One athlete I never had much of a chance to appreciate while he was playing for a local team was Earl “The Pearl” Monroe… but today, I’ll get a chance to be at the Verizon Center when they retire his #10 jersey as the Wizards take on the Raptors.
The Pearl’s importance to modern basketball is best summarized by a column Mike Wise wrote in the Washington Post (which also explains the “Black Jesus” nickname):
In his autobiography “Giant Steps,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recounted the day an all-star team from Philadelphia came to claim the Rucker League crown. He spoke of a player who had moves the gangly teen never had seen, vividly describing the two busloads of worshipers who came to see him play.
Harlem, circa 1966, and the only sound was a “continuous wail that seemed to be coming from everywhere.
“Where’s Jesus? Black Jesus!”
Earl Monroe parted the crowd to get to the court. They kept chanting, in a whisper now:
“Black Jesus, Black Jesus, Black Jesus.”
“Mount Morris Park, that’s where it was played,” Monroe said yesterday. “What a place. . . . What a time.
…
The adolescent reading this who believes improvisation and creativity started with Michael and now resides on an AND1 bus needs to check himself before he wrecks himself. Monroe spun his body 360 degrees in midair before Jordan or LeBron James’s mother were born. So unpredictable, so original, Monroe painted more than he played, and the court was his canvas. He once was asked to describe his stutter-stepping, stop-and-pop game. The Pearl settled on this:
“The thing is, I don’t know what I’m going to do with the ball, and if I don’t know, I’m quite sure the guy guarding me doesn’t know either.”
Monroe was less a symbol of basketball’s evolution than society’s. He was not a free-flowing player as much as an ideal — a pirouetting vision of black empowerment, who married sport and pop culture long before Jordan. Something about his loping gait, his easygoing, “don’t-worry-I-got-this-game” smile — Monroe and teammate Walt Frazier’s style and panache flat-out reflected the zeitgeist of 1970s New York.
Clyde and the Pearl in fur on Friday night — that was how to live.