Earl the Pearl
Page 16
My junior year was a stepping-stone for me and the team. That year our record was 17 and 4, but 3 of our losses were to Norfolk State, another CIAA team, and we finished second behind them in the regular season rankings. Still, we went to the CIAA tournament and I scored 32 points in a 96–86 first-round victory over Johnson C. Smith University. Sonny (who made All-CIAA that year, as did I) also stepped up in this game, and his scoring helped us get the win. We played Hampton University in the next round and won 85–84 in a really thrilling game. That put us in the final against Howard, and we beat them to win the tournament. I scored 42 points in that final game and was named the Most Valuable Player of the tournament.
After winning the CIAA tournament, we qualified to play in the NCAA Division II Championship in March 1966, in Durham, North Carolina. It was the first time our school had ever competed in that tournament. We played Oglethorpe College, a small white team from Atlanta, in the first round. We lost 69–66 in a low-scoring game because they slowed the game down and that unnerved us. We lost also because we played a very sloppy, error-filled game. But I had a horrible night, too, scoring only 14 points on 6 of 21 shooting. I think Sonny Ridgill, who was our second-leading scorer that year, averaging around 16 points a game, scored around 20 points in that game. That game was a downer for all of us, but especially for me because I felt I had let my team down. Overall that year, we finished with a 20-and-5 record after the 3 tournament wins and that 1 final loss.
But a weird thing happened to me and my guys that night after the game. After we lost we were walking to a party we had been invited to when out of the blue a bunch of black men rolled up on us in a car. Then they jumped out of the ride and one of them started pointing fingers at us, saying, “Those are the guys that beat up my cousin!”
So one of our guys said, “Beat up your cousin? What are you talking about?”
Then the guy who had been yelling at us pulls out a gun and so did the rest of them. We were shocked, because now they were talking about shooting us and they were dead serious. This goes on for about 15 minutes, with us trying to explain to them that we were all basketball players and not even from Durham and that we were just in town to play in a tournament. But they weren’t having any of it and were just waving their guns around. So they made us sit down on the ground and just as I was really starting to get pissed off—and nervous—the guy we were supposed to have beaten up showed on the scene. So one of our guys says to these crazy people, “Man, we’re from Winston-Salem. We play on the college team, and like I just told you, we were playing in a tournament.”
Then the guy they said we beat up got out of the car that brought him, came up to us, looked at me, and said, “Man, that ain’t the people who beat me up. Do y’all know who this is? That’s Earl Monroe, the basketball player. This here is Black Jesus, man!”
The man with the gun looked closely at me and said, “Oh man, you’re Earl Monroe? I just saw you play tonight. Hey, man, I’m sorry.”
By now I was hotter than a lit firecracker. I was almost foaming at the mouth. Then one of the guys with a gun says, “That’s Black Magic! Black Jesus, who can walk on water on the basketball floor.”
So they let us go. But I wasn’t in any mood to go to a party after that, so I just walked back to the hotel, got in my bed, and fell asleep, trying to forget about what had just happened.
A few days after this, on March 19, 1966, Texas Western beat Kentucky, 72–65, in the NCAA Division I Championship game. Before they met, Kentucky had been ranked number one in the country and Texas Western number three. What made this game special was that Texas Western, coached by Don Haskins, who was white, started an all-black team and Kentucky, coached by the legendary Adolph Rupp, started an all-white team that included Louie Dampier, Pat Conley, and Pat Riley. After Texas Western won that game, Southern universities started recruiting star black players to play both basketball and football, and this was the beginning of the end for many of the great black basketball players—and football players, too—attending historically black colleges. But I remember Coach Gaines was disappointed to hear that Coach Haskins received hate mail from racist white people for starting five black players. Coach Gaines had always believed you started whoever were the best players regardless of race, and eventually his point of view turned out to be the correct one.
That summer my teammate at Winston-Salem, Ernie Brown, who was from the Bronx, invited me to come to New York to play against some of the best players up there. So I accepted his invitation. I found out that I would be playing against three of the players from Texas Western’s championship starting five: Nevil Shed, Willie Cager, and Willie Worsley. The idea of playing against those guys just lit a fuse to my competitive fire. Anyway, some other guys from South Philly also went up to New York to play in those games, and they got there before me. We were supposed to play at Mount Morris Park, which is an outdoor playground in Harlem, but it started raining. So they had to move the games up to Saint Mary’s Gym in the Bronx. By the time Ernie and I arrived at the gym, the guys from Philadelphia were already there, and when I walked in they started chanting, “Black Jesus is here and you New York guys gonna see Jesus walk on water!”
That made me feel really good, because there were some other great New York players there besides the guys from Texas Western, like the legendary New York playground player Pee Wee Kirkland and Tony Jackson, who played for Saint John’s. They were looking at my Philly guys like they were crazy when they started talking about me like that. But after I got the ball and spun some white kid so hard I almost broke both his ankles, they started paying attention to me. Then I came down, put my spin move on two other guys, and hit a jumper from the top of the key. The gym went crazy, with people shouting, “Oh, man, did you see that move and what he did with that shot? That was crazy!”
And the Philly guys were saying, “It’s on now, man, Jesus is here and he gonna walk on water.”
And I did. Time after time I just put on moves and made spectacular shots that sent the people in the gym into delirium. They were screaming after I put a move on one of those guys from Texas Western, who had a real confused look on his face after I busted that move on him. Anyway, I was floating on air after I made those guys up in New York believers in my game. It boosted my confidence for the rest of the summer that I could play the game on an extremely high level, and I carried that energy into my senior year that fall. When I went back to Winston-Salem in September, I was determined to do my best to lead my team to an NCAA championship, like those guys from Texas Western had, and to make a national reputation for myself. Little did I know that it would be a historic season for me and my Ram teammates.
Chapter 10
BECOMING “EARL THE PEARL” IN MY SENIOR YEAR AND THE PAN AMERICAN GAMES DEBACLE: 1966 TO 1967
MY SENIOR YEAR STARTED OUT with us playing some important scrimmages against the Wake Forest University basketball team that had been arranged by the Demon Deacons’ head coach Jack McCloskey and his assistant coach, Billy Packer. Coach McCloskey had coached at the University of Pennsylvania when I was going to high school in Philadelphia, so he knew about me. Billy Packer had played at Wake Forest and had gone back there as an assistant coach (later, he would become a famous basketball color analyst for CBS), and he loved Cleo Hill as a basketball player. Anyway, Billy set up these practice sessions and our team and Wake Forest had about six of them at their gym. I remember when we got there, Coach McCloskey, who was a friend of Coach Gaines, saw that our ankles weren’t taped and he told Coach Gaines they weren’t going to let us play until he had us tape our ankles, which he did.
Now, we weren’t used to playing with our ankles taped—it was a cost factor at Winston-Salem because the administration didn’t have the money—and it almost felt like we were wearing casts. It was that stiff at first. So in that first scrimmage they beat us because we couldn’t hardly move. But then we got used to our ankles being taped and we beat them five straight games. I remember me and their sta
r player, Paul Long, having some spirited sessions. I also remember Coach Packer asking me to show the Wake Forest players my spin move. I tried, but the move was too quick and new for them—they were all white guys and weren’t used to trying nontraditional basketball moves—to absorb. So he asked me to slow it down some so they could get it and I tried to do that, but my move was too intuitive, improvised, and spontaneous for them to wrap their heads around it.
After I realized I couldn’t explain it to them verbally—it’s hard to explain improvisation to someone who has never had to do it—I just stopped. One of my favorite sayings around that time was that whoever was guarding me couldn’t ever figure out what I was going to do with the ball because I didn’t know myself until I did it. So teaching them the spin move was out of the question. They had to feel their way through to learning and doing it and maybe, you know, their culture got in the way a bit. Perhaps the way they had been brought up in the game prevented them from being able to execute an improvised move. I don’t know, but it’s something to think about when comparing black basketball culture to its white counterpart. Still, those early scrimmages pulled our team together and got us off and running. Knowing that we could beat a major college team like Wake Forest gave our squad a lot of confidence going into the season. It also injected more purpose into my game.
We had a great year as a team my senior season and I put up some really outstanding scoring numbers. Our starters at the beginning of that year were Eugene Smiley, Smitty, Bill English (who would break my single-game scoring record of 68 the next year by scoring 77), Jim Reid (who was drafted by the Philadelphia Warriors the same year I was by Baltimore), and myself. Reid was about six feet six, a monster rebounder, good jump shooter, and great dunker. English was six six, and Smitty was five 10. I was co-captain of the team, sharing the honor with my longtime friend Smitty, who started at the beginning of the year, was replaced by defensive specialist Johnny Watkins, and then became an important contributor coming off the bench.
That year I led the nation in scoring, averaging 41.5 points a game overall, 44 points a game in conference play, and a total of 1,329 points, which is still the second-most ever. I shot 60.7 percent from the floor that year, and many of my points came on long jump shots. My highest scoring game was a 68-point explosion against Fayetteville, but I had a string of about 10 or 12 games scoring in the high 40s or more that Luix Overbea, a black sportswriter for the Winston-Salem Journal, referred to as “Earl’s pearls.” That nickname soon morphed into “Earl the Pearl,” and it stuck to me from then on.
By the time I graduated from Winston-Salem I had set a school scoring record of 2,935 points, breaking the mark set by the great Cleo Hill. Our record that year was 31 and 1. We actually dropped 2 games that season, but the other loss was wiped away because the team that defeated us early in the season, High Point—they beat us 89–84—had to forfeit the game because of playing an ineligible player. High Point had some good players on that team, including Gene Littles, who played pro ball in the ABA and later became an NBA coach, and Tubby Smith, who coached Kentucky to an NCAA Championship. The other game we lost was to North Carolina A&T at the end of the season, in the CIAA tournament championship game. In between those losses we cleaned up on everybody we played.
I remember playing in the Chicago Invitational Tournament in late December of my senior year. I had been scoring a lot of points during the first games of the season, and a Chicago sportswriter said that I wouldn’t get 50 points when I came out there to play. So in the first game of the tournament I just stopped shooting with two or three minutes to go, after I had already scored 48 or 49 points and we had established a manageable lead. I just wouldn’t shoot anymore because I didn’t want to get 50, just to let them know I was in control. Later, in the championship game against Wilberforce University, we were down at the half and I had to shoot in order for us to win 101–100. I got 50 points on the nose, okay? Because I could get 50 points anytime I wanted to. So I’m standing with my guys when they announce the MVP award, which I just knew would go to me. But they gave the trophy to Melvin Clark, a guy on the team we had just beat. He was a black, classic-style player, a forward I think, and he scored maybe 30 points in the championship game. I scored 50, and we won! Their excuse was that they had voted on the award during halftime. Everybody was shocked, but the guy who won went up and picked up his trophy like he deserved it and didn’t even acknowledge me. I never saw or heard from him again after that. I don’t know what happened to him and I’d even forgotten his name until I looked it up for this book.
We were playing great as a team despite losing a couple of key players off the previous year’s squad, like Gilbert Smith, who would have started but quit because he couldn’t get along with Coach Gaines. They were always arguing about something or other, and, Gilbert being a really smart guy (he’s a PhD today), he just up and quit the team one day. The other guy who didn’t come back was Sonny Ridgill, our second-leading scorer from the year before. I think Coach Gaines didn’t want him back because Sonny thought he should have been getting more shots than he got and was probably a little jealous of me, but I don’t know this to be a fact. Anyway, he had been at Winston-Salem forever and Coach just didn’t want a problem on his hands. At least that’s the way I looked at it.
One of the most gratifying memories of my senior year was when we had to move our games from our home gym to the Winston-Salem Memorial Coliseum—the same place Wake Forest played—because the crowds were getting so big. We were beating everybody and I was scoring so many points that we were packing them in like sardines, with every seat sold for every home game. Black and white people, young and old. People were being turned away, couldn’t even buy seats, or find tickets anywhere. Even when we went on the road to play it was like this, with all of our games having to be moved from the school gym to the largest facility in any given town. All our games were sold out. Everywhere. It was something. Blew my mind.
People just loved to see us play, especially in North Carolina, and some people started saying that our team, with me as its star, was beginning to integrate the state. That was something, but there were a lot of white people at our games. So many, in fact, that they would take up the section of seats reserved for our students close to the floor. They were white and thought of themselves as being privileged. So they would just come in and sit down in those seats because they were some of the best seats in the facility. And I remember one time Coach Gaines saw them doing this and made them move, telling the crowd that the seats they were sitting in were reserved for Winston-Salem students, so they had to get up and move, and they did.
But the fans, black and white, started asking me for my autograph after every game, because I had gotten so famous now in North Carolina. Coach Gaines put a stop to that and made the fans ask the entire team for their autographs, because he knew it might create some tension on our team if I was the only one signing. So everybody had to sign their names to souvenir programs after every game that year, and that was a good thing.
Coach Gaines was really great for all of us, keeping us zeroed in on the realities of our lives and our futures. I remember one time during my last year at Winston-Salem, he sat the entire team down in the dressing room and asked us, “How many of you guys think y’all going to play pro basketball?”
So every hand was raised, I think, except for Ernest Brown’s and Smitty’s. So then Coach looked at us real hard and said, “I’m going to ask this question again and I want y’all to think seriously about it. How many of you guys seriously think you have a chance of playing professional basketball in the NBA or the ABA?”
So I raised my hand and James Reid raised his and a few others I can’t remember, but less raised their hands than had the first time. Coach looked at everybody real hard, kind of smiled, shook his head, and said, “Yeah, well some of you sons-of-bitches aren’t using y’all brains because ain’t but probably two of you guys going anywhere near professional basketball and we all know
who one of them is and that’s Earl. And the other guy might be James Reid.”
Then he smiled and looked at us again and said, “Those of you who didn’t raise your hands ain’t as dumb as I thought you were.”
And everybody laughed and looked at me and James Reid. Now I must admit it made me happy when Coach Gaines said that about me and I could tell it made James Reid happy, too, because he had a big old smile on his face. But it also made me self-conscious that he had laid it all out there like that, because I was still really shy, even though I knew by then that pro basketball was definitely in my future. I guess I kind of felt bad for the rest of my teammates who weren’t picked, though I knew Coach Gaines was telling them the truth.
Although I was shy I still led the team in my own quiet way, and everybody on the squad was cool with that. I wasn’t a rah-rah kind of guy, you know, exhorting, “Let’s go.” That just wasn’t (and isn’t) my way. I wanted everyone to do well and they all knew this. I led by setting an example for everyone else to follow, by playing hard each and every time I was out on the court. I dove for loose balls, played tough defense, and was a good teammate, encouraging and supporting all my guys. And even though I scored a lot of points—which is what they expected me to do—I still had a lot of assists. I think I was also second on the team in rebounds.
After we lost our opening game of the season to High Point and saw the result reversed due to forfeit, we won 22 straight games, which made us 23 and 0 and regular-season CIAA champions. Then I scored 53 points in a 92–84 victory over the University of Akron Zips on a neutral court, making us 24 and 0 going into the CIAA tournament, which we were expected to win hands down. We beat Hampton Institute in the first game of the tournament, 114–73, and I scored 42 points. We were 25 and 0 and headed to the CIAA tournament championship game, where we’d face North Carolina A&T. We had beaten them twice during the regular season, 87–85 and 104–93. But they kicked our asses real good in the championship game, 105–82. I had a terrible game, due in part to the defense from George Mack, my old Philadelphia high school nemesis, and because of my own poor shooting.