by Earl Monroe
But out of all those guys who came to rookie camp, the only ones who stuck besides me were Ed Manning, Stan McKenzie, Roland West, and Tom Workman—a total of five players. I think management carried 12 players on our squad that dressed for games, maybe a couple more to round out the entire team. At least 50 or 60 players came to camp trying to make the team, though, so a lot of good players didn’t survive the cut. After the cuts were made, the five of us who survived moved on to start practicing with the veterans out at Fort Meade. But all of a sudden Roland West, a six-foot-four-inch guard from the University of Cincinnati, just disappeared, you know, vanished from camp. Nobody knew where he was. Well, we found out later that he had gone to Elkton, Maryland, to get married. It was really strange, and it didn’t bode well for him, either, because he eventually was cut from the team after playing in only four games. And he never played in the NBA again.
Now, we rookies went out to Fort Meade to compete against the veterans like Gus, Johnny Egan, LeRoy Ellis, Bob Ferry, Kevin Loughery, Jack Marin, Don Ohl, and Ray “Chink” Scott. These were names we had all heard of, so we knew we were moving into the big time and I, for one, was pumped. I had been waiting for this for a very long time and I was ready for the challenge. But the first practices weren’t anything special, you know, because we were just running through plays, getting to know guys I had already seen play at Convention Hall, where the 76ers played before moving to the Spectrum. I knew Chink Scott because he was from Philadelphia, and I had seen LeRoy Ellis play when he was at Saint John’s. I had met Bob Ferry because he had come out to scout me for the Bullets, but I didn’t really know him and had never played with him. Of course, I had watched Gus Johnson, and it was a thrill to finally meet him. I had watched Jack Marin, Kevin Loughery, Don Ohl, and Johnny Egan play, but I didn’t know them, either. But out of all those guys, I found that I gravitated to Gus most, because of his energy and charisma. I was cool with all the rest of the guys, most of whom were married. And because I was single that became like a natural social barrier.
Then, after a while, the level of play in the practices picked up and the competition got intense. Now I could see how hard it was to succeed at the NBA level, because all the players could play. But I relished competition and it just helped to raise the level of my own game. These practices were where the rookies were trying to show what we could do. If you were a rookie forward like Ed Manning, Stan McKenzie, or Tom Workman, you had to go up against Gus Johnson, and he would be out there beating you down every day. He’d come in and start flexing on us, because he was a real strong man, a really powerful player. He did that to Dexter Westbrook, too, before Dexter was forced to leave camp. Gus beat him down so bad it was pitiful to watch, but that’s just the way Gus was. By the time Dexter left camp he was a shadow of the player he had been when he first arrived. Much of that was due to the mononucleosis, but a lot of his collapse and demise was because of Gus relentlessly beating him down. Gus tried to do the same thing to Razor Manning, but Razor was able to hold him off. Razor was tough and had vowed not to go back to Mississippi, so he fought back and Gus grew to respect him.
Gus was hip, too. He had a gold star in one of his front teeth, wore great clothes, had style, sported a Fu Manchu goatee—I think he was the first player in the league to wear one—so all of the black cats on the team gravitated to him. Although he walked with a slight limp, he even made his walk look cool. Gus had a 48-inch vertical jump and could leap so high he could pick a quarter off the top of the backboard. He was a street cat, known to knock guys out and shit. But he was lovable, too. Still, you didn’t mess with him. Gus was very charismatic. He just drew people to him, and I liked that. He had a funny way of talking. When we went out to restaurants he had this thing about trying to speak all proper, like he would say in his real deep voice, “Give me one of them excellent steaks and cover it with some of that War Chester Shire sauce.”
Man, we would almost fall off our chairs with laughter when we heard him talking like that. But one evil look from Gus would shut our mouths up real fast and all laughter would quickly disappear from the air. Then Gus would grin at us and start laughing himself and everybody would know things were all right.
Gus had his flaws, too. Like we found out he had borrowed a lot of money from the team. When it came time to renegotiate his contract he couldn’t put his best foot forward because of all the money he owed management. So they kind of gave him what they wanted to pay him because they had him over a financial barrel. I know I learned from this example not to ask for any more money from the team than was in the contract, learned this early from watching how they treated Gus. Management would advance you the cash if they thought you were a valuable player, but the catch was you had to pay it back come contract time. So I just learned to live on the money I was being paid.
I also decided in my rookie year that I wasn’t going to get married while I was playing professional basketball. After seeing how some of my married teammates acted up out on the road and how their wives reacted to them after hearing rumors of other women, I knew I didn’t want to be a part of that. I already knew what was out there with women, so I didn’t want to be a dog to my wife, you know what I mean, with all kinds of ladies calling up my house. So I just stayed single, because I knew how much I liked being with many women and I realized my involvement with them would be a no-no if I was married.
I liked Gene Shue as a person and as a coach. Gene liked Gus Johnson, was a real Gus fan. Gene had one of those Johnny Unitas crew cuts, and he and the legendary Colts quarterback were probably the last two white guys in Baltimore to get rid of that hairstyle. People on our team used to call Gene “Jim Shoe,” like “gym shoe,” because he was in the gymnasium so much. He had a great love for the game and a good sense of what needed to be done. Plus, he was funny, too, had a very good personality that I could relate to. He was a very soft-spoken guy, analytical, and he could explain what he wanted players to do come game time. He talked basketball constantly, and tried to teach players on the fly as the practices went along. One thing about Gene was you didn’t really make the team until you played him one-on-one, because he was still playing ball regularly. Gene was about six foot two and was still in good shape, weighing around 175 pounds. He was born in Baltimore, played college ball at the University of Maryland, and was the third overall pick in the 1954 NBA draft. As a pro he made All-NBA and was a top scorer in the league, twice averaging better than 22 points in a season. Coach Shue had a pretty long NBA career—twelve years, I think—and played in five straight All-Star games from 1958 to 1962. So Gene wasn’t a slouch as a player.
Gene had a spin move himself, but his was done with two hands. Still, he was very slick with the ball and in the way he played the game. A lot of guys didn’t make the team because they couldn’t beat him one-on-one. (The next year, when Fred Carter came to try out for the team, he proceeded to hack Gene to death when he was guarding him. That’s how Fred got his nickname, “Mad Dog” Fred Carter. So he became a defensive specialist. Plus he scored on Gene, too, and that’s why he made the team.) I beat Gene when we played one-on-one. I didn’t hack him or nothing like that, but just shot the lights out on him when we played, you know, beat him handily, scored on him at will with my own slick spin moves and outside jumpers.
Gene was instrumental in helping me develop as a pro ballplayer because he let me play my game and then reined me in when he saw me doing stuff like making passes that many on the team—with the exceptions of Gus, Chink, and Kevin—couldn’t handle. Gene knew what kind of player I could be, what I might contribute to the team in terms of winning and people coming to see us play, which meant money in the team’s bank account. He knew and understood this, you know, the entertainment aspect of pro basketball. He knew that with my style I was going to put asses in the seats of the Civic Center once word got out. So he brought me along carefully, allowed me to play my game so that I would become an asset in the future. When I realized this, I understood that I was fort
unate to have a coach like Gene, because if I had gone number one in the draft to Detroit, I would have been in a very different situation.
Earl Lloyd, the Pistons’ top scout, was one of three blacks (along with Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton and Chuck Cooper) who broke the color barrier in the NBA in 1950. Lloyd really wanted to draft me number one, but Detroit’s management overrode him and took Jimmy Walker, a more traditional player and a safer pick, instead. Jimmy fit into the vision they wanted for their future team better than I did. Plus, he was a player from a predominantly white university who people had seen around the country, so it was an easy sell. And he was National Player of the Year! So why pick a player who averaged 41.5 points a game at a small black college, a guy with a multitude of weird nicknames, like “Slick,” “Black Magic,” “Einstein,” “Pearl,” and “Black Jesus,” over him? It was a sure shot. And they didn’t pick me and I dropped to Baltimore, which was great for me.
The same thing might have happened had I gone to another college instead of Winston-Salem with Coach Gaines, you know, because other coaches might have wanted to change my game. But both Coach Gaines and Gene Shue embraced the way I played. If I had gone to another pro team and they refused to let me play like I played, you know, and tried to marry my playground style to an on-the-edge traditional approach, my pro career probably would have been very different. But Gene let me flourish in Baltimore, so I’m indebted to him for letting me be me.
I got along with everyone on the team while we were practicing and playing games. But I socialized only with the black players because that’s just the way it was back in those days. Of the white guys on the team, I felt Jack Marin and I were the most different, because he was a right-wing guy from the jump. Now, Jack was really smart, and a very fine player. He was from Pennsylvania, too, but he was from a small town and I was from a big city. He went to Duke and had a certain arrogance about himself that might have turned some people off. Gus pretty much kept him in place, just by being Gus. But then again, Gus kept everybody on our team in check.
Gus was from Akron, Ohio, and had played on the same high school team with Nate Thurmond, who was six foot 11 and, like Gus, also had a Hall of Fame career. (I can’t even imagine how great that high school’s team must have been! To think about it now is even scary!) On the court and off the court, Gus was the go-to guy on our team. He could shoot the ball, had a nice little one-legged fadeaway shot, was a ferocious dunker, could rebound and really play defense: Gus always guarded the opposing team’s best player.
After a month or so of practicing together and trimming the roster, we finally had a squad of about 12 guys. When the season got under way I was the first player coming off the bench because Don Ohl, a white guy with a great jump shot, was the starter, along with Gus, Jack Marin, Kevin Loughery, and Chink Scott. I was averaging about 14 points a game coming off the bench for the first month or so of the season. But sitting on the bench proved a good thing for me—as it had my first year at Winston-Salem—because it gave me a chance to watch and analyze the pro game up close. I learned a lot from this. I could see the flow of the game, what the guys were doing, what was working, and what wasn’t working. When I did get into the game I had a feel for what we were doing as a team at that moment and how I fit into that in terms of setting up my teammates to shoot or picking spots to score myself. Like maybe I saw we had to speed the game up some, or slow it down, or maybe get the ball down into the hole—the pivot—a little bit more.
Our team was a run-and-shoot group of guys, and we didn’t have a lot of patience as a group because we had a lot of shooters. Like I said, Don Ohl was a great shooter, but he never changed the way he shot his jumper. So he would get it blocked over and over and he’d still be shooting it the same way, all the time, from the top of his head. Kevin was another great shooter, with a lot of energy, as were Jack Marin and Gus.
Gus’s nickname was “Honeycomb,” or “Comb” for short, because one day when he was in college someone in the stands had yelled out, after he made a great shot, “Wow, he’s sweet as a bee’s honeycomb!” That was his name amongst his teammates after that. Gus had a lot of flair in the way he played the game, and he was a very good passer as well. Like, he would get a rebound and we would be running at full speed down the court and Gus would throw a perfect behind-the-back pass to whoever was free and that player would catch it in full stride and shoot a layup for the score. Gus was something else. Even his opponents liked him.
But then in October or November I got the sad news that Mom had died in her sleep in Philadelphia. Her death set me back emotionally, because I have never really handled death well, especially someone as close to me as Mom was, or anyone else in my immediate family. But despite it being difficult for me—I have never liked attending funerals—I went up to Philly to attend her funeral with my mother and sisters.
The services were held at Chew Funeral Home, where she lay in state, and it was packed with mourners because she had a lot of friends. I stood in the back of the mortuary and didn’t go up to view her body in the open coffin they had Mom laid out in. I hate looking at dead bodies laying there all waxen looking and lifeless in a casket, so I never do it. I wanted to remember her like she was when she was alive, vibrant, full of humor and a great, loving spirit. People came up and told me she looked good in death, but I just didn’t want to see her in that way. Now, I don’t know if that’s a good thing, but it’s just the way I am.
After the funeral and all the crying and sadness, I had to pull myself together to go back down to Baltimore and focus on playing basketball again. That was hard to do for a week or two—Mom’s face kept jumping into my mind for a while, even when I was with Cookie sometimes, or playing in games—but eventually I was able to refocus my mind on basketball and the little things I had to do to get better as a pro.
The first part of my rookie season was all about the process, you know, learning the pro game and where I fit in with my teammates. One day, after we got through practicing, Coach Shue came up and said he wanted to talk with me about my passing. Now, what had been happening was that my behind-the-back and no-look passes were catching my white teammates by surprise and they were either not catching the ball or my dishes were hitting them upside the head. See, they weren’t used to playing like that, with a player like me who could pass the way I did. They were missing the passes even when they were wide open because they were used to traditional passes from their teammates, not these razzle-dazzle dishes that were coming from me.
Coach Shue pulled me aside and said, “Earl, now you’re a great passer and those are great passes you’re making. Creative and imaginative. But these guys are not catching your passes because they’re not ready for them. So you got to kind of hone them down. That way they’ll be able to see the passes coming and receive them. And in the end, when they can’t see them coming, they are bad passes because they’re turnovers and they hurt the team. What do you think?”
Now, I was shocked at first when he told me this, because I thought I was being a good teammate by making good passes to players who were wide open to make shots. I was even looking at them with my eyes to signal I was about to pass them the ball, but they couldn’t decipher what my looks meant, so they would miss the passes. It was frustrating, because they were wide open, all by themselves, you know what I mean? But I understood what Coach was saying. My passes were creating turnovers. They were surprising my teammates and that’s why they were dropping or not seeing the ball. This was now clear to me.
“I understand what you’re saying,” I told Coach Shue. “And I will try to make passes my teammates can handle from now on.”
Coach smiled. “Just hone them down a little until they get used to your style,” he said, “and when that happens you can go back to passing like you know how to do. I’m sure it’s all going to work out in the end for the better.”
We shook hands and everything did work out, just like Coach Shue said it would. But I did start harnessing my game a l
ittle more, shooting the ball in situations where my instinct was to look for a creative pass. Another thing that meeting with Coach Shue taught me was if I made a pass to a guy who couldn’t catch the ball or make a shot when he was wide open, those were bad plays. So for me it was important to know who could and couldn’t catch the ball and make the play, you know, get a good shot off and make it. Because there’s a lot that goes into passing the ball. You not only have to know who can make a shot if you give them the ball, but also where on the floor to get them the ball. These are things a lot of people don’t think of when they’re making a pass, and with Coach Shue’s help I was starting to implement them as a rookie.
After a while my white teammates did get used to handling my razzle-dazzle, behind-the-back, no-look passes. Eventually they were even looking out for me to make them, and I did a lot as the season progressed. I learned a lot from that brief conversation with Coach Shue and I began to really trust him as a very good coach for me after that, because he embraced and encouraged me in the way I played the game.
After we broke camp, Abe Pollin, who was one of the owners of the Bullets, invited everybody out to his country club somewhere in the Maryland countryside. Now, some of the white guys played golf, so they went their individual ways out on the course like they had some sense. But the black guys had never been anywhere near a golf course before. Some of us got into the golf carts, but I stayed in the clubhouse and just looked out the window at the beauty of the place because I never liked playing golf and didn’t know anything about the game at the time. So these guys were riding in the golf carts and playing hide and go seek with each other out where there were trees. They were running carts across the putting greens and one of the old white guys sitting in the clubhouse across from me saw them and said out loud to the manager, “What the fuck are those black guys doing out there! Get their asses off those greens and take them off the course!”
