Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet
Autor Paul Knepperen Limba Engleză Hardback – noi 2025
The young Malone prophesied his improbable rise and succeeded where others later failed because of his strength of character and unparalleled work ethic. Malone dominated his years in the NBA with a relentless determination that made him the greatest offensive rebounder in basketball history—a record he holds to this day. From 1979 to 1983 he won three of the NBA’s Most Valuable Player awards and with Julius Erving helped to deliver the Philadelphia 76ers to the NBA championship in 1983. He remains one of just nine players to win the NBA MVP award three or more times.
In many ways Malone was an anti-superstar. He lacked a signature move, displayed almost no ego, and shunned the spotlight to the detriment of his commercial appeal. Shy by nature and self-conscious about a speech impediment, Moses kept his distance from the media, some of whom mistook his reticence for stupidity. A man of few words, he possessed a magnetism rooted in humility, authenticity, and passion.
Moses was a giver, equally generous in assisting a friend as he was mentoring younger players, including Charles Barkley and Hakeem Olajuwon. While his contemporaries preened for the cameras, Moses remained the “lunch pail superstar,” a quiet and humble teammate who expressed himself through his tireless effort on the court and compassion off it.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781496238979
ISBN-10: 1496238974
Pagini: 304
Ilustrații: 22 photographs, index
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.59 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Locul publicării:United States
ISBN-10: 1496238974
Pagini: 304
Ilustrații: 22 photographs, index
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 mm
Greutate: 0.59 kg
Editura: Nebraska
Colecția University of Nebraska Press
Locul publicării:United States
Notă biografică
Paul Knepper is a freelance writer who covered the NBA as a featured columnist for the Bleacher Report website for two years. He is the author of The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks, and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All.
Extras
1
The Heights
The rickety house at 241 St. Matthew Street had asphalt siding and a tin
roof covered with tar. The paint on the front of the house had chipped
away long ago, and the slightly sloped front porch appeared to be on the
verge of collapse. The interior was equally shabby. Plumbing was spotty,
and one of the bedrooms had a hole to the outside world where a window
had once been. The living room consisted of an oil stove, an old couch
slanted to one side where the springs sunk in, and an orange crate that
served as a table. Three portraits hung on the wall: Martin Luther King
Jr., President and Mrs. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ. This was the home of
Mary and Moses Malone.
Mrs. Malone was born Mary Hudgins on July 28, 1928, in Chesterfield,
Virginia, the oldest of Jannie and Oscar Hudgins’s nine children. She came
up hard. Her father, who lost his right arm in a shotgun accident, was a
wood worker whose annual income was $460, according to the 1940
census. Mary left school after fifth grade to help keep the family afloat.
The Hudgins suffered a tragedy when Mary’s mother died at age thirty-four.
Oscar didn’t have the means to care for all his children and sent the
boys to live in an orphanage. Mary was sixteen years old and tended to her
younger sisters. She cooked, cleaned, ironed their clothes, and sent them
off to school. She remained the matriarch of the family in the decades that
followed, caring for her father in the later years of his life and attending
graduations and other special events for her nieces and nephews. When
her brother William was murdered, she looked out for his son Mario.
On January 22, 1955, Mary married Moses Malone in Chester, Virginia.
Moses was born in nearby Drewryville in 1930 and worked a factory job
at the Continental Can Company. On March 23, 1955, their son, Moses
Eugene Malone, was born with the help of a midwife in Chesterfield
County, Virginia. He weighed seven pounds.
When Moses was about two years old, Mary kicked his father out of
the house. The elder Moses was drinking too much, and she didn’t want
her son to be exposed to that behavior.9 Moses’s father was not a part of
his life going forward. Mary and the younger Moses moved to East Bank
Street in the Blandford neighborhood of Petersburg before settling in at
the house on St. Matthew St. around 1965 in a Petersburg neighborhood
called the Heights.
Mary earned about $59 a week working at a home for the elderly. She
later landed a job packing meat at a supermarket for $135 a week. “I always
saw to it that Moses had food on the table and a shoe on his foot,” she
told writer Ira Berkow. “We never had much savings, never more than $25
in the bank, and that was in case he got sick, and I’d have enough to get
him to the doctor.” Moses had two pairs of pants for school, which Mary
washed nightly. Holiday and birthday gifts were modest or nonexistent.
One exception was an organ Mary purchased for Moses for Christmas
when he was six. He cherished that organ into adulthood, and it instilled
in him a lifelong love of music.
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. Ms. Mary unleashed her wrath on any child who made fun of
her son.
She nicknamed Moses “Teeny” as a baby because he was so skinny. The
name stuck and caught on in the neighborhood. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.”
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. 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
The Heights
The rickety house at 241 St. Matthew Street had asphalt siding and a tin
roof covered with tar. The paint on the front of the house had chipped
away long ago, and the slightly sloped front porch appeared to be on the
verge of collapse. The interior was equally shabby. Plumbing was spotty,
and one of the bedrooms had a hole to the outside world where a window
had once been. The living room consisted of an oil stove, an old couch
slanted to one side where the springs sunk in, and an orange crate that
served as a table. Three portraits hung on the wall: Martin Luther King
Jr., President and Mrs. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ. This was the home of
Mary and Moses Malone.
Mrs. Malone was born Mary Hudgins on July 28, 1928, in Chesterfield,
Virginia, the oldest of Jannie and Oscar Hudgins’s nine children. She came
up hard. Her father, who lost his right arm in a shotgun accident, was a
wood worker whose annual income was $460, according to the 1940
census. Mary left school after fifth grade to help keep the family afloat.
The Hudgins suffered a tragedy when Mary’s mother died at age thirty-four.
Oscar didn’t have the means to care for all his children and sent the
boys to live in an orphanage. Mary was sixteen years old and tended to her
younger sisters. She cooked, cleaned, ironed their clothes, and sent them
off to school. She remained the matriarch of the family in the decades that
followed, caring for her father in the later years of his life and attending
graduations and other special events for her nieces and nephews. When
her brother William was murdered, she looked out for his son Mario.
On January 22, 1955, Mary married Moses Malone in Chester, Virginia.
Moses was born in nearby Drewryville in 1930 and worked a factory job
at the Continental Can Company. On March 23, 1955, their son, Moses
Eugene Malone, was born with the help of a midwife in Chesterfield
County, Virginia. He weighed seven pounds.
When Moses was about two years old, Mary kicked his father out of
the house. The elder Moses was drinking too much, and she didn’t want
her son to be exposed to that behavior.9 Moses’s father was not a part of
his life going forward. Mary and the younger Moses moved to East Bank
Street in the Blandford neighborhood of Petersburg before settling in at
the house on St. Matthew St. around 1965 in a Petersburg neighborhood
called the Heights.
Mary earned about $59 a week working at a home for the elderly. She
later landed a job packing meat at a supermarket for $135 a week. “I always
saw to it that Moses had food on the table and a shoe on his foot,” she
told writer Ira Berkow. “We never had much savings, never more than $25
in the bank, and that was in case he got sick, and I’d have enough to get
him to the doctor.” Moses had two pairs of pants for school, which Mary
washed nightly. Holiday and birthday gifts were modest or nonexistent.
One exception was an organ Mary purchased for Moses for Christmas
when he was six. He cherished that organ into adulthood, and it instilled
in him a lifelong love of music.
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. Ms. Mary unleashed her wrath on any child who made fun of
her son.
She nicknamed Moses “Teeny” as a baby because he was so skinny. The
name stuck and caught on in the neighborhood. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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.”
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. 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Cuprins
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Preface
- The Heights
- Chuck Taylor All-Stars
- Visitors from the Moon
- Five Stars
- Lefty and the Milkman
- The Decision
- Stop Jivin’ Me, Coach
- A Star Is Born
- Bad News and the Spirits
- Wandering Moses
- A Launch Pad
- Chairman of the Boards
- Four Guys From Petersburg
- King of Fonde
- Straight Cash
- Time to Go to Work
- The Promised Land
- Reluctant Superstar
- Fat and Lazy
- The Breakup
- Come On Down!
- Superstar In Decline
- Endings
- Relentless Friend
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Recenzii
“A balanced portrait of a trailblazing athlete.”—Publishers Weekly
“Moses Malone might be the most underrated player in basketball history, a genuinely great athlete with a great but mostly forgotten story. He has long deserved a biography that told that story in all its richness. Paul Knepper has delivered that book. Every hoops fan should read this.”—Mike Sielski, author of Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk
“A groundbreaking read on one of the more quietly fascinating—and somewhat unheralded—figures in NBA history. Through his meticulous storytelling, Paul Knepper sheds ample light on the life of Moses Malone, who became one of the most important figures the league has ever seen.”—Chris Herring, New York Times bestselling author of Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks
“Moses Malone is one of the most underappreciated players in NBA history, so it’s sadly fitting that it has taken decades for a proper biography on Petersburg, Virginia’s, finest to arrive. That’s why I’m elated that Paul Knepper has invested the love and care in crafting Malone’s life story, from his fabled high school days to his work as the 1980s utilitarian, brilliant superstar and beyond. Knepper memorably puts a misunderstood player and man in his place among pro basketball’s giants. Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet is worth the wait.”—Pete Croatto, author of From Hang Time to Prime Time: Business, Entertainment, and the Birth of the Modern-Day NBA
“An incredibly detailed accounting of the life and career of Moses Malone, giving one of the NBA’s greatest ever a biography worthy of his achievements on and off the floor.”—Jake Fischer, author of Built to Lose: How the NBA’s Tanking Era Changed the League Forever
“Moses Malone has a dream biographer in Paul Knepper, someone who shares Malone’s tenacity, wit, and passion for his craft. It’s time younger generations learned more about the greatness and giving soul that was Malone. I consider this magnificent book essential reading to understanding one of the NBA’s all-time underrated pioneers.”—Mirin Fader, author of the New York Times bestseller Giannis: The Improbable Rise of an NBA Champion
“Moses Malone might be the most underrated player in basketball history, a genuinely great athlete with a great but mostly forgotten story. He has long deserved a biography that told that story in all its richness. Paul Knepper has delivered that book. Every hoops fan should read this.”—Mike Sielski, author of Magic in the Air: The Myth, the Mystery, and the Soul of the Slam Dunk
“A groundbreaking read on one of the more quietly fascinating—and somewhat unheralded—figures in NBA history. Through his meticulous storytelling, Paul Knepper sheds ample light on the life of Moses Malone, who became one of the most important figures the league has ever seen.”—Chris Herring, New York Times bestselling author of Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks
“Moses Malone is one of the most underappreciated players in NBA history, so it’s sadly fitting that it has taken decades for a proper biography on Petersburg, Virginia’s, finest to arrive. That’s why I’m elated that Paul Knepper has invested the love and care in crafting Malone’s life story, from his fabled high school days to his work as the 1980s utilitarian, brilliant superstar and beyond. Knepper memorably puts a misunderstood player and man in his place among pro basketball’s giants. Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet is worth the wait.”—Pete Croatto, author of From Hang Time to Prime Time: Business, Entertainment, and the Birth of the Modern-Day NBA
Descriere
The biography of legend Moses Malone, the first modern-day player to jump from high school basketball to the pros, paving a path for future star players like Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, and LeBron James to follow.