by Earl Monroe
My mother thought it was a good thing my father and I had met, had gotten back together and liked each other. Over time, especially after I turned pro and played with the Baltimore Bullets, I would occasionally drive up to Philadelphia, pick up my mother and then my father, and take them to a nice restaurant in downtown Philadelphia. I really enjoyed these times we had together, and so did they. We would eat and they would talk about what I did growing up, what I was doing now, but they would never discuss what had gone on when they were together, and that was okay with me because it was water under the bridge.
Still, like I said, I grew close to my father, his mother (who he introduced me to), and Hattie, even though I wasn’t as close to them as I was to the rest of my family. I would stay close with him for the rest of his life.
Chapter 8
REACHING FOR STARDOM IN MY SOPHOMORE YEAR: 1964 TO 1965
THE JOY AND HAPPINESS I FELT after my reunion with my father in June was offset the following month by the death of my Aunt Mary. She was only 47 years old. I went back to Philadelphia for her funeral after finishing up summer school. That was a very sad day for my entire family and for many people—black and white—in Philadelphia, especially in South Philly, where she had run her numbers business. I guess after a while it got to the point where she couldn’t take being an invalid anymore and so her spirit just went downhill and she died in her sleep. Her wake was held at Chew Funeral Home and it was overflowing with mourners. It was a big affair because a lot of people knew, respected, and just loved her. I don’t remember if the casket was open or closed, but I do remember feeling really sad about her passing. Still, I was anxious to get back to basketball because that was what I loved. But I also needed basketball to fill the hole in my heart that my aunt’s passing had left in my life. Playing basketball was a joyous thing for me, and at the moment it helped me push back all this grief.
The biggest thing that happened for my game between my freshman and sophomore years at Winston-Salem was that my ball-handling skills improved considerably. I really got a lot better over the summer of 1964 playing in Philadelphia every day, nonstop, with the Trotters and other teams around the city. I practiced my dribbling a lot when I was home, and then I kept it up when I returned to Winston-Salem, doing three or four hours of drills a day. It was all starting to pay off. My outside shooting had improved also through constant practice, so I knew by then that if I could get to a certain spot on the floor, I could make that shot. But this required having a great handle—you know, dribbling skills—because by then I could make my jumper. So my dribbling got me wherever I wanted to go on the court and that improved my offensive game and scoring potential tremendously.
I remember hearing in-the-know basketball people saying to coaches when I was playing up in Philadelphia that summer, “You should see how this kid handles the ball! He’s amazing!”
Hearing that made me feel good. So that’s what turned my game around that summer. Plus, I was getting a lot of minutes in the games I played in on playgrounds all over the city, where the level of competition was top-notch. Playing against really good players can only make you better, and it did; it made me a lot better. Like I said, my ball-handling ability helped me get to those spots I had to get to in order to score. But the biggest thing that happened when I got back to Winston-Salem was that I was finally free enough to let my talent shine through, which is where Coach Gaines came in.
Coach Gaines had already had a lot of success at Winston-Salem before I arrived, winning four CIAA championships and three conference Coach of the Year awards, and he did it by playing to the strengths of his players. With my style, the freelancing mode I had developed playing the game, a lot of coaches might have just pulled me back and said, “I don’t want you to do this and I don’t want you to do that.” But during the first scrimmages we had after we got back, Coach Gaines saw how much I had improved over the summer and he just let me go. He recognized how I could shoot the ball and score, how much my dribbling and my knowledge of the game had improved, and he believed in my talent. He allowed me to play my style of the game as long as it was effective, and it was. It was as if he was saying, “Why change it?”
That endorsement built my confidence up to a very high level, and I averaged 23 points a game in my sophomore season at Winston-Salem, scoring a total of 697 points. I remember playing in a tournament out in Kansas City that year and seeing Buddy Jeannette, the coach of the Baltimore Bullets, speaking to Coach Gaines about me. So I made up my mind right then and there that I wanted to play with the Bullets after I got out of college, and that’s who drafted me when I graduated. (I had already wanted to play for them after seeing Gus Johnson dunk over the Boston Celtics’ Bill Russell and said, “Wow, I’d like to play with him!” And voilà! I did.)
The big change on our team in my sophomore year was that Coach Gaines teamed me up with Teddy Blunt in the backcourt, and we worked together very well. Teddy was the point guard and I played off him at the shooting position. Now, Teddy was what I call a “nurtured” player, meaning that when he came to Winston-Salem he instantly ingratiated himself into Coach Gaines’s basketball culture. Coach trusted Teddy to run the team. See, Teddy was very mature, and he might even have already been married—or close to it—when we started playing together. I accepted this and understood that my role was to play off Teddy, for him to set me up and feed me, so that I would be free to create and then score, which I did.
Teddy and I both understood and accepted our roles, and that’s why we worked so very well together. Teddy was also a very good person, always had a smile on his face—zing!—whatever the case might be. And we played together really well for two years. But Teddy had bad feet—really bad arches—that eventually gave out, so he couldn’t get around like he used to after a while. For instance, during my sophomore year he couldn’t practice sometimes because his feet couldn’t take the pressure. So Coach Gaines saved him for just playing in games. Everyone on the team was cool with that because we had so much respect for Teddy and, like I said, we all liked him so very much. But when he could play he saw the floor extremely well, was unselfish, passed the ball to players in the spot they needed to be in to get a great shot. Teddy just controlled the game with his intelligence and knowledge and I really loved playing with him.
Teddy was very smart, always had the upper hand when it came to using his brains, and we were a great combination together. Teddy did whatever he had to do to win games. Once, a reporter asked me about winning and what I thought Teddy brought to that concept.
“You can be on a team and be a star scorer,” I said. “You can be the star point guard, you can be the star defensive player, you can be the star rebounder. But the name of the game, the main purpose, is bringing all the stars together so they can mesh and co-exist to become a winning squad. That’s the real challenge and that’s what Teddy did for our team; he brought us all together and taught us all how to become a winning squad. And I learned a lot from him when it came to knowing how to lead a team to victory, and to be able to win championships.”
Now, Teddy got his points, too, because he was a scorer—not a great scorer, though—as well as a great passer and floor general. But he made us all better because he was there. Besides Teddy and me, our starting team that season consisted of Ted Ratchford, who was a six-foot-10-inch center; forward Sonny Ridgill (who seemed like he had been in school forever), who was six feet three; and Joe Cunningham, who was about six feet seven, at the other forward (Joe later played for the Harlem Globetrotters). Smitty was the first player off the bench.
I made All-Conference my sophomore year and didn’t have any problems with Coach Gaines, because we were winning and I was playing very well. Things were obviously better than they had been during my freshman year. I think he and I had grown as people, not just as coach and player; I think we all grew together as a team. Coach Gaines became more of a father figure to me, as he was for everybody else. He also treated us all like men and we appreciated
that. Letting me play my game was actually an outgrowth of Coach Gaines’s philosophy, which involved a belief in the star system. Whoever Coach’s star player was—and now it happened to be me—he let that guy, if he had a certain amount of talent, shine.
Coach Gaines ran a pro-style offense, which meant we got the ball up and down the floor quickly. If we didn’t have a fast break possibility, then we’d match up with our opponent’s defense and run our half-court offense, which revolved around Teddy, because he was the point guard. We’d switch up the offense according to who we were playing and tried to take advantage of whatever weakness our opponent had. If a team didn’t have a good inside game, we’d play more of a two-three offense, in which we shot from the outside, because we had good shooters and that opened up a lot of stuff for our inside game. Against other teams we sometimes played a two-one-two offense. We’d bring our center out to the free throw line and then players would cut off him to create lanes for me to drive to the basket. We could also set up screens, pick and roll, or free up our shooters to take jump shots out of this alignment. It was a very creative system.
My thing was to free myself up and be able to create, or drive to the basket for a layup, maybe drive and dish to the free man. I could also drive and pull up and shoot my jumper, so our offense made us a lot different than we had been the year before because those guys didn’t drive that much. Now I could do all my playground moves and Coach Gaines freed me up and allowed me to use them. I was doing my Thomas Edison creative moves to the basket and pulling up and shooting the long or midrange jump shots, too. See, I was never a catch-and-shoot kind of guy. I always wanted to be able to have the ball in my hand and then create, and Coach Gaines allowed me to do this in my sophomore year. We played good team man-to-man switching defense, too, though our forte was running, shooting, and scoring the ball.
I have always been a little cocky, especially after I reached a certain plateau as a player. I guess it started to show in the confident way I carried myself around this time, not so much to turn people off but to let them know I could really play this game. My confidence let my opponents know that I was there to turn up the heat on them every time I stepped on the court. It was interesting how some people liked to play with me and others liked to play against me. The ones I played against knew that if I got the chance I was going to embarrass them. I was going to shake and bake them, put my spin move on them, cross them over with my dribble, and leave them standing somewhere looking silly after I had nailed them with a creative move. Then, when they looked around, I would be gone to score the basket. I’d have a smile on my face after I had done this to one of my opponents. It wasn’t arrogance—it was something more like supreme confidence and cockiness—but it was just my way of saying to them that I really could do this, so they’d better be prepared to deal with me every time they came up against me, because I wanted them to know I was always going to be bringing it to them, you know what I mean? I did this all in my own quiet way, because at the time I was still too shy to be talking trash to players I had embarrassed; all that would come later.
See, in my mind, it was all about competition, about competing with another player that’s good. I always loved this aspect of playing basketball. It made me excited to just be out on the floor going up against the very best. It made my adrenaline flow. Like I said, for me it was all about competition and had nothing to do with arrogance, at least not in my mind, not in the way I saw it.
I really began to mature as a player during my sophomore year when I realized I had to step up and accept and embrace my role as a scorer and leader on the team if we were going to win games. I recognized that our team was going through a period of transition, while other teams in our conference, like North Carolina A&T and Norfolk State, for example, had stabilized and strengthened their rosters. The year before, I had been a benchwarmer, scoring only 7 points a game, while Teddy Blunt had been the absolute leader of our team. But now I had blossomed as a person, scorer, and team leader, and Teddy, though still the unquestioned leader and captain of our team, understood this totally. He knew that I had improved a lot as a player, because we practiced together every day and he saw with his own eyes how much better I had gotten. And because Teddy was a very mature, smart player, he knew he had to adjust his own role to complement my newly elevated status on our squad. He did so willingly, even sacrificing his own scoring, though he still averaged around 12 or 13 points a game.
Following Teddy’s example, all the other players on the team—with the exception of maybe one, whose name I won’t call out in this book—accepted my new role on the team. But Teddy had nagging little problems with the arches in both feet all season long and that affected our team negatively as well, you know what I mean? Sometimes when Teddy had to go out because of his feet, Smitty would replace him, or sometimes Coach would move me to the point and I would become the key, you know, creating and running the team from there, which I enjoyed. Then, my role would switch from just scoring the ball to getting everyone involved in the flow of the game.
We had been conference champions the two previous seasons, winning more than 20 games in both of those years, and those teams had been led by Teddy. But although we were predicted to win the conference again in 1964–1965, Teddy couldn’t practice a lot, which impacted our team play because he was the leader. In part because Teddy couldn’t play at his usual high level, we finished third in conference play, behind A&T and Norfolk State, with a record of 11 and 6 in the conference and 20 and 7 overall (not a bad record, but we had expected much better). Now, no one blamed Teddy for this because it was not his fault his arches gave out, but he was a key player for us and had he been healthy, I just didn’t think anyone could have beaten us.
Despite our disappointing third-place finish in the regular season, in the CIAA the winner of the postseason tournament was crowned league champion, which meant we still had a chance to win the overall championship. In the first round we beat Livingston College 84–59, setting up a meeting with Norfolk State. In a truly thrilling game, we lost in overtime after blowing a big lead because of turnovers. I scored 30 points in that crucial game, but I was disappointed because I thought we should have won. Both Teddy and I made the All-CIAA All-Conference team, and the team received an invitation to play in the NAIA tournament in Kansas City for the fourth time in five years.
In March 1965, we left Winston-Salem to travel to Kansas City. I was excited about this opportunity to play in the tournament, as was everyone else on our team. But when we played our first game against Saint Norbert College, an all-white team from De Pere, Wisconsin, it was the first time our players from the South had ever gone up against white players. I think some of our players from the South froze up and were, in my opinion, hesitant in their play in this game, perhaps because they had been told for so long that white people were superior to blacks in all aspects of life, including basketball.
Now, I don’t know if that was true or not, but that’s how I felt after we played so badly in the first part of that game, trailing by as many as 9 points, and went into halftime behind, 32–27. But we pulled it together in the second half and won the game 87–69 when some of our players from the South, like Howard “Sonny” Ridgill (who scored 23 points) and Ted Ratchford (who scored 19), got it going; I also scored 23 points in that game. I think the same thing might have happened in the next game, against High Point College, which was 20 miles outside Winston-Salem. But in that game we turned up the heat on them near the end of the first half and coasted to victory, 78–62; I had 22 points in that game.
In the next game, however, against Oklahoma Baptist, we came out cold and stayed that way and lost 71–62. In that game, despite scoring 20 points, I couldn’t hit a brick wall with my shots, and I think Sonny finished with just 2 points. That was the game Teddy fouled out, I think, because his feet were hurting badly, as they had been throughout the tournament. Coach Gaines thought that the referees were biased in that game—so did I—because we only shot
18 free throws and Oklahoma Baptist shot 31.
That was the way I finished my sophomore year at Winston-Salem, and though I was happy about how I had elevated my play that season, I was disappointed that we lost in the NAIA tournament and in my poor shooting performance in our last game.
Malcolm X, another of my heroes, had been assassinated about a month earlier by three members of the Nation of Islam at the Audubon Ballroom up in Harlem. I never liked thinking about death, or seeing it manifested in someone lying in a casket. That’s just the way I am. I love celebrating life, and that’s what I did when I was out playing on the basketball court. Basketball was always a way I could express myself, be creative, imaginative. It was a joy for me to be out there playing, and I could lose myself in the joy of playing the game. I just never felt any joy about death, even though I missed people being there, you know, alive and joyous in their living. Like I missed Malcolm X’s presence in the world, even though I never met him, you know what I mean? I loved the words he gave us and the meaning behind them for both black people and all people all over the world. I loved that.
After the assassination of Malcolm X and our loss in the NAIA tournament, I felt it was necessary to do some reflecting back on my life, and attending an all-black college helped me in this regard. Because I was surrounded by black people, I didn’t have to do as much explaining about the death of Malcolm as I would have had I been at an all-white school. So there was comfort for me in being at Winston-Salem, being around people who understood, you know what I mean?
