It’s no secret the connection that Knicks fans of a certain generation feel toward the 1972-73 championship-winning squad. But a pair of stars from that team share a deeper connection that was on display Thursday morning in the South Bronx.
Speaking before a packed gymnasium at the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball School, two-time NBA champion and former U.S. senator Bill Bradley spoke from the heart about his friend, one-time on-court rival and eventual Knicks teammate, Earl “The Pearl” Monroe.
“The fact that it has Earl Monroe on the [school] name, that might be a little reason why I’m here, but you guys are the reason that makes my heart full. Earl is the reason of my heart, because he is in my heart,” Bradley said with Monroe sitting off to his left and drawing an audible reaction from the school’s students in the crowd. “When you are a teammate and you go to the top, it’s a forever bond, and we did that twice.”
Bradley, 83, added that his appearance Thursday was “one small way for me to say to my friend, I love you.”
The two Knicks legends were side by side once again to celebrate the opening of the new 69,000-square-foot facility for the Earl Monroe New Renaissance Basketball School, a specialized charter school in The Bronx whose curriculum is based around basketball and careers beyond the court.
The school opened in 2021 and provides its 440 students from grades 9-12 with an education in topics ranging from broadcast, print and digital media to law and marketing.
“Everybody can’t play basketball, even though everybody wants to, but there’s so many other aspects of the sports and the game that you can be involved in without being the sports person,” Monroe, 81, said after the event. “I think that this is an excellent way for people to be involved in the sport and still get the same satisfaction as scoring a basket.”
The ribbon-cutting ceremony drew a star-studded list of guests, including former Knicks stars John Starks and Stephon Marbury, Knicks celebrity superfan Tracy Morgan, ESPN personality Mike Greenberg, who hosted the event, and NBA commissioner Adam Silver.
Silver noted how fitting it was that Thursday’s ceremony was taking place after the Knicks ended their 53-year championship drought this past summer, making them the first Knicks title squad since Monroe’s 1973 team.
“It felt great,” Monroe said about seeing the Knicks win another title. “We’ve had some great players come through over the years, and finally getting over the hump. Not only just for me, just for the city itself. We’re a city of champs, so we deserve it.”
But the Knicks will have a target on their back this season as defending champions, and repeating is no small task.
Monroe was part of the Baltimore Bullets team that prevented the Knicks from repeating in 1971, knocking them out in the Eastern Conference Finals. The Naismith Basketball Hall of Famer didn’t seem too worried about the Knicks’ mindset going into this season.
“Certainly, the fact that you’ve won, obviously, it makes it so that you understand that you can win again,” Monroe said. “So I’m quite sure that they’re coming into this thinking that we’re No. 1, and I’ll tell other people to prove that we’re not.”
While Monroe and Bradley are forever tied together on the court, from their days playing in the Baker League in Philadelphia through college and into the NBA, Bradley’s lasting memory of Monroe reflected more from what he saw Thursday than on the court.
“This is the Earl Monroe that I know,” Bradley said prior to the start of the ceremony. “From the first day I met him, when we had a shootout at Bry Pope Baptist Church in Philadelphia in the summertime, Earl Monroe was interested in the community, and this is the epitome of being interested in the community.”
