Jeff City native Maya Moore’s quest, social conscience make her first hoops club proud
Back when Maya Moore was on her way to St. Louis for the 2009 NCAA Women’s Final Four and again at the 2012 London Olympics, the fact she was born in Jefferson City made for a convenient — if perhaps slightly contrived — excuse to write about her as a “local” athlete.
Colorful as some of the basketball origins stuff was, Jeff City seemed incidental to her story since she left when she was 11 for Charlotte, North Carolina, and on to Atlanta.
But all these years later, it turns out Jefferson City was the essential underpinning for her most noble and meaningful achievement: suspending a flourishing basketball career a year ago to help free Jonathan Irons from Jefferson City Correctional Center.
When it came true on Wednesday, Moore was visibly overcome and fell to her knees after he walked out.
“It was kind of a worshipful moment,” she said on ABC’s Good Morning America.
A moment applauded by Rich Tipton, one of her former coaches at the Jefferson City Basketball Club who sees her dedication to this cause as indicative of a new wave of empowerment among athletes.
“To me, it’s inspiring,” said Tipton, a supervisor in the supply chain for Capital Regional Medical Center and a youth sports referee and umpire.
Much as we relish sports and miss them now, we’re reminded these days simultaneously stranded in a pandemic and engulfed in a movement for social justice that sports aren’t the “end all, be all,” as Tipton put it.
Athletes aren’t just automatons who shoot three-pointers, dunk and pull off spin moves for our amusement.
“There’s people behind that: We do have feelings; we do have thoughts,” Tipton said, later calling the cynical notion of “stick to sports” insulting because it says, “I only want this little nugget out of you — your athletic ability.”
All that said, Moore’s athletic ability (perhaps enhanced by her father, Mike Dabney, a member of Rutgers’ 1976 Final Four team but not part of her upbringing) provided a platform.
One that goes full-circle back to Jefferson City, where Tipton remembers her single mother, Kathryn, being strong and outspoken with exemplary morals he believes shaped her daughter’s principles.
It was there that Kathryn set up a small plastic basketball hoop on a door in their apartment and soon provided an adjustable outdoor basket in the driveway. That was her inauspicious debut in the game that led her by about age 9 to the now-defunct Jefferson City Basketball Club, which displays on its Facebook page an old team photo featuring Moore in the front row.
The night her mother came to practice to tell them they were moving for her job, Tipton said, Maya stood in a huddle peeking up at the net stuck up around the rim after the last shot.
“All of a sudden, she just, like, rocks back on her heels, takes one step and jumps up and pulls that net off the rim,” he said.
As if she could do anything she put her mind to, which in her case already had included launching “Maya’s Mobile Car Wash” to raise money for a set of drums.
“She always had something cooking,” Tipton said, laughing.
All of which is why, as a parting gesture, then-JCBC president Eric Stone gave Moore a card with the image of blue sky on the outside and words within that said, “The sky’s the limit.”
Off she went to conquer the basketball world, becoming a four-time WNBA champion in Minneapolis, two-time Olympic gold medalist and two-time NCAA champion at the University of Connecticut … where coach Geno Auriemma almost had to invent ways to challenge her.
In his office in 2009, he said her teammates “think she’s Superman … because there’s probably nothing Maya can’t do.”
Including devoting herself to a role in liberating Irons, whom she met at the correctional center through a prison-ministry program during her freshman year at Connecticut.
That was arranged after she’d inquired about the interest taken in the case by her godfather, Reggie Willams — who along with his wife, Cherilyn, had befriended her mother and Maya when they moved to Jefferson City.
Per ESPN: “Irons, 40, served 22 years of a 50-year sentence from 1998 following a conviction of burglary and assault with a weapon of a suburban St. Louis homeowner. The man testified that Irons was the person who assaulted him in his home, but Irons’ lawyers said there is no evidence (witness, fingerprints, footprints, DNA) to corroborate that their client committed the crime. Irons, a Black teen who was living in poverty, was 16 at the time of the incident but was tried as an adult, and the all-white jury found him guilty.”
Along the way to this moment, Moore lent financial assistance, public advocacy and countless time to a case inspiring in result but also a sad cue to remember from whence it came.
While noting that she admired how Moore put this team on her back as she so often has on the court, Reeve added, “I also can’t help but feel a great deal of anger. Maya Moore should never have had to leave her profession to engage in the fight against the two-tiered criminal justice system that over-polices, wrongfully convicts, and over-sentences (Black) and brown communities. The criminal justice system in America is so far from fair and equal, and it angers me that Maya has had to sacrifice so much to overcome this racially disparate system.”
It’s unclear when Moore, 31, will seek to resume her basketball career. All we really know now is that Jefferson City wasn’t incidental in her life, but instrumental — the place where she both learned the game and found higher purpose.
“We’re proud of who she became,” Tipton said, “and what’s she done on and off the basketball court.”