When the Garden Was Eden (30 page)

“It was strange—me coming back as an opponent, the Minutemen broken up, Earl Monroe and Jerry Lucas in the Knicks uniform,” Russell said. “It was a moment of saying, ‘Wow, this is really different.’ But at the same time, life teaches you to move on.”

Russell went forward with a 42-minute, 20-point, 6-rebound, 5-assist performance in a 112–103 Warriors victory that was the Knicks’ fourth straight defeat. Appearing for the first time in two weeks, Reed played 23 scoreless minutes, missing all five of his field goal attempts.

Monroe was marginally better, logging 20 minutes and scoring 9 points after receiving what the
New York Times
described as a “thunderous ovation” from the sellout crowd of 19,588. Afterward, he said he wasn’t in game condition and would need about two weeks to get in shape. But the real Monroe appeared that season only in occasional flashes. What New York saw that first night was pretty much what it got the rest of the way: 20.6 minutes a game, 11.4 points, 2.2 assists—Earl without his Pearl, fitting in to the point of becoming another foot soldier, a moneyed Minuteman, pressing for minutes off the bench along with the rookie Dean Meminger.

Monroe liked his teammates well enough. “I’ll never forget DeBusschere coming up when I walked into the locker room for the first time,” Monroe said. “Then Bradley and Reed. And that was good.” He found them to be cordial, businesslike. The old line about the Knicks was that when they left the Garden, they hailed 12 different cabs—an exaggeration, but Monroe could see right away that they were not fraternal like the Bullets. And he certainly was not one of them, on or off the court.

“As far as my game,” Monroe said, “it went from spectacular to being like a student. It was very hard when the game was at a certain point not to try and take over, because I was so used to doing that. I’d always played at a certain pace and rhythm, managed the game as opposed to just playing it.”

More transcendent showman than traditional superstar, Monroe was never as dominant as Oscar or West. But because he was an anti-establishment cult figure in a sport fast becoming a bastion of black expression, his sacrifice was even more painful for devout fans. Those who had watched him or played against him from his earliest playground days didn’t recognize the role player he’d become in New York.

“I’d go down to Philly and guys would say, ‘Eleven points a game—what’s up with that?’ ” Monroe said. “I got dogged a lot, you know, but I made sure to go down to the Baker League that summer to bust them all up, just so they knew I was still me.”

CONSIDERED IN THE
context of the modern era, Monroe’s sacrifice had a “He did what?” quality that players like LeBron James—secure in his expectation of getting paid, location notwithstanding—would find incomprehensible. Joining forces with Dwyane Wade in Miami was one thing; going to the bench was another. “What Earl did could never happen today,” said Kevin Loughery, Monroe’s backcourt partner in Baltimore. “Can you imagine an agent or a shoe company allowing a guy like Earl to go to a team where he wouldn’t even start?”

Big-market influence remains a persistent story line in the modern NBA, and twenty-first-century players do make sacrifices. Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen, and Paul Pierce happily teamed up to win a 17th title for Boston in 2008, proving to be perfect complementary pieces. James, Wade, and Chris Bosh in the 2010 summer of free-agent insanity at least had the same idea, even if year one ended unhappily. But no NBA star player has ever made so radical a career transformation in his prime as did Monroe.

Though he, too, departed Baltimore in the Archie Clark trade, Loughery conceded that for admirers of the Old Knicks, Monroe over time became the ultimate example of putting team values first.

“It’s been one of the great questions: is Earl remembered as an even greater player because he fit in and won a championship in New York, or did his career suffer because he couldn’t be what he was in Baltimore?” Loughery said. As the man who coached the revered doctor, Julius Erving, with the New York Nets in the ABA, Loughery reached his own biased conclusion.

“Because of how the league evolved into one that was about entertainment, I think it would have been better for him had he stayed,” he said. “I know you wouldn’t have seen any seasons where he scored 11 points a game. In Baltimore, he was one of the great showmen, maybe the best. The NBA lost that. Earl lost that.”

Monroe wasn’t one to hide his misgivings, especially when he knew how much it delighted the Baltimore lifers. “I never thought of myself as a real Knick,” he told the
Washington Post
at Pollin’s Top 50 dinner. “I always felt as though the Bullets and Baltimore was the way I made my name.”

Did he really believe that he’d cheated himself, given up too much individuality for the sake of being part of a cherished collective? Apparently so; when he was enshrined in the Hall of Fame in 1990, he called Pollin and told him he wanted to go in as a Bullet.

“We talked about the Hall of Fame thing many times,” Sonny Hill said. “It always came down to: how do you want them to remember you—as a guy who changed, sacrificed, and fit into what the Knicks did, or as Earl the Pearl? He worried that people would see it as being disrespectful to the Knicks. I told him, ‘This is not disrespectful to the Knicks. You have your championship ring.’ ”

Beyond basketball, New York had delivered benefits he always knew Baltimore could not. In New York, Monroe could chase off-court ambitions, some of which—like the music industry—proved expensive and short-lived. He didn’t get discouraged easily. In his mid-sixties, he was still making a go of it, teaming with the dance-pop singer Ciara Corr to launch Reverse Spin Records, specializing in hip-hop and R&B.

There were other creative outlets for Monroe that probably would not have opened to him as a lifelong Bullet. Sitting on a shelf above the fireplace in his Harlem apartment was a Peabody Award for the television documentary
Black Magic
, which he co-produced in 2008 with the filmmaker Dan Klores. The project, tracing the history of blacks in basketball, was thrilling for Monroe because it celebrated so much that the multimillionaire NBA stars knew little or nothing about.

“That’s what New York’s been about—connections and temptations,” Monroe said furtively, in reference to a fast life of risk and reward, highs and lows. In the seventies, an accountant steered him into tax shelters that much later came to the merciless attention of the Internal Revenue Service. Monroe was eventually tagged with more than $3 million in back payments and interest. He and his longtime companion and later his wife, Marita Green-Monroe, plunged into dire financial straits. They had to leave Manhattan for several years, rent in New Jersey, and seek help from their extended basketball family, including the NBA’s Retired Players Association, led at the time by Dave Bing, which wrote him a check to stave off the debt collectors.

“There were difficult times,” Green-Monroe said, recalling Red Holzman’s tender calls, asking what he could do to help. Eddie Donovan’s son Sean—a financial broker and consultant who worked with some of his father’s old players, including Reed—spent considerable time with Monroe formulating a plan. But it was a painful struggle, days when that $99,000 question—what if he’d stayed on Pollin’s team?—loomed much larger. Maybe he would have earned less than he had in New York. But perhaps life would have been simpler, more about the things money
couldn’t
buy.

For better or worse, Pollin ran his team like a mom-and-pop shop, long after the NBA outgrew its small-family roots. The young builder grew into a man of uncommon depth after having endured the worst of tragedies, losing two children to congenital heart failure. His wife, Irene, became a psychotherapist specializing in grief counseling. Pollin became committed to charitable organizations that helped feed and educate underprivileged children.

He moved the team, which had relocated from Baltimore to the Maryland suburbs, to the nation’s capital. In 1997, at a time when most multimillionaire owners were still asking for municipal handouts, he built the MCI Center (later the Verizon Center), revitalizing a downtrodden neighborhood. The same year, alarmed by the number of gun-related deaths in the district, he changed the team’s name to the Wizards.

As the years rolled by, Monroe developed a greater appreciation for the man, understood the impossible situation he had put him in. Pollin had his faults. He was stubborn. He was thrifty. But compared with the hired guns running the Garden in the years after Ned Irish, Pollin was practically a saint.

On the day of his death—November 24, 2009—Pollin was the most tenured and respected NBA owner, the league’s paternal conscience. And Monroe still grappled with regrets about running away, off into the arms of a corporate sugar daddy that would later cut him loose without so much as a call.

IN 1980, WHEN SONNY WERBLIN SAT DOWN
with me for a season-ending chat, Monroe was the last link to the Knicks’ championship teams, having just finished his 13th. He was a free agent, however, and Werblin matter-of-factly said that the Knicks would not be re-signing him for the following season, and that the team had “given him enough.” The public execution on the back page of the
New York Post
, under my byline, was crushing for Monroe, and another story that was painful for me to write—in effect the career obituary for another icon of my youth.

Monroe read the story and couldn’t believe that was how he’d be leaving the game. Maybe he didn’t have a whole lot left. But he had been the Knicks’ sole attraction after the other core players left, the last link to the glory years. And yet there was no notification, no opportunity to say good-bye to the fans, and certainly not the hoped-for job offer within the organization.

“I guess for the most part I felt that I should have still been a part of it in some capacity,” he said. “Basically because of coming here and having sacrificed to be here, I felt the organization didn’t appreciate that. I just felt, if this is the end of my career, there is something I should be doing with this organization. And when it wasn’t offered to me, I just went away.”

Through the years, many of them luckless for the Knicks, he became convinced that it was a case of ethical payback. The franchise banished Frazier, fired Reed, cut him loose, and what did that say? “The history of what’s been here: that should be what every organization is about,” he said. “If you don’t honor your history, then how can you plot your future? If your history has been clouded, it sends a bad message. You haven’t won the championship in almost 40 years; karma-wise, that may be the reason why. I mean, how long did it take to retire Dick Barnett’s number?”

When the Knicks first approached Monroe about raising number 15, he declined, still smarting over his departure from the organization “without signs of humanity or compassion.” The second invitation, in 1985, came from Dave DeBusschere, who had returned as general manager. “When your teammate calls, it’s different,” he said. But by the night of the ceremony, DeBusschere had been fired, leaving Monroe, again, with a bittersweet aftertaste.

Pollin, he knew, never would have treated one of his guys that way. “Deep down, it bothers Earl that his life could have been very different,” Marita Green-Monroe said. “How could it not, when all he had to do was look down there and see what Abe was doing for Wes?” Wes Unseld, who might have been his career-long companion, Reed to his Frazier, retired from the Bullets in 1981 and immediately began a long run in the organization as a vice president, general manager, and coach.

Monroe watched other NBA greats carve lucrative administrative careers or get paid the big network bucks. Julius Erving did both, as an executive in Orlando and as a studio analyst. Green-Monroe, a good friend of Erving’s ex-wife, Turquoise, knew why Erving was able to market himself after his glory years: he never had to stop being Dr. J.

For his part, Monroe said his everlasting regret was rooted less in remuneration and more in the sadness that there remained precious little evidence, scant film footage, of Baltimore’s Black Jesus. “I was always a history buff, and because of history you’re remembered in a certain way, and people down the road won’t remember you sacrificed—they’ll remember your stats,” he said. “People never really get to see what I did on a day-in, day-out basis, the way I was, and what I was capable of doing as an individual.”

IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 1995
, I was in Orlando for a story about the NBA’s rookie orientation program, chatting up a group of players who were kicking back in the hallway outside the league’s hotel office: Kevin Garnett, Antonio McDyess, Joe Smith, and a seven-footer from Kansas, Greg Ostertag, alternately talking trash and feeling each other out for information that might be of benefit when they reported to their first training camp.

Suddenly, from an elevator just down the hall, there came a distinguished figure who could have offered them all pearls of wisdom. Except that, to them, Earl Monroe wasn’t famous or even familiar. Monroe passed by without one of them so much as turning his head. I asked if they had recognized the man. No takers. Earl Monroe, anyone? “I heard the name,” Ostertag said.

Young people, I thought. At about the same time, Earl and Marita had one in their own home—a teenage daughter, Maya, who would play basketball at Georgia Tech. But when she was just learning the game, her mother wanted her to know about her special gene pool. How could she explain this in plain, simple terms to a child born in 1983? Marita told her, “What Michael Jordan did in the air, your father did on the ground.”

But where, in the visual age, was the proof? People—sportswriters especially—talk a virtuous game, espouse team values, but in the end glorify the one-name goliaths, reduce their teammates to
supporting casts
and
Jordanaires
. Maybe Loughery was right: for Monroe, great as Broadway was, it wasn’t Baltimore.