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NEW YORK — He moved through the crowd slowly, pushing his walker across the Bronx asphalt until he reached a folding chair, where he sat and rested the legs that once delivered him to basketball brilliance.

“Hanging in there,” he said to someone who greeted him. “Another day.”

More than a generation ago, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe was to professional basketball what James Brown was to performance, a man of a million unplanned moves who thrilled his audiences and left them clamoring for more.

As a Baltimore Bullet and a New York Knick, Monroe was a freewheeling revelation in an era of predictable pick and rolls and sensible bounce passes. His spindly legs and quick feet were his wings, propelling him up and under and around defenders, a blur of spins and reverse spins, floating double pumps and deadly jump shots.

Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Kobe Bryant turned the game into global entertainment; LeBron James, Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry shattered stratospheric salary records. Before all of that, before “SportsCenter” and “Inside the NBA” and social media, there was “The Pearl,” a one-man highlight reel, the father of improvisational basketball who inspired magazine covers and written reveries from the likes of Woody Allen and Spike Lee.

“God couldn’t go one-on-one with Earl Monroe,” a teammate declared during his prime in the late 1960s and ’70s.

A half-century later, as he turns 80 years old Thursday, Monroe struggles to stand without a cane or a walker — that is, if he can stand at all after dozens of surgeries, many resulting from the wear and tear of 13 years in the NBA.

He and his old friend and former Knicks teammate Dick Barnett, now 88, were in wheelchairs when they appeared onstage last month at Barnett’s Hall of Fame induction. Bill Bradley, another former Knicks teammate, stood between them as a crowd that included Julius Erving, Larry Bird and Reggie Miller rose and applauded.

Monroe, himself a Hall of Famer, said it was important for him to be there to escort Barnett, another graduate of a historically Black college whose induction was long overdue. But he said later that being in a wheelchair before television cameras and basketball’s aristocracy “was traumatic for me, the world seeing me like that.”

David Butler II

“I’m a shell of myself at this point,” Monroe said. “I’m very depressed about it. I don’t like to do things, going here and going there, because I’m pretty vain. I don’t want people to remember me as a cripple after you’ve seen me as I was.”

For all of his limitations, though, Monroe still has moves. His intellect and interests can be as peripatetic as his game, spinning in unpredictable directions, which is what led him to that Bronx street corner on a late September morning. He was the star attraction at the ceremonial groundbreaking for a new home for the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball School.

“Clyde, you didn’t have to get all dressed up for the affair,” Monroe laughed after spotting Walt “Clyde” Frazier, 79, his former Knicks backcourt mate who lived up to his reputation for sartorial style, arriving in a dark leather jacket with long white fringes.

Someone led the way as Monroe pushed his walker from the sidewalk to a stage to another chair, where he sat again. A roster of speakers, including NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, Knicks Coach Tom Thibodeau and then-Knicks forward Julius Randle, praised Monroe for lending his name to a public charter high school that promotes basketball as a field in which kids can find careers as anything — agents and broadcasters, designers and trainers.

“I said to Earl Monroe years ago, one special high school, the first of its kind in the country, period, not even close,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/09/espn-has-episode-basketball-series-an-unusual-plan-get-it-you/" target=_blank>Dan Klores</a>, a documentary filmmaker, playwright and the school’s founder, told the crowd. “And he said, ‘I’m in; I’m in.’”

It was left to Frazier to introduce his old teammate, the other half of what was known in their heyday as the Rolls-Royce backcourt for their elite play and taste in superluxury wheels. First, though, Frazier recalled their famous rivalry, when Monroe was with the Bullets, and Frazier had the unenviable task of chasing his impossible twists and turns.

“Earl didn’t know what he was going to do. How did I know what he was going to do?” Frazier said. “I used to tell friends he was the only man I ever dreamt about. Trying to guard this guy. Man.”

Monroe has heard Frazier tell stories about their showdowns for years. In a basketball town, they’re still gold 51 years after the last Knicks championship.

“Thank you for that rousing oratory,” Monroe said, taking the mic when Frazier finished. As he spoke, he remained seated, a basketball on his lap.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “Obviously, it has floored me. So I’m not even going to get up.”

Paul Schwartzman

“He’s here!” spectators would shout when he made his entrance, all but floating onto the court in the sweltering basement of Bright Hope Baptist Church.

This was in Philadelphia, where Monroe grew up and where his inventiveness on schoolyard courts and in the summertime Baker League inspired a litany of nicknames: Thomas Edison, Doctor, Magic, Black Magic, the Duke of Earl and various iterations of a certain well-known deity.

Fellow basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar would talk about him decades later, when a TV host asked about the greatest schoolyard player he ever saw.

“Earl Monroe,” Abdul-Jabbar said, describing an encounter dating from when he was known as Lew Alcindor and Monroe walked onto a court in mismatching sneakers — one black high-top, one white low-top. “I didn’t know who he was. He had his own cheering section. He came out and people were running around talking about ‘Jesus! Jesus!’ And I’m like, ‘Wait a minute.’”

Monroe didn’t find basketball until he was 14, when the coach at John Bartram High eyed his skinny 6-foot-3 frame in the hall and invited him to the gym. Before then, he was more interested in soccer. He had quick feet, which he probably inherited from his father, once a dancer in Bessie Smith’s jazz-blues act, who left the family when Monroe was a boy and didn’t see him again until he was an adult. His mother, Rose, had good reason to keep little Earl close. When he was 5 or 6, he saw a man in his neighborhood stab another man and try to cut the heart out of his chest.

Basketball became a liberating obsession. He practiced his high dribble in the living room while absorbing the rhythms of James Brown, Gladys Knight &amp; the Pips and Miles Davis. He got ideas for moves — including his signature spin — by watching players on neighborhood courts. But there was no one he emulated, not like when he played baseball and imagined he was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2024/06/22/willie-mays-catch-1954-world-series/" target=_blank>Willie Mays making “The Catch.”</a> On the court, Monroe was inventing himself, even coming up with names for his acrobatics, including the “flukey-duke” for his feathery midair hesitation shot.

“I wasn’t taught how to do things,” he said. “It was all trial and error.”

Sonny Hill, the founder of the Baker League, was an early admirer of Monroe’s style — how he would show up late for games to build the crowd’s anticipation, check in without warming up and whip passes through his legs and behind his back and score as if no one were guarding him. “You’re talking about one of a kind,” Hill said. “What he was able to do, no one has been able to copy or perform. The moves he made came out of instinct. It was never something that could be planned, almost like a Globetrotter reel.”

His Baker League opponents included Bradley, who rode the train from New York one afternoon and ended up in a shootout that became the stuff of lore — Monroe, playing for a local business called Gaddie Real Estate, scoring 63 points; Bradley, the future senator in a Jimmy Bates B-Bar jersey, with 54. “The place was packed,” Bradley recalled. “He’d go down and do his thing. I’d go down and do mine. It was the battle of Bright Hope Baptist Church.” (Monroe’s team won.)

There was a racial component to Monroe’s play, a street style Hill calls “Black ball,” which the basketball establishment — White coaches, mainly — dismissed as hot-dog heresy. “Early Black players were role players. They played defense. They rebounded. The game was geared to White players,” Hill said. “What Earl was doing, the NBA had never seen a Black player do or allowed a Black player to do.”

Monroe’s play may have been stifled had he gone to a mostly White school, Hill said. Instead, he attended Winston-Salem State College, a historically Black school in North Carolina’s tobacco country, where he had encounters with the Ku Klux Klan and a White police officer who called him the n-word. Clarence “Big House” Gaines, coach of the Winston-Salem State Rams, let Monroe be Monroe. In 1967, his senior year, he averaged 41.5 points and led the Rams to the NCAA Division II championship.

“These are Earl’s Pearls,” wrote a newspaper columnist, highlighting Monroe’s single-game scoring gems — 50 here, 58 there, and his high of 68.

From then on, he was Earl “The Pearl.”

His growing fame did not halt resistance to his style. Although he led the qualifying trials in scoring and assists that year, the U.S. team rejected Monroe for the Pan American Games.

“I was told my game was ‘too Black,’” he said, the slight edge in his voice suggesting that not all bygones are entirely gone.

Malcolm Emmons-US PRESSWIRE

On Nov. 4, 1968, Sports Illustrated’s cover headline read “Magic in Baltimore,” alongside an image of the Bullets’ star guard staring at the camera, unsmiling, a ball floating above his fingertips.

Frank Deford’s story introduced “The Pearl” to a national audience, casting him as the best of basketball’s young wave and a threat to established stars such as Oscar Robertson and Jerry West. One night in Baltimore, he scored 56 points against West’s Los Angeles Lakers and was on his way to winning rookie of the year honors.

“Your mouth was open, like, what the heck was this?” said Hall of Fame broadcaster Marv Albert, the Knicks’ radio voice in those years, describing the challenge of finding the precise words to narrate Monroe’s ballet. “His dribble was so quick. He couldn’t jump, but his moves were so unusual. It was art at such a high level.”

He signed as a rookie for a paltry $20,000 per year, a salary that eventually soared to $140,000, enough for him to put down $30,000 for a Silver Shadow model Rolls. But he felt underpaid. In his fifth season, after Baltimore had lost to Abdul-Jabbar’s Milwaukee Bucks in the NBA Finals, Monroe got into a bitter contract dispute with team owner Abe Pollin. Then, the unthinkable: On Nov. 10, 1971, the Bullets traded Monroe to the archrival Knicks.

The blockbuster deal roiled basketball’s punditocracy and unleashed a cloud of questions: How would a premier soloist play with basketball’s version of the Budapest String Quartet? Would two basketballs be needed to accommodate a backcourt of Monroe and Frazier? And could Monroe commit to a team he had considered a mortal enemy?

Yet despite his reputation as a showman, he knew he was a complete player and resolved to fit in. He deferred to Frazier, the team’s floor leader. He passed more and shot less. For a time, he even came off the bench. His scoring average, once as high as 25.8 points with the Bullets, fell to 11.9 in his first year with the Knicks. “It was hard,” he said. “I was going back to Philly; guys were talking to me: ‘Man, you’re not the same person. Where’d your game go?’”

Nowhere, as it turned out. In his second year with the Knicks, the team pulled off an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1972/11/20/archives/willis-reed-and-the-sound-of-music.html" target=_blank>astonishing comeback</a> early in the season against the Bucks, scoring 19 straight points in the last 5:50 to win. Monroe made a string of clutch baskets, including the jumper that put them ahead. The deafening roar from the Madison Square Garden crowd made New York feel like home.

He embraced his new city, moving into a Broadway high-rise with a view of the Chagall murals at the entrance to Lincoln Center (rent: $1,000 per month). He hung out at jazz clubs where he became friendly with Miles Davis, feigning polite interest when the bandleader spoke in a rasp he could barely decipher. He became a New York celebrity, described by Roger Kahn in Esquire as “a seething prince out of the ghetto” whose game was so good, “the only way another mortal can stop him from scoring is with an M-16.”

As much as he loved New York, Monroe sometimes felt as though he hadn’t left the South. A Greenwich Village loft he wanted to buy suddenly became unavailable after the owner learned he was Black. Cabbies refused to pick him up so often that he kept rocks in his shoulder bag to fling at them as they drove away. In 1973, after leaving the Garden after a Finals game against the Los Angeles Lakers, Monroe and his girlfriend encountered a trio of drunken White fans in Knicks garb, one of whom called him the n-word, punched him in the jaw and ran. Monroe stored a pistol in the glove compartment of his Rolls, which he wanted to retrieve and “drive around and find those guys,” he said. But his girlfriend reminded him he had a plane to catch.

The Knicks were flying out west to play the Lakers in Game 5 of their series, a game they won to capture the title. Monroe earned his first and only ring and proved, finally, that one ball was all he and Frazier needed.

“It’s ironic,” Bradley said. “Earl had the reputation of a virtuoso, with the spin moves and the shake and bake. But I don’t remember him that way. I remember him as someone who put the team first. He’s a reaffirmation of the old principle: Winning is better than losing, and championships are why you play the game.”

Yet even with his success in New York, many of Monroe’s fans still yearned for the old Earl of Baltimore. Woody Allen, in a 1977 Sport magazine cover story, wrote that Monroe on court was akin to Marlon Brando on screen because “the potential for a sudden great thrill is always present.”

“Here is the single most exciting player in basketball,” wrote Allen, a season ticket holder at the time. “Do we really want him to abandon his individuality and become a cog in a machine?”

Chris Sorensen

Twenty-one years later, Jake Shuttlesworth, the character played by Denzel Washington in Spike Lee’s “He Got Game,” tells his son about his “all-time favorite ballplayer,” the guy “the Knicks put the shackles on.”

“You know what they called him?” Shuttlesworth asks over a montage of Monroe twirling as a Bullet. “Jesus — that’s what they called him. Jesus. Because he was the truth.”

Lee calls his film “an homage to Earl.”

“Earl ‘The Pearl’ was not just any player. He was all, my brother. He had the style,” the director said. “What people don’t understand is he made the great sacrifice.”

On a Friday afternoon a couple of weeks before his birthday, Monroe pushed his walker across the gym floor at his school’s current Bronx home. A photographer had set up lights to take his portrait. As he sat on a stool, Monroe said he felt lightheaded, then waved away offers of help. “I’m used to performing,” he said, his face brightening.

Monroe’s poor health often keeps him home in the Harlem apartment he shares with his wife, Marita. His rare excursions are mainly to see doctors. Someone from the Knicks had been in touch about inviting him to the Garden for a birthday toast at an upcoming game, an offer he appreciated even as it unsettled him.

“They don’t understand. If I can’t be presented right, I don’t want to be presented,” Monroe said. He imagined the hassle of getting to and from the arena, maneuvering his walker to a courtside seat and, when his name was announced, enduring the attention.

“It’s always this here,” he said, mimicking a practiced smile and wave. He laughed. “I prefer when the emphasis is not on me.”

Despite his reticence, Monroe was at the Knicks’ game against the Washington Wizards on Monday night, in a black leather jacket as he sat with his wife on “Celebrity Row.” His wide grin flashed on the videoboard as his name was announced and the crowd sang happy birthday. A TV reporter asked whether he had a message for Frazier, a Knicks broadcaster who somehow still appears fit enough to play.

“Stop looking like that, Clyde,” Monroe said. “You’re messing me up.”

His 15 hangs in the Garden rafters with Frazier’s 10 and the numbers of other Knicks legends. But old attachments linger. At his 1990 Hall of Fame induction, Monroe entered as a Bullet and sometimes contemplates what might have been had he stayed in Baltimore, an untethered version of “The Pearl.”

“Who doesn’t like to be king?” he asked. “I could’ve said no to the trade and been seen as a bigger star. It turned out okay but certainly not what it would’ve been had I stayed.”

As he has aged, he has found himself reflecting on his place in basketball’s evolution and the significance of all those improvised moves, many of which surprised even him. “It came from the street, and it changed the way people looked at the game,” he said. “When I first got there, they called me a hot dog. Then they understood it put people in the seats and everyone could do that. Now it’s the norm.”

He does not miss playing. When he sleeps, he does not dream about driving on Frazier or anyone else for that matter. And you won’t find him searching YouTube for his highlight reel. No need. “I was there,” he said. When he watches sports, it’s mainly tennis, though he said he enjoys the WNBA because the women “play beneath the rim” and there are “intricate plays and great shooters.” And the NBA?

“The game is boring except for the last five minutes,” he said. “You kind of know what’s going to happen.”

His post-basketball life has been an extended zig and a zag, not unlike his path to the hoop. His ventures have included a music production company, a Harlem restaurant and a painting and flooring business. He coproduced “Black Magic,” an award-winning documentary that Klores directed, about civil rights era basketball at Black colleges. There was a period in the mid-1980s when Bronx Republicans talked of recruiting him to run for Congress. (He said he declined.) A decade ago, he wrote his autobiography, which includes a few whiplash-inducing anecdotes, such as the night he unwittingly smoked angel dust at a party thrown by Bubba Smith of the Baltimore Colts.

“My whole thing has been about unpredictability,” Monroe said of his meandering journey. “If someone wants to kill you, if you have a certain routine, they know where to find you. But if you don’t have a routine, they might never find you.”

What has found him is the toll all that basketball magic took on his body. Surgeons have operated on his back, neck and elbow and replaced his knees and hips multiple times. His sinuses alone have required more than a dozen operations.

“It’s like 40-something,” he said of his surgery count. “My whole body, from my head down to my foot.”

The hardest part about not feeling well is staying home and thinking about things such as his next doctor’s visit, why his head hurts, why he feels foggy, whether he’ll be able to walk again without that damn walker and his mortality. Time is getting short, Monroe said. He understands that.

He prefers thinking about his school and the $5 million it needs to raise for the new building. He has a stack of R&amp;B and pop songs he wants to find artists to perform. He has a movie idea, a “back-in-the-day type of thing” about his college basketball team, a cross between “Remember the Titans” and “Animal House.”

He has the title (“Magic of the Rams”) and even a story outline. He just needs a script.

“Know any screenwriters?” he asked, as always contemplating his next move.

Oberlin College, BA in English

Paul Schwartzman specializes in political profiles and narratives about life, death and everything in between. Before joining The Washington Post, he worked at the New York Daily News, where he covered Rudolph W. Giuliani’s rise as mayor.

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Earl ‘The Pearl’ Monroe turns 80 years old, a slowed but proud NBA legend

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Earl Monroe changed the NBA. At 80, he is still making moves.

“The Pearl” revolutionized professional basketball with his flashy style of play. As he reaches a milestone birthday, he is slowed but proud.