BALTIMORE BULLET EARL "THE PEARL" MONROE--BLACK MAGIC
Four decades later, Baltimore has fond, bittersweet memories for Monroe
Hall of Fame basketball player believes his trade to Knicks changed his legacy
March 21, 2012 By Don Markus, The Baltimore Sun
As an entertainment entrepreneur, Earl Monroe is engaged in putting together a reality television show with a woking title of "What If?" As a Hall of Famer who wears a ring he received for being one of the NBA's top-50 all-time players, Monroe asks the same question of himself.
What if he had not been traded from the Baltimore Bullets to the New York Knicks early in the 1971-72 season?
"I would have been revered as a different type of player, who would have accomplished all the things that I started out to accomplish," Monroe, 67, said this month, sitting at a table at Samos Restaurant in Greektown.
The league's Rookie of the Year in 1967-68 coming out of Winston-Salem, Monroe went from being one of the NBA's most prolific and creative scorers to someone who had to share the ball and the stage with Knicks guard Walt Frazier.
Monroe, who had forced his trade for Dave Stallworth, Mike Riordan and cash when a salary squabble with Bullets owner Abe Pollin went public, said longtime friend Sonny Hill, who ran the famed Baker League in Monroe's hometown of Philadelphia, had warned him about giving up what he had in Baltimore.
"He said, 'All this stuff you want to do as a player, you're not going to be able to do if you go to the Knicks,' " said Monroe, who had averaged better than 24 points a game as a Bullet. "I know he said that because we just talked about it the day before yesterday. I told him that 'I'm a ballplayer, I can be in any system.'"
In forming what was dubbed "The Rolls-Royce Backcourt," Monroe had to give up a lot more than his No. 10 jersey worn by Frazier for No. 15, which still hangs from the rafters of Madison Square Garden.
"It was hard giving up a lot, because when I went to New York, I gave up my team," said Monroe, who went into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1990 as a Bullet. "It was somebody else's team; it was Clyde's team. When you have your own team, you know when to take over games, you know when to feed people to keep them happy. Going to New York, I had to learn when to do that. Even more so, when not to do stuff."
Monroe recalled how when he returned home to Philadelphia after that first season in New York, after averaging what was then a career-low 11.4 points a game playing with bone spurs in his ankle — "I pretty much played on one foot," he said — his friends joked that they didn't recognize him "because you're not Earl." Certainly not the playground legend many called "Black Jesus."
Though he and Frazier combined to lead the Knicks to the NBA championship in 1972-73, Monroe's career was never the same. Only during a three-year stretch toward the middle of his nine-year stint in New York did Monroe average over 20 points and show glimpses of what fans saw in Baltimore.
By then, his knees were nearly shot and he was well on his way to 33 different surgeries, most recently a 12-hour back operation last month.
"I probably scored more points in four years in Baltimore than I did in New York," Monroe joked.
Monroe has lived in New York since he retired in 1980, and his music production company, Pretty Pearl Records, has evolved into Reverse Spin Entertainment, the name synonymous with the move Monroe flummoxed countless defenders with over the years.
"My whole game was being where they were not," Monroe said.
Having given up his role a few years ago as a radio analyst on Knicks broadcasts — "It got to the point where I couldn't take it anymore, they were [so] bad," he said — Monroe said the current group of NBA point guards does not hold much interest for him.
"I don't really see the cunningness, I don't see the knowledge of the game the way it used to be," he said. "I just attribute that to the fact that you have a lot of younger guys who come into the league early and it takes awhile for them to really find their way. When you talk about championships, you never see a young team win a championship. It says something for a guy staying in college for four years."
Monroe acknowledges that he recently found himself watching his former team again when Jeremy Lin took over running the point.
"He's been great for New York," Monroe said. "When you look at it, it's been like 21/2 weeks. He changed the whole culture about basketball and what people looking at basketball is about. People said it's not going to continue, but I don't see why not. It's a matter of being a leader, and that's what the Knicks have always lacked."
Monroe, who was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes in 1998, returned to Baltimore last week as part of a 20-city tour to help promote diabetes awareness in restaurants, still has a special affection for his first pro city. He is confident that the Bullets would have been even more successful had he stayed.
Like others, he thinks about what might have happened if Pollin's team had eventually become a box-office success instead of moving to Landover and eventually to Washington, where they became the now-woeful Wizards. It might have been Pollin's wish to bring pro basketball to his hometown, but Monroe knows what would have happened on the court had the team stayed.
"We would have won championships," Monroe said. "They did a great job of bringing in other people. Archie Clark came in that year. Phil Chenier was drafted that year and he was in the backcourt with Archie when I left. We would have had pretty good teams."
Monroe smiled broadly.
"You wonder," he said.
What if?
Before the arrival of "Magic" Johnson there was another "Magic" -- "Black Magic," also known as "Earl the Pearl." He was Earl Monroe, a dazzling ballhandler and one-on-one virtuoso who made crowds gasp with his slashing drives to the hoop.
Monroe joined the NBA in 1967 and parlayed his talents into a distinguished 13-year career. He was part of a changing of the guard in the NBA, arriving at a time when high scorers like Dave Bing and Jerry West were showing that the backcourt could rack up points just as effectively as the center position. He finished with a career average of 18.8 ppg, however his first five seasons with the Baltimore Bullets were the best of his career. Monroe averaged over 21 points per game every season in Baltimore, including a league-leading 25.8 ppg in 1968-69.
Monroe, the No. 2 choice in the 1967 NBA Draft, was chosen by the Baltimore Bullets, a franchise that had not enjoyed much success. During his initial season the team showed little improvement, finishing in the Eastern Division cellar. Monroe, however, was a standout. He was named NBA Rookie of the Year after averaging 24.3 points to finish fourth in the league in scoring. In one game against the Los Angeles Lakers he tossed in 56 points.
The Bullets' fortunes improved after they surrounded Monroe with a strong roster that included All-Star Wes Unseld, bruising forward Gus Johnson, talented Jack Marin, and guards Kevin Loughery and Fred "Mad Dog" Carter. Monroe was at the head of the pack, leading a run-and-gun attack that was fueled by Unseld's quick outlet passes. During the next three seasons Monroe averaged 25.8, 23.4 and 21.4 points, respectively, leading the Bullets into the playoffs each year.
Lacking great speed and leaping ability, Monroe compensated with a feathery jump shot and a patented spin move that he initiated by bumping up against an opponent and making contact before spinning away to launch one of his unorthodox shots. Most of all, Monroe made his mark with his uncanny moves to the hoop. Employing a hesitation dribble or perhaps a double-pump or triple-pump fake, he would slip past mystified opponents and drop in layups.
Observers said that watching him play was like listening to jazz; his moves resembled free-floating improvisations, riffs that took off in midflight and changed direction unpredictably. "The thing is, I don't know what I'm going to do with the ball," Monroe once admitted, "and if I don't know, I'm quite sure the guy guarding me doesn't know either."
Fans and pros alike loved Monroe for his array of entertaining shots and his special flair. "Put a basketball in his hands and he does wondrous things with it," said Bullets Coach Gene Shue. "He has the greatest combination of basketball ability and showmanship." In a New York Post interview, Baltimore teammate Ray Scott was less circumspect: "God couldn't go one-on-one with Earl."
In 1968-69, Monroe averaged 25.8 ppg to help the Bullets jump from last to first in their division. He also appeared in the All-Star Game for the first time, scoring 21 points and dazzling viewers with his moves. The season ended abruptly, however, when the Bullets faced the Knicks in the playoffs and were buried in four straight games.
At season's end, Monroe was rewarded with a berth on the All-NBA First Team, the only such honor of his career. The Bullets and the Knicks hooked up again in the 1970 playoffs, tangling in a wild seven-game division semifinal. The Knicks prevailed a second time as Monroe starred in a losing effort. He fired in 39 points in a 120-117 double-overtime loss to the Knicks in Game 1.
Monroe continued to be a key figure in the series of Bullets-Knicks playoffs that followed -- a bitterly contested, long-running saga in which the two clubs faced each other in six consecutive years from 1969 to 1974. The series offered exciting games and dream matchups, the best of all being the duel between Monroe and the cool, stylish Walt "Clyde" Frazier. Both stars had entered the NBA the same year (Frazier was drafted by the Knicks three notches below Monroe) and each was called upon to guard the other during games.
Defensive wizard Frazier often battled Monroe to a standoff, but he likened guarding Monroe to "watching a horror movie." After one skirmish Frazier marvelled, "You'd have to knock him out to stop him. He gets his body between you and the ball so you can't get at it. Yet, he seems so relaxed. He doesn't show a bit of pressure."
Amazing as he was, Monroe failed to satisfy many basketball purists, who tended to downplay his overall value. Although he had led Baltimore to winning seasons and had carried his college team to a national championship, some perceived Monroe as simply a show-off who cared more about scoring baskets than about winning games.
Monroe never had a chance to prove his critics wrong in Baltimore. On Nov. 10, 1971, the unthinkable happened: Monroe was traded to the hated Knicks. During the offseason he had wrangled with Bullets management over his salary, and he had considered defecting to the American Basketball Association's Indiana Pacers.
In 1989, Monroe was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and in 1996 was named to the NBA 50th Anniversary All-Time Team. "If for any reason someone were to remember me," he said during an interview with HOOP, "I hope they will remember me as a person who could play the game and excite the fans and excite himself."
There's little doubt that anyone who saw Monroe play will ever forget him. Earl the Pearl helped herald a new era in basketball, a more exciting game that showcased dazzling individual skills within a team context. He proved that you could win-and have a magical time doing it. (NBA.com)
