Earl the Pearl

by Earl Monroe

  But because of our outstanding record over the entire season we were invited to play in the NCAA Division II national championship tournament, which we won. In the process I became the second player ever (after Clyde Lovellette) to both lead the nation in scoring and play on the team that won the national championship in the same year.

  We played Baldwin Wallace College in the first game of the tournament, and on that day I was told I had been selected to the United Press International small-college All-American team (I think Phil Jackson was on that team, too); I had made the Associated Press Little All-American Team the week before, as had Walt Frazier. We beat Baldwin Wallace in that first game 91–76, and I scored 34 points. The next day the Sporting News also selected me for their All-American Team, joining me with Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) from UCLA, Jimmy Walker from Providence, Sonny Dove from Saint John’s, and Elvin Hayes from the University of Houston. That was a great honor for me, to be mentioned with those big-college guys. I remember the citation said that I had “tremendous ability with the ball” and that I was “a great scorer with a remarkable percentage from the field.” I was really happy when I read that news!

  Our next game was against a team we had already beaten, the University of Akron, but this time we would play them on their own home court, where they had a 54-game winning streak. Their fans had hung a derogatory sign about me in the gym that read, “Earl Monroe is just a myth! He can’t compare with SUMTHIN’ SMITH.”

  The player they were talking about, “SUMTHIN’ SMITH,” was actually named Bob Smith, and he was a pretty good little guard (Akron also had another pretty good player named Bill Turner, a forward, who was picked 27th in the 1967 NBA draft; Bob Smith wasn’t picked at all). In that rematch game I scored 49 points, SUMTHIN’ got 17, and I shut up whoever had hung that sign. On top of that, we beat them for a second time that year, 88–80.

  It was during that game that the Akron fans started calling me “the Pearl,” putting a new twist on Luix Overbea’s “Earl’s pearls.” Coach Gaines used to always wonder if it was some of the Winston-Salem fans who had come up to Akron for the game that were calling out that name. We will never know. But after that the Akron papers used to say the nickname first started there and later they would say it started in Baltimore, after I turned pro. All I know is that Luix Overbea used that term before anybody else and I will leave the rest to the historians.

  After we defeated Akron we moved on to Evansville, Indiana, to play Long Island University, and we beat them 62–54. I scored 29 points in the game and broke the single-season small-college scoring record. Then we played defending champion Kentucky Wesleyan College and beat them in a very close game. Their defense double-teamed me, so I decided I was going to pass the ball to my open teammates and I did, feeding my roommate, Eugene Smiley, who finished with 27 points, and Bill English, who scored 22 points. I ended up with 24 points and was happy we got the win.

  Now we were 30 and 1 and going to the national championship game against Southwest Missouri State. We beat them 77–74 in a hard-fought, really close game. I scored 40 points and hit two crucial free throws with 25 seconds remaining to help seal the deal. After they shot and missed, I got the ball, dribbled the clock down, and threw the ball up in the air (always the showman) like I had seen Sam Jones of the Boston Celtics do once in a big game. When the ball came down there were only two or three seconds left on the clock and that was that. We finished the season 31 and 1.

  We were the first black college to win an NCAA Division II Championship (Tennessee State was the first to win an NAIA championship). I was named MVP of the tournament, as well as the NCAA Division II Player of the Year. I had finally led a team to a big, important championship, and I loved the feeling. When we got back to Winston-Salem there was a large crowd—black and white people—at the airport to greet us, and I felt great for days after that. There was no other mountain for me to climb on the college level, so I turned my eyes to the NBA draft and turning pro. But a nasty little thing happened to me at the end of the season. The problem I had with beautiful Dorothy came back to torture me for a while.

  What happened was I started receiving telephone calls from somebody telling me I had to pay them some money or else they were going to go to the newspapers with pictures of Dorothy and me together, which they said would hurt my chances of going high in the upcoming pro draft. By now sportswriters were predicting how high I might go, and early indications were that I’d be one of the top picks. So I figured these calls were about getting money from me that I would make in the future playing pro ball, because I certainly didn’t have a dime to give to anybody at the time.

  At first I was shocked and scared because I couldn’t figure out who it could possibly be. Then I got a letter telling me specifically what motels Dorothy and I had been rendezvousing and making love in. So I started thinking real hard about who it could possibly be.

  One day he called me again and said, “I saw you coming out of the motel with Dorothy yesterday, and unless you give me money I’m going to tell everybody. I’ll be back in touch with you.” Then he hung up the phone, but not before I had listened real close to his voice to see if I could maybe recognize if I had heard it before. Then I started really getting angry and thought to myself, This motherfucker is trying to blackmail me for money he thinks I’m going to get when I turn pro.

  So now I was racking my brain trying to remember where I had heard the voice before. Then it came to me that it sounded like a guy named Tobias who had kept statistics and been a scorekeeper for our team. Now, I wasn’t married, but Dorothy was and she had a kid. So I thought to myself that I wasn’t going to give this asshole a dime. I just waited for his next phone call or letter, and I got this note from him a few days later that said, “Give me $2,000 and I’ll keep this to myself. If you don’t, I’m going to spill the beans.”

  There was a number on the letter for me to call and I called it. Someone answered and I said in a lowered voice, “Who is this?”

  “You don’t know me,” the guy said, “but I saw you and Dorothy coming out of the motel and unless you pay me, I’m going to tell her husband and everybody.”

  So I said, “Hey, I’m not married, man. Fuck it, then. Go tell anybody you want to tell.”

  “You want me to tell?” he says.

  “Fuck it,” I said. “You tell anybody you want to tell. Don’t matter to me because I’ll be out of here in another month. Plus I know who you are.”

  And he hung up the phone and I never heard from him again. Nor did he say anything to anybody. Case closed. But that incident taught me something valuable and I decided to break off my relationship with Dorothy. But then she got divorced from her husband and moved to Baltimore and started teaching school there. We had a little relationship there for a minute, but it fizzled out after a while because I started getting into other things. But she had become like a drug to me for a while, and this was one of the deepest relationships I had been involved in up until that time, especially from an emotional point of view. I promised I would never go out with a married woman again in life, but that was a promise I broke many times during the coming years.

  At the end of March, after we won the championship, me and a few guys went barnstorming around the state just playing games for fun and to keep our skills up. Then I left them and went and played in a North-South All-Star game at the Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina. I played on the South team and our coach was the legendary Jerry Colangelo, but I only knew him as “Coach” or “Jerry” at the time. Anyway, I scored 40 points, we won the game, and I was named MVP.

  In mid-April I was invited to the Pan American Games trials, which were held in Saint Cloud, Minnesota, a town of about 60,000 people. When I arrived at the airport I saw only one black man, and he was sweeping the floor. So I walked up and asked him how many black people lived in the town.

  “About five,” he told me without hesitation, “and they all work either out here at the airport or in tow
n at the bus or train station, doing what you see me doing.”

  He smiled a knowing smile that told me the place wasn’t too cool for black people. Then he winked and went back to sweeping the floor. I went out the door to a waiting bus, which took me to a hotel. It was really cold up there in Saint Cloud and there was nothing for me to do but eat, sleep, and play basketball. I played on the NAIA team with Charlie Paulk and with Al Tucker, who, like me, was later drafted in the first round. I also played with Henry Logan, a little guard out of Western Carolina, on that team. He was a really good player who went on to play with Rick Barry on the Oakland Oaks in the ABA. Another guy on that team was Bob Kauffman, who played with the Buffalo team in the NBA and later became the general manager of the Atlanta Hawks.

  But the best players on that team were Al Tucker and Charlie Paulk. Both were six foot eight. Paulk, who was drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks and later was a teammate of mine on the New York Knicks, played in the NBA until around 1974, so he had a nice little pro career. Tucker played for a while in Seattle and was a teammate of mine with the Bullets. Anyway, it was Logan, Tucker, Paulk, Bob Kauffman (who later became the general manager of the Detroit Pistons), and me on the starting five. The tournament was between four teams: one made up from the NAIA (the team I was on), one from the NCAA, one from the Armed Forces, and one from the Amateur Athletic Union.

  The team I played on wound up winning the tournament, and I led everyone in both scoring and assists. We beat a team that had Wes Unseld and Elvin Hayes on it. But for whatever reason, I didn’t get picked for the Pan American team. The only player on my team who made the squad was Henry Logan. Someone told me later that the coach, a man named Jim Gudger, didn’t like my style of playing and thought it was an embarrassment—too street, too playground, too black for him. Here he was a white guy passing judgment on my game even though I had already proven that I was a team player and a winner!

  When I asked around about the reason I was left off the team, several people told me that Coach Gudger thought my game would insult the international competition we would be playing against. Now, Henry Logan was a hell of a player, don’t get me wrong. He could do everything well and deserved to be on the team. But there were other guys that made that team that shouldn’t have been there over me. I forget who they were, but they were there and they knew I should have been on that team. I know Wes Unseld, Jo Jo White, and Sonny Dove were on that team, and they should have been there. But Elvin Hayes didn’t make that team, either. Why didn’t he and I make that team?

  In my opinion, it was a racist thing, no question about it in my mind. That kind of stuff would plague me throughout my whole basketball career. Some of those incidents hurt me, but none of them were as painful as what happened to me in the Pan American Trials. That rejection prevented me from representing and playing for my country abroad. That hurt a lot, left a scar in my memory that has lasted even until this day. I’ll never forget it. It was also a two-pronged insult, because Winston-Salem State was the only winner of the national championship that didn’t go overseas to represent the NCAA.

  Those incidents gave me a kind of anti-American feeling, and it made Black Power a lot more relevant and prevalent in my life from then on. After that I got into the movement in my own sort of way; I started wearing the red, green, and black colors of the movement in my little kufi cap and in the sweatbands I wore during games. And I wore green battle jackets and the little sunglasses as a fashion statement. The Pan American Trials incident changed me fundamentally, and I started being more aware of everything I did as a black man. It also made me look closely at how my country—a country that I loved!—was treating black people, and it turned me from a pacifist into an activist from then on.

  But the NBA draft was coming up. All the experts predicted I’d be selected very high and I was, higher than any of the players picked over me for the Pan American Games squad. That was sweet revenge, although I still would have loved to have been picked for that team. Still, as I always said, it is what it is, and I moved on with my life because there was nothing I could do about not being picked for Gudger’s team but prove him wrong, which I did.

  It happened for me on May 3, 1967, in New York City, when the Baltimore Bullets made me the number two overall pick in the NBA draft (Providence’s Jimmy Walker was chosen number one by Detroit). This served as an affirmation of me amongst the owners, coaches, and scouts of the greatest professional basketball league in the entire world. What my high draft choice meant was that my talent counted, and that an NBA franchise was willing to pay me to showcase my ability, you know what I mean? For me, that was my vindication and it marked the end of the Gudger story, though it didn’t end my pain at not being selected for the Pan American team.

  On May 2, the day before the draft, I had come home to Philadelphia from Winston-Salem to hang out with some friends, and I got home very early in morning, about 3:30 a.m. When I drove up to my mother’s house, I saw that lights were on in the kitchen and I thought maybe something had happened because Ma never stayed up that late. So I got out of the car and went into the house and into the kitchen and who did I see there but Buddy Jeannette, who was the general manager and then head coach of the Baltimore Bullets; Gene Shue, the assistant coach (who would succeed Jeannette later that year as coach); somebody else I didn’t recognize; and my mother. I had met Coaches Shue and Jeannette previously because they had come to a few of my games and Buddy had expressed an interest in my playing for the Bullets before.

  I must admit that I had a feeling the Bullets really wanted to draft me because in the middle of April I had come home one day and found a red convertible 1967 Mustang sitting outside our house. When I went inside, my mother told me that the Bullets had sent the car up for me to ride around in. I had a car, but it was an old Oldsmobile and this was a shiny new machine! But the funny thing about this car was that I didn’t know how to raise the canvas top back up. So when it rained I had to find a place to sit under a bridge until it stopped raining—I was too shy and proud to ask anybody how to raise the roof. Then, after the rain stopped, I would drive the car back home and dry out the insides with some rags, and then it would happen again and I would have to do the same thing all over. Now, the car was fun while it wasn’t raining, but I was kind of glad when I had to turn it back in—it was a rental that the Bullets had paid for.

  When I walked in the house everybody was grinning like Cheshire cats. Then Buddy said they were going to draft me in the second spot the next day in New York City (they already knew who Detroit intended to select with the top pick) and they wanted me to drive up with them and be there when they made the announcement. So I said, “Cool. When do we leave?”

  “Right now,” Buddy said.

  “Cool,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  So my mother gave me a big hug and we went out and got in their car and drove up to New York to the hotel where the draft was being held. They had gotten me a room there. They were staying in the hotel, too. So when we got to our rooms and settled in they came back and pulled out these papers and I just signed them without reading them over or realizing it was the contract—that hadn’t even been negotiated—I was signing. Now, we didn’t have agents back in those days and I thought in my head that Coach Gaines had negotiated the deal for me, but he hadn’t.

  Later, we would have a disagreement about this because I thought if anybody was going to be looking over the contract it would be Coach Gaines, who would have negotiated whatever I was signing. See, I knew I wasn’t sophisticated enough back then to know anything about contracts. I just came to play basketball. That’s all I knew, and especially coming from a small black school I wasn’t used to signing anything as complex as a contract with all kinds of clauses dealing with money.

  Coach Gaines came up a short time after I had signed the contract. The Bullets had invited him up and paid his expenses. Coach knocked on the door and they let him in, and I remember he was so big that day he filled up the entire door frame. Aft
er he came in and said hello to everyone, he looked down on the table, saw the contract, picked it up, and read over it. Then he turned to me with his eyes blazing and said, “Son, what have you done? You signed the fucking contract for $19,000 for one year!”

  So now I was sitting there with my mouth open. Shocked. Coach Gaines told me to step out of the room because he wanted to speak with Jeannette and Shue in private. So I did, and about 20 minutes later they called me back into the room and I read over the contract. This time it was for $20,000 a year for two years. They had changed it a little, but it was still a bad contract. I realized it was my fault, but I had to live with it. I’d deal with the next contract in two years. It was what it was, you know what I mean? But I wouldn’t make that same mistake again. Ever.

  Soon it was time to go down to face the press and take part in the draft ceremony. Then I realized I hadn’t brought a jacket to wear, so Buddy took his off, which was an unhip-looking plaid jacket, and gave it to me to put on. So we went down to meet the press and the announcer introduced me as the number two pick after Jimmy Walker had been announced as the number one selection. They presented me to the press and a reporter asked me, “How much did you sign for?”

  “A substantial amount,” I said.

  That was all I could think of to say. I had had visions in my mind of making $100,000. But that wasn’t what it was going to be, and it was my fault. I was never bitter about the deal I made, but I promised myself I would be a lot smarter the next time my contract came around. I didn’t know—and still don’t know—what everybody else who was in that draft received in their contracts, though I know it was probably a lot more than I got. But, like I said, it is what it is and I had to go on from there with a positive outlook.