Moses Malone, page 4
Peal attended Morris Brown College in Atlanta on an athletic scholarship, where he competed in several sports. After the army, he landed a coaching job at Peabody High School. During a fifteen-year period, he coached football, baseball, basketball, and golf at Peabody and became the head basketball coach at Petersburg when the schools integrated in 1970.19
Peal was a taskmaster who expected complete obedience from his players. He didn’t tolerate mental mistakes or lack of effort and made sure his players took care of their schoolwork. “Coach Peal was a guy that, you know, he didn’t look at us just as a star, he just looked at each of us as players and his sons on the team,” remembered Gonzell Phillips.20 It was difficult for Moses to find or afford clothes his size. Peal arranged for clothes to be donated to his star center and provided Moses and Mary with a little extra money for food.21
Coach Peal and his assistant, Pro Hayes, made a strong team. Peal designed practices, determined what type of offensive and defensive systems the team would run, and disciplined and motivated the players. Hayes handled play calling. Peal also added a young coach named Jimmy Williams, who had played for him at Peabody.
Peal demanded that his team play disciplined basketball. No showboating or wild shots were tolerated. The coach was determined for his players to be in excellent physical condition. The Crimson Wave ran and ran and ran. Sometimes players would leave the gym and run the streets of the city. Wyatt Curtis, a member of the 1973–74 team, said he ran more under Coach Peal than he did on his basketball team in the military.22
Peal preached that defense was the foundation of a great team. “Anybody could score,” he’d say. The key was stopping the opponent from scoring.23 The Crimson Wave played a 1–3–1 matchup zone most of the time, with Moses on the back line, protecting the basket. With their length and quickness, the players generated a lot of turnovers, allowing them to get out on the fast break.24
It was useless for other teams to press Petersburg. Stanley Taylor zoomed through any trap to create easy baskets. In the halfcourt, the Wave ran a motion offense: Pass. Screen. Cut. Look back door. Once comfortably ahead, Peal instituted the four-corners offense, a stall technique popularized by Dean Smith at the University of North Carolina.25
The Wave looked to work the ball inside to Moses, but players didn’t force-feed him, as was common practice with a big man of his ability. Bill Littlepage, the longtime coach at Hopewell High School, wondered why Petersburg didn’t make Moses more of a focal point of the offense.26 The truth is, they didn’t need to. The best way to get Moses the ball around the basket was off a missed shot. Nobody could keep him off the backboard.
Moses pummeled defenders in the paint and on the glass, as the Crimson Wave steamrolled its opponents during the 1972–73 season. He posted 34 points, 29 rebounds, and 8 blocks in a win over the Manchester Lancers on December 8, 1972. A few nights later, he compiled 26 points and 24 rebounds against John Marshall High School. Teams began to double and triple team him, but it didn’t make a difference.
January was more of the same. Moses dropped 35 points and snagged 30 rebounds against Meadowbrook High School. Later in the month, he scored 35 points, snatched 37 rebounds, and blocked 11 shots against Midlothian High School. In a February victory over Midlothian, he scored 30 points and gobbled up 37 rebounds. Midlothian had 21 rebounds as a team. His gaudy statistics were even more impressive considering high school games were only thirty-two minutes long, teams stalled—before the advent of a shot clock—to keep the ball out of Petersburg’s hands, and Malone often sat for much, if not all, of the fourth quarters because games had already been decided.
Moses’s stellar play began to draw the attention of college coaches. Lefty Driesell, of the University of Maryland, and Norm Sloan, from North Carolina State University, were some of the first to arrive in Petersburg to check out the 6-foot-10 sensation. It was exciting for Moses’s teammates, who were unaccustomed to seeing coaches from big-time programs. “We saw Bobby Boyd of Southern California,” said Ronald Robinson. “To us that was the moon, all the way on the other side of the country, for a person like me. I’d never been past Washington DC, and this guy’s coming from California. That’s like to the moon to me.”27
The coaches were impressed. “He is the best high school player I’ve seen,” said Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) coach Chuck Noe at the end of Moses’s junior season. “He could do more for VCU than Artis Gilmore did for Jacksonville. He could put us in the top ten, and I could put him in pro basketball.”28
Moses appeared unfazed by the attention. He never bragged about the accolades or mentioned the famous coaches who had come to see him. He didn’t demand the ball, instead choosing to contribute in less glamorous ways by controlling the paint on defense and attacking the offensive glass. When the team struggled, which was rare, he placed the blame on himself, rather than on coaches or teammates.29
One incident exemplified to Assistant Coach Jimmy Williams what type of teammate Moses was. The boy had an apple after practice, which he could have easily eaten by himself. Instead, he sat down at the bottom of the stoop outside the gym with a knife and cut a piece for everybody on the team.30
Malone didn’t need to say much; he led through his actions. He never talked back to the coaches and took their instructions to heart. He didn’t cut corners during drills at practice. Every time players ran line drills, he finished in the top three, outpacing some of the guards. Malone’s commitment to the team, his craft, and winning earned the respect and loyalty of teammates. Even the coaches looked up to him.31
More than fifty years later, one sequence stands out to teammate Ronald Robinson. Moses was chasing the other team’s ball handler from behind on a fast break, ran him down, and dove to knock the ball away. Robinson said, “This guy is the number one player in the country. He could have messed his elbow up. He could have messed his knee up. And I said to myself, If he can do that, why can’t I do that?”32
The Crimson Wave finished the 1972–73 regular season undefeated, with sights set on a state championship. Petersburg destroyed the defending state champions Hopewell, 95–43, to capture the school’s first Central District Tournament championship. Moses had 38 points, one shy of his season high, and 37 rebounds. The following week, Petersburg defeated John Marshall High School in the Central Regional Final, behind 30 points and 15 rebounds from Moses, to advance to the four-team state tournament at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, about an hour and a half northwest of Petersburg.33
* * *
The integration of Petersburg High School had gone as well as administrators could have hoped. Racist white students who couldn’t accept mixed-race schools transferred. Petersburg students don’t remember any racial tension at school. They were exposed to Black and white teachers and administrators and became friendly with classmates of different races, though there were still unwritten rules. Black students wouldn’t go to the home of a white classmate, and vice versa.
Sports can break down racial barriers by transforming the us-and-them mentality from a racial context to a geographic one. Petersburg was a sports town, and like any fan base, the residents got behind a winner. “Crimson Wave Country” bumper stickers began to appear on cars throughout town, and proprietors went out of their way to help Moses and some of his cash-strapped teammates with clothing and other needs. Moses and the Crimson Wave generated so much interest that Athletic Director Bob Kilbourne moved the team’s games to Virginia State’s Daniel Gymnasium to accommodate the crowds. Many Petersburg residents, Black and white, made the trip to Charlottesville for the state tournament. However, it didn’t escape Malone that none of the white people who cheered for him offered him a ride home after the games.34
Petersburg High School hosted a massive pep rally prior to the basketball team’s departure for Charlottesville. The students came outside and cheered as the team bus pulled away. Principal Jimmy Sublett informed the players that they’d be treated to a steak dinner whether they won the tournament or not.35 The coaches kept the team secluded in their Charlottesville hotel to avoid the distractions of a bigger city and family and friends who made the trip.
Petersburg faced West Springfield High School in the semifinals. The Spartans’ big men, Ed Tiernan and Bob Ferris, were 6 feet 4 and 6 feet 5, respectively, and had never competed against a 6-foot-10 center. At practice, Dave Koesters, who was sidelined by injury, contested every West Springfield player’s shot with a broom to simulate what it would be like to face Moses.36
West Springfield played keep-away with Petersburg, moving the ball around the perimeter to shorten the game and draw Moses away from the basket. They were unsuccessful. Petersburg won, 52–41, to move on to the championship game, where it faced Halifax High School. The Comets tried to confuse the Wave by switching between a zone and man-to-man defense. Calvin Crews, a 6-foot-11 center who would later be drafted by the Atlanta Hawks, was the primary defender on Malone, though the Comets had two or three bodies draped over him at all times. He had just 3 points at the half and finished the game with 12. His teammates picked up the slack. Three other starters scored in double figures, and Petersburg won, 59–51.37
The Petersburg Crimson Wave capped off a 25-0 undefeated season with the school’s first state championship. Their star center averaged 29.6 points and 20 rebounds. Moses had fulfilled the prophecy that he tucked into the family Bible a few years earlier. He was the best high school player in the country. It was time to place another note in the holy book. This time, Moses stated that he was going to be the first player to jump directly from high school to professional basketball.38
4
Five Stars
Howard Garfinkel was a bit eccentric. He dined on onion sandwiches covered in salt, chain-smoked Chesterfield cigarettes, and never drove a car. Garf, as he was known to friends, resembled a lawyer from the neck up, with thick-framed glasses and slicked-back hair, and had a theatrical style, which friends described as Runyonesque.1 “If Garf’s parents had taught him singing and dancing or sent him to acting school, he could have spent his lifetime in the road company of Guys and Dolls,” said his business partner Will Klein.2
Garfinkel, born in New York City in 1929, grew up in an apartment on Park Avenue surrounded by his mother’s friends in the entertainment business. Al Jolson sang “Sonny Boy” to him on his fifth birthday. Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker, Henry “Henny” Youngman, and Ted Lewis performed at his Bar Mitzvah. His favorite entertainer was actress-singer Judy Garland.3
Garfinkel’s father owned a lucrative woolen business and wanted his son to follow in his footsteps, but Howard shunned the textile industry to pursue his passion for basketball. He began coaching “outdoor teams,” a precursor to AAU basketball, and made a name for himself as a shrewd talent evaluator who knew every prospect in the five boroughs. In the 1950s New York City was producing more basketball talent than the local colleges could handle, and scouts began funneling players to Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) schools. Vic Bubas, then an assistant coach at North Carolina State, hired Garf as an unofficial scout.4
Garf debuted his personal scouting report, High School Basketball Illustrated, or HSBI, in 1965. It was the first scouting service of its kind, a comprehensive breakdown of all high school basketball prospects in the New York area. He soon expanded it to cover the territory from West Virginia to Maine. The typewritten reports, which included Garf’s unique catchphrases and colorful language, provided a rating for every prospect, from one to five stars. Five stars were reserved for players who were projected to be starters at a top-tier college program. The term five-star prospect would become standard in the recruiting industry.5 Hubie Brown, a Hall of Fame coach who paced the sidelines at every level from high school to the NBA, said, “Howard Garfinkel is still the best evaluator of high school talent that I’ve ever seen or been around.”6
Coaches could subscribe to Garf’s service for $50. Bob Knight, an upstart coach at Army, didn’t have a recruiting budget that would allow him to travel to see kids play. He relied on Garf’s reports to know which prospects to pursue. Another one of Garf’s early subscribers was John Wooden. The legendary UCLA coach was inspired by a report in HSBI to recruit a kid from Power Memorial Academy in Manhattan named Lew Alcindor (later, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar).7
In 1966 Garf founded Five-Star Basketball Camp with Long Island University coach Roy Rubin and high school coach Will Klein. Rubin dropped out after a couple of years. Klein took care of the logistics and finances, which allowed Garf to focus on basketball. The mission of the camp was to teach the game and prepare high school kids for the upcoming season at a time when virtually no organized basketball was played between March and November. Great athletes changed sports with the seasons, and with the exceptions of the Rucker Tournament in New York and Baker League in Philadelphia, summer basketball was limited to pickup games.8
Five-Star became the template for basketball camps, a destination where prospects tested themselves against elite competition and players and coaches gained exposure to further their careers. The first camp was held at Camp Orin-Sekwa in Niverville, New York. One of the initial instructors was Hubie Brown, then the coach of Fair Lawn High School in New Jersey. The keynote speaker that summer was another future Hall of Famer, Chuck Daly, who was then an assistant coach at Duke University. The following summer, Five-Star moved to its long-term home at Camp Rosemont in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. The head counselor that year was fiery young coach Bob Knight. He instituted teaching stations, which became a staple of the camp, where coaches demonstrated the techniques behind various basketball skills. The players were drafted onto teams for the week and played games in the afternoons.9
Garf infused the camp with the theatrical influences of his youth. He woke the athletes up every morning by imitating the sound of a bugle, then blasted Frank Sinatra over the loudspeaker.10 Five-Star included a featured speaker every afternoon, typically one of the marquee names in college coaching, and Garf introduced each one with a flourish of words befitting a king or queen. “For a college or pro coach to get the opportunity to speak at one of his [Garf] camps was like getting an opportunity to perform at Carnegie Hall,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski told the New York Times in 2013. “If you got that opportunity, you knew you had arrived.”11
Word spread that Five-Star was the place for players and coaches to be seen. The camp initially attracted players from the New York–New Jersey area, though kids soon began arriving from New England, as far west as Chicago, and down South past the Washington DC area.12 Grant Hill, who attended high school in Virginia before starring at Duke and in the NBA, was first introduced to Five-Star by a 1984 article in Sports Illustrated. “It was like this mythical place where you could go—if you were fortunate enough to go—and then maybe have a chance to play in college,” Hill said. “I remember being blown away by the idea of it.”13
College coaches attended Five-Star in the hope of finding players to take their program to the next level, though they were just as likely to secure a talented young assistant. The coaches earned their basketball PhDs over drinks at the Fireside Inn in town, where many of the brightest minds in the game used salt and pepper shakers to diagram plays late into the night.14 Some of the many coaches who launched their careers at Five-Star included John Calipari, Rick Pitino, Hubie Brown, Dick Vitale, Mike Fratello, and Brendan Malone.
Fratello, known at the camp as “The Alligator,” worked at Five-Star for the first time in 1968. When campers arrived late for breakfast or spoke while a coach was giving instructions, they were sentenced to the “alligator pit,” where Fratello pushed them through intense conditioning drills. The young coach was hired as Lou Campanelli’s assistant at Madison College (now James Madison University) in 1972. Campanelli instructed Fratello to send an introductory letter to all the high school coaches in the Virginia-DC area. Fratello included a postcard and asked the coaches to jumpstart Madison’s recruiting process by listing the top five underclassmen they had seen. He received numerous replies about a phenomenal big man from Petersburg named Moses Malone.
Fratello called Moses’s coach and informed him about Five-Star, then told Garf about Malone. Garf made some calls and got back to Fratello, instructing him to offer Moses a scholarship.15 Each summer the top players in the camp were granted partial scholarships for half the cost of tuition. In return, they worked in the cafeteria. Moses was one of the campers responsible for cleaning up the tables after everyone had eaten. “It was an honor to be on scholarship,” Grant Hill said years later. “You were exalted and put on a pedestal if you were invited to be a servant.”16
Malone was initially reluctant to attend Five-Star, believing the camp had nothing to offer him, but Pro Hayes convinced him that it would be a good opportunity to measure himself against some of the best players in the country.17 Moses had no way of traveling to Pennsylvania, so Hayes dropped him off at Madison College, and Fratello took him from there. Malone barely said a word the entire car ride.18
Tom McCorry had the first pick in the Five-Star draft in August of 1973. An assistant coach at Fairfield University in Connecticut, he’d never heard of Malone. He wasn’t alone. Recruiting was largely regional at that time, and in the days before ESPN, social media, and the deification of prepubescent athletes, many of the high school and college coaches at the esteemed camp were unaware of the 6-foot-10 prospect from Petersburg. McCorry recalled that Garf and his right-hand man, Tom Konchalski, “almost broke my arm to make sure that I picked him [Malone]. And I did.”19
Coaches and players in attendance remember Moses being extremely quiet. “He didn’t really look people in the eye at that point,” said McCorry. “He wasn’t disrespectful in any way, shape, or form. You just knew that he was listening, but making eye contact was not something that he was used to having to do.”20
