Over the last few weeks, Pearl Moore has fielded several interview requests from reporters around the country. Many of them suddenly are interested in the 5’7” guard from Florence, S.C., who once played college ball at Francis Marion University, a Division II school in the 1970s.
Last weekend we caught up with Moore while she was celebrating her sister’s birthday away from home. She took time and spoke with us on Feb. 16, a day after Caitlin Clark’s new NCAA scoring record was set.
The Iowa star is still behind Moore’s all-time scoring career mark of 4,056 over four years (1975-79) when the three-point line didn’t exist at the time and women played with the same basketball as the men’s—today women play with a smaller ball than their male counterparts.
Moore is third on the college basketball men’s and women’s all-time scoring list, the only woman with at least 4,000 career points, well ahead of Pete Maravich (3,667 at LSU, 1967-70) who is in ninth place. She averaged over 30 points a game each season at Francis Marion and once hit for 60 points in a game.
“If I was good, I probably would have never missed a shot,” joked Moore.
Nonetheless, Moore’s place should be fully recognized. But the NCAA doesn’t because her points came when the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) ran women’s hoops and before the NCAA took over in 1982. Therefore, Clark passed Kelsey Plum for the top spot among NCAA Division I scorers but in actuality, she still is behind Moore.
This oversight isn’t Clark’s fault. Instead, blame the PWM who routinely don’t do their fact-checking and due diligence to properly inform their audience. Rather, they pursued a whitewashed version, putting Clark in the middle of the hoopla, while virtually ignoring Moore.
Born in a family of 11 children in Florence, S.C., Moore left home after high school for a semester at a junior college and played a few games—her 177 points are included in her total career points but returned to her hometown and enrolled at Francis Marion, the small 4,000-plus school also located in the Florence area.
The guard left again after college, and played two pro seasons, one in New York and one in St. Louis for a now defunct U.S. pro women’s league, then went overseas and played there for a year.
“When I played in the Women’s Basketball League,” recalled Moore, “the contract my first year was $6,000 and I didn’t even get all of that. Then the second year in St. Louis was $16,000.”
Going overseas, the only option then for women’s hoopsters wishing to play pro ball, was a culture shock for her, continued Moore.
“I was in South America for one season,” she said of her time spent in Venezuela, where she didn’t have the Spanish down pat as she did her English. “I learned a little bit of the language, but I didn’t really have to because we had a translator.”
But she quickly learned what “pass” and “shoot” was in Spanish because this was what the coach wanted her teammates to do, and what he wanted her to do whenever she got the ball.
However, Moore said she grew tired of seeing “people walking around with guns” virtually everywhere she and her teammates went. Soon she returned home to Florence, where she resettled and worked for the Postal Service and ran youth basketball camps in her post-playing life.
“I was playing basketball because I loved it,” said Moore.
It took a few decades before Moore’s place in history was finally recorded. Several of her items used when she played were sent to the Naismith Hall of Fame in 1996, and in 2011 was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. She became part of the Hall’s “WBL Trailblazers of the Game” exhibit in 2016.
The Naismith HOF finally inducted her in 2021. Around Florence, a center is named for her, and her old high school court is named for her. Moore is in several halls of fame based in South Carolina.
“I always get nervous and everything when somebody wants to name something for me,” said the now-retired 66-year-old Moore humbly.
Furthermore, Moore is not bitter that people are finally acknowledging her achievements, mainly because of Clark’s run at the NCAA scoring record, and have followed it with great interest.
“I said that records are made to be broken but I should say that records that are set can’t be broken,” she told me matter-of-factly. “The evolution of women’s basketball right now is tremendous.”
But it can’t be ignored that whenever Black people do something positive in sports, especially Black women, it gets short-shifted, ignored, or minimalized.
Such is the case of Moore’s over 4,000 points, or Lynette Woodard, who’s 12th on the all-time scoring list with 3,649 points when she played at Kansas in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Woodard later would be the first woman to play for the Harlem Globetrotters.
Clark is expected to soon overtake Woodard on the NCAA list but has some ways to go to overtake Moore’s place at the top. This fact is getting lost amid all the hoopla over the Iowa senior guard.
“Lynette and me may get overlooked, just like a lot of our Black people,” Moore concluded.