I WAS SURPRISED—but not shocked—when flames and riots erupted all over the United States in the summer of 1965, especially out in California, in Watts. I had never even heard of Watts, which was a poor black community in southern Los Angeles. It was a wild time. Malcolm X had already been killed, Martin Luther King Jr. was leading thousands of civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, after the Ku Klux Klan shot some black people down there, and there were riots happening all across the country.
The Watts riots were being talked about everywhere because so many people had been shot and killed by the police and a lot of property had been destroyed. All of this was making a lot of young people—black and white—more politically aware, and I know I was paying more attention to how black people were being treated in this country. I could feel the racial tension in the air in Philadelphia and when I returned to Winston-Salem. I could see and feel that tension in the way black and white people interacted with each other, with fear in their eyes. But I didn’t know what I could do about any of it, so I just retreated into playing basketball, determined to get better in all aspects of my game.
There have been so many things that I dreamed about in my life that came true, like becoming a basketball star. I worked hard at it, sure, but I’ve also been very lucky. A lot of people work hard at stuff all their lives, you know, and never realize their dreams. That’s why I admit to being lucky, because I know that nothing is guaranteed, even with hard work and focus. It just might not be in the cards for some people. A lot, of course, has to do with being willing to sacrifice. But a lot of it also has to do with being lucky, and I’ve been very lucky.
One of the things I was lucky about was the caliber of my Winston-Salem teammates after Teddy Blunt graduated in June of 1965. Losing Teddy hurt, but Eugene Smiley could really play. Eugene was a guard, about six feet one, from Newark, New Jersey. We became roommates and good friends, and he replaced Teddy at the point. Sonny Ridgill, a hometown favorite from Winston-Salem, was still around, as was Joe Cunningham, who became our new captain (we used to call him “Capt Spec” because he was always saying we never gave him the respect he deserved for being the captain). Willis “Spider” Bennett rounded out the starters.
Now we had some other really strong players who were ready to step in coming off the bench, like Smitty, who backed up the guard spots with Johnny Watkins, a really good defensive player from Badin, North Carolina. Jim English was a six-foot-six-inch high-scoring freshman forward from Virginia, and he worked well in tandem with six-foot-six-inch junior forward James Reid, another really good player from North Carolina who probably should have been starting. I had elevated my game again by playing against some top-notch competition on the Philadelphia playgrounds over the summer. I had also gone up to New York to play some games on the playgrounds up there in Mount Morris Park and did very well, even wowing some of those die-hard New York City hoopsters. So by the time I returned to school in September, I was really focused on playing at the top of my ability and on winning a championship for Winston-Salem.
When Teddy graduated, I understood I had to become the leader of the team and I took that responsibility upon my shoulders, which was a lot different from how I used to be. For the most part, I had stood back and let things happen and just kind of gone with the flow and created off of that. But now I felt as though there was an opportunity for me to become more assertive, you know, to step up and lead, which I felt would make us a better team. And it did. At the same time, even though I was determined to increase my scoring, I was always cognizant of the other guys on the team. So it was important for me to make sure that they understood I was for them as much as they were for me. That’s why I got along with my teammates so well, because they always understood this. They understood that a real quick metamorphosis was going on now, that I was going from one of the guys to “the guy,” and they accepted it. I relished the idea and the role, felt that it fit and that I was going to be up to the task.
I knew I had to score more if we were going to win, which meant that I had to take more shots. By this time I could really shoot the ball, make a high percentage of my shots, and all my teammates knew it. They knew I could create on the spot, improvise within the structure of the game. See, Coach Gaines had a system that he tried out on his players. Aside from all the running up hills, the miles we had to run in under six minutes and whatnot, climbing 20 feet up ropes, he also wanted to find out and know what kind of heart a player had, what kind of player you were going to be for him. So he had all these tests, you know, like shooting from the top of the key, from the free throw line, layups. If you made shots from out on top of the key, from other places on the floor, then you were a shooter. If you missed those shots then you were a defensive player, and if you fell somewhere in the middle, then you were a ball handler. It was crazy but he kind of separated players like that. This is how he understood who his players were and what they were all about.
He knew I could really shoot the ball, so that’s what I did in practice, just worked on my shooting from everywhere. And Coach Gaines set up the offense to free me up to do just that in games; shoot the ball, that was my contribution toward helping us win games, that was my role. So all my teammates understood that they had somebody—me—who wasn’t afraid to take the important shot at crunch time and was willing to pay the price if I missed, which I did on occasion but not very often.
I averaged 29.9 points a game in my junior year at Winston-Salem (I always say I averaged 30 points a game that season because they took some points away from me for one thing or another) and scored 746 points. I would shoot my jumper, bang, bang, bang, every chance I got. I had the confidence now, and the green light from Coach Gaines, to shoot my jumper from even farther out on the floor, and even if I missed a few times it didn’t bother me. Because now I knew I was going to make most of them, and I did. That helped us win games, which was the most important thing in this equation.
I also decided that year to join a social fellowship group by the name of Groove Phi Groove Social Fellowship Incorporated. I guess the idea was that there were other organizations, like the Alphas, the Kappas, all the other Greek-named sororities and fraternities on campus. So those of us who started this new chapter at Winston-Salem thought we would offer a kind of alternative to that. Groove Phi Groove had initially started up in 1962 at Morgan State in Baltimore. It was pretty synonymous with all the other chapters that started up at black schools, except we might have partied a little more. So my guys and me, Smitty and a bunch of others, mostly athletes, were the core of our group. I went over—was initiated—as a Swanksman, and our motto was “I think, therefore I am,” which came from a guy named René Descartes, a famous French philosopher.
One of the main differences between our organization and a lot of others was that members only had to have a C average, rather than a high B or A, to be in Groove Phi Groove. Our shield was black and white with chains that went over the shield from top to bottom. Plus, we had textbooks on the image, which were to evoke the feeling that our members were enlightened, above and beyond our grade point averages. There was a beer mug on there, too, which was to represent that we were grooving, you know, having a great time, and we were. We also believed in helping the disadvantaged people get ahead. But most people thought of us as kind of a rowdy party group because we were always having parties and a lot of people came to those get-togethers.
It was a funny thing that people perceived some of us as total party guys, particularly me. Now, I’ll admit that I was a rowdy guy in the organization from time to time, despite my shyness. But Smitty was too, especially when he had a drink or two. See, he was the guy who, when we came out of high school, never drank. He was always our cushion. We could do whatever, get drunk, whatever the situation, and Smitty would be the one who drove us home. He was always there. He was like Mr. Church. He was the guy who would always go to class in a tie, looking real studious, and he’d be bullshitting people all along. He changed once he got to college; that’s when he started to drink and get drunk. Man, we would be drinking wagon wheels (we called them “wagon wheels” because after you drank a lot of them you would be rolling around the floor drunk), which were made out of grain alcohol and Hawaiian Punch. We’d throw in some lemon slices, sometimes some wine, because we could do it for about four or five dollars a gallon. We’d dip it out with scoopers, pour it in plastic cups, knock it on down, and have a ball. We were listening to Ben E. King, the Drifters, James Brown, “Function at the Junction” by Shorty Long, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Clyde McPhatter, Ray Charles, and Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears.” We’d be waiting for the slow tunes to come on so we could grind our lady friends back into the corners.
As a part of our initiation, our fellow men took all of us in Groove Phi Groove out sometime that year. But, unfortunately one of the health problems I had developed over the years was hemorrhoids. And on the night they were to take us out to a place called Kernersville, about 15 miles outside of Winston-Salem, with everybody blindfolded, my hemorrhoid problem rose its ugly head up. See, you know, the challenge for us guys was that we had to find our way back to campus after they took the blindfolds off. But I couldn’t go because my hemorrhoids were acting up. So to ease my discomfort I sat in a tub of warm water in my dormitory. Still, I wanted to go really bad, because that was the night I was supposed to go over, you know, pass my initiation test, so I could really become a Swanksman.
After spending some time cooling myself down I decided to drive out there in my car. Now, they had a lookout waiting for me, and when they spotted me they made me stop the car and get out. Then they made me give up my car keys, blindfolded me, and took me to where everyone else was waiting. Now, it was winter, near the end of the basketball season, and it was around midnight. Very dark. No lights anywhere. But fortunately for me, when I arrived I had missed all the hazing stuff. Only Smitty and about six other guys were left when I got there. They took the blindfolds off, but nobody gave me back the keys to my car. So we had to walk and find our way back to Winston-Salem. No one had any idea where we were. I knew how to get back from the spot where they had picked me up, but that was about five miles away and I didn’t know how to get there from where we were. And though it was frightening not to know what direction to go, the scariest part of this equation was that we were out in Ku Klux Klan territory, you know what I mean?
So we started walking back on this dirt road to nowhere and we’re talking back and forth with each other and all of a sudden lights start coming on in the farmhouses we pass. Now, none of us wanted to go up to any of these houses and ask for directions, because as we were passing this one house a white guy came out on his porch with a shotgun in his hands and hollered, “Who’s out there?”
That scared the holy shit out of everyone! So everybody just shut up and ran off the road into some bushes and kept quiet. After that we didn’t say another word. We just kept on trucking until we got to another dirt road, which led to a paved road cars and trucks would be traveling on. Soon we saw this pickup truck coming up and somebody flagged it down. The truck stopped and there were two white guys in the cab who let us know they had shotguns by showing them to us. So we told them we were trying to get back to Winston-Salem, that we were lost and were basketball players. They looked at each other and the driver said, “All right, boys. Y’all get in the back.”
So we got in the back of the pickup truck and they drove off. I remember Smitty whispering as we were going along, “Man, I feel like cattle sitting back here.”
“I know one thing,” I said. “We’d better shut the fuck up before they hear us and shit.”
And we did. They drove us and stopped at the Winston-Salem city line, where they dropped us off and kept on going. That was nice of them to do that. After they dropped us off we walked our way back to campus. But that was a real strange night that ended up on the positive side.
On the social side of things my main squeeze back then was a lady named Betty. We hooked up and were an item most of my years in college. She was from Winston-Salem. Betty was about five foot seven or eight and brown skinned with nice legs, eyeglasses, and an Afro. She reminded me of Angela Davis. Betty liked to wear tight jeans and I liked that, because I like to see a woman’s body. I don’t like real big behinds, but I do like nice shapes. Betty and I got along real well, but we had one instance where things went off the tracks. What happened was Betty had gone somewhere and left me in my dormitory room. So I’m laying on my bed in my room and there’s a knock at the door, so Smiley, my roommate, goes and opens the door and I turn over and Betty’s father is standing in the doorway with a double-barreled shotgun pointed at my face.
“Where’s my daughter?” he said. “Where’s Betty?”
Now, I’m in shock, so I said, “I don’t know where no Betty is.”
“What do you mean you don’t know where she is?” he said. “I’ll blow your motherfuckin’ head off!”
So I looked at him real hard, thinking, Go ahead, do it. If not, man, get the fuck out of here. But I didn’t say that. I just looked at Smiley just standing there with his eyes wide open. So I told the man again that I didn’t know where she was. I hadn’t seen her and he could see she wasn’t with me. So he finally left but he never apologized to me for pointing that shotgun at me, or for threatening my life, and that really pissed me off. When Betty finally came by the next day after hanging out with her girlfriends, she had found out from her father what he had done. By then I had calmed down and she said she was sorry for what her father had done. I told her it wasn’t her fault and that everything was cool, which it was. But I thought about that incident a lot after it occurred and I never came up with an explanation for why it happened. I never saw her father again, either.
I also went out with a woman named Dorothy, who was a little bit older than me and one of the most beautiful women I have ever known. She was about five feet eight, really sophisticated, brown skinned, and had a very nice body. I think she had been Miss Winston-Salem one year. She was married and had a daughter, but when I first saw her I just fell for her like a ton of bricks. Wow! Eventually we got together and started sneaking around, laying up in motel rooms. After a while, though, word got out and her husband came up to me and asked pointblank, “Are you seeing Dorothy?”
“Dorothy who?” I said.
“You know who I’m talking about,” he said.
“No, I really don’t know who you’re talking about,” I said.
So he just stood there looking hard at me. He was about five 10, thin, light brown skinned. So I looked back hard at him because if something jumped off I wasn’t worried unless he had a gun or a knife or something like that. Because I was so adamant in my denial he just turned around and left. But Dorothy was a woman I just couldn’t resist seeing, and the feeling was mutual. So we kept sneaking around with each other, though her husband never confronted me again. But when Coach Gaines caught wind of the situation he called me into his office and said, “You know, Earl, there’s nothing more dangerous than a woman scorned.”
So I looked at him puzzled and said, “Coach, what do you mean?”
He looked at me real hard with those eyes of his and said, “You know what I mean, son. You’d better watch yourself.”
“Yes, sir,” I told him, and then I left. But I kept on seeing Dorothy and I didn’t stop until late in my senior year.
A warning was one thing, but there was another incident that occurred during that year that really pissed Coach Gaines off. That was the time I was late for a game because I was just not thinking in a serious way. What happened is I was supposed to drive up to Philly for the weekend with Smitty but he couldn’t make it, so I asked his roommate, Ernie Brown, if he would go up with me and he agreed. The deal was that I would drop him off at the Philadelphia bus station and he would go on up to New York, come back to Philly, and then we would drive on back to Winston-Salem together so we could get back for the game that next Monday.
Well, I got to running around in Philly, seeing old friends and old girlfriends, and having a good time. Then Ernest called me on Sunday and said he was coming back to Philly, so when he arrived I picked him up at the bus station, took him to my mother’s house, dropped him, and kept on running around. I came back and had to drive the whole way down to Winston-Salem myself, because Ernie, like many New Yorkers, couldn’t drive. So we hit it and I think we got to Virginia around two o’clock Monday morning. I was tired as a dog, so I pulled over and told Ernie I was going to sleep for a little while. Well, I didn’t wake up until three o’clock Monday afternoon! Our game against Saint Augustine’s that day was to be played in Raleigh, North Carolina, so we had to drive there. When we finally arrived at the coliseum the teams were already warming up, so we went and put on our uniforms and walked out to the court. I looked up and saw Coach Gaines and he was angrier with me than I’d ever seen him. He looked at Ernie and me and said, “Hell, y’all ain’t playing!” Then he turned around and walked away.
They played without me and won anyway, because Sonny Ridgill and Joe Cunningham picked up their scoring in that game. After that silly incident I decided I’d better get more serious about my involvement with the team, and I did from then on. Nothing like that ever happened again because I realized that if I was going to become a team leader I couldn’t be making those kinds of immature mistakes.
My junior year was a stepping-stone for me and the team. That year our record was 17 and 4, but 3 of our losses were to Norfolk State, another CIAA team, and we finished second behind them in the regular season rankings. Still, we went to the CIAA tournament and I scored 32 points in a 96–86 first-round victory over Johnson C. Smith University. Sonny (who made All-CIAA that year, as did I) also stepped up in this game, and his scoring helped us get the win. We played Hampton University in the next round and won 85–84 in a really thrilling game. That put us in the final against Howard, and we beat them to win the tournament. I scored 42 points in that final game and was named the Most Valuable Player of the tournament.
After winning the CIAA tournament, we qualified to play in the NCAA Division II Championship in March 1966, in Durham, North Carolina. It was the first time our school had ever competed in that tournament. We played Oglethorpe College, a small white team from Atlanta, in the first round. We lost 69–66 in a low-scoring game because they slowed the game down and that unnerved us. We lost also because we played a very sloppy, error-filled game. But I had a horrible night, too, scoring only 14 points on 6 of 21 shooting. I think Sonny Ridgill, who was our second-leading scorer that year, averaging around 16 points a game, scored around 20 points in that game. That game was a downer for all of us, but especially for me because I felt I had let my team down. Overall that year, we finished with a 20-and-5 record after the 3 tournament wins and that 1 final loss.
But a weird thing happened to me and my guys that night after the game. After we lost we were walking to a party we had been invited to when out of the blue a bunch of black men rolled up on us in a car. Then they jumped out of the ride and one of them started pointing fingers at us, saying, “Those are the guys that beat up my cousin!”
So one of our guys said, “Beat up your cousin? What are you talking about?”
Then the guy who had been yelling at us pulls out a gun and so did the rest of them. We were shocked, because now they were talking about shooting us and they were dead serious. This goes on for about 15 minutes, with us trying to explain to them that we were all basketball players and not even from Durham and that we were just in town to play in a tournament. But they weren’t having any of it and were just waving their guns around. So they made us sit down on the ground and just as I was really starting to get pissed off—and nervous—the guy we were supposed to have beaten up showed on the scene. So one of our guys says to these crazy people, “Man, we’re from Winston-Salem. We play on the college team, and like I just told you, we were playing in a tournament.”
Then the guy they said we beat up got out of the car that brought him, came up to us, looked at me, and said, “Man, that ain’t the people who beat me up. Do y’all know who this is? That’s Earl Monroe, the basketball player. This here is Black Jesus, man!”
The man with the gun looked closely at me and said, “Oh man, you’re Earl Monroe? I just saw you play tonight. Hey, man, I’m sorry.”
By now I was hotter than a lit firecracker. I was almost foaming at the mouth. Then one of the guys with a gun says, “That’s Black Magic! Black Jesus, who can walk on water on the basketball floor.”
So they let us go. But I wasn’t in any mood to go to a party after that, so I just walked back to the hotel, got in my bed, and fell asleep, trying to forget about what had just happened.
A few days after this, on March 19, 1966, Texas Western beat Kentucky, 72–65, in the NCAA Division I Championship game. Before they met, Kentucky had been ranked number one in the country and Texas Western number three. What made this game special was that Texas Western, coached by Don Haskins, who was white, started an all-black team and Kentucky, coached by the legendary Adolph Rupp, started an all-white team that included Louie Dampier, Pat Conley, and Pat Riley. After Texas Western won that game, Southern universities started recruiting star black players to play both basketball and football, and this was the beginning of the end for many of the great black basketball players—and football players, too—attending historically black colleges. But I remember Coach Gaines was disappointed to hear that Coach Haskins received hate mail from racist white people for starting five black players. Coach Gaines had always believed you started whoever were the best players regardless of race, and eventually his point of view turned out to be the correct one.
That summer my teammate at Winston-Salem, Ernie Brown, who was from the Bronx, invited me to come to New York to play against some of the best players up there. So I accepted his invitation. I found out that I would be playing against three of the players from Texas Western’s championship starting five: Nevil Shed, Willie Cager, and Willie Worsley. The idea of playing against those guys just lit a fuse to my competitive fire. Anyway, some other guys from South Philly also went up to New York to play in those games, and they got there before me. We were supposed to play at Mount Morris Park, which is an outdoor playground in Harlem, but it started raining. So they had to move the games up to Saint Mary’s Gym in the Bronx. By the time Ernie and I arrived at the gym, the guys from Philadelphia were already there, and when I walked in they started chanting, “Black Jesus is here and you New York guys gonna see Jesus walk on water!”
That made me feel really good, because there were some other great New York players there besides the guys from Texas Western, like the legendary New York playground player Pee Wee Kirkland and Tony Jackson, who played for Saint John’s. They were looking at my Philly guys like they were crazy when they started talking about me like that. But after I got the ball and spun some white kid so hard I almost broke both his ankles, they started paying attention to me. Then I came down, put my spin move on two other guys, and hit a jumper from the top of the key. The gym went crazy, with people shouting, “Oh, man, did you see that move and what he did with that shot? That was crazy!”
And the Philly guys were saying, “It’s on now, man, Jesus is here and he gonna walk on water.”
And I did. Time after time I just put on moves and made spectacular shots that sent the people in the gym into delirium. They were screaming after I put a move on one of those guys from Texas Western, who had a real confused look on his face after I busted that move on him. Anyway, I was floating on air after I made those guys up in New York believers in my game. It boosted my confidence for the rest of the summer that I could play the game on an extremely high level, and I carried that energy into my senior year that fall. When I went back to Winston-Salem in September, I was determined to do my best to lead my team to an NCAA championship, like those guys from Texas Western had, and to make a national reputation for myself. Little did I know that it would be a historic season for me and my Ram teammates.