by Earl Monroe
So they sent security to bring them in and that ended our stay at that country club on a sour note. Abe never invited us back again. But I liked Abe Pollin and his family, especially his wife, who was a very stylish woman.
Besides starting over me, Don Ohl also wore my old number 10 on his jersey. I had to wear number 33, and this kind of bothered me because I had worn number 10 for so long it had become almost spiritual for me (athletes are very finicky, almost superstitious, regarding the numbers they wear, and I was no different). But I took it in stride because I was a rookie and Don was a veteran. Plus he was a good guy. Our first game of the season was against the New York Knicks, on October 18, and we beat them 121–98 in Baltimore. This was a promising start for us, and I scored 22 points coming off the bench. Jack Marin had 24 and Don Ohl had 13. I think Willis Reed and Dick Barnett scored 22 each for the Knicks. I remember Walt Frazier didn’t play in that game—I don’t know why. I had been looking forward to going up against him, but that would have to wait for another day.
Sometime in late September or early October, Frank Deford, the well-known, very respected writer for Sports Illustrated, came down to watch me play and interview me. This would be the second story Mr. Deford had written about me for Sports Illustrated. The first one was a short article published on March 6, 1967, after I had scored 53 points in a game against Livingston College and reached the 1,000-point mark for the season, becoming one of the few college players to ever accomplish the feat. Now the Baltimore native wanted to write about how I was faring as a rookie in the pros, so he wrote another very favorable piece titled “It’s Earl, Earl, Earl, the Pearl.” It appeared in Sports Illustrated on October 30.
Then on October 21 we played the Boston Celtics, again in Baltimore, and we lost to them 125–109. Now, I must admit that playing against the Celtics was special for me. They were my favorite basketball team when I was growing up in high school, because Bill Russell and Sam Jones were on that squad. So I was a little bit in awe of them in that first game. I always looked up to Sam Jones because he came from the same college conference, the CIAA, that I had played in. Sam had been a star at North Carolina Central University and could really shoot the ball—especially that famous jumper he banked off the backboard from either side of the court. So I was too busy watching him the first time I played against him. But that awe evaporated after he treated me so bad that night, just shot me out of the gym. (But I vowed that the next time I played against the Celtics it would be different, because I was going to be ready to compete against him properly.)
The first time I saw an opening to go to the hoop in that first Celtics game, I did, beating my defender, Larry Siegfried, cleanly. I drove the lane for what I thought was going be a beautiful right-handed layup on the left-hand side of the basket, but the legendary, great defensive player Bill Russell came from seemingly out of nowhere and swatted away my shot! I couldn’t believe it! I hardly ever had any of my shots blocked because I got them off so quickly. A little later in the game I beat my man cleanly again and dashed to the basket and shot the same shot and smack! Russell did the same thing to me again. This time he looked at me, wagged his index finger, winked, and, with a little grin on his face, shook his head as he ran back up the court as if to say, “Welcome to the big time, kid.”
Now, I was really pissed off. A little bit later I saw that same opening and I put another nice spin move on my defender, left him nailed to the floor, drove hell-bent to the basket again from the left side. This time I had my eye out for Russell, so when he came to block my shot I ducked my head under his outstretched arm, put my body between Bill and the ball, switched the ball to my left hand, used the hoop as a screen, hung in the air until I was on the other side of the goal, spun the ball off the backboard with my left hand and into the goal for a score. Bill looked a little shocked by the move. I was elated, and as the crowd was cheering wildly, I turned to run back down the floor and hollered at Bill with a big grin on my face, “You can’t get ’em all, big fella!”
He looked at me and cackled ha ha ha with a big grin on his face. Wagging his finger, he said, “Yeah, but two out of three ain’t bad, rookie!”
Those were moments from my first season in the pros that I will always remember: my first game against two legends, Sam Jones and Bill Russell. Those moments let me know for sure that I was in the big time of basketball. They also taught me that with some seasoning I could be on the same level with these great players, and motivated me to demonstrate through my skills and my play that I belonged there with them. I was used to getting cheers, not jeers, after my career at Winston-Salem. So now I was going to bring that game to the NBA and make everyone take notice.
But a really annoying thing kept happening to me early in my rookie season, and that was the referees calling me for palming the ball when I made a spectacular spin move and scored (I later found out that they had never seen anything like it before—it was so quick—they just couldn’t believe what they were seeing with their own eyes, that it could be done without me doing something illegal). So I complained to Coach Shue about it and he took the refs aside, gave them some films to watch of me making the move, and after looking at them they realized I wasn’t palming the ball and stopped calling that rule infraction on me.
There were two other important early-season games that had a significant impact on my psyche and the way I would play the game in the future. The first game was when we played the Detroit Pistons on November 3 and lost at home 115–113. The other was the next night in Detroit, where we lost again, 127–118 (I think these marked the last two games of a six-game losing streak that had begun on October 27). Dave Bing, Terry Dischinger, Dave DeBusschere, John Tresvant, Happy Hairston, Eddie Miles, one of the identical Van Arsdale twins, Dick—his brother Tom played for the Cincinnati Royals—and of course Jimmy Walker were some of the players on that Pistons team.
What happened was Eddie Miles, a guard known as “The Man with the Golden Arm” because he could shoot so well, picked me up defensively at the half-court line when I brought the ball down. Back in those days a defender could hand check his offensive opponent, you know—this was outlawed in 1994—he could put his hands on the offensive player’s back, stomach, legs, arms, sides, and hips to try and stop him from scoring. So Eddie did this to me. Now, I had played against this style of defending a little on the playground but not in high school or college, and in that second game it bothered me a lot. His tactic prevented me from getting into the normal flow of my game because he played me so close—or “in my jockstrap,” as we used to say—when I came into the front court. Eddie got inside my head when he guarded me like this and I didn’t get a chance to do anything, to shake him, you know, to put my spin moves on him and get free to score. In the first game I think I scored 12 points, but in the second game I was shut out. This really perturbed me, you know what I mean? It really did, because this was the first time I had ever failed to score a single point. There was a big fat zero by my name in the box score.
On the bus ride down to Cincinnati, where we were scheduled to play our next game, I kept visualizing Oscar Robertson and the way he played offensively. I remembered “The Big O” used to put his back up against his opponent as he dribbled the ball in the front court. Then he would back the defender down to get closer to the basket and shoot his turnaround jump shot over him from 15 to 18 feet away from the hoop. So I said to myself, Okay, I’m going to try that.
Fortunately for us, Robertson didn’t play in that game, and his absence from the Royals’ lineup helped us beat them convincingly, 122–100. I bounced back from getting shut out with a 22-point effort. When we returned to Baltimore I asked Gus, who had hands of steel and was a great, hard-nosed defensive player, to guard me and put his hands on my back and on my hips. What I learned from those practices with Gus was that when he put his hands on my hips he was actually leading me around the court, wherever he wanted to guide me. So after a while I was able to fight off Gus’s pressure and back him
down, though it was hard because he was so strong. Once I learned this move I was able to back Gus down, get into position, turn around, use my pump fake, and shoot my fadeaway jumper over him.
The next time I played against Eddie Miles, on December 12 in Baltimore, I implemented my new move at the beginning of the game. I started at half-court, where he picked me up, turned my back on him, backed him down to the foul line (I got there quickly, too). Then I pump faked. He went up to try to block my shot, and when he was coming down I went up over the top, shot the ball, and scored. Wow, I said to myself, this is something else! As I was running back down the floor, I glanced over at Eddie and he looked a little confused. He had never seen this kind of game coming from me before, because previously I was either shooting long jump shots or slashing to the basket. This was a new Earl, and he wasn’t prepared for a Big O–style game from me. So this was my whole hookup for the rest of the game. I got 32 that night and we won going away, 140–117. Eddie scored 18, I think. And as I was walking off the floor after the game, Eddie told me I had played great.
“Yeah, don’t even think about it,” I told him, “because in the last game I got zero points. So over the two games that means I’m only averaging 16 points against you now.”
He laughed, but the last laugh would be coming from me because I scored a lot of points against him and Detroit for the rest of the season. I liked playing against the Pistons because it was fun going up against them, and it’s possible that I might’ve drawn some extra motivation from their having bypassed me at the top of the draft. I don’t really know if that’s true, but I do know I have always believed in getting revenge. Anyway, in my first season against Detroit, after I had no points against them earlier, I scored 32, 13, 37, 35, 35, and 37 points before culminating with a 49-point outburst on February 24 in Baltimore. We always had really entertaining games against Detroit because they had really good guards, starting with Dave Bing (who is now the mayor of Detroit) and Jimmy Walker. And I always enjoyed playing against those two guys.
I spent the bulk of that first NBA season learning and steadily getting better as a player, and over time, Coach Shue gained more and more confidence in me when I was in the game because of the flow and chemistry I was bringing to the team. We were running and scoring more easily when I was in the game, and that made everyone happy even though we were still losing. I was adjusting to playing against great players every night as opposed to only a few times a season when I was in college. We were still in last place, but I could sense the team was coming together and jelling as a unit.
We played Philadelphia on Christmas Day in Baltimore and lost 108–105 in a close game. I scored 13 points and Kevin Loughery led us with 21. Hal Greer and Billy Cunningham each had 27 points and Wilt had 15 and a ton of rebounds and blocked shots. I was a little sad that I couldn’t go up to Philly to be with my family and close friends that day, but I was seeing Cookie more regularly at this time and we were getting along very well. Still, playing professional basketball was taking up more and more of my time with the constant practicing, playing, and traveling. So I couldn’t be with Cookie as much as I would have liked to, because I really enjoyed being with her. It was hard sometimes, though it was something that I had to adjust to as a professional.
Then one day in late January I woke up and was greeted by the news that Baltimore had traded Don Ohl to the Saint Louis Hawks. That was shocking. But I guess Coach Shue and management had seen enough growth in me as a player and had enough confidence in me to make that important decision; I liked Don, but I was overjoyed now that I knew I’d be starting. I was also happy to be getting my old number 10 back.
But then I had to endure some unwanted (and unwarranted) media attention because of a story that Charles Rayman of the Baltimore Evening Sun wrote about me. What had happened was that on January 17 we had played the New York Knicks in Baltimore and lost a very tight game, 111–109. I scored 26 points that night but missed a last-second layup that would have tied the game and sent it into overtime. After the game I was really down on myself for blowing what had been a makeable game-tying shot. So I was sitting in front of my stall in the locker room, about to go to the shower, when Rayman came up to me to ask some questions. But instead of talking to me about the game, he pulled out his pad and said, “So, I hear you got your draft papers today. Are you going into the service?”
“Naw, I’m not signing up for no draft,” I said, shocked by his question. “I’m not going to no damn service!” Then I just brushed it off. And the next day the headline of a front-page story in the Sun read “Monroe Refuses the Draft,” which was completely untrue.
The truth is that when I received my draft papers I went down to take my physical and was declared 4-F because I had bad knees. I had hurt my knees before in an accident when I was working at the Knitting Mill and drove up to New York City with Wilkie. I had borrowed the car and was driving through Harlem and was hit by another car when I ran a red light. My car jumped the curb, hit a light pole, and was totaled. My legs jammed up under the dashboard and my knees were injured as a result. That was a scary event, but I walked away relatively unscathed. After all the police reports were filed, we took a bus back to Philadelphia, where all the legal stuff was worked out.
After the newspaper story I began getting letters from retired servicepeople about how they were going to do this and that to me and make sure I joined the Army and whatnot. I was perplexed by this turn of events, you know. People talking about how privileged I was being a black man playing pro basketball and making money. A lot of people were pissed off at me for a while, and the way I figured it, it was all because of Muhammad Ali’s refusal to go into the Army in April of 1967. A lot of people were trying to put Ali and me in the same boat and tar and feather two famous black men with one stroke. But I never liked war anyway, and to paraphrase Ali, I didn’t know anybody in Vietnam who was trying to enslave or lynch me in my own beloved country over the years. So the whole thing just got on my nerves and didn’t make sense to me.
Then Alan Goldstein, who also wrote for the Sun, came to interview me after a game toward the end of January and he really pissed me off, also. Now, I liked Al, we got along well. But when he started asking me about being inducted into the Army, I got so angry about the topic that after answering a couple of questions I got up and left the dressing room. Then Goldstein wrote a story for the Evening Sun that was published on February 1, in which he reported that I had passed my Army examination and was 1-A, which, again, wasn’t true. I was angry about all of this, so I stopped speaking with most sportswriters after that.
Some writers are always trying to distort what is actually being said for whatever reason, you know, trying to write something sensational, because they might not like you. And sensationalism is known to sell newspapers. Whatever. Either way, I was beginning to see how the media could possibly work against me. So I just tried to be careful from then on about what I said to reporters.
My scoring had been really picking up after the first of the year, but following the trade of Don Ohl on January 20, my scoring soared. Over a span of 13 games from that date to February 13, I averaged 39.8 points a game. But on February 13 I hit the jackpot, scoring 56 points against the great Jerry West in a thrilling 119–116 overtime loss to the Los Angeles Lakers (West scored 47 points in that game and Elgin Baylor added 32, while Gus had 18). I remember being very relaxed before that game. Cookie came over to my apartment and made my usual pregame meal of spaghetti and meatballs. Then she came into the bedroom and we started messing around and we had some great sex, which made me a little bit late getting down to the Civic Center.
Whether it was the spaghetti or the sex or something else entirely, I was very much at ease with myself that night. I felt really good, like I could do almost anything, you know what I mean? I always looked forward to playing against Jerry—and his teammate, Archie Clark—because he was not only a great competitor, but also one of the greatest players of all time, both offensive
ly and defensively. But I was on fire throughout that entire game, hitting on drives to the basket, long jump shots—which would have been 3-pointers had that game been played today—bank shots I spun in off the backboard, dipsy-doo layups down the lane, little fadeaway jumpers in the paint. I mean everything was clicking. And Jerry and Archie couldn’t do anything about it but watch. It was something.
After I scored those 56 points on the Lakers, everyone in the league started to notice me and my game. I remember in that game, even before it started, when the two teams were saying hello and shaking hands before tip-off, Jerry said to me, “Hey, Ben.”
Now, I didn’t know who he was talking about. I thought maybe some psychological shit was going on, you know, Jerry playing games with my mind. So I just said, “Hey, what’s up?” Then we shook hands. With both of us scoring like crazy once the game started, it seemed like a mutual admiration society as we complimented one another after making great shots. But every time I would come down and score, Jerry would say to me, “Nice shot, Ben.” And he kept calling me this throughout the entire game.
I was getting puzzled now. And since I didn’t know what or who he was talking about, I decided not to pay him any mind. (I found out later that he was calling me “Ben” after another black player, Ben Monroe, who had played for the University of New Mexico and was drafted by the Lakers!) Later, after the game, Jerry came up to me with this big smile on his face, shook my hand, and said, “Real great game, Earl.”
“Thanks, man,” I said. “You played a great game, too.”
Then he trotted away, grinning like a Cheshire cat. And I thought to myself, He knew my name all along!
