Earl the Pearl

by Earl Monroe

  Coach Shue didn’t say anything after I said that. We rode around some more, talking about our team and the game of basketball, and then he took me back home and dropped me off.

  But then on April 4 one of my all-time heroes, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., was assassinated while standing on the second-floor balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. The authorities said a lone white gunman named James Earl Ray had shot Dr. King with a rifle, although many people still don’t believe he acted alone. I didn’t know what to think about who really had him killed, because there were a lot of white people that wanted Dr. King dead, especially with all the important civil rights work he was doing at the time. He was in Memphis at the time of his death to support a strike by that city’s sanitation workers and planning a Poor People’s March on Washington for later that year that I was secretly planning to participate in. This was all in addition to his many speeches opposing the war in Vietnam, a stance I also supported.

  I’m not sure about that one-gunman theory, but it always seems that when something terrible like that happens it’s usually one lone, angry killer full of hate who does it and not a collection of people, you know, forces that are part of a conspiracy. Dr. King’s death sparked riots all across the United States. His assassination shocked millions of people in this country and around the world. I know it made me really sad to think about how a man of peace, who had received the Nobel Peace Prize, could die like that. For me it was shameful and I felt his death deeply because I loved what he stood for. I was also sad and disappointed that I never got a chance to meet him or to participate in one of his marches. His funeral, which I watched on TV, was very sad but dignified, and I will never forget the pain and noble sadness his widow, Coretta Scott King, displayed in every photo I saw of her at the time. But the pain of Dr. King’s death stayed with me and it was one of the reasons I decided that from that time on, I would participate in my own quiet way to give back something to the black community in America, and that I would start this while I was playing ball in Baltimore.

  In addition to Dr. King’s death, my first child, Sandy, a daughter, was born in Philadelphia in May of that year. Her mother was a girlfriend of mine who worked in our grocery store and lived up the street from my mother’s house. I got her pregnant when I came home once on a weekend from Baltimore in September 1967. I had met her when I was in college. Her name was Sheila and we would get together from time to time whenever I would come home from school. We were close. I was also seeing a lady named Gloria in Baltimore, and at the same time I was hanging with Cookie. Gloria and her sisters were these light-skinned young women with nice legs that always sat in the front row at Bullets games. They were all very pretty. I got Gloria pregnant in April 1968. Our baby, a boy named Rodney, would be born later in that year, in December.

  Now, there were a couple of funny things about going out with Gloria. One was that we broke up shortly after she got pregnant and she never told me she was pregnant. I had also—now, I know this will sound crazy—been going out with another woman named Gloria. But I decided I couldn’t handle seeing her any longer because it was just getting out of hand with her boyfriend threatening and stalking us all the time. So when Gloria would try to call me to tell me she was pregnant, I thought it was the other Gloria and I wouldn’t answer her call. My refusal to talk to her led to some complications between us that I will address later. Suffice it to say that things on the home front were getting a little complicated, and this was just a sign of my immaturity at the time. I wasn’t proud of my actions, getting two women pregnant, but I wasn’t ashamed of it, either. In retrospect, I should have known better because I hadn’t been raised by my real father and didn’t get to know him until I was already much older. But this fact didn’t register in my thinking at the time because I was just too immature and, yes, selfish about what I wanted to make a better decision. In the end, though, it was my responsibility because they were my kids and I was just going to have to figure out a way to handle it. I hoped I would grow from these mistakes and I did, but not before I impregnated another beautiful young lady named Linda around 1970. But more about that later.

  During late April of that year, I was one of three players on the Bullets—Bob Ferry and Chink Scott were the other two players—selected to travel to Japan as part of a USO tour. This was my first time ever traveling out of the country and it was an interesting experience. We took a flight from Baltimore to San Francisco, then another plane from there to Tokyo. In all, with both flights we spent 12 to 13 hours in the air, which is no joke for real tall guys like Bob and Chink (who were both six foot nine or six foot ten) and me being almost six foot four. Fortunately they provided us with seats that had legroom on all of our flights but we were still tired as hell when we arrived in Tokyo. Anyway, after we arrived we got into one of these little cabs and we were trying to explain to the driver where we wanted to go, you know, the name of the hotel, but he didn’t seem to understand what we were saying. So we’re sitting there with our knees bunched up under chins, mad as hell, and it’s looking like this driver is trying to take us on a slow ride into Tokyo. This pissed everybody off so Bob, not thinking the driver understood English, jokingly said, “If you don’t get us to the hotel in a hurry we’ll blow this motherfucker up again!”

  Well, the cab driver immediately stopped the cab, pulled over, turned around to Bob, and said, “You don’t talk about Japanese motherfucker! Japanese fuck you up!”

  Man, that cat was mad as hell with Bob. He wasn’t a big guy but he was ready to fight all three of us. You could see the anger in his eyes. He understood English real well, including everything Bob had been saying. We were shocked. Then he turned around and started driving again and we rode in silence to our hotel. So we got there and he drove off without even taking a tip. When we got to our little rooms we found out that we had to share bathrooms with everyone else on the floor. That, too, was different for us, though we got used to it.

  We were brought over there to visit hospital wards and troops who had been wounded in Vietnam. Our visits were supposed to encourage them but many of the troops were wounded so badly—very young guys with arms and legs blown off, burned so badly their faces had no noses or lips—it was very difficult for us. But the most traumatic visits for me were the burn wards. After a couple of visits I just didn’t want to do them anymore, though I continued to do the visits anyway. Now, I understood why we were there but I just couldn’t fathom seeing young guys alive one day, then the next day, when you come back, they’re dead. I had never been around anything like that before and it wasn’t something I was comfortable doing. It was hard and tragic for me to see young guys my age blown up, burned to a crisp, blinded and crippled for life. It’s not a pretty sight and I applaud people who can visit people in that kind of state because I know I don’t have the stomach for it. Aside from those visits we visited Guam and Okinawa as well and continued to make visits to wounded troops there. All in all we were there for over a week.

  During that time, obviously, we had an opportunity to go out and do some things. We visited a geisha house, which was an eye-opening experience for me, a guy who hadn’t been out of the country before, going overseas and seeing all of this. Every night we went out to dance clubs and in the ones where they had the most beautiful looking women we found out that they were really men made up to look like ladies. Every night I had been dancing with transvestites. Man, I almost threw up when I found that out. It was very frustrating, you know what I mean, thinking these guys were women and they were all men. Then again, it just taught me how naïve I still was at the time. So I told Bob and Ray that I was going back home. But I had to get a special dispensation from the late Vice President Hubert Humphrey to come back home because the tour wasn’t completed. So I got my dispensation and since I had a government rank of a GS-15 for the tour they put me on a transport plane that stopped in different places and it took me 26 hours to get back to Philadelphia. That trip showed me I wasn’t cut out for the military
. I applaud those guys who go into the armed services because I saw with my own eyes that they were doing a great service for the country, risking their lives and well-being by fighting wars to protect us over here.

  That trip was a heck of a learning experience for me; seeing all those young men wounded like that affected me deeply, gave me a different perspective about war, that we shouldn’t engage in them unless it’s completely necessary. I have the same thoughts about war today.

  Chapter 12

  PRESSING PEDAL TO THE METAL, FULL SPEED AHEAD: 1968 TO 1969

  BEING NAMED ROOKIE OF THE YEAR was something that I relished, because it was like a validation of Philly basketball, the Baker League philosophy, the “science of the game” approach, and Coach Gaines’s Winston-Salem style of playing, you know, to get out and run and create and be imaginative. For me, that’s what the Rookie of the Year Award affirmed, you know, a black approach to the way basketball should be played: with a whole lot of music up in the moves, a lot of rhythm like James Brown’s music or Miles Davis’s approach to jazz. Now that approach had gone national through me and my style of playing, had spread through the word-of-mouth drumbeat of real people—both black and white—who loved basketball and found my approach thrilling.

  Why do I say this? Because they were starting to come in droves, from the East Coast to the West Coast and from the middle of the country, to watch me play. It was something for me to behold, and you have to remember there was no ESPN, no highlight shows, no famous sports media personalities to push who they liked on the fans. No, it was the fans themselves who were voting for who and what they liked by buying tickets to come watch their favorite players play, and I was high amongst those they most wanted to see. It was Oscar Robertson, Jerry West, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, Dave Bing, Bill Russell, and me. That was something. Because when I first came into the NBA people on the West Coast only saw me when I played out there. Same thing on the East Coast and in the Midwest. NBC was the only national network that showed basketball games on a regular basis at that time, and they only showed games on weekends. The NBA’s relationship with television was just beginning back then. Really, it was in its infancy.

  Now, I don’t know exactly why the fans took to my style of playing, but I’m pretty certain it had something to do with the entertainment aspect of it. Like ordinary people and fans of basketball—and players—thought I was fun to watch because I was unpredictable in my approach. I think some of that unpredictability came from the way I kind of saw myself back then. There was a lot of trickery in my game. Like I would come down, spin left, then right, or I would fake like I was going to spin and then just keep on going straight. Or I might come down the floor and if I was juking or whatever the case might be, I would maybe fake my opponent with my dribble and by moving my body from side to side. Then the defender wouldn’t know which way I was going and I didn’t really know either, because with me it was all about improvisation. But if he leaned one way, that gave me the opportunity to go the other way. Then the defender wouldn’t be able to get in front of me. And that was the premise for all the shaking and whatnot, to see which way my opponent was going to go and then determine which way I would go by him.

  I don’t like to admit this, but I do know for certain that I was consciously trying to embarrass the guys I was playing against. But in a good way, you know? Because I always smiled at guys to let them know that what I was doing to them was just in jest. But I always wanted to beat my man and score so I could help my team win games, which was the bottom line. And I think the kinds of stuff that I did were all really predicated on what the defense would allow me. Plus, it all had a lot to do, as I have said, with improvising in the moment, being spontaneous and creative. That’s why I have always said that the way I played was like a musician plays an instrument in a freestyle-jazz-solo type of way. I always thought of myself as an artist when I was out on the basketball court. But what I wanted to do in the final analysis and after everything was said and done was to help my team win games. That was always my primary goal.

  So I think the fans really loved the way I played, because they could see I was having fun out there, being entertaining. And they were drawn to it, like people are to all great entertainers. So I think the entertainment aspect of my game had a lot to do with my growing popularity. People would come up to me and say they had never seen a player like me before. Sportswriters were saying the same thing in the articles they wrote. I was quickly becoming like a cult hero, and that was thrilling. But it also carried within it the seeds of downfall, of destruction, of people getting jealous of my success, you know, being envious and whatnot. A lot of people like to put those they love up on pedestals and then knock them off and bring them crashing down. But that wasn’t clear to me at first, you know, the responsibilities that a lot of quick fame brings with it. The pitfalls of that weren’t truly clear to me then because I was still growing as a person; I was only 23 years old and still a bit naïve. At that time I thought I was Superman, that there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do in the game of basketball, and at this stage of my development I thought I would only get better. And I came out of my rookie season with the mind-set that my life couldn’t get anything but better. Over time, though, I would begin to recognize I was wrong. But this wasn’t the time for that kind of thinking and so I just pressed on, you know what I mean? I just kept moving to the music of my own drumbeat.

  After lying around Baltimore with Cookie and partying for a minute, I had to refocus my energy, start conditioning myself to go up to Philadelphia to play in the Baker League. I had to keep my momentum going. Now, I have always thought that I felt the most freedom when I was playing in the Baker League, because in those games I could always be creative, imaginative, take risks not only with the shots I took but also with my ball handling, my razzle-dazzle passes, and the fans loved it. So I looked forward to going back home to try out new things there, and to seeing my family and friends and eating my mother’s great home-cooked meals.

  Then in early June, before I arrived in Philadelphia, Robert Kennedy was assassinated out in Los Angeles. I remember thinking, What is happening in the United States with all these political killings? First it was President Kennedy, then Malcolm X, then Dr. King, and now Senator Kennedy, who was running for president at the time. I started thinking that all these killings weren’t just coincidental, that possibly some unknown, powerful forces were coordinating all or some of them. But I couldn’t point any fingers at anyone because I was uninformed about these kinds of political things. But I did find it disheartening and interesting that all these murders seemed to target only left-leaning political leaders and not those who were more conservative in their beliefs. I did find that fact troubling, but hey, what could I do about it? I was only a young, naïve black basketball player, though I was really beginning to open my eyes to what was happening politically all around me and to the issues that would deepen my involvement with the progressive black movement in the coming years.

  That summer, however, I focused my mind on becoming a better basketball player going into my second NBA season. My Rookie of the Year season was now behind me and it was a great accomplishment. But, being practical, I was looking forward now, not backwards, and towards helping to lead my team to an NBA championship, which is every NBA player’s ultimate goal. So I felt that playing in the Baker League for the next couple of months would really help sharpen my game and focus my mental attitude toward the game in a very competitive way, and keep my game evolving. That was the way it was in the Baker League, with very skilled players putting on tremendous offensive shows, running up and down the floor scoring the ball in every conceivable way. The games were also very hard fought, with players trying to either gain or maintain their reputations. It was fantastic and I just loved playing there. Plus, I had great teammates like Trooper Washington, a six-foot-seven-inch forward who played on the 1968 Pittsburgh Pipers ABA championship team with the great Connie Hawkins, and Ty Britt, a six-foot-fo
ur-inch guard who played briefly in the NBA with San Diego. Both were from Philadelphia, and I had played with and against them on Philly playgrounds in the past.

  Now, the nature of these games, in my opinion, was a lot like famous musicians sitting in with bands playing in clubs all over Philadelphia and New York City back in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. They used to call those sit-in encounters “cutting sessions,” which meant that a great musician would go up on stage and duel against some other great player, just to see who could play better. Well, that’s exactly the way the Baker League was. You could lose your reputation in the blink of an eye to someone you didn’t really know, who would come in and shoot you out of the gym and embarrass the hell out of you. So you had to watch out for that. But the play there was fan oriented, meaning the players catered to the people who came out to watch them perform. And because the games were entertainment based, players could work out their imaginative moves there and either win the approval of the crowd or their disapproval, if they fell flat on their faces trying to do something that failed. Then you would hear boos and that wasn’t a good thing. But for me it was fun and highly competitive at the same time, and everyone had a sense of freedom playing there. Plus playing there always kept you alert to the possibility of failure, and helped you maintain your conditioning in the offseason.

  But I learned a lot there, too, especially from Sonny Hill, who people in Philly round ball and political circles call “Mr. Philadelphia Basketball” because he has done so much for kids and basketball in that city. Sonny just knows so much about the history of the game as it’s played in my city and all across the United States. I remember him giving me history lessons one summer about the Jewish influence on Philadelphia basketball, specifically regarding a particular team that called themselves the Philadelphia SPHAs—I had heard of them, but only in passing—which was an acronym for the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association. Now, the SPHAs were organized by a Jewish guy named Eddie Gottlieb, who could be considered the “father of the NBA.” See, the team dates back to around 1918 and an amateur team that was put together by Mr. Gottlieb (I think he played on the team, also) and two other Jewish friends of his, Harry Passon and Hughie Black. Then, in the late 1920s, the SPHAs defeated two of the best teams around, the Original Celtics (no relation to the modern-day Boston Celtics) and the New York Renaissance, also known as the Rens (a fabled all-black team) in two best-of-three series. First they beat the Celtics in three games, then the Rens in two. These wins really put the SPHAs on the basketball map. So during the 1920s and ’30s and into the mid-’40s, the Jewish players on the SPHAs, playing in the American Basketball League (ABL), dominated amateur and professional basketball with their skill and won 7 league championships out of 13, with players like Harry Litwack (who later coached Temple University for 21 seasons) and Moe Goldman leading the way.