A Fond Farewell to Moses Malone

I barely knew Moses Malone and I promise you he wouldn’t have remembered me. But for a few short weeks, he was the force at the center of my universe.
 
Malone, three times the NBA’s MVP and one of its greatest centers, died Sunday morning of cardiac disease in Norfolk, Va., at the age of 60. And so the mental newsreel unfolded …
 
He had accepted an athletic scholarship to the University of Maryland in 1974. I was the sports editor of the student daily newspaper. But even as Malone arrived for fall classes, stories were circulating that he would instead turn pro with the American Basketball Association. No high school player had ever gone directly to the pros.
 
For the first two weeks on campus of that semester, I majored in Malone. He was playing basketball at the gym? I was at the gym. He’d gone back home to Petersburg, Va.? I was on the phone in the office with a wire services contact there, swapping information. All Moses, all the time.

Malone turned pro. Never played for Maryland. His mother had quit school after the fifth grade, his father was no factor in the family and the $1 million contract offer from the Utah Stars was too good to turn down. He was gone from College Park and it wasn’t even September.

The ABA soon floundered and Malone played in the NBA for eight teams until he retired in 1995. Named one of the NBA’s 50 greatest players, he led the Philadelphia 76ers to the 1983 title, earning MVP honors in the Finals, and topped the NBA in rebounding six times, five in a row. He made the All-Star team 12 times.

His was a remarkable journey, the beginning of which taught me innumerable lessons in journalism. That journey, that life, ended far too soon.
 
 
Post By: Larry Weisman, a longtime sportswriter for USA TODAY, blogs for Twistity.com. Follow him on Twitter @MrLarryWeisman .