Moses Malone, page 2
Ms. Mary, as she was known in the Heights, packed a strong personality into her slender 5-foot-2 frame. She was sweet but tough, a disciplinarian who always spoke her mind. And she was very protective of her baby. The boy was picked on often. He was painfully shy and an easy target due to his stutter and lanky build. Kids teased him for not wearing a winter coat and snowshoes in the cold weather, luxuries Mary couldn’t afford.13 Ms. Mary unleashed her wrath on any child who made fun of her son.14
She nicknamed Moses “Teeny” as a baby because he was so skinny. The name stuck and caught on in the neighborhood.15 Neighbors and friends remember him as a quiet kid who kept to himself. He never got into fights or trouble with the law. When comfortable with the people around him, he opened up a bit and liked to crack jokes.
Despite the absence of Moses’s father, the Malones were surrounded by love. Mary’s nephews James and Harold lived with them for a while, as did her father for the final years of his life. Mary had other siblings, nieces, and nephews nearby, including sisters Laura and Naomi, who lived in the Heights. Moses was particularly close with Naomi and her daughter, Diane, who was the same age. He also spent a lot of time with his uncle Charlie Hudgins.
The Malones built a community at the Morning Star Baptist Church on St. Mark Street, which they attended regularly.16 They also enjoyed the emotional support of the proverbial village that raised Moses and the other children. Originally known as Delectable Heights, the Heights was a poor, Black neighborhood within walking distance of downtown Petersburg. Money was tight, though those who grew up there look back on their childhood fondly.
Wealth is relative. Moses’s neighbors were all in a similar financial position, and most didn’t venture far from the neighborhood. Corporate dollars did not flow through Petersburg. The white middle class lived more comfortably than Black folks, but the contrast wasn’t as stark as in many larger cities. The Malones weren’t bombarded with images of wealth on social media, cable television, or in movies, the last of which they couldn’t afford to attend. They didn’t realize how poor they were.
The Heights was a small neighborhood, so everybody knew each other, and families looked out for one another. “We didn’t have much, but we had each other,” said Roger Pegram, who grew up a block from Moses.17 If you needed a teaspoon of sugar or a couple of dollars for groceries, your neighbor helped you out. Parents sat on their front porches while young kids played hopscotch, tag, jump rope, and marbles in the yard. Adults had a license to scold or even smack any child who stepped out of line, and bad behavior was sure to get back to one’s parents.
The Heights could be rough. Johnny Byrd, whose convenience store was a few houses down from the Malones, was held up numerous times, and residents had to be wary of wild dogs roaming the streets.18 However, the children felt safe in their familiar surroundings. Guns and drugs hadn’t infiltrated the neighborhood yet. Fights were common but settled with fists, and if two kids threw punches in the morning, they’d be playing together again by the afternoon.
Moses delivered the local newspaper, the Progress-Index, for a while and, like many boys in the Heights, earned spending money by caddying at the Country Club of Petersburg in walking distance from the neighborhood.19 But most of the time he was free to play with his friends. “I didn’t like him to do no work at all,” Mary told Frank Deford of Sports Illustrated. “I know how hard I come up, so I didn’t want him to.”20
Entertainment options were scarce. Sometimes the boys messed around with sticks or hit golf balls in the woods. During the summer months, Moses cooled off at the Bunker Hill swimming pool on Jefferson Street.21 In his spare time, he drew pictures of buildings or the schoolyard, and every year he attended the Southside Virginia Fair that came through town.22
Mostly, boys and girls who had outgrown their parents’ front lawn spent their leisure time at the Virginia Avenue Elementary School schoolyard. Virginia Avenue, the street the school was on, ran parallel to Moses’s street, one block over, just a short walk up High Pearl Street.
In elementary school, Moses played baseball and football. The local schools fielded football teams that competed against each other. Moses, who was tall for his age, emerged as a reliable target at wide receiver for the Virginia Avenue School. He enjoyed watching football on TV and was a devout Dallas Cowboys fan in the heart of Washington Redskins country.23
Moses first picked up a basketball at age thirteen. “I thought basketball was a sissy’s game—too easy,” he said years later. “When I first was introduced to basketball me and couple of my buddies, we’d come around the playground, and we had a little rubber kickball. I threw the rubber ball up, and it went into the hoop. I said, ‘This might be a game I wanna try.’ All of a sudden, I left football, left baseball, and I really started loving the game.”24
Virginia Avenue Elementary School was the site of some of the best basketball games in Petersburg. Initially, the older players didn’t welcome the young Malone. He was tall with long arms but lacked coordination. “He had no hands,” said David Pair, a friend from the neighborhood. “We’d pass him the ball and it would hit him in the chest.” The guys laughed and kicked him off the court. Moses would stand by the fence and watch them play.25
Foreshadowing his professional career, the boy went to work. Every day after school, he played ball on Virginia Avenue. When most of the guys went home in the evening, he stayed there practicing his shooting, rebounding, and moves around the basket until the early morning hours. There were no lights in the schoolyard, so he relied on the dim glow of a lone streetlight. Don Wall, a friend who lived across the street from the school, fell asleep every night to the repeated bang bang ching of Moses dribbling the ball then shooting it through the metal nets. Rumor spread through the Heights that Teeny slept with his basketball.26
The competition at the schoolyard was fierce. When a team lost, it might be a long time before its players had a chance to play again. Sometimes the boys played for orange juice, a rare treat for Moses. The more he played, the more his love of the game grew, and he’d hoop with anybody at any time. Phyllis Jones and Janet Pegram, two girls from the neighborhood, played Moses two-on-one to 20. Moses would spot them 18 points and still win.27
When the weather didn’t cooperate, Moses and the other boys moved their games to the Harding Street Recreation Center. Originally called the Harding Street Community Center, the venue had hosted legendary acts such as Sam Cooke and James Brown. Over the years, it morphed into a community recreation center where kids from different neighborhoods tested their skills on the basketball court.28
Roger Pegram was a high school football star from the Heights a few years older than Moses. He and some friends put together a team to play in a basketball tournament at the Harding Street Rec Center. Roger’s younger brother, Curtis, was a close friend of Moses, and they formed their own team. Roger couldn’t believe what he witnessed as James and Moses’s squad beat his team in the championship game.
“We never knew Moses could play ball,” he said. “We’d be at the school yard, all the older guys. All the other guys would get up and play, but Mo never participated. Never knew he could play until we played in a tournament at the Rec. And we were just so shocked how Moses played. You could just tell how talented he was—for a guy who you never seen him play basketball. Never seen him play!”29
Malone’s rate of improvement was staggering. When asked years later by Playboy magazine how long it took before his hard work paid off, Moses said, “Only about a year—one of my years was worth five of anybody else’s. When I was 14, I was going up against much older guys and puttin it to em.”30
In the summer of 1968, not long after Moses picked up the game, he visited his cousins James and Harold, who had moved to New York. “There was this playground tournament up about 165th Street and Amsterdam Avenue,” Moses recalled years later. “There were these three fancy city dudes, and they were using their flashy behind-the-back and between-leg stuff to beat everybody. My cousin looked at them and said ‘Hey, I know a guy who can beat you all.’ They said, ‘Who?’ and he pointed at me. So, I found two guys who couldn’t even play. One was from New York and the other was from my hometown in Petersburg. We played to 32, and my team won, 32–20. I got 30,” he said. “Then this girl came over and said, ‘Hey, you’re kind of cute.’ ‘I was kinda shy. I turned away.’”31
Moses and Mary had few possessions, the most prized of which was an old Bible, dog-eared and coverless, that had been passed down by Mary’s father. When Moses was fourteen, he wrote on a piece of paper that he would be the best high school player in the country his junior year and tucked it inside the Bible.32 It was a preposterous prediction. Sure, the boy was tall for his age, but his skills were far from exceptional, and he had never even played organized basketball.
The other ballers at Virginia Avenue were vital to Malone’s growth. They challenged him daily, instilling in him a competitive drive. He patterned his game after the older guys, some of whom took him under their wings. David Pair only stood about 5 feet 9, though he was on the high school wrestling team and would become a state judo champion. He showed Malone how to use his body to gain position under the boards. Sometimes he just kept Moses company while the boy practiced his free throws.33 Baby Head was a 5-foot-10 guard who, according to his brother Leroy, could shoot like Stephen Curry. The Cole brothers, Baby Head, Leroy, and Bozo were regulars at Virginia Avenue, and Moses grew close with Baby Head in particular.34 Gut Johnson played football for the high school and looked out for the younger kids in the neighborhood. He took a liking to Moses, and the two would play one on one, full court, until well past midnight.35 Some of the older boys Moses befriended were into gambling and drinking on the street corner, but he stayed away from those activities.
Malone formed a spirited rivalry with a boy from St. Mark Street known as “Jimmy Snake.” Jimmy was a street kid who didn’t have much use for school or organized ball. He grew to about 6 feet 6 and jumped high enough to touch the top of the backboard. “He looked like a giant,” said Ricky Hunley, a football star from the Heights who went on to play in the NFL. “He used to wear Moses’s skinny ass out cause Moses didn’t carry the weight that Jimmy did.” Moses and Jimmy were always placed on separate teams to keep the games fair.36
While some of the older kids provided guidance, for the most part Moses taught himself the game. Petersburg wasn’t a basketball hotbed. There wasn’t an Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) scene or expert coaches working with the kids in the Heights.
Moses and his friends watched their favorite players on television then emulated their moves on the court. They’d call out their hero’s name as they went up for a shot, drove to the basket, or swatted an opponent’s offering. Moses’s idol was Spencer Haywood, the superb forward best known for paving the way for players to leave college early for professional basketball. “Haywood to the hoop!” Moses would yell as he drove to the basket. “Haywood with the shot!”37 Morris Fultz, a friend from the Heights who played high school ball with Moses, pretended to be Julius Erving. Mo Howard went by Lew, for Lew Alcindor of UCLA. Ronald Robinson idolized another UCLA standout, Sidney Wicks.38
Before and after runs at the playground, the boys sat around and daydreamed about what they would do when they grew up. “I’m going to be a millionaire,” said one kid. “I’m gonna play in the NBA,” said another. “We didn’t take it too serious,” said Fultz. “But Mo was serious. He said he was going to be like Spencer Haywood.”39
David Pair was a big Wilt Chamberlain fan. He had a poster of the Big Dipper hanging in his house. Moses asked Pair, “How come you like Wilt so much?”
Pair replied, “Because he’s the best.”
Moses said, “Someday I’m gonna be the best.”
Pair said, “Okay, when you’re the best I’ll put up your poster.” Not many years later, Pair hung a Moses Malone poster on his wall.40
2
Chuck Taylor All-Stars
Clint Bufford lived two houses down from the Malones on St. Matthew Street. He was a few years older than Moses and played for Peabody High School’s basketball and football teams. One day during the 1969–70 school year, Peabody’s assistant basketball coach, Pro Hayes, drove Clint home from practice. They passed the Virginia Avenue School, where Moses was playing ball.
Hayes spotted the lanky eighth grader, who by then was about 6 feet 1 or 6 feet 2, and asked Bufford about him. “What’s his name? What grade is in? Does he play organized ball?” At that time, Moses was attending Peabody High School. Virginia Avenue Elementary School ran through seventh grade, and there was no junior high or middle school. Bufford called Moses over to the car. Hayes asked him to practice with the varsity team in the evenings after school. The boy demurred. Hayes persisted, pointing out that it would be beneficial to play against strong competition on an indoor court instead of the concrete schoolyard.
The next day Moses practiced with the varsity team. Hayes was impressed, but the boy didn’t return. The coach asked Clint to talk to him. Clint thought maybe Moses was self-conscious about his long, skinny legs. He’d never seen his neighbor wear shorts; it was always jeans or overalls. He convinced Moses to return to practice. Moses showed up for a few days, but then he quit again.
This time Coach Hayes went to the Malone home. He told Mary that her son had potential and sealed the deal by offering Moses a pair of Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars, the premier basketball shoe on the market worn by most NBA players. Mary couldn’t afford to buy Moses basketball shoes, opting instead for the cheapest tennis shoes she could find. Hayes told Moses that the Chuck Taylors were his so long as he showed up for practice every day. If he stopped coming, he had to return them.1 That was the start of Moses’s career in organized basketball.
* * *
Petersburg is a small city in southeast Virginia at the fall line of the Appomattox River, best known as the site of a nearly yearlong siege at the end of the Civil War. General Robert E. Lee and his troops eventually lost the battle, opening a pathway for the Union to Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, twenty-five miles north of Petersburg. Lee surrendered at Appomattox weeks later, bringing an end to the war. Petersburg had a population of about thirty-seven thousand people during Moses’s childhood. Tobacco was the leading industry until the city’s biggest employer, Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, left town in 1985.2
Despite its location in the heart of the south, Petersburg had a long-standing free Black community residing predominantly on Pocahontas Island.3 Yet the city was not immune from discrimination. Moses, who was born the same year that Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white person in Montgomery, Alabama, and fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in the Mississippi Delta, lived the earliest years of his life in a city under the scourge of segregation.
There were “Whites” and “Colored” restrooms, water fountains, and waiting areas at the Petersburg bus station. Courtrooms used separate Bibles for Black and white folks, and the public library had different entrances and reading rooms for the different races. Black people were allowed to buy food from Woolworth’s and W. T. Grant but couldn’t sit at their lunch counters.4
Wyatt Tee Walker, pastor of the Gillfield Baptist Church, served as head of the local NAACP and spearheaded a vibrant civil rights movement in the city. He helped organize protests and sit-ins by students from Virginia State University and Peabody High School at Petersburg Public Library, housed in the McKenney Building, in 1959 and 1960, which resulted in integration of the facility. That led to demonstrations and eventually an end to segregation at the Blue Bird and Century Theaters, Spiro’s Department Store, and the Trailways Bus Station, as well as other locales.5
Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. at an interseminary meeting while in seminary school, and the two became friends. Dr. King was so impressed by Walker and the movement in Petersburg that he recruited his friend to be executive director of his civil rights organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1960. “The fact that Dr. King selected me to lead the SCLC is proof that Petersburg played a big role in the civil rights movement,” Walker told the Progress-Index in 2009. “The SCLC used the local model of the movement that we had in Petersburg and applied it to the entire South. That was a critical strategy.”6
Segregation was illegal by the time Moses finished elementary school, though the separate races continued to reside in different communities and attend different schools. “We were kind of isolated in our own neighborhood,” recalled Francine Cole, who grew up on Virginia Avenue. “It’s amazing that there are some neighborhoods that are white, maybe ten minutes, fifteen minutes from where I grew up that I didn’t know existed until, you know, later on.”7
In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional. The following year, the year Moses was born, the Court provided guidelines for the integration of schools, stating that states must do so “with all deliberate speed.”8 Fourteen years later, as Moses entered eighth grade at Peabody High School, the Petersburg school district had still not integrated.
Virginia state officials furiously resisted integration. Senator Harry Byrd authored a document signed by close to one hundred members of Congress in 1956, known as the Southern Manifesto, which rejected the Court’s decision in Brown on the grounds that it violated states’ rights. Byrd advocated a policy called massive resistance, a multipronged approach to prevent Virginia schools from integrating, or at least delaying the process as long as possible. State officials withheld funding, and in some cases, closed schools entirely if they were on the verge of integrating. The public schools in Prince George County, located about twenty minutes from Petersburg, closed for five years from 1959 to 1964. In other instances, state and local governments issued vouchers to white students to attend private schools rather than share a school with Black children.9
