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Paul Knepper, author of Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet, joins the show. Enjoy!
Here are some highlights –
7:02-7:42: “He realized very early on that these people… were trying to get something out of him. He was cautious and kind of withdrawn before that, and I think that maybe that experience made him add even another layer between him and the outside world or certainly between him and people that he didn’t know well and people that could potentially take advantage of him. So it led him to be very protective in that way going forward.”
14:22-15:07: “It’s always hard to go straight from high school to pros. … I think in certain ways it was harder for Moses as the first. I think he faced tremendous backlash because of that, but also there was no infrastructure in place. There was a lot less money in professional basketball in general then, certainly in the ABA. It was a head coach, an assistant coach, and that was it; they didn’t have 10 coaches who could kinda babysit him and take care of him and make sure that he’s doing his laundry and paying his bills and all that. The other thing I think people forget is that very few people were even leaving college early at that time.”
19:38-20:21: “If you think of more recently maybe a comparison would be a Tim Duncan, who also had no flash to his game. He was better with the media in that I don’t think he was as standoffish, but he didn’t really give the media anything either. … It was almost like on the court and off the court there was no personality to him, and I think that’s how a lot of people saw Moses. Moses played with a scowl on his face. I always say Michael Jordan and Kobe also played with scowls on their face, but then they’d go into the interview room and they’d flash that million-dollar smile and it was like you saw a different side of them; Moses just never gave you that.”
