by Earl Monroe
Chapter 16
THE DEATH OF MY MOTHER AND THE NBA HOLY GRAIL: 1972 TO 1973
THE FIRST THING I DID when I returned to New York after the finals was to schedule surgery to have the bone spurs on my left foot and ankle (it was true that I had two spurs) removed. I knew it would take about two months to rehab after the surgery, so I was determined to have it done as soon as possible so I could be ready for the Knicks’ training camp in September. This meant I had to have the surgery done in time for my rehab to be completed by the beginning of August. That would give me a month to rest my ankle and relax before training camp started. Having this surgery and doing the rehab also meant I couldn’t play in the Baker League for the second time over the last three summers, and that was disappointing. So I called Sonny Hill and told him my decision. He understood my situation, but I knew he was disappointed as well, because my presence in those games was very important to him and to the fans. I knew that, but I had to take care of my health first so I could play again at a high level in the NBA. So that was that.
I called the Knicks’ trainer, Danny Whelan, who I had gotten close to over the past season, and asked him to recommend a surgeon. He put me in contact with the Knicks’ team doctor, Andrew Patterson, who agreed to operate on my foot and ankle on June 20, 1972. Danny Whelan had helped me a lot with my bone-spur problem over the past season by expertly taping my ankle to ease my pain, so I trusted him. Anyway, I had the surgery and everything went well and I decided to return to Kernan Hospital rehab center to work with Bill Neill again. So I drove down to the Baltimore area in my Rolls. And since I had gotten rid of my townhouse and liked staying by myself, I got a room at a Holiday Inn on the Parkway near Woodlawn, Maryland, where Kernan’s rehab center is located. I stayed there for almost three weeks. I had a cast on my foot for 10 days, so I went back to my apartment in New York and then commuted back and forth down to Kernan until midway through August, seeing friends—and, for a minute, Cookie—while I was there.
Now, things had changed since I left Baltimore, because I had met and started dating Tina, though Cookie didn’t know it. Now, like I said, I was still seeing Cookie. As a matter of fact, we had gotten engaged to be married that summer, in June 1972. She had come up to New York and gone to Bergdorf Goodman to pick out her wedding dress. She had ordered all the bridal paraphernalia like bridesmaid dresses and engraved invitations and had booked a photographer, a caterer, and a venue for the wedding. But since I’d met Tina I had changed my thoughts about getting married to Cookie, because a lot had happened between us over the years. Like all of her indiscretions with men and also mine, with an array of different women. So I just wasn’t feeling her like I used to, especially after Tina came into the picture. Tina was a one-man type of woman and I appreciated that. There was no drama with her. She was very independent, never wanted anything from me because she always wanted to make her own way. That was the way she was. She used to always like to say, “I don’t want to owe anybody anything!” And she meant it. I was very impressed. I’ve always liked strong, independent women. That’s always been very important to me. She wasn’t like a wham, bam, thank you ma’am type. But what she was like was I don’t need to have you, my brother, you know what I mean? So chill. She was from North Carolina and had been doing a little modeling in New York. In fact I remember seeing her in a poster with the actor Richard Roundtree. So it took a long while for us to really get to know each other.
So after Cookie came up to Bergdorf’s and made all those arrangements and then went back to Baltimore, I called her one day in early June and said, “Hey, as much as I’d like to do this, I can’t do it now. I just can’t see myself doing this because I’m up here in New York now and things are different, you know? And I don’t think this is something that’s going to be good for us right now.”
I had to put the emphasis on “right now” just in case she thought I wasn’t serious. She was so pissed off she hung up on me. And her family was pissed off as well. See, Cookie was a very beautiful woman and she wasn’t used to not getting her way. But I wasn’t used to it either; we were both spoiled in terms of being used to getting whatever we wanted. And her family probably thought, Here’s this black bastard leaving our daughter at the altar. You know what I mean? I liked her family, especially her father, who everybody called “Sarge” because he had made a career out of the army before retiring. I liked her mother, too. She drank a lot and I know she was calling me every nasty curse word under the sun. So I called my mother and told her my decision, and although she really liked Cookie—so did my sister Theresa—Ma said, “Okay, if that’s the case, cool. If that’s what you want to do, you just make sure you’re making the right decision.” I told her I thought I was, even if I did feel a little bad about treating Cookie the way I did. But I knew our relationship wasn’t going to work out good for either of us and so I thought it was best to just end it before we got into a marriage that I know I would have been sorry to be in. So that’s why I broke off the wedding the way I did. Quickly and cleanly.
I told Cookie that I would pay for all of the expenses incurred for the wedding, which I did. I just thought it was the right thing to do. So from that day Cookie was out of the picture for me and my main squeeze became Tina. And during my rehab period, when I was going back and forth from New York down to Kernan and the Baltimore area, I saw a lot of people I knew while I was living there. I had a good time for the most part, even though I couldn’t walk too well. Things were a bit different now that I wasn’t playing for the Bullets anymore, but for the New York Knicks—the Bullets’ enemy—instead. From some people, though, I felt an ambivalence, you know, almost like I was still a Bullet. But at the same time, everybody knew I wasn’t. Still, the feeling around Baltimore was definitely different toward me now. When I was playing for the Bullets it was like, “Oh, Earl, what do you want, man?” La-di-da-di-da. Now people were more reserved. And from some of the guys I actually sensed that they felt I had betrayed them, that I was a traitor for forcing my way out of Baltimore the way I did. But I couldn’t do anything about that now because that’s what had happened, you know. I couldn’t take it back. So in my mind I’d just moved on, though some of them hadn’t.
Still, some of my guys, like Lenny Clay, my barber, were always there for me. That’s why I gave him my Eldorado after I got my Rolls, because Lenny always had my back. And Gus Johnson was still there, too. Even though he had been traded to the Phoenix Suns in April of 1972, he still had a place in Baltimore. It hurt both of us that he had been traded, because he had been a Bullet for so long and had been the captain and the soul of the team. The reality of it was hard for us to swallow, but it was what it was. So while I was there we’d shoot the shit and whatnot, see some girls, and it was all good. But at the same time it was sad as well, because we had once been so close. I saw Linda and my daughter Danielle while I was down there, and saw Gloria and my son Rodney, too. I just saw different people periodically while I was rehabbing there and enjoyed being with my friends and spending some time alone as well. I would sit in my hotel room, order room service, watch TV, and I was good. But I made sure I ordered everything early enough—before 8:30 p.m.—because you couldn’t get any food after that.
So, all in all it was a great stay for me. It kind of cleared my head and helped me to realize exactly what I had gotten myself into in New York City, what kinds of things would be available to me now besides just playing basketball when I went back. It just brought into view the whole entertainment thing that I wanted to get involved in after my playing career was over. Because the Big Apple was a center of the entertainment industry at that time, you know, way more so than Baltimore. So by the time I left the Baltimore area and came back to New York to prepare myself for training camp, my mind was in a great place and I was ready for it.
I had experienced the city somewhat in my first season with the Knicks, but I wasn’t really ready for all the different things it had going on. Now I was going back with a different
perspective and I’d have a chance to see where everything really was, the places where I could fit in. So I had a renewed spirit when I came back and I was ready mentally and spiritually to deal with whatever presented itself to me, both in basketball and in my life outside of the game. So the first non-basketball thing I did when I got back to the city was to renew my relationship with Tina. Everything with her was as great as I had remembered and that just fueled me, you know what I mean, lifted my spirits up and prepared me to face each and every challenge, each and every day. That’s the way Tina was. She was special and being with her made me look at my life positively every day.
But even though I really had a great feeling for Tina old habits die hard. I still was single and though I really liked Tina I wasn’t even thinking about marrying anyone. So in July, on a Friday night, quite by accident, I went to a party up in Harlem with some old friends from Winston-Salem and met a lovely young woman named Marita there. We struck up a conversation and she intrigued me with her attitude, her intelligence, and the way she looked. Marita had a nice Afro and a great body. So I asked her about herself and she told me. Then she asked me about myself and I told her I was a basketball player.
“Oh, you’re a basketball player?” she said. “My favorite player is Elgin Baylor!”
That intrigued me because Elgin was one of my favorite players, too. So, I asked her to dance—I could only dance slowly because of the surgery on my foot—and man could she move. I found out she had been born in the Central American country of Honduras, but had come up to the United States at a young age, first living in San Antonio, Texas, with her mother, who was a registered nurse, before moving to Brooklyn where she grew up. Her mother and father were divorced, so her mother was raising Marita and her two older brothers, Richard and Raymond.
Anyway, after a while I left with my friends to go to another party over in New Jersey and I spent the night and most of the next day hanging out with my friends over there. Then we came back into the city and for some reason went to another party over on East 88th Street in Manhattan at Flo Anthony’s townhouse. Anyway I hadn’t changed clothes, so when I walked in lo and behold there was Marita, looking fresh as a daisy. So she looked at me and said, “Are you homeless? I see you got on the same clothes you had on last night.”
I thought that was cold-blooded but I just laughed it off because she was right; I hadn’t changed my clothes. So we talked again and I found out she was going to school at Manhattanville College, majoring in political science, and that she was going to be going to law school at Antioch in Washington, DC, the next year. So I got her number and we sort of stayed in touch periodically after that until she graduated from Antioch in 1976.
After having a great summer of fun I started focusing my mind back on basketball and preparing my mind for going to training camp. When it came time to go to training camp in September I was in a great state of mind. My left foot and ankle were still a little tender, though they were much better than before. Now I could cut better and do my spin move with little pain and implement my back-down maneuvers. So I was feeling pretty good and hoping to get into a groove offensively speaking, you know what I mean? Anyway, I had been thinking back to how the Lakers had routed us in the finals the season before and how Gail Goodrich just kind of ran by me and had his way scoring because I had been limited by my foot. I had been starting in place of Dick Barnett by the playoffs, but I just wasn’t effective at all in that series. So I was in a very redemptive mood going into the 1972–1973 season because I had a lot of shit on my plate from the last season that I wanted to rectify in the one coming up. I knew the system, but I thought training camp would be a great place to really get Red Holzman’s philosophy down pat like the guys who had been with the team awhile had. Plus, since I knew I would be starting, I wanted to really jell with the other starters on the squad, like Clyde, Dave, Bill, and Jerry Lucas, since Willis wasn’t going to be ready until later in the year.
In September, during training camp, I received a letter from a Knicks fan. It was addressed to Earl Monroe in care of the New York Knickerbockers, Monmouth College, Long Branch, New Jersey. I thought it was odd to receive mail at training camp, but nevertheless, I opened it after practice one day when I was alone in the dorm where we stayed. It was a letter from a fan wishing me luck and hoping that I had a great season coming up because he (and all his friends) thought I was the most exciting athlete in professional sports.
It went on to say that some people are born soloists, and if it turned out that there was a problem adjusting to the team play of the Knicks, he hoped it wouldn’t worry me because my style and natural gifts were far more thrilling than anything else around. The truth is, the letter said, that the Knicks should bend over backward to adjust to me.
This threw me for a bit of a loop, but it gave me hope and faith that someone believed in me and that everything would be all right. At the end of the letter the fan wished me and the Knicks a great year and said that no matter what happens, to the real basketball fans, I was the greatest. Then it was signed, “Woody Allen.” I was really floored. And flattered. Woody Allen, writing to me? My God! I relished the thought of Woody Allen thinking about me, and then all his friends as well—wow. Shit, I slept very well that night and continued training camp with new hope and vigor. I even thought of one of my family names, Allen. Could he be a distant relative? Hell no.
Red’s approach to the game revolved around hitting the open man. That was his philosophy of the game. So it wasn’t hard for me to buy into that philosophy because I had been doing it for my whole career. It was just that after I became a big-time scorer in college and then in the NBA, I had gotten used to my teammates passing the ball to me to take whatever shot I thought was appropriate because I was the main man, you know, the go-to shot maker and principal scorer. So I had to change my mind-set here a bit, though I hadn’t had to during the past season because I wasn’t healthy. Now, basically I was. So that’s what I worked on in camp, creating a new mind-set for myself to distribute the ball to the open man and dropping my old one-on-one habits. See, we were still getting used to playing with each other, especially me, because I had been injured so much during the past season and couldn’t really practice as much as I would have liked. So I had to get my chemistry together with this team, had to fit the cadence of my music into the concept of their more team-oriented game.
While I worked on fitting myself into the Knicks’ system, I also used training camp as an opportunity to really get to know the guys on the team beyond Dean Meminger. Like I said, Dean had become my best friend on the team while we sat at the end of the bench together. We would just talk a lot down there when we weren’t in the game and over time we grew very close. Dean was a very confident guy—some called him cocky, even brash—but I liked that about him because it reminded me of myself in that regard. Everybody on the team called him “the coach” because he always had an answer for every basketball question. “The Dream,” as he was also called, could talk trash with the best of them, and he also liked a good party, like I did. He was from New York and knew his way around, and with both of us being single, we had some great times together. We’re still close friends to this day.
I had good relationships with all the guys on the team. We related well to each other. Many of the guys on the team were married and I wasn’t, so I didn’t hang out with those players much because after practice, playing games, and traveling, they spent most of their time with their families when they got back to New York. We had a very good professional relationship, though, and on the road we got along very well, which is one of the reasons why I think we had a good team—because we were not only good players, but we mixed together very well when we were traveling, talking about politics, music, and culture. We were a bunch of guys who cared about things going on in the world and that bonded us closer, even though there were some differences between us, just as there are with everyone else in the world. And that closeness remains even today. That’s one o
f the great things I have taken from that experience of being on that team is the fact that I played with great guys I feel would go to bat with me back then and would do the same today. Now, that’s rare.
Willis Reed was our captain. He was always concerned about everything and everybody and he was our enforcer, too. So if anything went wrong anywhere, but especially out on the floor, Willis would be there to take care of it. He was also a very caring guy who was a role model for a lot of guys throughout the league. He was a blue-collar type of guy, hard working, and he and Dave DeBusschere represented working class people in New York. They were both great warriors who came to play every night.
Dave was a tremendous individual all the way around. Very steady. One of the things I admired about Dave is that he always said what was on his mind so you didn’t have to think about it; it was always right in front of you. Bill Bradley, despite coming from an upper class family in Crystal City, Missouri, where his father owned a bank, and then going on to school at Princeton before becoming a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, was a guy with a lot of heart. And he could really play basketball. But the real reason I gravitated towards Bill was because I always saw him as a person who really cared and who was a lot like me in that regard (I have always had a certain reverence toward Bill Bradley, and think after leaving basketball and becoming a United States Senator, he would have been an even better president of this country than he was a senator).
