Moses Malone as an Athlete and His Effect in Sport and the Media

Moses Malone was a basketball prodigy many years before it was considered commonplace for a richly talented kid to come out of high school and go directly to the professional leagues. Moses was, in fact, in addition to his sterling Hall of Fame career, a youthful pathfinder in a highly competitive sport many years before prep stars-turned-NBA-superstars like Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant came along. And of course, Moses was an icon well prior to the latest high school prodigy, 19-year-old LaBron James, of the Cleveland Cavaliers, who recently became the youngest player in the history of the NBA to win the "Rookie of the Year" award.

What kind of reception did Moses receive in pro-basketball?

Meanwhile, one of the pertinent questions, in hindsight, is, how was Moses, a kid out of high school competing against some of the best players on the planet, received by the fans and by the media? As for the press, Moses did not talk to the media very much, according to his former teammate and his Hall of Fame presenter, Julius "Doctor J" Erving (Hunt, 2002). "He didn't want a lot of recognition," Julius remembers. "He just wanted to play the game. That's exactly what he did. And he did it extremely well," Julius added.

Certainly Moses was on occasion misunderstood - probably simply because he was so young, and did not always have a lot to say at that time (for fear his enthusiasm might be misconstrued as cockiness?), he was wrongly painted sometimes as a brooding, uncooperative African-American player. And, was he unfairly placed under the brutally intrusive microscope of the TV and print media, and hammered by the reporters with each tiny misstep? Yes, indeed he was, until later in his career. But more to the point, Moses generally handled that pressure with grace and composure, and by letting his brilliance on the court do his talking for him. By comparison, LaBron James has faced far, far more pressure from fans and the media than Moses did in 1974, because of the enormous, unbelievably high expectations heaped upon him beginning with his senior year of high school in Florida. To wit, as good as Moses was in high school, none of his prep games were shown on ESPN - or any network - nationally, or even locally, as was the case in 2003 with LaBron.

Moses, particularly later in his career, did some "boasting" and "bragging" and even predicting, prior to games and series. In the 1982 season with the Sixers, a year in which Philly won 65 and lost only 17 (Moses was on a team with Julius Erving, Bobby Jones, Maurice Cheeks, Andrew Toney), when Moses predicted that the three playoff series his team would face would go "fo, fo, fo" - 4, 4, 4 - he was nearly right. The Sixers went 4, 5, and 4, and won the NBA championship.

What did Moses mean to the NBA? He meant a great deal to the NBA, as a force under the basket (he finished his pro-career with 17,834 rebounds), as a scoring machine (29,580 career points scored), but also, as an example for all kids who dream. From the moment he began to succeed in the ABA in 1974, he was erasing the myth that you had to finish college to be mature enough to make it in the pro-game. "I didn't do it just for the money" (Hunt, 2002), Moses said of his jump from high school to the ABA. "I definitely wanted to help my mother. We didn't have a lot of money. But I love the game. I worked hard every day in the playgrounds. I was 6'10" with a lot of heart. I played hard all the time. I never stopped working. Some people considered me a superstar. I never considered myself a superstar. I wanted to play against the best players in the world." And while he did just that, he excelled - from his rookie season with the Utah Stars where he averaged 18.8 points and 14.6 rebounds to his glittering, 19-year career statistics tallied through 1,455 games as a member of nine pro-teams.

Moses' Career Highlights

According to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame (from which these data were retrieved), Moses graduated from Petersburg High School in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1974, where the 6-foot-10-inch, 260-pound talent had led his teammates to 50 consecutive victories, and back-to-back state championships. He was brought to Philadelphia in 1974 by Wali Jones, a member of the 76 ers' NBA championship team of 1966-67, and played in an All-Star game at Temple University. That is where he caught the eyes of the ABA, a rival to the NBA at that time, and signed on with the Utah Stars.