By Shaylyn MacKinnon
On the basketball court, Earl Monroe’s dazzling, jazz-like style earned him the nickname “The Pearl.”
But his journey to the Hall of Fame had its share of bad bounces, Monroe told fans at Drew University’s In the Game lecture series this week.
Like the time at a diner near his college, Winston-Salem State in North Carolina, when a man informed the African American star: “We don’t serve your kind.”
“And this was the first time I was really confronted with this. I’m from Philadelphia, you know I’m used to race riots and all that, but nobody’s coming to me and telling me this kind of stuff. So they had to violently carry me out of this place,” Monroe told series host Ira Berkow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning sports columnist for the New York Times.
Berkow recalled how Monroe was passed over for an all-star tournament in 1967, despite his clearly superior credentials, because coach Jim Gudger believed his style to be “too street, too playground, too black.”
The Civil Rights movement was in full swing, and Monroe felt “in the midst of it all” in North Carolina. He volunteered on voter registration drives, and saw poverty and enthusiasm that made him resolve to do more.
“I would listen to Martin Luther King and his speeches were like poetry to me, they filled me up, and it made me feel good and it made me feel like I was part of this,” Monroe told an audience comprised largely of people old enough to remember his 13-year career.
He started with the Baltimore Bullets in 1967 and concluded with the New York Knicks in 1980. Both teams would retire his uniform number.
Race factored into his coming to the Knicks.
Before learning of a potential trade to New York, he attended a locker room meet-and-greet with the American Basketball Association’s Indiana Pacers in Indianapolis.
Monroe witnessed Roger Brown and a few other players remove guns from a space above their lockers, because “the Ku Klux Klan was there and this was their protection,” he recounted.
He found the nearest phone and called his agent to say he could not play there. Instead, he won a championship at Madison Square Garden in 1973.
When a Drew student asked Monroe’s opinion about race relations now, the basketball legend expressed his desire for political parties to work together, and for less discrepancy between rich and poor in America.
Monroe dedicated himself to his sport at the relatively late age of 14, after a chance meeting in the high school hallway with his school’s coach. As a youth, Monroe was determined to make his mother proud, he told Berkow.
His arrival with the Knicks was a challenging period; the point guard was benched until he could “understand and match the cadence” of his new team.
Since his induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1990, Monroe has been a commentator for MSG, served as a commissioner of the New Jersey Urban Development Company, and started a candy company. He also owns a record label, and promotes diabetes-friendly eating (he is diabetic) for a pharma company.
Monroe joins a list of “In the Game” speakers that includes former teammate Walt “Clyde” Frazier, former New York Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton and Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred.
Author Ron Chernow, whose biography inspired the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” will speak at Drew on Wednesday, April 5, 2017, at 8 pm in the Simon Forum and Athletic Center. Tickets are $32. The university is at 36 Madison Ave. in Madison.
Shaylyn MacKinnon is editor of the Drew Acorn newspaper.
