And today with his grandson still styling at age 68. (Getty Images)
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Earl the Pearl: My Story
by Earl Monroe with Quincy Troupe
Rodale
In 1973, the Knicks were one game away from winning the NBA championship. Earl Monroe was on top of the world — a superstar guard on the court, a celebrity in New York City.
Monroe and his girlfriend, Tina, were walking to his Rolls-Royce outside Madison Square Garden when they came upon “three big, nasty-looking, heavyset white cats.” Though they wore Knicks hats and shirts, they seemingly didn’t recognize “Earl the Pearl.”
“They looked at us and then one of the guys pushed me, punched me in the jaw and called me a n – – – er,” Monroe writes. “I was shocked. In Manhattan?’’
Monroe had experienced plenty of racism in his life, but here, now, by fans of his own team?
Tina pulled him away, but an enraged Monroe got into his car and pulled out the gun he stored inside. Instead of heading directly to the airport where he was supposed to meet the Knicks for their flight to Los Angeles, he cruised the area around the Garden looking for his attackers.
He never found them and, with Tina’s prodding, Monroe eventually made it to the airport — albeit late — where the Knicks were holding the flight for him.
Monroe was still angry the next night when the Knicks played the Lakers. But he channeled that anger onto the court, something he said he had always been able to do, scoring a team-high 23 points as the Knicks won the title in five games.
It was the Knicks second NBA title in four seasons. But it was the first for Monroe, who celebrated in low-key style — ordering room service in a Los Angeles hotel room with roommate Dean Meminger.
“That night I slept as peacefully as a baby, without a worry or a care in the world” writes Monroe in his new memoir. He had lost his mother, Rose, a few months earlier. He had made it on a team no one expected him to play for.
“It was a beautiful ending to a long journey. And though I wished my mother could have shared it with me over the phone, she was there with me in spirit, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
It was a title that almost didn’t happen for Monroe or for the Knicks. He had been traded to the team early the previous season after a contract dispute with the Bullets, but had yet to really settle in.
He had spent the first four years of his career butting heads with the Knicks as the heart and soul of the Bullets. “Earl the Pearl,” as Monroe was widely known, was one of the most dynamic and exciting players in the NBA.
After demanding a trade out of Baltimore, Monroe was surprised to learn the Knicks, in those days the Bullets’ most bitter rivals, were interested in adding him to their cavalcade of stars. Initially, he nixed the deal because Monroe, whose team had knocked the Knicks out of the playoffs in a bruising seven-game series the previous spring, didn’t see how he could switch sides like that.
Too much bad blood, he thought. Too much Walt Frazier.
Frazier was clearly the leader of the Knicks and, as Monroe had been in Baltimore, a point guard accustomed to having the ball in his hands. After joining the Knicks, Monroe had taken “a backseat” to Frazier, the slick-dressing All-Star known as “Clyde” who had led the Knicks to the 1970 NBA title. Many said the two would never co-exist in the same backcourt. Monroe, so used to running his own show, had doubts himself.
After a few days, however, he changed his mind, joining the Knicks during that 1971-72 season, one that would end with a loss to the Lakers in the NBA Finals. A full season later, bothered by sore knees and bone spurs in his feet, Monroe, who with the Bullets controlled the basketball as if it were a yo-yo on a string, was still unsure of his role in the Knicks universe.
He was away for the team for about a week following his mother’s death, and the drive back from Philadelphia to New York gave Monroe some time to think.
“So, on the drive, I decided I was going to dedicate the rest of the season to the memory of my mother, though I didn’t tell anybody this — I just kept it to myself,” Monroe writes. “I also decided I had to become more like ‘Earl the Pearl’ again, when my knees and bone spurs allowed it. I wasn’t in New York because I was Earl Monroe, but because I was ‘Earl the Pearl’ or ‘Black Jesus.’ So I had to become ‘the Pearl’ again.’’
Monroe returned to the Knicks and did just that. While the team sputtered down the stretch of the regular season with a 13-11 record, the Knicks, with Monroe and Frazier forming the perfect complement, won what remains their most recent NBA championship when they beat Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain and the Lakers for the title.
Monroe would play nine seasons for the Knicks, retiring after the 1979-80 season, a season in which he writes he was nearly traded to the Lakers to become a mentor to a youngster named Magic Johnson.
Monroe would be named one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history and he would be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. His No. 15 jersey hangs from the rafters in Madison Square Garden.
Not bad for a kid from a tough area of south Philadelphia who was raised by a single mother after his father walked out when Monroe was little more than a toddler and didn’t reappear until his son was already a college basketball star. By then, Monroe had long been telling people his father, Vernon, had died in the Korean War.
Violence was a fact of Monroe’s young life and while playing in his neighborhood when he was 5 or 6 years old, he saw one man stab another to death and then try to rip the victim’s heart out of his chest. The killer ran when he noticed a lot of people watching, including Monroe and his friends who had been playing basketball across the street.
Monroe, who would father four children by four different women, also writes, he had “sex” — his quotation marks — for the first time at the age of 9. The girl was a year younger.
Monroe always did like the ladies and to have a good time. While he favored Courvoisier, he writes he tried angel dust once, at the Baltimore apartment of Colts defensive end Bubba Smith.
“The next thing I knew I was somewhere else looking back at myself,” he writes. “I couldn’t move . . . Everything I saw was, like, jumping up and down and in slow motion. But I wasn’t in control, and I’m a control freak. . . . Chicks were rolling around naked on the floor and then coming up to me and there was nothing I could do.”
Somehow he and his car made it back to his townhouse.
“And I promised myself that I would never, never smoke anything like that again,” he writes. “And I didn’t.”
Monroe developed his singular playing style on the playgrounds and believes a victory in a one-on-one game with another local legend established his bona fides as the top basketball player in Philadelphia.
“That win not only gave me a lot of satisfaction but also gave me a reputation to protect,” he writes, calling that game the “turning point’’ in his basketball life.
Despite his success on the court, college scholarships were in short supply and, after what he described as “a lost year” between high school and college, Monroe enrolled at Winston Salem State Teacher’s College in North Carolina. It was a culture shock for someone from the north who, while used to a certain amount of prejudice, was ill prepared for life below the Mason-Dixon Line with its segregated water fountains, bathrooms and mind-set.
He wasn’t totally unprepared, however.
Among the few possessions Monroe stuffed into the bag he packed for college was a .25-caliber semiautomatic he slept with even after he arrived at the all-black school.
“I wasn’t about to take any stupid stuff from racist white people if I could help it,” he writes.
But he experienced his share of stupid stuff anyway.
There were run-ins with legendary coach Clarence (Big House) Gaines, who was also black, but called the darker-skinned Monroe “Chocolate’’ until Monroe stopped answering to it. There was the night cars full of Ku Klux Klan members chased him while Monroe made a wrong turn in Virginia. There were overzealous police officers, who didn’t like seeing a black man at the local bus station or a group of young black men driving in a car together. And, of course, there were opposing fans.
Monroe writes he believes racism caused him to be left off the US team for the 1967 Pan American Games despite his averaging 41.5 points per game as a senior, leading Winston Salem to the NCAA Division II championship and excelling at the Pan Am trials. The coach, Jim Gudger, thought Monroe’s game was “too street, too black, too playground’’ for his taste.
“That hurt a lot,” Monroe writes of being left off the team, “left a scar in my memory that has lasted even until this day. I’ll never forget it.”
dburke@nypost.com