by Earl Monroe
The number three pick after Walker and myself was Clem Haskins, another really good guard from Western Kentucky, who was selected by the Chicago Bulls. Walt Frazier, from Southern Illinois University, was the fifth pick, selected by the New York Knicks. Hey, what can I say? It was a great year for guards coming out of college! Other notable players selected in that draft were Sonny Dove from Saint John’s University (selected number four), Al Tucker from Oklahoma Baptist (number six), Pat Riley from Kentucky (number seven), and Phil Jackson (number 17). Other players selected who I knew or had played against were Cliff Anderson from Philadelphia (by the Los Angeles Lakers), my teammate James Reid (by the Philadelphia 76ers), Bill Turner of the Akron Zips, and Paul Long of Wake Forest.
Smitty and I graduated from Winston-Salem on time, on Thursday, May 30, with Dr. Harold W. Tribble, the president of Wake Forest University, giving the commencement address. Now, that was something. I remember being so happy to see my whole family there and how happy they were for me, especially my mother. Big Jimmy, my sister Ann’s husband, was running around trying to take pictures but his camera wasn’t working. So I was up on stage trying to pose for him and he was running around cursing because he never got his camera to work. Somebody else took pictures, though, and documented the entire ceremony for the school.
Some days I look at those pictures and still feel proud of myself. Graduating was very important to me because I remember when I first arrived at Winston-Salem, Coach Gaines took all the basketball players aside and said, “All you guys, you athletes, come here thinking you’re somebody special, and you are in terms of playing basketball. But don’t think you are some kind of Don Juan or Rudolph Valentino with the girls down here because you can shoot a basketball. King Kong could come in here and get some of these girls because there’s so many. But what’s going to happen to you after basketball, or sports? So you better watch yourselves the first semester, because you’re going to see all these girls and they’re going to get into your heads. You’re going to be walking around, holding hands, and you’re not going to study or do your work and the next semester you will be on probation. Then, at the end of the year you’re going to be out of school because you’re going to be thinking about basketball and girls and not your schoolwork. So y’all better check yourselves and stay straight because many of you won’t graduate and you will be sorry down the road.”
I never forgot what Coach Gaines said that day, and on my graduation day there were only four or five guys—you know, athletes—that graduated out of around 230 people. I think it was Smitty and me, a football player named Melvin Mayo, and I think James Reid. So Coach was right, and I have always thought about what he said that day during my freshman year, how right and on the mark he was. I will always be thankful to him for that, for those words of wisdom and for all the other things he taught me about basketball and life.
There were more riots in the country that summer, in Cleveland, Detroit, and Newark, New Jersey. Dr. King led an anti–Vietnam War march in New York City. Muhammad Ali was indicted in Houston for refusing to be inducted into the American Armed Forces to fight the war. It seemed like the country was falling apart racially. But then a good thing happened when Thurgood Marshall was appointed to be a justice on the US Supreme Court, the first black person ever to serve on the highest court, and that lifted my heart and my spirit.
Now my eyes and energy turned toward playing for the Baltimore Bullets. I would prepare myself again with constant practice over the summer, honing and sharpening my skills. I was also going to be playing in the legendary Baker League for the first time, and playing against top-shelf competition, many of them pros. I knew playing in the Baker League would prepare me to go down to my new city, my new home, to make my mark in pro basketball. I knew I had a lot to prove because a lot was expected of me. But I also felt my talent was there, that I was up to the task. I was very focused, absolutely convinced my game had grown by leaps and bounds and would carry me through to stardom, something I had long imagined for myself. And I was sure, almost to the point of arrogance, that I would claim a spot amongst the elite of the game, and that I would do this in my rookie season.
Part Three
MY HUNGER FOR
NBA RESPECT
AND A
CHAMPIONSHIP RING
Chapter 11
A PARADIGM SHIFT IN PRO BASKETBALL: MY ROOKIE YEAR, 1967 TO 1968
IN THE SUMMER OF 1967, I finally got my opportunity to play basketball in the famed Charles Baker Memorial Summer League. According to the guidelines of the league, players were eligible to compete only if they weren’t high school or college students. So since I had graduated from Winston-Salem, that wasn’t a problem. The league was a quasi-pro league, though no one got paid for playing in games. The league was founded by William Randolph “Sonny” Hill—everybody called him “Sonny” and sometimes teased him about his full name—who was still a great basketball player at the time the league was formed. As a matter of fact, one of the reasons Sonny started the league was so he could compete against all the top-flight players he planned to invite. But running the league became a full-time job and before long he stopped playing and became the coach of his own team.
A five-foot-nine-inch guard, Sonny was born on July 22, 1936, in Philadelphia, where he was raised. He was a high-jumping scorer in his day, feared for his outstanding, extremely accurate jump shot from any spot on the floor. Sonny had played against and was a close friend of the great Wilt Chamberlain, who once scored 100 points in an NBA game and still holds more than 90 NBA records, when they were in high school. Guy Rodgers, the extraordinary ball-handling guard who twice led the NBA in assists, was Sonny’s mentor and friend. So Sonny came from a longtime Philadelphia basketball legacy and was a student and historian of Philadelphia basketball.
Sonny had attended Central State College in Wilberforce, Ohio, for a minute—two years to be exact—and made All-Conference in his freshman year (another notable name on that team was Dick Barnett, also a freshman, from Tennessee State and later my teammate on the New York Knicks). But Sonny dropped out of school in order to play in the Eastern League, where he also excelled. Then, in the summer of 1960, Sonny started a four-team pro league on a concrete court outside of Moylan Recreation Center at 25th and Diamond Streets in North Philadelphia. During the mid-1960s, at the invitation of a local pastor, Reverend William Gray, Sonny moved his league to a basement gym annex of Dr. William H. Gray Jr.’s Bright Hope Baptist Church at North 12th and Oxford Streets.
The league was reconfigured and its first games in the new league were played there. City commissioner Charles Baker, the uncle of Temple University basketball great Hal Lear, helped Sonny get the permits he needed to start the league, and after Baker died Sonny named the league after him, calling it the Charles Baker Memorial Summer Pro League. Over the years some of the greatest basketball players in this country—black and white—have competed in the league, including Hal Greer, Cazzie Russell, Chet Walker, Clifford Ray, Darryl Dawkins, World B. Free, Bill Melchionni, Billy Cunningham, and, of course, Wilt Chamberlain and Guy Rodgers. Later, I played against and with Bill Bradley, Willis Reed, Walt Hazzard, Wali Jones, and Archie Clark.
I played on the Gaddie Real Estate team, coached by Herb Janey. Frank Card, who I had played against at West Philadelphia in high school, was on my team. Tom “Trooper” Washington, who played at Edison High in Philly (and who was a teammate of Connie “The Hawk” Hawkins with the Pittsburgh Pipers in the old ABA) was also on that team; Trooper was also one of my very good friends. Sonny coached the Jimmy Bates B-Bar team and had some great players like Ray “Chink” Scott (later my teammate with the Bullets), Jim Washington, Wali Jones, and George Lehmann. In later years Sonny had Cazzie Russell, Hawthorne Wingo, Bobby Hunter (who played for the Globetrotters), and Bill Bradley on his team. The Kent Taverneers were coached by John Chaney and had Hal Greer, Chet Walker, and Ben Warley as members of that squad. Then there was the Century Chevrolets, which had B
illy Cunningham and Luke Jackson on its roster. So you can see they had some well-known players dueling against each other in that league, including a bunch of future Hall of Famers.
We played two games a week from late June to the end of August. The games were played on a gray concrete floor set against wooden, moon-shaped backboards in a gym with no windows or air conditioning. So it would be hot as hell inside there in the summer, with temperatures reaching more than 100 degrees, even with the doors open. I remember when I played my first game there that summer, all of us players went outside at halftime to wring out our sweat-soaked jerseys. Then, after wringing them almost dry, we went back inside and played the second half just as hard as we had the first half. In addition, all the fans who had been jammed into that sauna bath of a gym—about a thousand people in all—came outside with us at halftime to get some much needed relief from all that heat themselves.
It was something playing in all that heat, with all those fans screaming their heads off—black and white. But that great competition was why all those players were there and what all of us—the fans included—were there to see. (I don’t think this kind of competition could happen these days because of the money players now make and the injury risk.) At the end of the summer there would be a tournament to determine the champion. Then there would be a draft and each team would select its players according to a lottery. That’s how I got to play with the Gaddies team. As I said, no one ever got paid to play in the Baker League, which was hard for many people—including a lot of players at first—to believe, or understand. But it was true.
One of the first things I picked up regarding playing in the Baker League came from Ben Warley, a six-foot-five shooting forward and guard from Washington, DC, who could really play. He was playing for the Anaheim Amigos in the ABA at the time—he was an All-Star in that league—and had once played for the Baltimore Bullets, the Philadelphia 76ers, and as a member of Tennessee State’s three-time NAIA championship team. Anyway, Ben had pulled me aside in my first year playing in the Baker League and said, “Good luck when you come here to play, Earl, but I’m going to give you a piece of advice.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“Don’t take the ball out of bounds.”
So I looked at him and said, “What do you mean, don’t take the ball out of bounds?”
Ben looked at me with a big smile on his face. Then he laughed and said, “Because if you take the ball out of bounds, you’ll never see it again!”
I thought that was strange until I was in my first exhibition game and the ball went through the hoop after the first shot, hit the floor and started bouncing. And it bounced and bounced and bounced until it stopped on the floor and everybody was standing around looking at the ball. Nobody picked it up until the referee did and he just gave it to the nearest player—which wasn’t me—and told him to take it out, which the pissed-off player did, shaking his head in exasperation. And I remembered Ben’s advice as I was running back up the floor and just burst out laughing. Man, that shit was funny and I never forgot it.
That first summer playing in the Baker League I did very well, scored a lot of points, about 32 or 33 a game. I also dished out a lot of assists and put on some great shows for the fans with my crowd-pleasing game. (After that summer, Sonny Hill and I formed a very close friendship and he became my basketball mentor. I could go to him with any basketball question or problem I had in my life and he was always there to counsel me. My relationship with Sonny remains a very special one to this day.)
After I finished playing in the Baker League late that summer, I stayed around Philadelphia for a few days before going down to Baltimore for my first pro training camp. When I arrived there in late August, I was ready to get down to the business of playing pro basketball and having a great year and career. But first I had to find myself a place to stay, to lay down my head at night, where I could sleep comfortably. I was without a car because I didn’t have enough money to buy what I wanted, but I did find a nice little apartment on North Avenue, near Druid Lake, right off Monroe. The apartment was in the back of a real estate office, which was like a brownstone. I had three rooms and I roomed with a guy named Malkin Strong, who was a second-round pick of the Bullets out of Seattle, Washington.
Malkin was a big strong kid, about six seven or six eight and 230 pounds. But he couldn’t play basketball at the time because he had injured his knee, an injury he never recovered from. He never played with the Bullets and eventually went back home to Seattle. But Malkin and I became fast friends while we were roommates, because we were together a lot doing community service work for the Bullets organization. Like we would go to different basketball courts and shoot around with the kids to promote the team. We stayed together in that apartment on and off until the season started.
Malkin was married to a white lady named Betty, who came down to be with him. Around this time I met a beautiful lady named Cookie at a party, and I started going out with her. But the four of us never went out to dinner or anything like that together, because when I did socialize I usually took Cookie to parties that my social fellowship, Groove Phi Groove, threw. The fraternity had started at Morgan State, which was in Baltimore, so there were a lot of my brothers around there. Then, when the season started, I moved into a place on Garrison Boulevard, in the Beacon Hill Apartments, near the Green Spring Apartments. It was a medium-sized one-bedroom apartment, and it was easy to get downtown to our home arena, the Baltimore Civic Center, from there. I had gotten a car by this time, a champagne-colored Pontiac Bonneville. I didn’t spend very much money—in fact, some people probably called me cheap—but I didn’t put myself on a budget. I just tried not to spend a bunch of money.
The Bullets’ regular training camp was out at Fort Meade, Maryland, on an army base, but the rookie camp was held downtown in Baltimore, and they put up all the new players in the Downtowner Motel on Reisterstown Road. The star player on our team was Gus Johnson, and I found out that there was always some rookie or new player coming to the Bullets’ camp with the specific intention of taking Gus’s job. Now, there were sportswriters who were always writing about some new guy that was supposed to be special and whatnot, you know, better maybe than Gus. That is until the new phenoms got to camp and went up against him and Gus would crucify them. Gus Johnson was a hell of a player, and after he got done with these new phenoms, the sportswriters would have to wait until the next year. And the embarrassed new players would be reduced to licking their wounded egos in the corner somewhere, after they were cut from the Bullets’ roster.
We also had characters at those camps like Dexter Westbrook, who was a six-eight forward from New York City and had played at Providence College with Jimmy Walker. He was a real smooth player who could handle and shoot the ball well, and he understood how to play the game. In the beginning of the rookie camp he was killing everybody with his basketball ability. But the longer the camp went on, the worse he got, until finally, after Gene Shue insisted he go for a checkup, he had to reveal to the coaches and to management that he had mononucleosis. Then they found out the reason he had mononucleosis was because he had a drug habit and was using heroin. Man, that was so weird! So he was forced to leave the camp and I haven’t seen or heard from him since. Personally, I was sorry to see him go because I thought he had a great game and he and I would have meshed very well together.
Then there was Ed Manning from Jackson State College in Mississippi. Ed was the father of Danny Manning, who led Kansas to the NCAA Division I national championship in 1988, became the number one overall pick in that year’s draft, and went on to play 17 seasons in the NBA. Anyway, Ed came to camp with this big old footlocker and he had everything he owned in there because he said he wasn’t going back to Mississippi. We called him “Razor” because he could cut off screens so well. He could also jump very well and was strong as hell. He had a nice little jump shot, and man, could he dunk the ball. I mean real quick. He was six foot seven, 210 pounds. He lived out of his
footlocker until he made the team, which he did after playing really well in camp.
Bobby Allen was another player in rookie camp. Bobby was from Arkansas, and man, could he really shoot the ball. He was about six eight, maybe six nine, really thin, and he had a pronounced Southern drawl. He would say stuff like “When is the honey coming to Kansas?” What? What did that mean? I used to ask myself. But Bobby lived around Baltimore. I remember seeing Bobby play, I think, in the Georgia Invitational Tournament. Come to think of it, Ed Manning played in that tournament, too. Bobby didn’t make the team but he was a really interesting guy.
There was also a guy at that camp named Jimmy Hall, who went to Morgan State. Anyway, he had a hustler thing going on, you know. He talked out the side of his mouth. He was a good guy—he wasn’t a thug—but he talked real slick.
Funny story about Jimmy. I remember that there was some kind of convention going on around the motel we were staying at during rookie camp, and there were lots of prostitutes hanging around. Jimmy was trying to pimp the girls on to guys on the team, trying to negotiate the money aspect of it, you know what I mean? The guys on the team were just trying to get their nuts up out of the sand, you know, get with a woman so they wouldn’t be so horny, because most of them were a long way from home. So Jimmy’s trying to help out by getting girls for some of the guys on the team (not me, because I had Cookie) and so I guess he was able to be the pimp of the rookie camp, to make a few deals. He didn’t make the team, though. I know he stayed in the Baltimore area because I would see him around. I think he became a schoolteacher.
