Moses Malone

• 1. Introduction

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  Moses Eugene Malone Sr. grew up in Petersburg, Virginia as an only child, raised almost entirely by his mother Mary, who had left school after the fifth grade. She worked to give him a life she never had. He repaid her by becoming one of the most unstoppable forces the game of basketball has ever produced.

  At Petersburg High School, Malone led the Crimson Wave to back-to-back Virginia state championships without a single loss over his final two seasons. Colleges came calling. He signed a letter of intent to play for the University of Maryland under head coach Lefty Driesell. Then the Utah Stars of the American Basketball Association made him an offer, and Malone made a choice no player in modern professional basketball had made before: he went pro straight out of high school.

  What followed was a career spanning more than two decades, three MVP awards, an NBA championship, and a nickname that said everything about how he played: the Chairman of the Boards. But the numbers alone do not capture what made Malone remarkable. The real story is in how he played, who he became, and what he left behind.

• 2. The High School Pioneer

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  When the Utah Stars selected Malone in the third round of the 1974 ABA Draft, the NBA had a rule that blocked players from entering its league before completing four years of college eligibility. The ABA had no such restriction. Malone signed a five-year contract worth one million dollars and reported to Utah as a professional basketball player who had never played a college game.

  He was listed at 215 pounds at the time, lean for a big man. The Stars played him at forward while he built his body into something capable of surviving at center in professional basketball. Even as a rookie playing out of position, he earned ABA All-Star and ABA All-Rookie honors. In a first-round playoff loss to the Denver Nuggets that year, he averaged 22.7 points, 17.5 rebounds, and 1.5 blocks per game. That was his first taste of the postseason.

  The Stars folded 16 games into the following season, and Malone, recovering from a leg injury, was sold to the Spirits of St. Louis to help settle the team's debts. His ABA teammates Ron Boone, Randy Denton, and Steve Green came with him. The Spirits finished 35-49 and missed the playoffs, but Malone got through those two ABA seasons averaging 17.2 points and 12.9 rebounds per game. When the ABA-NBA merger happened after the 1975-76 season, Malone was ready.

• 3. Building the Body of Work

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  Portland selected Malone fifth overall in the 1976 ABA dispersal draft, but the Trail Blazers already had Bill Walton, Maurice Lucas, and Lloyd Neal in their frontcourt. They traded him to the Buffalo Braves before the 1976-77 season even started, receiving a first-round pick and $232,000. Buffalo played him in two games and then moved him again, to Houston, for first-round picks in 1977 and 1978.

  With the Rockets, Malone finally had a home. In that first Houston season, playing forward beside Rudy Tomjanovich, he set what was then an NBA record with 437 offensive rebounds. In a single playoff game against the Washington Bullets, he grabbed 15 offensive rebounds in an overtime win, setting an NBA playoff record that still stands.

  By the 1978-79 season, Malone had added 15 pounds in the offseason and fully made the transition to center. He shot 54 percent from the field and averaged a career-best 17.6 rebounds per game, leading the league. He set an all-time single-season record with 587 offensive rebounds. On the 9th of February that season, he grabbed a career-high 37 rebounds in a game against the New Orleans Jazz. The league named him MVP for the first time.

  In the 1980-81 season he put up 51 points against the Golden State Warriors on the 11th of March, then carried Houston all the way to the NBA Finals, scoring 36 points and grabbing 11 rebounds in a decisive Game 5 Western Conference Finals win over the Kansas City Kings. The Rockets lost to the Celtics in six games. In 1981-82, Malone set a career-high scoring average of 31.1 points per game, won his second MVP, and on the 11th of February set a new single-game record with 21 offensive rebounds against the Seattle SuperSonics.

• 4. Fo, Fo, Fo

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  On the 2nd of September 1982, Malone signed an offer sheet with the Philadelphia 76ers: six years, $13.2 million. The Rockets matched the offer and then agreed to trade him to Philadelphia for Caldwell Jones and a first-round pick. The deal closed on the 15th of September.

  The 76ers had just lost the Finals to the Los Angeles Lakers in a 4-2 series where their big men, Darryl Dawkins and Caldwell Jones, had been outplayed by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Malone arrived alongside Julius Erving, Maurice Cheeks, Andrew Toney, and Bobby Jones. Head coach Billy Cunningham later said plainly: "Let's not make believe. The difference from last year was Moses."

  Before the playoffs, Malone made a prediction in Southern vernacular: Philadelphia would go "fo, fo, fo," sweeping all three rounds in four games each. The New York Times later called it "an enduring quotation" and Comcast SportsNet called it "one of the greatest rallying cries ever uttered." The Sixers did not quite manage it. They swept the first round and the Finals, but dropped Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals to the Milwaukee Bucks. The final record was 12-1, and the inside of the championship ring was inscribed "fo' fi' fo (four, five, four)."

  In those 13 playoff games, Malone averaged 26.0 points and 15.8 rebounds. He outrebounded Abdul-Jabbar 72-30 in the Finals and won the Finals MVP. He was also named the regular-season MVP for the second straight year. No other NBA player had ever won consecutive MVP awards with two different teams. The achievement would only be matched in the four major American sports leagues by Barry Bonds in 1992-93 and Shohei Ohtani in 2023-24.

• 5. Mentoring the Next Generation

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  Around the time of the 1983 championship, Malone began working with a young center named Hakeem Olajuwon, then just arriving with the Rockets organization. Malone passed along what he knew about playing the position, and Olajuwon went on to become one of the greatest centers in basketball history.

  Two years later, when the 76ers drafted Charles Barkley out of Auburn in the 1984 NBA Draft, Malone took on another project. Barkley reported to training camp at 300 pounds. Malone pushed him, encouraging him to get his body right. Barkley got down to 255 pounds and made the NBA All-Rookie Team that season. Barkley would later become one of the most dominant power forwards of his era.

  Malone's own play did not suffer during those mentoring years. In the 1984-85 season he led the league in rebounding for a record fifth straight year and scored his 15,000th NBA point on the 28th of November and grabbed his 10,000th NBA rebound on the 29th of March. He also scored 51 points against the Detroit Pistons on the 14th of November that season. The record of five consecutive rebounding titles was later surpassed by Dennis Rodman, who put together seven straight seasons.

• 6. The Long Finish

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  After a 1985-86 season cut short by an orbital fracture in his right eye suffered in a game against the Bucks on the 28th of March, Philadelphia traded Malone to the Washington Bullets along with Terry Catledge and two first-round picks. Washington sent back Jeff Ruland and Clifford T. Robinson.

  With the Bullets, Malone scored his 20,000th NBA point on the 12th of April against the Detroit Pistons and posted 50 points against the New Jersey Nets on the 8th of April, joining Earl Monroe and Phil Chenier as the only Bullets players to score 50 in a game. He made his 10th and 11th consecutive All-Star Games during his two seasons in Washington.

  With the Atlanta Hawks he became the first and only player in professional basketball history to average 20 points and 10 rebounds for four different teams. His 12th straight and final All-Star selection came at Atlanta. After Atlanta demoted him to a backup role, Malone signed with the Milwaukee Bucks, then returned to Philadelphia as a backup and mentor to rookie center Shawn Bradley, who stood 7 feet 6 inches tall.

  He played his final NBA season with the San Antonio Spurs in 1994-95. In the last game of his career, against the Charlotte Hornets, he hit a buzzer-beating three-point shot from 74 feet away, at the opposing free throw line. He was the last active player to have played in the ABA. Malone finished his combined ABA and NBA career with 29,580 points and 17,834 rebounds, and holds the all-time professional record for offensive rebounds at 7,382, a figure 35 percent higher than runner-up Artis Gilmore.

• 7. The Record and the Reckoning

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  Malone died on the morning of the 13th of September 2015, in his sleep, from heart disease, at a hotel in Norfolk, Virginia. He was 60 years old. He had been scheduled to play in a charity golf tournament that day and was found unresponsive in his room when he did not appear for breakfast. He had previously complained of an irregular heartbeat and was reported to have been wearing a heart monitor at the time.

  His personal life had been complicated. He and his wife Alfreda Gill, married in 1982, divorced in October 1992 after a legal proceeding that included a restraining order and an arrest in January 1993 in Galveston, Texas, tied to a peace bond she had obtained. He also had a younger son, Micah Francois Malone, with Leah Nash, whom he had met in 2006.

  The honors continued to arrive long after his retirement. The Houston Rockets retired his number 24 in 1998. The 76ers waited until the 8th of February 2019 to retire his number 2, partly because Malone had insisted that all of his 1983 championship teammates be included on the banner. The team fulfilled that condition. They also unveiled a statue in front of their training facility in Camden, New Jersey. In 2001, Malone was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. In 2022, The Athletic ranked him the 18th greatest player in NBA history on their 75th anniversary list, placing him among a group of nine players who have ever been named MVP three or more times.