The AltRaps Blog

ESPN - Jamario Moon in “Sole Influence” - TrueHoop
Moon never went to the school, but as the book tells, he did visit then-coach Hopkins, who sold him on the idea that Moon could go straight to the NBA like McGrady had. “And if the NBA didn’t work out immediately, Moon says Hopkins assured him his academic transcript would be in line to receive a scholarship. ‘They said I didn’t have to worry about academics,’ Moon said. ‘You had to go to class but you didn’t have to worry about no grades.’”

Moon visited at first with his mother and grandmother, but then somehow got roped into staying longer, and did not like at all that he and the other basketball players were kept “on lockdown,” far from the head coach’s mansion, at all hours of the day and night.

Moon roomed with Steven Hunter, and got in trouble for bringing in a CD player. (Rap music is banned.) Phone calls were not allowed, and straying away from the assistant coaches on hand is also, reportedly, forbidden. Moon says he got really crazy at one point and defied the rules by sneaking across the street to McDonald’s.

“They don’t want you do to do nothing,” Moon is quoted as saying in “Sole Influence.” “They just want to control you.”

Moon eventually left, and signed a letter of intent to attend Mississippi State, although he did not get the grades to make the team. He ended up on a basketball odyssey that took him to play for a long list of teams that include Meridian Community College, the Rome Gladiators, the Albany Patroons, the Huntsville Flight, the Kentucky Colonels, the Dodge City Legend, Fuerza Regia, the Gary Steelheads.

It’s one of a million stories about players underprepared to make good career decisions and overexposed to the those eager to exploit them. It’s also one of a million stories about someone whose first, second, third, fourth, and fifth attempts to make it in basketball all fell short. But now? It’s that one-in-a-million such story that is well on its way to a happy ending.