When the Garden Was Eden (28 page)

After a hard-fought night with Johnson, DeBusschere would go home to Garden City, ease gently into bed, and tell his wife, Geri, how much of a war it had been. He relished the combat, though, residual aches and all. “The strongest individual I ever played against,” DeBusschere said. “He’d put his hand on your back and you couldn’t move. Never a cheap shot, though.”

When DeBusschere and the Knicks jogged out to the Civic Center floor for Game 6, there, suddenly, was Johnson—back in uniform, on the layup line, bad knee and all, for the first time in the series. Now Baltimore had its own cause and rallying cry. Johnson gave them 10 points and 19 minutes in Game 6. Inspired, the Bullets toyed with the Knicks, blew them out. Worse, Reed had 3 points and 4 rebounds in 26 minutes. His disturbing lack of productivity put New York on high alert as the series returned to the Garden. Unlike the previous spring, there was little doubt or drama about Reed’s availability. But that wasn’t the issue.

“Question Is How Long and How Well Knick Star Can Go at Garden Tonight,” read the headline above Leonard Koppett’s story in the
New York Times
. In other words, how much longer could the Knicks get by with Reed’s mere presence?

He was becoming a one-man soap opera, his own medical center, and a fascinating subject for future debate on athletes being pumped with numbing agents. Before the Bullets showdown, Reed received a painkilling shot of Xylocaine in his left knee. At halftime, with the Knicks clinging to a 4-point lead, he took another. But even with Reed playing well, the Knicks could not shake the Bullets. Marin was outplaying Bradley. Johnson was battling DeBusschere to a standoff. Unseld was en route to a 17-point, 20-rebound night. Monroe kept shooting—only 10 for 26 by game’s end, but his 26 points doubled Frazier’s.

Monroe’s jumper put the Bullets ahead 89–88, with two and a half minutes remaining. He was causing havoc in the Knicks’ defense—near panic in the stands. When Marin recalled the ’71 series, he cited Monroe’s willingness to share as the difference from the previous Knicks series. Bradley that night told reporters: “At one time you could count on Monroe passing off only five percent of the time. You can’t double-team him now because he’s passing off a lot more.” Monroe himself spoke of a new “gung ho attitude.” But then, Holzman’s original scouting report on Earl the Pearl, while calling him out as a showboat, did indicate that he always had that cherished court vision.

In what might retrospectively be viewed as an in-game audition, Monroe killed the Knicks by doing it their way: hitting the open man. In crunch time, he twice found Loughery off double teams for jumpers from the key. With the Bullets leading 91–89 and the Knicks again determined to get the ball out of his hands by trapping him, Monroe hit Carter for a 20-footer. Frazier got one basket back. The Knicks dug in for a stop, but DeBusschere missed at the other end as the clock and season dwindled to 11 seconds. The ball remained in New York’s possession. The Knicks called time-out. The Garden fans, along with a live New York television audience, prayed for the familiar bolt of 11th-hour lightning.

The Knicks planned for Frazier to use a high screen from Reed, create off the dribble for himself or the big man rolling to the rim. But Unseld busted the screen and stepped into Frazier’s space. “They overplayed me,” Frazier said. He had no choice but to surrender the ball, passing to Bradley on the left side.

“He had only one place to go, which was to me, and I had only one place to go, which was toward the baseline,” Bradley said. He was briefly open because Marin was screened and out of the play. In the chaos of all the switching, Unseld chased the ball, making a mad dash for Bradley. A more creative player like Frazier might have pump-faked, drawn a foul, or stepped inside Unseld for the shot. But Bradley was more straightforward. He didn’t want to risk not getting any shot off. He coiled for the release just as Unseld leaped and stretched his 6'7" frame to its fullest. Unseld got just enough of the shot to keep it from reaching the rim.

In the dying seconds of the Knicks’ one-year reign, the ball settled—fittingly, as far as the Bullets were concerned—into the hands of Gus Johnson. The clock ran out. Marin let out a primal scream that resounded through the otherwise quiet, stunned arena. “At that moment, I don’t think it mattered how many people were there,” he said. “It was all about the guys in orange and white.”

The photo of that final scene—with the scoreboard in the backdrop—would become more Baltimore family heirloom than Bullets playoff keepsake. Bradley discovered just how much Abe Pollin relished the victory over Ned Irish’s team when he was elected to the Senate by New Jersey voters in 1978—at the age of 34, only a year and a half after retiring from the Knicks. Pollin, a loyal Democrat with contacts in the D.C. area, had helped Bradley launch his campaign. “Now I’m elected, and it’s Christmas,” he said. “I get a frame from him in a wrapped piece of paper. I open it up. What is it? It’s a picture of me with my head down, the Bullets in jubilation, with the score up there [93–91] on the board.”

In an accompanying note, Pollin wrote: “If you ever start thinking that you’re really hot shit as a senator, just take a look at this.”

CALLING THAT GAME HIS GREATEST VICTORY
, Loughery hung the framed photo in his basement so he could look at it for the rest of his life. Monroe would say: “After all we’d been through against them, it was a huge hurdle and relief. That was our championship.”

Forever the union man and players’ advocate, Loughery took special pride in knowing that the Bullets got paid like champs, too. “Before that game, Abe Pollin came into our locker room and made the greatest pregame speech by an owner in the history of sports,” he said. “Remember, we’re playing in a sold-out Madison Square Garden. It’s Game 7. So Abe was getting half the gate. He comes in, looks at us, and says, ‘If you guys beat the Knicks tonight, you get my share of the gate.’ And then he walks out. We’re sitting there, amazed. Playoff money was a big deal in those days—to him and to us.”

But the hobbled Bullets never had a chance against Abdul-Jabbar and the well-rested Bucks in the Finals. After finishing off the Knicks on Monday night, they had to fly to Milwaukee the next day to begin the series on Wednesday night. They lost Game 1 by ten points on the way to a four-game sweep, with no margin of defeat closer than eight. Robertson was finally an NBA champion. Abdul-Jabbar won the first of his six rings. “We still wound up with a bigger playoff share, because Abe kept his word,” Loughery said. “He gave us the gate from the Garden.”

Neither Loughery nor Monroe recalled exactly how much Pollin’s munificence amounted to, but Monroe, viewing it as found money, had about $10,000 cash in a paper bag under his car seat as he drove three college friends up to New York to celebrate. Always one to play uptempo, he managed to get pulled over for speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Four black men in a car prompted some extra law enforcement sleuthing. The troopers ordered them out of the car. “They look right under the seat and they find the $10,000,” Monroe said. “They obviously think we had robbed a bank or were about to make some kind of drug deal. They actually took us in. It was crazy, me trying to explain to them that this was the money from the gate at the last game at the Garden. They were like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ ”

Eventually Monroe convinced them that the money was related to his pro basketball earnings, and the field trip to New York continued. Much as he considered himself a Philly guy and had enjoyed playing in Baltimore, Monroe said he had long thought the Big Apple was a perfect fit for his nocturnal lifestyle. Like Monroe, New York pulsated with energy and opportunity. “In Baltimore, even TV went off early,” he said. “Here, you had early cable. Even if I didn’t go out, I could stay up late and there was always something to do.”

New York was not only the best place to be with some extra money in his pocket; it was the ideal location to earn even more. Abe Pollin was a good man, a devoted owner; but from the time he had signed his first pro deal, Earl Monroe was underpaid. He was already one of the premier showmen in a theatrical sport where the great ones more often than not would gravitate to a stage worthy of their skills.

Not that Monroe was aware of it at the time, but all he had to do on his drive to New York was take a look in his rearview mirror, where Baltimore had already faded from sight.

WHEN EARL MONROE FORCED ABE POLLIN TO TRADE HIM TO THE HATED
Knicks in 1971—after four seasons as the face of the Bullets franchise—he more than incurred the owner’s wrath. He broke his heart. Now, in the fall of 2009, old Abe, 85, was succumbing to a rare neurological disease, progressive supranuclear palsy, and all those unresolved feelings, regret mixed with guilt, were doing to Monroe what he had once done to defenders: in short, making him ill, hobbled, unsure of what to do next.

As he sat in his Harlem apartment, Monroe was dealing with his own medical issues. In addition to ongoing treatment for an enlarged prostate and type 2 diabetes, he had been hospitalized that summer with a severe sinus condition that would, after years of dogging him, finally require surgery. Then there were the vertebrae that needed stabilizing, the hips that had been replaced, the cartilage removed from his knees, and the ligaments sewn back together. He had just about lost count of how many times he’d been under the knife. “I think the next two will be something like my 27th and 28th surgeries,” he said.

The weight he felt most heavily, though, had nothing to do with his body. Pollin had invited him to Washington in 1996 to honor him as one of three former Bullets named to the NBA’s all-time Top 50 team, and Monroe went with conflicted feelings, more than a few pangs of guilt. There was a dinner, some wine, and a moment, he recalled, when he just had to tell Pollin how he really felt, despite Pollin’s old-school tenets, which had once made him too stubborn to accede to Monroe’s contractual demand.

“I love you,” he said.

Perched in a living room armchair, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, Monroe’s legs were still muscular and thin, but a little creaky as the 65-year-old legend rose to move about the room. When the hips started going, in his forties, he would come around the Garden, flash a sheepish smile, and joke that the erosion on both sides of his body was from all the spinning, this way and that, when he was tormenting NBA defenders. It was typical Monroe, inevitably endearing and disarming.

So, yes, despite Monroe’s calculated but complicated abandonment of the Bullets, Pollin eventually forgave him, even retired Monroe’s number 10 in 2007, showing up in his wheelchair to make Earl the Pearl part of the organizational family forever. In doing that, Pollin also forced Monroe to confront a haunting question for the rest of his life: What if he’d stayed? What if he hadn’t let the prospect of more money and the feelings of disrespect convince him to turn his future over to his agent?

In those days, as union general counsel, Larry Fleisher represented not only individual stars but the players collectively. He firmly believed that the union could only be as strong as its best players. But this could also create a fundamental conflict of interest in certain cases that raised the question of agenda: was he acting in behalf of the players or the player? If he steered a star like Monroe to a big market like New York to raise the salary bar, did the financial gain necessarily make it a better move for the player’s career? Fleisher had been firing shots over the owners’ bow as the union pushed for free agency (which would be won five years later). With Monroe, he took aim at the heart of the matter.

Monroe was in his final contract year and was sick of Pollin telling him, “Listen, kiddo, Baltimore is not Los Angeles or New York—we simply can’t afford the big bucks here.” Monroe was a Rookie of the Year, a two-time All Star, an instant sensation who in his second pro game, against the Celtics, attracted the largest cash gate in the Bullets’ short history and moved Bill Russell to say, “I don’t know how much he’s making, but he’s worth every penny.”

Even by the era’s standards, Monroe earned pennies: $20,000 per season as part of a two-year deal he had signed before his college coach, Clarence “Big House” Gaines, could stop him. Monroe was underpaid to the extent that a Winston-Salem friend made a passing remark that he was making a comparable salary teaching school. When Fleisher became his agent about a year before his contract was to expire and convinced him it was time to force a showdown, Pollin antagonized Monroe by pleading poverty to the press. “Abe had said some things early on about what I was asking for that I didn’t like,” Monroe said. “You know, I was a very cocky and egotistical kind of guy at the time, young and headstrong.”

Monroe was not one to suffer persecution—nor the perception of it. Like so many others during the sixties, he had become more socially and politically aware in college. Following President Lyndon Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Monroe participated in voter registration drives in Winston-Salem. He attended sit-ins on campus, befriending student activists who wanted, in turn, to know what he, a popular athlete, could do to help.

“Son, you can’t do all that stuff—you got to come out here and play basketball,” Coach Gaines told him. It was the same refrain Willis Reed had heard from Fred Hobdy at Grambling, except that Monroe’s experience growing up in the North made it more difficult to simply look myopically to sports and assume everything would just work itself out.

He was born Vernon Earl Monroe at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in 1944, but his mother, Rose, had migrated north from North Carolina in the mid-thirties, when she was only 14. His parents divorced when he was five and he didn’t see his father—a singer and dancer who once worked with Bessie Smith—until young adulthood. On top of that, Monroe lost much of his extended family: ten of his mother’s twelve brothers and sisters had met the kind of untimely end—victims of violence and disease—that poverty metes out.