#64 - Earl Monroe is Yemi

Black Jesus! C’mon, Black Jesus and then there’s a saintly African priest who sacrifices his own life to save his older brother’s?! I said, ‘C’mon!’ Of course, Black Jesus aka The Pearl aka Black Magic aka The Lord’s Prayer aka Einstein aka Thomas Edison has GOT TO BE our favorite Nigerian holy man who dies by gunshot wound while protecting his druglord brother inside the heroin plane that crashes on THE island, which is the same THE island his aforementioned brother crashes on years later in a different plane filled with more people and less heroin. C’mon!

I’ll be honest, I’d never heard the later half of those nicknames for the one and only Earl Monroe of the great city Philadelphia. Pearl? Sure. Black Jesus? Yep. Black Magic? Another yep. Either way, Earl Monroe was so damn cool- it’s crazy he didn’t play in the ABA. Am I wrong about that? Anyway, Earl was one of those classic ballplayers that I heard about growing up as what made basketball exciting to watch. Sure, I’m from New Jersey with a dad from New York City who is/was a New York Knicks fan and Earl was a Knick for 9 years as a featured star during their most fabled years, BUT c’mon! Earl was fast, skillful, creative, a slasher, a dasher, a ballhandler, a scorer, and he was that kind of player who racked up those nicknames for a reason. When I listened to old heads talk the NBA during the Michael Jordan era of non-stop Michael Jordan highlights with him switching hands mid-flight and throwing up crazy shots and spinning people and spinning himself into a shot and I’ll admit I’m from an area of the country populated by Knicks fans, I heard about Earl ‘The Pearl’ Monroe. 

And I got to say, Mr. Monroe and I once lived in the same town. BOOM! Think about that. Me and Earl living in Westfield, New Jersey, together. BOOM! Actually, not ‘together’. Never saw him. Only saw his daughter once who I think was around the same age as me. He didn’t live there too long. Maybe a year. I was I think in middle school at the time. I thought about going to his house and asking if he wouldn’t mind signing a basketball for me like every damn day and never did it. One, I was scared. Socially awkward scared. No way would I have pulled that off without like nervously chattering my teeth the whole time and acting like my family was being held hostage if I didn’t do this. Two, I was betting and had heard rumors of dumbass kids just like me and most likely worse harassing him for the same signage. Individually, they were reason enough not to do it, but MAN ALIVE I wanted to do that! Damn it. Stupid other dumbass rich white kids. Fuck. I didn’t like them either, Earl. I don’t talk to anyone from Westfield! I spent so much more time there than you too. Damn. C’mon. I wasn’t born there. Ok, let it go. Just saying, those kids bummed me out too. 

The Pearl was the name of a Dharma Initiative station where two man teams watched what the other stations were doing via a multitude of cameras and took notes and then sent those notes through a pneumatic tube to another part of THE island. It’s all connected! Seriously, fuck all the magnets and hydrogen bombs and time travel shit- how the fuck and who the fuck made that pneumatic tube system? That must’ve been a hell of a project. Who did that? 

Earl was the leader of the Baltimore Bullets and Yemi was the leader of a Nigerian church and later ate a bullet. Ok, I can do better than that. A classic storytelling archetype is the pair of brothers where one goes good and the other goes bad and in there the one going bad does it with a chip on his shoulder that this is what had to be done to save the family and the one going good does it was a chip on his shoulder that this what has to be done to save the family because the other one went bad. There are a ton of examples of brothers where they feel like the only two choices in life were to join the clergy or become a criminal, and they ain’t wrong and they kind of profit off each other. Sinners and saviors. And usually the bad brother is the main character like Tuco in ‘The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly’ where he takes himself and Blondie to a monastery that his brother is the monsignor or whatever. And that’s the same case with Yemi and his much more famous brother Eko aka Mr. Eko. 

So, Eko becomes the Tony Montana of Nigeria and Yemi becomes their village’s local priest and he is the one with only the good book in his hands to staredown murderous druglords like his own brother who come to his church looking for the money from their collection plates and for their malaria drugs to sell back to them for profit. He stands up to his brother multiple times, he even goes to confront him on the tarmac to stop him from flying off in his plane filled with Virgin Mary statues stuffed with heroin and is shot and killed by the Nigerian military as they try to stop the plane from taking off, and Yemi’s death haunts Eko for the rest of his days. Kind of like how Earl’s Knicks’ success and, specifically, the 1973 NBA championship has haunted the Knicks ever since and, specifically, Patrick Ewing’s Knicks. Is Patrick Ewing going to be Mr. Eko? Who knows?! 

Fuck style? Well, Yemi was a virgin. I mean, the Lost creators never explicitly said, ‘Yemi’s a virgin’, but I mean he had to be. I know not all priests are virgins, I doubt even half of them are. But we’re not talking about a real priest. We’re talking about a fictional TV character priest, so he’s actually way more priest-like in the idyllic way than a real priest who no doubt is some weird pervert not paying taxes. Yemi was a virgin. By the way, there’s so many virgins on Lost, TV in general, movies in general. It’s bizarre. Do you think Hurley had sex? Like really? They certainly make it seem like he hadn’t. Ben? Ben Linus was a virgin. At best, Ben was a virgin. I guess those are spoilers for posts that I haven’t written, but Ben Linus and Hurley are virgins. 

As for Earl, I’m sure he had many lovers saying The Lord’s Prayer after some highlight-reel sexing. Right? I could’ve said something about pearl necklaces too. Hmmmm… 

I don’t really want to end the post with that. How about- ‘He Got Game’! That’s where many from my generation or so probably heard the nickname Black Jesus from with its association to Earl. I had heard Black Magic and The Pearl, but Black Jesus wasn’t something I knew until He Got Game. Great movie. I think it’s debatable whether it is more or less culturally relevant to some of Spike Lee’s more obviously philosophic movies like ‘Do The Right Thing’. It’s probably my favorite Spike movie though or at least if I had to choose a Spike Lee movie to watch at any given moment- He Got Game would be my first choice. I’ve definitely seen it the most. I think all the stuff with Ray Allen/Jesus Shuttlesworth is great and is a great movie unto itself, obviously, that includes all the great stuff from Denzel Washington as his highly-flawed dad. But there is this completely incongruous other part of the movie where Denzel’s character is in what is basically a Tennessee Williams play with him and Milla Jovovich as a prostitute and this flop house they all are in and so on. That part of the movie is Spike being Spike aka the filmphile, art school kid, nerdy auteur, NYC artist et cetera come out and play with Denzel fucking Washington at his disposal. Go watch ‘He Got Game’. 

These were supposed to be short posts, I swear.