An excerpt:
As Terry Bradshaw would explain, if, you know, he only could, the hardest knock an athlete has to live down today is that of deficient intelligence; even the choker can get off the hook more easily. If he is big and black, it's twice as hard. A quarter of a century ago, Willie Mays, overwhelmed and untutored, was generously accepted by newspaper reporters who turned his intellectual shortcomings around, using them to create a happy-go-lucky myth, our own Say Hey Kid. But Moses Malone, who comes from the same sort of black Dixie background, was publicly mocked as "Mumbles" Malone by a Salt Lake City disc jockey. Nowadays, any athlete who cannot express himself capably is fair game. Now that the TV microphones are on all the time, there can never be another Pygmalion.
Those who know Malone make it a point to protest allegations of ignorance. Moses himself, though, stays above the fray, refusing to discuss almost anything he deems "personal." If people insist upon dwelling on how he talks instead of on what he has attained, then that is their dumb fault. He grows increasingly more confident socially, more witty, more outgoing all the time, but he cannot be bothered with enrolling in speech classes, as his lawyers have suggested. What's the point? His friends understand him—"When you're alone with Mo, you can't shut him up," says John Lucas of the Warriors—and he knows that no matter how carefully he enunciates, nobody is ever going to hire him to fill in for Bruce Jenner.
No, Malone realizes today, as he always has, that his fortune is to be found around the rack. Charles Moses, a pharmacist who helped advise the Malones when the teenager was being recruited by hundreds of colleges, says, "If you can't express yourself correctly, it doesn't mean you're a stupid kid. Stupid? Listen, he was the first one to understand that he was a franchise. Moses was the one who figured it out."
Turning down the University of Maryland, Malone went with the Utah Stars. "I knew what peoples was saying," Malone says, "and so I told the Stars, 'It don't make no difference how old I am, because I still think I can bust y'all. You just watch my action.'
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