I knew he would, I put my hand on the ball, stole it from him and went in and made a layup. Now the score was 20 to 16. Matt was shocked and pissed. I saw fear in his eyes. The crowd went crazy and my guys were slapping hands and cheering like mad.
In my mind there was no denying me now. My confidence was just soaring. He knew it and I knew it. I could already see defeat in his eyes. My next move was a double-fake. I started by faking a jumper, which drew Matt out. I put the ball down with my left hand, then pulled it back between my legs and as his momentum carried him toward me, I made a strong move to the basket, went by him, and as I soared (I felt like I could have dunked) I laid the ball over the rim and into the basket. Twenty-two to 16. Game over. The crowd went berserk. People ran onto the court and hugged me. I felt like a hero for the very first time on the basketball court. I had felt good making All-City, but this was a different feeling because I hadn’t felt like a hero then.
When they carried me off the court up on their shoulders, I felt that I had done something heroic in my own community. As I went by him, Matt and I shook hands but he didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be any hard feelings, but I don’t know. It was evident who was the best man on that day, you know, the best player. I was able to pull it off and beat him, beat him handily. He had his fans there, too, and they went away glum. My people went wild.
Like I said, Matt went on to play at South Carolina State, a black institution, and had an okay college basketball career. But I don’t think he was ever the same after I beat him because he knew what had happened to him, knew that whatever reputation he had had now belonged to me. That game established my status and reputation as a basketball player in South Philadelphia, because it’s out on the playgrounds where you earn your reputation as a basketball player. Word of what I had done to Matt Jackson spread quickly in the basketball community. It also opened up the eyes of some people who weren’t in my tight little circle as to the depth of my game. Up until this point, most guys I played against only saw me making certain moves they knew I could make, like little shots around the basket, or making little moves from down in the post, because I had played center in high school. They never knew I could shoot great jump shots or dribble and execute spin moves out on the floor like they saw me do that day. So I surprised a lot of people with my new bag of basketball tricks that day.
Like I said, Matt didn’t say anything to me, not even “Nice game.” Nothing. My guess is that he was very disappointed in himself, and I could understand that. I had just gotten out of high school and I had proved a lot not only to myself, but to others as well. Everything had just changed hands. That win not only gave me a lot of satisfaction, it also gave me a reputation to protect, a crown, so to speak, that a lot of players in South Philly wanted to knock off my head. Now a lot of players wanted to be “like Earl,” and in order to do that they had to challenge me. I knew it wasn’t personal. They just wanted to be the best, too, and I could understand that. But it never happened.
That game against Matt Jackson was also the turning point in my basketball life, and on the way home I was so pumped up that I don’t think my feet ever touched the ground. My reputation was growing by leaps and bounds, and things would never, ever be the same again. I never got the five dollars we played for, but I got everything else I wanted that day.
Later on that day I began reflecting back on how I had reached that point, a place in my life and basketball development where I could win a one-on-one game against a guy like Matt Jackson. This led me to recognize the fact that I had always practiced hard since I’d fallen in love with the game, since I decided that I wanted to be great at playing the game of basketball. After a certain point I was always playing ball, you know, shooting around, even in wintertime. If it had snowed, my guys and me would get shovels and shovel the snow off to the sides so we could shoot the ball on the court out there at Trotters Ground.
Basketball just consumed me at that time, and I had in my head the idea that if I wanted to be that “number one” player, I had to work at getting better and better, and that meant practicing hard every chance I got. That wasn’t difficult because basketball had become such a huge part of my life, not only being able to play but also having guys around me that liked to play as much as I did. It was around this time that I started to really understand what I later called “the science of the game,” which basically starts out as trial and error and was what the old heads had been teaching me out on the playgrounds. They told me we just had great basketball in Philadelphia back in the day, but that it was on the playgrounds where the really great basketball was played. And it was on the playgrounds where the science of the game was (and still is) passed down from generation to generation.
There were guys on the playground who had been playing basketball in Philly for a long time and had learned all the nuances of the game. Their knowledge of the game, which we called “30 years,” was invaluable to me. These old heads had seen and played against them all, too, from John Chaney to Wilt Chamberlain and Guy Rodgers. Today, the old heads talk about my generation, on to guys like Gene Banks, then Rasheed Wallace and Kobe Bryant and Eddie Griffin. The old heads now are the sons of people I used to play against, which is a trip: guys like Kobe’s father, Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, who made the NBA for a few years before playing out his career in Italy. In other words, “30 years” was being passed down to young players like me on Philadelphia’s playgrounds, and that tradition continues to this day.
The old heads helped me realize that the Philadelphia game was a structured finesse game, full of finesse players. And there was always a teaching element to Philadelphia basketball. Even when I would be playing against a certain guy on the playground, he would come up to me after the game and say, “Earl, you could have done another move than the one you tried on me when I stole the ball.” We shared that information with each other so we could all get better.
I would take
that information with me for the next time I played. Philly players weren’t great dunkers, like they were in North Carolina, and we didn’t drive to the hoop like they did in New York City. We were just smooth players, and that’s part of the makeup of people from Philadelphia; we try to be smooth in most things that we do. And all of this goes back to the way the city is: It’s a finesse city. The music, the humor are also about finesse, you know, laid back, but at the same time on the mark. We’re doing little runs in the music and in basketball games and we learned that just from playing against guys who taught us. (I would learn later that in New York City you have all these areas—Staten Island, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan—that each play separate styles. In Philadelphia you have different areas, too, but everyone—white and black—basically plays the same style, though mine was a little different, more creative, more original to me and my personality.)
There seems to be a coming together of talent and teaching in Philadelphia. When I got older, people were always asking me if I was influenced by the Harlem Globetrotters, and I wasn’t, because I never got to see the Globetrotters play until one night when I was playing pro ball in Baltimore and they played the first half of a doubleheader before our game. That was the first time I ever saw them play in person, or even on television or film. But from the style I developed, many thought they had influenced me. But I never had any Globetrotter in my game. My game just came naturally, you know, through trial and error. And it came out of the Philly game; I just added some stuff to it that was my own. My foundation came from what the old players kept telling me and showing me out on the playgrounds and it all came rushing back to me that day when I was walking home after beating Matt Jackson.
You know, it’s interesting how I saw all of this transpire by looking back, how I arrived at the place I found myself in at that moment. I realized it was almost like a movie, my life, and it was all up in my mind. The thing is that reflection is almost always good. You can’t really appreciate good things that happen to you unless you’ve had a lot of problems in your life that you’ve been able to work through. I understood that some of my motivation to succeed was a desire to become good at something a lot of people thought I couldn’t do, and that some of my drive came from being very dark skinned.
