When the Knicks won their last championship they were in Los Angeles, so there was no shortage of premium venues to go and celebrate. Earl Monroe made other plans.
He had just scored 23 points to lead the Knicks to victory, but he was not in the mood for champagne and Hollywood celebrities that night. One of a core group of champions, along with Walt Frazier, Willis Reed and Bill Bradley, they are forever joined in basketball lore.
The Knicks had won their first title in 1970, but with the addition of Monroe, a smooth, sweet-shooting playmaker, two years later, some fans felt that a dynasty was at hand. Little did anyone know that the Knicks would not win another championship for more than 50 years — at least.
Instead of hitting the clubs that night in L.A., Monroe had a quiet dinner at the hotel with a teammate, Dean Meminger. They ordered room service and hashed over the game, the series against the Lakers and an emotionally draining year.
Monroe’s mother had died in January, and he had been depressed and sullen for weeks afterward, while his play suffered. One day in February, Red Holzman, the Knicks coach of legend, took Monroe aside.
“He told me, ‘Even with everything going on, you’ve still got to be you,’” Monroe said last week. “He said, ‘You‘ve got to be Earl.’”
More than half a century later, after dozens of surgeries and unrelenting pain from a punishing career on hardwood floors and concrete playgrounds, those words still echo, even though it is not so easy and carefree to be Earl Monroe these days. Not that he would complain. An acknowledgment of his constant pain, from his feet to his head, had to be coaxed out of him during a chat at one of his favorite restaurants not far from his home in Harlem.
Now 81, Monroe is paying the price for his Hall of Fame career and all the joy he brought to Knicks fans in the 1970s. He was not known as Earl the Pearl just because it rhymed. His is one of the most apt nicknames in sports: He was elegant, sophisticated, cherished; and it still applies.
Outwardly, it appears as though he has been retired for 6 years, not 46. He bears the unmistakable aura and presence of an elite athlete, even though he uses a walker, which he hates and vows to chuck aside one day.
But he has endured more than 40 operations, he said, including a knee replacement, two new hips and spinal fusion. He can barely turn his head because of the pain in his neck.
“Every time I make a little progress, I’m back in the hospital,” he said. “Mentally it’s hard, because I know I can’t do things anymore. It’s disheartening. But then you think about people facing harder things. I say something for them in my prayers at night.”
Monroe dislikes discussing it all, but he understands that fans and admirers still care about him and want to know how he is faring, and hope he can infuse the current team with some of that elusive championship mojo.
But more important, in his view, is that by sitting for an interview, he would get to shine a light on one of his enduring missions, the charter school in the Bronx that bears his name. He even brought notes with him, and through the pain that forces him to twitch and fidget in search of the most comfortable position, if there is one, he arrived prepared.
He glanced down at his phone and began scrolling through his notes. He had facts and figures to share about the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball School, a charter high school in the Bronx, founded in 2021 by the Peabody Award-winning New York filmmaker Dan Klores, with Monroe as its patron.
“This is a very important part of my life,” he said.
Monroe said that 75 percent of the roughly 40 students come from single-parent homes, and 15 percent live in homeless shelters. He pointed out that last year’s graduating class, the first from the school, had a 100 percent college acceptance rate. When they entered the school, those students had an average reading level five grades below that of their age group, but by the time they graduated, they had jumped six and a half grade levels.
In a testament to its success, the school will open a shiny new campus in August in the South Bronx, in the poorest congressional district in the United States. This was intentional, Monroe said, so that it will become an aspirational hub to foster growth in that community.
“It’s not just a school,” he said. “It’s a legacy that will be here when I’m gone, and hopefully serve enough people who go on to do great things.”
Monroe has lived in the city since soon after he retired from playing in 1980, and like most of his fellow New Yorkers, he is captivated by the current Knicks squad, particularly point guard Jalen Brunson. Monroe, who was once named one of the 50 best players in N.B.A. history, has followed Brunson’s career since he played at Villanova. Monroe said he was not just disappointed that Brunson was not selected in the first round of the 2018 N.B.A. draft; he was “appalled.” And he was proved right.
He also knows how close Brunson is to attaining the same status Monroe has enjoyed for 53 years. During nine seasons with the Knicks, Monroe and his teammates were New York royalty, known in every borough and beyond, and treated accordingly. “Clyde says he still hasn’t paid for a meal in New York,” Monroe said with a laugh, referring to his famed backcourt partner Walt “Clyde” Frazier.
But that was a different time. In 1973, the country was winding down its war in Vietnam, and Monroe felt it set the stage for a happier vibe in the city with an eagerness to celebrate good things like the Knicks. He lived on the corner of West 64th and Broadway and said there were always good parties to attend. (He wasn’t always calling room service with Meminger.)
“We were part of the fabric of what the city was all about, and that was a good thing,” he recalled. “We were Knicks. But we were New Yorkers as well.”
He very much still is. He has lived in the same apartment in Harlem for the last 22 years, and, like most New Yorkers, he is tuned into the Knicks.
Last week, his grandson, whom Monroe has helped raise, asked if they could go to Game 3 of the finals against the Spurs at Madison Square Garden, where his grandfather’s No. 15 hangs from the rafters. It is challenging for Monroe. The crowds can be hard to navigate, and he shyly admits that he doesn’t like to be seen with his walker. But he said yes.
It wouldn’t be easy, but he is happy for his grandson to soak in a Knicks euphoria that seems to come around only once every few generations.
“This city doesn’t rock unless the Knicks are doing it,” Monroe said. “As great as all the other teams are, this is the Knicks’ town.”
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