When Jamario Moon was a teenager, he was the best basketball player anyone had seen in tiny Goodwater, Ala. A lot of people thought he was the best player in the state, though a kid named Gerald Wallace, just down the road, was really good, too, a solid bet to make the NBA, local people said.
They were right about Wallace, who makes $13-million-a-year (U.S.) playing for the Charlotte Bobcats.
In the summer of 1999, when Moon was entering his last year of high school, a man from another place came preaching the word of God and bearing gifts and took him away from home and family. He was going to help make Moon rich before he was 20 years old, and he locked him up in a house to make it so.
The unlikeliest of Toronto Raptors rookies didn't like that much, being locked up. He sneaked out, left town and started on a long road with no map and a lot of bad directions. But he made it. It took him a lot of years, but he made it.
Today, Moon is not quite rich, but he's going to buy his grandmother a car for Christmas. He's famous, a media darling for his outlandish story and easy way of telling it. Moon is swinging from a star.
"I tell people all the time, don't pinch me," he says with a characteristic smile and his backwoods drawl. "I don't want to wake up."
LONG SHOT
The NBA is a blue-chip league. There are 30 franchises, each allowed only 15 players under contract, for a total of 450 players. The contracts are guaranteed, so turnover is limited. The NBA entry draft has only two rounds and gets done in a single evening. With so few jobs open, why bother with all the applicants?
But just to make sure, an average NBA club spends $1-million a year and thousands of hours looking for talent.
Which means that in the six years since Moon decided to declare for the 2001 draft, all that time and nearly $200-million produced the same conclusion, over and over again: he wasn't good enough.
They were wrong. The money was poorly spent.
On a cold night this past November, Raptors head coach Sam Mitchell tapped his 27-year-old rookie on the shoulder and told him he was going to be his starting forward that night against the Philadelphia 76ers. He's been in the starting lineup since, creating havoc for opposing small forwards with his size and quickness.
One night in Memphis, a Raptors assistant coach heard two Grizzlies players chatting before the game, one asking the other, "Who the [hell]is Jamario Moon?"
After six years in eight leagues and 18 organizations, word is finally starting to get around. Moon is the NBA's third-ranked rookie and among the rookie leaders in points (8.1), rebounds (7.9), blocks (1.7) and minutes played (31.5).
"So this is a feel-good story?" a reporter asked Mitchell the other day.
"It's a feel-good story for us," Mitchell said.
Back to basics
They could have had him at hello. But Moon worked out for the Raptors the day before the 2001 draft and impressed no one, the results long forgotten, even by those who were there. He was 6 foot 8 and could fly, but skinny, unpolished and not ready for the NBA. The Raptors passed on him.
So did Phoenix, where Moon worked out for current Raptors president and then Suns general manager Bryan Colangelo. The 28 other clubs in the NBA felt the same. Moon found himself at home, watching all the other names being called on television and not hearing his. He was out of school, out of a job and without a clue about what to do next.
A summer league tryout with the Milwaukee Bucks went nowhere, so he started his minor-league professional career in Mobile, Ala., making $600 a week playing in the NBA Development League, a kid from the sticks playing with men for money.
It didn't go particularly well.
"He didn't know the most basic things, stuff like hedging screens or what to do in a 4-on-4 shell drill that most basketball players know, he didn't know," says Dell Demps, as assistant coach in Mobile and now the director of professional personnel for the San Antonio Spurs. "He wasn't taught that. He wasn't in a college environment. He just didn't know."
When you unravel the story about how a uniquely talented player somehow spent six years in basketball oblivion, bypassing college and the preparation he might have had there, it starts with Moon's encounter with Joel Hopkins, a religious man who had made his fortune by recruiting former Toronto Raptors and current Houston Rockets star Tracy McGrady to Mount Zion, his tiny Christian preparatory school in rural North Carolina.
McGrady became the No. 9 pick in the 1997 draft without going to university, and Hopkins pocketed nearly $1-million of the $12-million shoe contract McGrady had signed with Adidas. A few years later, he hoped to repeat his success with Moon, who liked the way it all sounded and liked the free shoes. He didn't like being locked in a house that doubled as a dorm for the basketball players, not allowed to come or go. He didn't like being held in what he describes as a basketball prison. He knew being told not to worry about school seemed fishy. He left in the middle of the night, one good choice in a string of bad ones made in an ill-advised attempt to make the NBA the easy way.
"Coming from a small town, you have the limelight, this close, two inches from you, which way are you going to go?" he said. "I was trying to get to the limelight quick, instead of listening to the right people, taking my time and letting it play out."
When he declared for the NBA draft after one year of community college [he had a scholarship offer, but didn't qualify academically] there was no looking back. And yet when he found himself a minor-league pro, he wasn't ready for that life, either.
"His athleticism always gave him a chance," Demps said. "But he was like a boy playing with men. Hungry men.
"And he was just green. I remember one day he came into practice and he was, like, 'Coach, guys were drinking and smoking last night, I didn't know what to do.' "
determination
But Moon had bigger problems as he kept bouncing through the minor leagues, his biggest payday coming when he was paid $60,000 for 200 nights of barnstorming with the Harlem Globetrotters. He was becoming a minor-league lifer, weighed down by the collective wisdom of an industry that had seen him here, seen him there, and shrugged.
"That's what happens. You get labelled," said Raptors guard Darrick Martin, himself a former minor-leaguer. "They don't even take the time to interview you, talk to you or watch you play for an extended period of time. They just move on."
Moon didn't, though. Naive or determined or both, he kept thinking his next break was coming. "I never thought I wouldn't make it. I never felt I would give up or work a 9-to-5," he said.
To his credit, he did recognize that he needed to change his game. He got married in the summer of 2006, realized that minor-league wages weren't going to cut it, and all that talk about making the NBA as a defender began to make more sense.
Within a season, he was chosen as the top defensive player in the CBA while playing for the Albany Patroons.
Also working in his favour was the Raptors were in the market for a small forward with exactly his set of skills. A dream candidate was Gerald Wallace, Moon's old high-school rival from Alabama who had made the NBA in a straight shot.
But Wallace was thought too expensive. Moon? On the recommendation of veteran Raptors talent evaluator Jim Kelly, they brought him to a free-agent camp.
"And, yeah, for about 30 seconds the thought crossed our minds: Why hasn't anyone else liked this kid?" Mitchell said. "Well, that's their problem. We liked him, so we signed him."
With one stroke of a pen, Moon was $427,000 richer and had turned six years of doubts upside down.
"This is a true story," Mitchell said. "Someone told someone in our organization that Jamario Moon couldn't read. Never talked to him. Never went to practice. Never was within 20 feet of him, but said he couldn't read. ... It's amazing how those things get started and how they spread like wild fire."
If you go to YouTube.com you can see Moon put that rumour to bed. There's a video of his singing the Canadian anthem on the floor of the Air Canada Centre as part of his rookie orientation, an NBA rite of passage he was only too eager to take.
The singing isn't much, but he's reading the words just fine.
MOON'S RÉSUMÉ
Perhaps no NBA rookie in recent memory has made it to the NBA after taking as circuitous route as Toronto Raptors forward Jamario Moon, who had never been to an NBA training camp until the Raptors invited him this year. He's now a fixture in the starting lineup.
Here is Moon's playing résumé, which is so varied that even he can't fill in all the blanks.
1999-2000: Meridian CC (Mississippi.): played 12 games for Meridian during 1999-2000 season before being suspended; averaged 20.8 points a game, 8.7 rebounds a game; head coach George Brooks called Moon best player he has ever coached.
2001: NBA draft candidate, but not drafted.
2001: USBL; Shaw's Pro Summer League in Boston (with Milwaukee Bucks).
2001-02: Mobile Revelers (NBDL), 5.2 ppg, 2 rpg, 0.7 apg.
2002: Dodge City Legend (USBL): played three games; 10.0 ppg, 5.7 rpg, 1.7 apg, 1 steal, 2.7 bpg.
2002: May: Philadelphia 76ers spring workouts; July: Southern California Summer Pro League in Long Beach (with Los Angeles Lakers); July: Rocky Mountain Revue (with Utah Jazz).
2002-03: Mobile Revelers (NBDL): released in November of 2002, and after two games, 2.5 ppg 1.0 rpg 0.5 apg.
2003-04: Huntsville Flight (NBDL): released in November before season started; signed again in January of 2004, but released again after one game.
2004: Oklahoma Storm (USBL) preseason camp.
2004: Harlem Globetrotters.
2004-05: Rockford Lightning (CBA): released before season started; in December of 2004 signed with Kentucky Colonels (ABA, 1T) left in February of 2005 after seven games, 10.7 ppg, 6.1 rpg, 2.7 apg.
2005: Rome Gladiators (WBA): 21 games, 13.4 ppg, 6.3 rpg, 1.1 apg, 2.0 bpg.
2005-06: In December of 2005 joined Albany Patroons (CBA), 30 games, 18.4 ppg, 6.6 rpg, 2.0 apg; in April of 2006 joined Fort Worth Flyers (NBDL), 3 games, 3.3 ppg, 2.3 rpg, 2.0 spg.
2006: In April joined Marietta Storm (WBA), in August moved to Fuerza Regia de Monterey (Mexico).
2006-07: In May signed with Gary Steelheads (USBL), 22 games, 16.7 ppg, 6.8 rpg, 2.0 apg, 1.6 spg, 2.1 bpg;. in November of 2006 signed with Albany Patroons (CBA), 44 games, 18.8 ppg, 7.5 rpg, 1.9 apg, 2.0 spg, 2.4 bpg; 2007 CBA defensive player of year.
2007-08: Toronto Raptors (NBA).
Michael Grange
ROUNDABOUT ROUTES
Jamario Moon took an unlikely route to the NBA, but he's not the only professional athlete with an unusual résumé.
Israel Idonije
Defensive line, Chicago Bears, NFL
He didn't play football until he was 17 and in his final year of high school in Brandon. He played at the University of Manitoba, but was so raw he didn't take the field for nearly two full seasons.
He was not drafted, but signed with the Cleveland Browns but was cut. He was signed by the Bears, played in NFL Europe initially, but has been a fixture in Chicago since. He is believed to be one of only eight or nine CIS players to have made the jump to the NFL.
David Naylor
Glen Metropolit
Centre, Boston Bruins, NHL
He grew up in Regent Park, one of Toronto's most underprivileged neighbourhoods, and was raised by a single mother. He was not drafted and never played major-junior hockey. He played two seasons of Tier Two junior in Richmond Hill as an 18-year-old and another season as an overage player in British Columbia. He turned professional and played for Nashville and Pensacola in the ECHL, Atlanta, Quebec and Grand Rapids in the IHL before the Washington Capitals signed him as a free agent. He began the 1999-2000 season with the Capitals' farm team in Portland of the AHL, but then finally got a chance to play in the NHL. He recently played his 210th NHL game.
Tim Wharsnby
Johnny Scott
Defensive lineman, Lions, Argos, Ticats, Renegades, CFL
Scott was never drafted by any pro football team. His college was listed as N/A because he didn't go. Instead, teams would list his Texas high school, Johnston HS in Austin.
He bounced around, attended a half-dozen or so tryouts and training camps before becoming a pro walk-on and signing with the Shreveport Pirates of the CFL in 1994 at the age of 25.
From there, he played four seasons with the B.C. Lions, three in Toronto, a couple in Hamilton and one with the defunct Ottawa Renegades. Altogether, he played 12 years in the CFL as a defensive lineman, was a two-time league all-star and retired at the age of 37.
Allan Maki
Jim Morris
Pitcher, Tampa Bay Rays, major-league baseball
A shoulder injury put an end to Morris's minor-league pitching career and he took up teaching and coaching instead. He attended a free-agent camp and surprised everyone by throwing a 98-mile-an-hour fastball. He signed a minor-league contract with Tampa Bay and was called up to the Rays in 1999, making his major-league debut at the age of 35. He appeared in 21 games in 1999 and 2000 before he required shoulder surgery, ending his major-league career almost as quickly as it started. In 2001, he co-wrote a book, The Oldest Rookie, based on his experiences, and a movie, The Rookie, was made in 2002 starring Dennis Quaid.
Michael Grange