Earl the Pearl

by Earl Monroe

  And that’s what I’m talking about here: understanding the game, the way it has been played for years. I mean, the Oklahoma City Thunder, which is a very young team, seems to understand this. But as tremendous as Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and Serge Ibaka are as players, they still need veteran players around them to win a championship. That’s what their loss to the Miami Heat demonstrated last year in the NBA Finals. They came close, but the team as a whole—even with James Harden last year—was inexperienced and they made mistakes that I don’t think a veteran team would have made. A season later, they are more experienced as they’re going down that championship-winning road, battling it out together, and a lot better equipped mentally—even without Harden, who they traded to Houston—to make a run for the title. I think they will do very well. But generally it takes teams even as talented as the Thunder one or two times in the big series to win a championship, though we’ll see what happens with them this year.

  I want to move on to talk about how referees back in my day exerted their own influence on the way the game was played (I can’t talk too much about the referees today because I’m not playing now and I am not familiar with them). Back in the day, everybody cursed at each other—players, coaches, referees, and fans. I mean it used to be like an orchestra of cursing. If the referee called something on a player, the player cursed him out, whatever the call was. Cursing was almost considered normal, like you’d hear a player underneath the basket telling another player, if he was pushing and shoving him too hard, “Motherfucker, get off me.”

  As for me, I had a habit of going almost crazy if a call went against me, you know, after I had established myself in the league. Especially if the call resulted in my fouling out of a game, which didn’t happen very often. That just made me go crazier because I knew I was out of the game—the call had been made and there was no going back on that. So my thinking was I might as well get my money’s worth by calling the ref an asshole or a son of a bitch! Things like that.

  But there was one incident with referee Earl Strom in the latter part of my rookie season that stands out in my mind in terms of my confrontations with NBA officials. Now, Earl Strom was what I would call a confrontational referee; there were several of them. Richie Powers was another one, though Strom was the worst. Anyway, these guys were always exerting their authority in ways that weren’t really necessary. Like they were always in your face, almost enticing players to hit them, their fists balled up, their faces red as beets, daring players to do or say something so they could bust you. That kind of shit. Usually, I would just let it slide. But this time, Strom called an offensive foul on me that I totally disagreed with. Now, I had the ball up under my arm and Strom asked for it. So I held the ball out and he thought I was handing it to him. But instead, as he reached for it, I pulled the old Harlem Globetrotter trick of throwing the ball toward him and then spinning it back on the back my hand. And as the ball was spinning on the back of my hand, it was spinning in his face. Well, this pissed Strom off so bad he threw me out of the game for embarrassing him. He jumped up in the air with his arms and hands over his head and screamed, “Get out of here, Monroe! Get out of here!”

  Then there was Sid Borgia, whose thing was calling traveling all the time. He was a little short guy who would, with his arms all spread out, make his call on someone with a high-pitched scream, “Na, na, na, na, na, na, na! Gimme the ball! Gimme the ball!”

  Man, Sid was a character. But Mendy Rudolph was cool. He was a real slick dresser, smooth, suave, and he was a great referee on top of all of those other attributes. I liked him a lot, on and off the court. But Earl Strom? Man, he would antagonize entire teams and cost us games with his calls. If he favored a certain team, then the fouls would go their way, and many times it would cost the opposing team the game. So teams had to know who was refereeing each night so we all knew what kinds of calls were going to be made for or against us.

  But referees definitely influenced the game back then because some of them were consistently making bad calls that cost teams games and championships, in my opinion. That’s not cool, but no one ever talks about this in any meaningful way. And yes there was a lot of prejudice against black players. That’s normal because there’s racial bias in American society, especially back then. But all of this was definitely swept under the rug. Plus, there weren’t many black referees back then, and of course no women. (Jackie White became the league’s first black referee during the 1967–1968 season, followed by Ken Hudson, James Capers Sr., Hugh Evans, and Hue Hollins in the early ’70s).

  Today the league has tried to impose consistency on referees, and it’s a good thing. But there are going to be bad calls, because referees are human and they still don’t like certain guys. That’s always been the case. It used to be that if a team was playing at home, that was worth at least a few points, but I don’t know if that’s true today. Still, there are always hard-asses, you know, refs that players can’t talk to because they just want to fight with you for whatever reason. I don’t really know. But what I do know is that the game needs more guys like Mendy Rudolph if we’re talking seriously about making the game better and fairer.

  Recently I have been thinking about changes to some of the rules that might make the game more interesting. Now, I know some of these ideas might be controversial, but here goes. First off, I think it might prove interesting if the baskets were raised some, maybe another six inches, because today you’ve got a lot of guys who are so tall they can just stand under the basket and dunk the ball without even jumping. So I think if the basket was raised, those players would have to jump a little bit to keep their advantage. It would also make the smaller guys have to get up higher to dunk. Now, obviously, guys that shoot jumpers and whatnot would have to change their shots and shoot them a little differently, too.

  I also think perhaps they should drop the rim about six inches lower in the women’s game. Because then you’d have young girls and women dunking more and that would make their games more exciting. I’ve seen games where the basket was at nine feet six inches, and the girls were dunking and the game was more exciting. It’s only the purists, so to speak, who don’t want changes. The fact is that the game has been changing gradually since its invention in the late 19th century, like with the introduction of the shot clock and the three-point line. Like anything else, the game has to evolve to meet the changing needs of the athletes and the fans. If it never changed, we’d still all be shooting at peach baskets.

  Then there’s that extra step players take when they tuck the ball and hop between guys, then take that step and go to the basket and score. This has become part of the game. It’s another way to give players a little more leeway to score. There was a time when players weren’t scoring the way they are now, and the NBA put some sanctions in to help increase scoring. It makes the game fun to watch.

  Back in the day they allowed hand-checking, and today they don’t. Players who scored a lot of points back then got them despite being hand-checked all over the floor. They also did it without the benefit of a three-point shot, and that definitely would have helped players like myself and others who could shoot the long-range jump shot. I played for one year, 1979–1980, after the NBA first initiated the three-point rule, which it borrowed from the old ABA, and I didn’t take one, just for kicks. I like the three-point shot, though. It adds excitement to the game. But the problem with it is that teams can shoot themselves out of a game just as easily as they can benefit from the shot. Like, a team is making three-point shots and is in the game, but then they start missing them and the other team comes back. So it becomes a seesawing affair, with the team that was ahead now being behind because they missed too many threes and because they relied so much on those shots falling that they’re now playing catch-up. So, it can be both a good and a bad thing. But on the whole, I like the three-point rule. As far as the no-hand-checking rule, today the referee will blow the whistle if you so much as touch a player, so it’s much easier to score tod
ay than it was back in my day.

  Back in the 1950s, when the NBA finally let black players into the league, the powers that be didn’t want there to be any black stars. So the great black players who came into the league as offensive threats—guys like Woody Sauldsberry, Sweetwater Clifton, Andy Johnson, Chuck Cooper, and Earl Lloyd, the first black man to play in the NBA—were told to become defensive players. When Cleo Hill was drafted by the Saint Louis Hawks in 1961, he was a great scorer, and he scored a lot of points in Saint Louis during the preseason. But the white star players on the Hawks at the time—Bob Pettit, Clyde Lovellette, and Cliff Hagan—didn’t like that Cleo was scoring even though the coach, Paul Seymour, loved Cleo’s game. So the players started boycotting Cleo by not passing him the ball, and when Coach Seymour threatened to fine them for doing this, management fired him, and the new coach, Andrew Levane, reduced Cleo’s playing time so drastically that his scoring average dropped from 10.8 points a game to 5.5. Eventually he was cut from the team and blackballed, never to play in the NBA again.

  And this was the case all the way down to when Bill Russell came into the league, though they didn’t have to try and limit Russell’s offensive production because he was mainly a defensive force from day one. But Sam Jones was a great scorer, totaling more than 20,000 points in his career. He’s a Hall of Famer, but we don’t hear that much about him today when the critics discuss those great Celtics teams that won 11 NBA championships. Sam was a clutch shooter and one of the main reasons Boston won all those championships, along with K.C. Jones—another defensive specialist—and Satch Sanders. These were black players who were integral to Boston’s success back in the day, even though the Celtics kept their black quota intact for years (the old line amongst NBA coaches was to play “two [black players] at home, three on the road, and four when you’re behind”).

  Broadcasters and sportswriters also like to employ coded language with regard to the black players they cover, such as when they refer to black players as “beasts” or as “athletic.” Conversely, they are always calling white guys “thinking players” or “heady players,” which reduces the game and its participants to a bunch of absurd stereotypes.

  That’s one of the main reasons I was one of the producers of the documentary Black Magic—to bring an African American perspective to the early great black coaches and outstanding black small-college players from back in the day. I mean, hardly anybody ever discusses the enormous contributions of my college coach, Big House Gaines, or John McLendon, who won three consecutive NAIA championships at Tennessee State. Why? Because they were black coaches, that’s why, and because they both coached at small black schools. A lot of people don’t want to hear this kind of talk. They’d much rather sweep it under the rug, because there aren’t too many films around that document the greatness of these early great black coaches and players. Mostly the information is passed down by word of mouth. The same thing is true of early great black football and baseball players, because no one was filming them. There isn’t any film of Wilt Chamberlain’s NBA record-setting 100-point game in Hershey, Pennsylvania; there’s only a radio tape of an announcer calling the game and the eyewitness accounts of the 1,000 or so people and players who were at the game, and most of those people are dying off now.

  Before I turn my attention to some of the players I think are amongst the greatest to ever play the game, including a few of the young stars who are competing today, I want to tell a little-known story about Magic Johnson and I possibly playing together toward the end of my career. Back in late 1978 or early 1979, I was on a flight from Portland back to New York when this white guy sitting next to me said, “You’re Earl Monroe, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, that’s me, every day of the year.”

  So we both laughed and then he said, “Do you know about this player named Magic Johnson who plays in Michigan at some college out there?”

  “No,” I told him. “Who is he?”

  “Well, he’s about six feet eight and he plays just like you. He’s going to be something else!”

  “Really?” I said to him, because I wasn’t a big follower of college basketball at the time. “I’m going to have to check him out.”

  That conversation stayed with me, first because he said this player played like me and second because he said his name was “Magic,” which was one of my old nicknames back in Philadelphia. So I made it a point to check out who this new “Magic” was. When I first saw him play, I could see the similarities in style because of the great way he handled the ball, his attitude toward the game, and the way he ran his team. I mean, he was in control of everything! And I thought to myself, Shit, this brother is something else! So I started following him just to see how far he would go. Then he and his team, Michigan State, beat Indiana State and their star, Larry Bird, in the NCAA finals that year. So, although I didn’t know him, I just liked his personality. He seemed like such a nice guy with that big, bright smile of his. Then he came into the league that fall and I had an opportunity to play against him, in what turned out to be my last year in the pros. Now, there were rumors circulating at the time about me being traded to the Lakers. So the Lakers had my good friend from Philly, Walt Hazzard, come and visit me in the locker room. He wanted to know what I thought about being traded to LA to become a caddie of sorts, you know, a guide to walk Magic Johnson through the pros and cons of pro basketball.

  I could see it was getting close to being over in New York for me, so I said, “Yeah, Walt, I’d welcome that.”

  I thought that going to LA, you know, La-La Land, would be a different kind of scenario for me, because I was interested in getting involved with music and film after I got through with playing basketball. So the next time the Knicks went out to LA, Walt came and asked me the same thing. So I told him again that I was interested and after that I thought it was going to happen. Then someone told me that Jerry West, who had been coach of the Lakers and now was serving as a scout for them, had nixed the deal.

  Now, I don’t know why it didn’t happen. Jerry and I have always gotten along and as far as I know everything was good between us. I’ve never had a conversation with Jerry about this, and I guess that’s my fault. Sometimes people might hear things that are somewhat negative about someone somewhere along the line, and maybe Jerry heard something about me. But I have no way of knowing what it was that killed that deal. I’m very sorry that it didn’t. I would have loved to have played with Magic Johnson and to have capped my career with another championship.

  Now, I want to turn my attention to listing some of the greatest players—in my opinion—to play the game of basketball in my time. My list dates from 1960 until the present day, and I will first list the best big men and then move on to forwards and guards. I said in an earlier chapter that I think Wilt Chamberlain is the greatest player I ever saw. Wilt was from my hometown, Philadelphia, though that’s not the reason why I think he was the best. The reason is that he still holds more than 90 NBA records. In his prime he could do everything: run, jump—some say he had a 50-inch vertical leap—rebound, score, play defense, block shots, pass. He just was a great, great player. He was big—seven feet one inch—strong—he weighed 275 pounds—agile, and quick. In 1962 he averaged 50.4 points and 24.7 rebounds a game. He even led the league in assists one year. He changed the game with his presence when he was young. They widened the lanes from 12 to 16 feet because of Wilt; players shooting free throws had to stand behind the line until the ball hit the basket, because Wilt used to jump from the free throw line and dunk the ball. A standing jump! But beyond all that, Dip was the reason basketball players today are making big money in the NBA, because he was the first cat to demand that the owners pay him. He knew that he was the primary reason people were filling up arenas, because they wanted to see him play. And Wilt felt that if the owners made money, then he should, too. So they paid him. I think it was called “the Wilt Chamberlain Argument.”

  Today, “great” players are measured by how many cha
mpionships they win. This is one of the arguments they make for Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, and Magic Johnson. That’s cool. But here, my judgment of “great” is rooted in a player’s individual ability, and on that basis Wilt, for me, is the most dominant player who ever played the game. Case closed. I mean, he has records that will probably never be broken, and he won two NBA championships. Plus he was an incredible athlete, a high jumper who also ran the 400-meter dash. He was intelligent and a very generous person who left a lot of money to charities without being public about it. He also had a very large personality—witness his claim of having had sex with more than 20,000 women—he was very outspoken and proud, and he didn’t suffer fools lightly. So he probably pissed off a lot of people with his opinions regarding certain things. But there isn’t any doubt that he had truly transcendent, unsurpassed talent as a basketball player, and that’s why he tops my list.

  After Wilt, the most dominant big man for me was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. From the time he was Lew Alcindor, he had big-time game, and aside from Wilt, he was the one, though I thought he was actually afraid of Dip when he first came into the pros. I think Wilt kind of intimidated him early on—though Wilt did that to everyone, so Kareem wasn’t alone in that regard—because of Dip’s weight and strength advantage. Dip was seven one and Kareem was seven two, but Wilt outweighed Kareem by 50 pounds. I don’t know exactly why Kareem was intimidated, because he had that great sky hook, and that was definitely an equalizer for Wilt’s strength—a truly lethal offensive weapon. And with the sky hook, Kareem didn’t have to be physical or play underneath the basket with Wilt; all he had to do was shoot that sky hook, and that was a game changer. See, the sky hook revolutionized the game, and it’s interesting to me that no big man of today has mastered that shot, because if they did they would be unstoppable. Kareem also had a nice little soft jumper, he could shoot free throws well, and he could really dunk the ball. He revolutionized the game, especially the college game. I mean, because of him they even banned dunking on the college level until a few years after he graduated. And then he changed his name to a Muslim one. Some other black NBA players did too, like Walt Hazzard, Don Smith, and Charlie Scott, who once famously said, “But you can call me Charlie Scott in the league, though.”