Another View
Here’s the rest of the story.
The late broadcaster and commentator Paul Harvey would always say, “…and now the rest of the story.” Iowa WBB player Caitlin Clark last week set a new NCAA scoring record (3,528 and counting). But the rest of the story is that Pearl Moore still is the all-time women’s basketball scorer.
Moore, in the 1970s a 5-7 guard at Francis Marion College, a small school in Florence, S.C., averaged at least 30 points a game—one game she hit for 60—and she finished her college career with 4,061 points. She is third on a list of college basketball men’s and women’s scorers, the only woman with at least 4,000 career points, ahead of such notables as Pete Maravich, who scored 3,667 points, good for ninth on the list.
Both he and Moore made their baskets at the time without a three-point line and with a similar size ball. Women today play with a smaller ball than the men.
Lynette Woodard also is on that list—her 3,649 career points at Kansas has her at No. 12 on the list of big-time scorers in college hoops history. It is expected that Clark soon will surpass her point totals as well.
However, while the spotlight has been on Clark as she sought the NCAA record, the two Black women’s historic accomplishments have been largely ignored save for a few of us, such as Lindsay Gibbs of Power Plays! who wrote about Moore and Woodard last year.
Moore played two seasons in a defunct U.S. pro league and a season overseas before retiring and returning to her hometown of Florence, S.C. Woodard, who after college became the first woman to play for the Harlem Globetrotters, like Moore has scored more points in college than Clark.
Clark isn’t to blame here, but rather the sports media who love to Whitewash history to suit their particular purpose, especially when it comes to Black females’ accomplishments. These PWM don’t do their rightful due diligence and fact-checking to properly tell the whole story.
Moore’s points came when the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) ran women’s basketball. But when the NCAA took over in 1982, the records of Moore and others of her generation never got officially recognized.
But decades later, Moore’s accomplishments got her inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011, part of the Hall’s “WBL Trailblazers of the Game” display in 2018, and the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2021. And her all-time scoring record still stands, despite all the hoopla over Clark last week.
“I was playing basketball because I loved it,” Moore told me last Friday, a day after Clark’s historic night. She expressed no regrets over the attention Clark is getting: “Records are made to be broken, but I should say that [her] record is set,” the 66-year-old pointed out.
Furthermore, she also understands how things work in this world of ours: “History is not actually repeating itself,” noted Moore. “Lynette and me may get overlooked, just like a lot of our Black people.”
We strongly suggest an asterisk be placed on Clark’s record, since it doesn’t fully recognize that Moore is the all-time queen in scoring. And that’s the rest of the story.
New rebounding record set
Francis Marion senior center Lauryn Taylor, on the same night that Caitlin Clark made headlines with her scoring, set a new NCAA rebounding record with 44 rebounds in a 22-point win. The 5-11 player had 14 offensive rebounds and 30 defensive caroms.
“It’s something that I like to do,” Taylor told the MSR the day after she set the record. She’s currently averaging nearly 14 rebounds a game this season. “I think it’s actually kind of easy. I really just have a knack for it.”
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