Moses Malone, page 5
Five-Star had expanded to two sessions, one in June, and another in late August. Moses attended the second one. Marc Iavaroni, who would later be a teammate with Moses on the Philadelphia 76ers, attended both sessions, as did Al Dutch, a 6-foot-7 forward from Archbishop Carroll High School in Washington DC. Dutch was selected MVP of the first session and would be named a Parade magazine All-American. “He was kicking everybody’s ass,” recalled Iavaroni, and in the second session “Moses destroyed Al Dutch.”21
“I had never seen a player at 6 foot 10 who could run from basket to basket as quick as he could,” Hubie Brown remembered. “His athleticism was off the charts.”22 George Raveling, the coach at Washington State University, marveled at how quickly Malone elevated for rebounds and blocked shots. Will Klein overheard a conversation between Raveling and his former boss Lefty Driesell of the University of Maryland. “They had just seen Moses Malone play in a game, and they don’t see me,” relayed Klein. “And they’re walking down a hill and Raveling is saying, ‘I can’t believe what I just saw. Every time a shot goes up, all I hear is whoosh, whoosh.’ That’s Moses blocking the shot out to half court,” said Klein.23
One play stands out to McCorry. Malone’s team was facing a squad that featured a highly touted center named Tommy Scates, who played for John Thompson at St. Anthony High School and then followed him to Georgetown University. Scates was 6 feet 11 and 250 pounds. “Big, big, big monster of a guy,” recalled McCorry. “So, one time Moses went up for a dunk, and Scates tried to block the shot. And Moses dunked the ball and Scates’s hand and everything through the rim,” said McCorry. “I mean it was just— You know, I mean nobody got hurt. But it was just unbelievable the strength he had.”24
Dick Vitale, a keynote speaker at the session, rolled up to the camp in a red Cadillac convertible with “Dick Vitale” and “University of Detroit” scripted on the side of the car. What jumped out at him was Moses’s work ethic. “Anyway, it was raining cats and dogs in Honesdale one day, and everybody was trying to get something to eat, and here’s this kid—all alone—throwing the ball against the backboard,” Vitale recalled. “He’s grabbing rebounds. He flips the ball and grabs it again. And he’s doing a tap drill twenty times with the right hand, twenty times with the left hand. Nobody is there supervising him. He’s all by himself. . . . He went after every rebound like it was his last meal.”25
Garf was equally impressed by Malone’s attitude. “The thing I really liked about him [Malone] was the individual instruction part of the camp. The individual instruction is at the end of the day and it’s optional,” Garf said in a 1983 interview. He continued:
A kid goes to Station B and he works the fundamentals. Of the 108 kids, only 30 or 40 go to the individual instruction, but Malone was there more than he wasn’t. I won’t say he was there all the time because he wasn’t. But he was there half the time, which was remarkable. It was remarkable because what the hell was anyone going to teach him? But Moses has a sixth sense of the right thing to do. It’s a leadership thing. He was a leader, and he was leading. Patrick Ewing went to that individual instruction segment once in two years, and Ewing didn’t have a move then. He’s only got one or two now. He should have gone. Moses did, and he didn’t have to; he went out of respect for the coach who was teaching.26
Malone’s team went undefeated (11-0), demolishing all competition along the way. When Garf handed out awards at the end of the week, he referred to them as “the only undefeated, untied, unscored-upon team in the history of the camp.” Hubie Brown reflected on Moses’s memorable showing twenty-two years later as a speaker at Five-Star in the summer of 1995: “And all you guys who are Parade magazine All-Americans. He didn’t give a shit who they were ’cause nobody knew him. He came in here and kicked everybody’s ass—and did it without even talking.”27
The Five-Star experience had a profound impact on Moses. He thought his team didn’t have much talent when he arrived, and it meant a great deal to him to excel against top prospects from New York and New Jersey. “When I left camp, Garf rated me one of the best,” Moses recalled. “He didn’t give me five stars or a five-plus, he gave me more than a five-plus and he was one of the top guys in the world at doing that. I did not know I was that good.”28
In subsequent years, many of the greatest players in basketball history showcased their skills at Five-Star, including Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Isiah Thomas, Dominique Wilkins, Chris Mullin, Grant Hill, LeBron James, Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Durant, and Stephen Curry. Garf maintained that “Moses Malone was the only player who was ever too good for the camp.”29
* * *
Five-Star exposed Moses to a larger audience, though his most remarkable feat that summer occurred weeks earlier at the All Pro Basketball Camp run by NBA All-Star Dave Bing and long-time college coach Howie Landa. Situated in the idyllic woodlands of Pocono Pines, Pennsylvania, the camp included four basketball courts, nine cabins, a cafeteria, a canteen, and a charming old barn.30 Campy Russell, who attended several years as a camper and counselor and would go on to a distinguished NBA career, referred to his time there as a “life-changing experience,” where he was exposed to people from different races and backgrounds while receiving excellent basketball instruction. Maurice Lucas, Ralph Simpson, Terry Furlow, and John Brisker are some of the other campers and counselors who went on to play pro ball.31
During the weekend, campers went into town to do laundry and catch a movie or grab a bite to eat. Moses joined some of them, including Furlow and Benny White, two guards who had just finished their freshman year at Michigan State, at the cafe. Furlow ordered apple pie à la mode for dessert. Moses silently pointed to the waitress, then to Furlow’s pie and nodded his head. The waitress brought Moses a piece of pie, and he gobbled it up. She returned and asked if anybody wanted anything else. Moses replied in his guttural voice, “Give me another piece of that pie.” Everybody at the table cracked up. “It was the first time I heard him talk,” recalled White. “He had been there all week.”32
Back at the camp, Moses crushed campers and counselors in games of one-on-one, including Furlow, who would lead the Big Ten in scoring before being selected twelfth by the 76ers in the 1976 draft. But he was just the appetizer. Each summer, Bing challenged some of the best players in camp to a game of one on one. No high school kid could compete with one of the top guards in the NBA—until Moses. Shockingly, Malone beat Bing in a game of one-on-one to 20.
“Moses blocked all of David’s shots and beat him in front of a crowd of people,” said Dave Pritchett, a Maryland assistant coach and a camp regular. “Bing was mad, made the kid come back and physically beat him up, but word spread about what Moses was capable of.” It took all of Bing’s strength and guile to edge out Malone by 2 points in the rematch.33 “I just couldn’t believe how good that guy was at that age,” Bing recalled.34 Moses was seven inches taller than the Pistons guard, but Bing led the NBA in scoring a few years earlier and was in the prime of his Hall of Fame career. He was named to the All-NBA Second Team the following season. Moses still had another year of high school.
The word was out. The biggest high school prospect in years was a 6-foot-10 kid from Petersburg, Virginia. Regional colleges recruited Malone during his sophomore and junior years. After his performances in the summer of 1973, coaches from around the country descended upon Petersburg in droves.
5
Lefty and the Milkman
Lefty Driesell shared the frustration of all coaches who recruited Moses. The young man didn’t look them in the eye and delivered monosyllabic replies to their attempts at engagement. If a coach approached him to chat, Moses would say a few words and continue walking. He abruptly stood up and walked out in the middle of a meeting with North Carolina State assistant coach Eddie Biedenbach for no apparent reason. Mary Malone simply said, “Well, that’s Moses.”1
“He’s so quiet,” said Driesell, “and the first time I talked with him I tried to draw him out by asking him where he got so good. There wasn’t anybody around Petersburg that could make him that good, I told him.” Moses said, “I play in the state pen, man,” referring to the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond, where he competed against the inmates. Driesell continued:
“‘You mean they’ve got some good players in prison?’
‘Yeah, lots of good ones, aggressive.’
‘Anybody your size?’
‘One guy about 6–8. They call him Milkman.’
‘Milkman? Why do they call him Milkman?’
‘Cause he murdered a milkman, man.’”2
Milkman was former Hopewell star Mike James, a.k.a. Spiderman, whom Moses competed against as a freshman. Lefty, always on the lookout for talent, reached out to Virginia governor Mills Godwin to inquire about the possibility of James being released. The coach said he’d provide the inmate with a scholarship to attend college, and of course, play basketball. Word came back that “the Milkman was never getting out.”3
* * *
Lefty Driesell was born and raised in Norfolk, Virginia. His stellar play at Granby High School earned him a basketball scholarship to Duke University. After graduating from Duke, Lefty took an office job with the Ford Motor Company but soon jumped at the opportunity to return to basketball as the junior varsity coach at his former high school. To offset the reduction in income, Driesell sold World Book encyclopedias door-to-door.
He later attributed his zeal as a basketball recruiter to his experience as an encyclopedia salesman. “The guy who got me involved with that told me, ‘If you knock on 50 doors, you might not sell anything. But the 51st door, the guy is gonna grab you and tell you he’d been waitin’ for the chance to buy a World Book all his life.’ I just kept knockin’ on doors until I found people who wanted to buy what I was sellin,’” Driesell told Basketball Digest.4
Lefty was promoted to varsity coach and a few years later accepted the head coaching job at powerhouse Newport News High School, where his team won 57-consecutive games, still a Virginia state record. Then he received an opportunity to put his skills to the test at the collegiate level as head coach of Davidson College. A small liberal arts school in North Carolina, Davidson had a student population of about nine hundred when Lefty took over the program in 1960. The Wildcats hadn’t had a winning record since the 1940s. The people at Davidson thought he was “smoking pot,” as he put it, when he declared that he was going to “put Davidson in the top ten.”5
The coach backed up his words. The Wildcats finished in the AP top ten four times in his nine seasons at the school. The man who could spin a tale as well as a basketball had established himself as one of the premier recruiters in the nation. Lefty had a $500 recruiting budget when he arrived at Davidson and saved money during recruiting trips by sleeping on a mattress in the back of an old, green Chevrolet station wagon owned by the athletic department.6 His greatest asset was his ability to connect with recruits’ parents.
Driesell’s long-time assistant coach Joe Harrington shared a story about Driesell’s first big recruit at Davidson, Fred Hetzel, a 6-foot-8-inch forward who went on to be the first pick in the 1965 NBA draft. “He [Driesell] was on a home visit with the family, and he’s sitting across the way from Mr. and Mrs. Hetzel. And he’s sitting on the couch or whatever. And there’s a ficus tree over his right shoulder, and it starts to move a little bit. And coach looked up there and it was a snake. And coach took the snake and wrapped it around his arm and let it play on his shoulder and everything. And Mrs. Hetzel said, ‘Well, the last coach in here said, “We stomp on those things where I’m from.”’ So as the story goes, later on, when he finally signed with Davidson, which was unbelievable that he did that, Mrs. Hetzel said, ‘I knew that that man would take care of my son. Anybody that would love my pet snake, I knew would take care of my son.’”7
After leading Davidson to a 27-3 record and a trip to the regional final in the NCAA Tournament in 1969, Lefty was offered the University of Maryland coaching job by athletic director Jim Kehoe. Initially, Lefty wasn’t interested. He had a great job at Davidson. But Kehoe persisted and appealed to Driesell’s ego by stating, “We’ll have Vince Lombardi in the fall (coach of the Washington Redskins), Ted Williams in the spring (manager of the Washington Senators) and you in the winter.” Lefty took the job.8
Maryland was a mediocre program that had never won the ACC. Once again, Lefty turned heads at his introductory press conference when he declared that Maryland “has the potential to be the UCLA of the East Coast or I wouldn’t be here.”9 UCLA was in the middle of a historic run of ten national championships under John Wooden.
Lefty brought excitement to the Maryland program. The pep band played “Hail to the Chief” as he walked onto the court at Cole Field House while flashing his trademark victory sign with the index and middle fingers in a V shape on both hands.10 He developed innovative approaches to recruiting, such as placing advertisements in an athlete’s local newspaper and posting billboards or passing out flyers in the student’s hometown.11 In his third season at College Park, Lefty created what came to be known as Midnight Madness. The NCAA dictated that teams could not practice until October 15, 1971, so Lefty put his players through a one mile run at 12:03 a.m. on October 15. Two years later, the event evolved into an open practice attended by thousands of fans and later became a tradition for programs around the country.12
Driesell inherited a Terrapin squad that had a losing record the previous three seasons. His third year in College Park, Maryland finished 27-5. He lured top recruits to the school, including Tom McMillen, considered by many to be the number one prospect in the high school class of 1970. Len Elmore was another highly touted member of Maryland’s 1970 recruiting class, and two years later, Lefty secured a splendid point guard named John Lucas.
In 1973 Driesell aggressively pursued a local high school star named Adrian Dantley. “That man could charm the birds right out of the trees,” Dantley’s mother, Virginia, said of Lefty, though her son chose to attend Notre Dame. To soothe his sorrow, Lefty went on a fishing trip in Bethany Beach, Delaware. He and a couple of friends were on a boat when he looked up and saw townhouses on fire. He rushed to the scene to warn the residents. Driesell heard children screaming from inside a house but couldn’t open the door. He finally kicked it down and scooped up several children, two at a time. He saved ten children that day and was given the NCAA’s first Valor Award.13
The coach had yet to land a generational talent—like Lew Alcindor or Bill Walton at UCLA—who could lead the Terrapins to national championships. Moses Malone was that kind of player. Driesell had a formidable group of assistants working with him on the recruitment of Malone. Hall of Famer George Raveling was on the Maryland staff until 1972. Lefty was also joined on the bench by former Maryland hoops standouts Joe Harrington and Howard White.
The coach’s biggest weapon in the ruthless college recruiting wars was Dave Pritchett, known as “Pitstop” in coaching circles for his obsessive pursuit of high school prospects. Billy Hahn, who played for Pritchett and Driesell at Maryland and later served as Pritchett’s assistant coach at Davidson, called Pritchett “an absolute mad, mad, mad dog on the road, a guy that never went off the road, was constantly recruiting.”14 Pritchett once boasted that his personal record was “seven rent-a-cars in one day.”15
Harrington was the first member of the Maryland staff to see Moses in action at a summer league after his freshman year. The coach was shocked at how quick Moses was around the basket and impressed by his strength and tenacity. He returned to College Park and told Driesell, “He’s the best I’ve ever seen.” Driesell responded, “Joe, you’re young. You don’t know what you’re doing.”16
Pritchett also recalled the first time he watched Moses play. “One of those eerie moments,” he told the Washington Post in 1981. “I can remember the game, but I can’t remember the other team scoring a point. It was on an outdoor court, this awesome 6-10 eraser against a bunch of 5-10s, Moses going 94 feet to reject shots and then sticking it in at the other end. And it wasn’t like he was just standing under the basket waiting for everybody. He’d move out, 15 feet or so, and when somebody would drive from the strong side, he’d move over and swipe the shot away. I’d never seen such intensity. I went back to the office and quietly shut the door,” Pritchett continued. “Recruiting is sort of like having an affair; you don’t want some things to leave the room. And I told coach: ‘There’s a God in heaven and he’s been great to us. One hour and 15 minutes down the road [in Petersburg, Virginia] is the greatest player I’ve seen in 12 years.’”17
Lefty made the trip to Petersburg early in Moses’s sophomore season. He recalled Malone scoring 45 or 50 points that night. “And they never passed him the ball,” said Driesell. “He got all of them off of a rebound. It was unbelievable.”18 Harrington was waiting for Driesell upon his return to College Park. “Well, what do you think, coach?” Harrington asked.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Lefty replied. “If Moses would guarantee me 10 percent of all the money he will make as a pro, I’ll quit coaching right now and just work with him.”19
From that point on, Lefty’s staff pursued the phenom from Petersburg with a fervor reminiscent of The Police song “Every Breath You Take.” Howard White had been a big-time prospect himself when he committed to Maryland in 1969. Known simply as “H” (the letter appeared on the back of his jersey at Maryland instead of his last name), White was drafted to the NBA in 1973, but a knee injury derailed his career. He was young and Black and took the lead in wooing Moses.
White immediately hit it off with Mary Malone. The first time he went to the Malone home, Moses wasn’t there, and Mary invited him in. The two fell asleep on Mary’s couch watching soap operas while waiting for Moses to come home. “I was from Virginia,” White said. “That probably helped. I was from Hampton. I had been the product of a single mother, growing up in that and just understanding them. . . . Probably the biggest thing is understanding them as people, versus a commodity, versus somebody that might change a program, versus a basketball player.”20 Lefty, the parent-whisperer, made Mary feel comfortable as well.
