The man had tiny hands. Or, at least, hands that looked tiny on his huge frame. Six foot ten, 275 pounds, and Moses Malone had the hands of a 5′9″ grocery bagger. Embarrassing hands, he seemed to think, stubby and ill-proportioned, and when he was young he would often hide them—tucking them into the pockets of his warm-up jacket or slipping them under the arms folded across his chest, the way a man self-conscious about his teeth will cover his mouth when he smiles.
A fierce hatred of embarrassment ruled a surprising amount of the life of Moses Malone, the Hall of Fame basketball center who died on September 13 at the age of 60. People who are easily embarrassed—those who blush too often and too soon—usually end up retreating from excellence. But the key for Malone lay in that word fierce: his embarrassment born of a burning pride and a rage for dignity.
The child of a genuinely impoverished background, Malone was a basketball star who possessed nearly all the tools he needed for the game. Unfortunately, he lacked the tools he could have used for stardom—the social esteem that seemed to come so effortlessly to the peers he admired, from the elegance of Julius Erving to the infectious smile of Magic Johnson. He wasn’t good-looking and he wasn’t articulate, his natural intelligence rarely making its way past his thick, mumbled Southern accent and into words. He wasn’t charming and he wasn’t graceful. He wasn’t quick at anything except basketball (if his hands were proportioned to his body, his teammate Rick Barry once joked, the league would have to outlaw him), and his greatest achievement may have been forming himself, willing himself, into a man of some real dignity and self-possession.
Yes, Moses Malone was probably the greatest offensive rebounder ever to play the game: three times the Most Valuable Player in the NBA, 12 years in a row an All-Star. But difficult as that was, his 21-year basketball career may have been the easy part. Growing up, that was the hard part, and he deserves to be remembered as much—no, more—for that success.
Born in 1955, Malone came out of Petersburg, Virginia, a rundown city of around 36,000 in those days, and even for Petersburg, his family was poor. Malone’s mother had dropped out of grade school to help support her brothers and sisters, and she was working as a packer at the local Safeway when her son was born. His father disappeared, kicked out by his mother for his drinking when Malone was two. Their house had little plumbing, a hole in the wall where a window was supposed to be, and no space for the rapidly growing boy, who used to climb up to the roof at night just
to breathe the air and avoid the college recruiters who began gathering as soon as he reached his teens.
The only book in the house was a battered copy of the Bible, and at age 14 Malone laboriously wrote out a note promising that he would work to become the best high school basketball player in the country, inserting it for mystical force into the pages of Isaiah 64: “Oh that thou wouldest rend the heavens, that thou wouldest come down, that the mountains might flow down at thy presence. . . . O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand.” By the end of his junior year, he had succeeded at his goal, and by the time he graduated in 1974, his Petersburg team had won 50 straight games and its second straight state championship.
It’s then that the story begins to get twisted. The greatest recruiting coach of the era, Lefty Driesell, beat out all the other college coaches pursuing the boy and convinced Malone to sign a letter of intent to attend the University of Maryland. But the early 1970s were a wacky time in basketball, with the staid National Basketball Association challenged by a startup rival league, the American Basketball Association. Desperate for attention and fans, the ABA had introduced into the sport the three-point line, barber-pole colored balls, and a chance for cities too long ignored by the NBA to host their own professional teams. The new league flashed enough money to draw in Rick Barry, Connie Hawkins, and a few other established NBA figures—and outbid the older league for the rookie contracts of such college stars as Artis Gilmore, out of Jacksonville University, and Dan Issel from Kentucky. And then, in 1974, the ABA’s team in Salt Lake City, the Utah Stars, jokingly wasted a third-round draft pick on Moses Malone, the nation’s top high school player.
The thing is, it wasn’t a joke to Malone. “I’d seen the pros on TV,” he said. “I figured I was quicker.” And it came to seem less and less of a joke to the Utah team. According to a first-rate 1979 profile by Frank Deford in Sports Illustrated, Malone showed the initial contract offer to Driesell, who was so offended by its loopholes that he brought in local D.C. power lawyers Donald Dell and Lee Fentress to act as “friends” to Malone. (NCAA rules at the time categorized as a professional, and thus ineligible for the college game, any player who consulted an agent.) They hammered out a deal, and in October 1974, at age 19, Malone played his first game as a professional in the Salt Palace arena for the Utah Stars.
It was there in Salt Lake that he first proved his extraordinary ability to reclaim his teammates’ misses, leading the league in offensive rebounds in his first season. It’s there, too, unfortunately, that he formed the reputation for being a slow-witted yokel that would trail him the rest of his career. Although Malone was widely reported at the time (and is still sometimes reported now) to be the first basketball player to skip college and jump straight to the pros, four high school players before him had managed at least a year in the NBA. But Malone was the first to make the transition with the eyes of the national press on him, and his protective shyness, fear of embarrassment, and ungrammatical mumble fed the narrative that he hadn’t been smart enough to go to college. “I be alone and be happier than with a lot of peoples,” he tried to tell the press. “You can’t get in no trouble then.”
Salt Lake, too, was where I met Moses Malone. My family had recently moved to Utah, and age 13, I’d gotten the father of a friend to help finagle me a job as a press assistant with the Stars. Apart from fetching stat sheets, soft drinks (it was a Mormon town, after all), and sandwiches for reporters, there wasn’t much to do but sit in the empty stands and watch the team practice, or keep an eye on the press table during games.
The Stars were a steady contender in the league, winning the championship in 1971. But the finances of the team were shaky, and by 1974 the owner, cable-television entrepreneur Bill Daniels, was going broke after some bad investments and an expensive education in politics during his unsuccessful run for governor of Colorado. Despite Utah’s steady fan base, the ABA canceled the team’s charter in December 1975 for missing payroll payments, and the Stars were unable to make the jump into the NBA when the two leagues merged the next season.
But for a year and a half, I got to watch Malone grow from a wiry young player to the early stages of the bulky presence under the backboard that he became. And to watch his shyness harden into a suspicion that the press was trying to embarrass him, trying to find something to make him mockable. Away from the reporters he could be whimsical, with an odd but real sense of humor, murmuring jokes that his thick accent allowed few listeners to catch. But even in Salt Lake, which he loved, he learned not to speak to anyone who might use what he said against him.
The collapse of the Stars and merger of the leagues sent him wandering for two years: first to St. Louis, another failing ABA team, then to the New Orleans Jazz, who drafted but didn’t want him, then re-drafted by the Portland Trail Blazers, who also didn’t want him, before being traded to Buffalo, which he didn’t want. Finally, he ended up in Houston, playing for the Rockets, where he proved in the 1978-1979 season that he was one of the game’s great centers, scoring almost 25 points a game, grabbing over 17 rebounds, and winning his first MVP award.
In 1982 he reached his peak, both professionally and emotionally, when he signed the biggest contract in the NBA and joined the Philadelphia 76ers. A tight-knit team, headlined by his fellow ABA alumnus Julius Erving, the 76ers took the NBA championship with a 12-1 romp through the playoffs. “Fo’-Fo’-Fo’,” Malone was quoted as saying, predicting the team would sweep its three playoff series. They did lose one game, to the Milwaukee Bucks, but that was close enough, and the 76ers had “Fo’-Fi’-Fo’ ” inscribed on their championship rings.
Malone would play on for another 12 years, and play well, mentoring such power players as Charles Barkley and Hakeem Olajuwon as he moved from team to team. But he never quite reached the levels of personal satisfaction he had known in Philadelphia. Still, he was a professional, with a professional’s pride: Basketball was where he had put in the hard work to make himself a dignified, serious man, and as long as he continued he knew who he was and what he was worth.
“The Lord gave me this talent,” Malone once explained. “That’s why I think I was named Moses.” But the truth is that he wasn’t innately gifted, a naturally athletic big man the way, say, Wilt Chamberlain was. The same medical anomaly that produced a 6′10″ child from a 5′2″ mother and 5′6″ father gave him his small hands and, probably, the overburdened heart that failed him at age 60. He had to work, to fight every moment, for the offensive rebounds that became his specialty—so much so that he would often send up toward the rim absurd tosses, in the confidence that he would be able to get the rebound and put the basketball back up again.
It’s telling, I think, that Malone asked Julius Erving to introduce him when he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2001. They were teammates for only a few seasons in Philadelphia, but they had both ridden the rickety rollercoaster of the ABA when they were young, and, except perhaps for his rookie season in Salt Lake City, his years in Philadelphia were the only time he felt loyalty to a particular place. Besides, Erving was everything he knew he wasn’t: a graceful, well-spoken man, respected by the press and loved by fans. Erving, he thought, could explain how Malone had played the game and why it mattered. Julius Erving, he knew, would not try to embarrass him.
But even Erving had trouble expressing what the combination of skill, hard work, and a great but inarticulate basketball intelligence had allowed the man to become. He might have put it this way: By the time he retired from play in 1995, Moses Malone seemed at last to have grown comfortable in the dignity he had insisted on claiming. He seemed at last to have grown into himself.
Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
