'Be Yourself, Work on You, and the Rewards Will Come'

Last week, Caitlin Clark made a three-pointer from about 35 feet to shatter the all-time Division 1 women’s scoring record.  

But decades before Clark scored her first points at Iowa — or even picked up a basketball — a guard from rural South Carolina set a scoring mark that still stands nearly 45 years later.

Pearl Moore once scored 60 points in a game, and tallied more than 4,000 over her illustrious career at Francis Marion University, a record that’s unlikely to be broken this year.

“That night I scored 60, I didn’t even know it until after the game,” Moore said. “I didn’t realize the magnitude of it at the time. I just knew we won.”

In 2021, Moore was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

The Daily Coach caught up with her recently to discuss Clark’s impact on the sport, garnering recognition so many years after her career, and the challenges young athletes currently face.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Pearl, thanks a lot for doing this. Tell us about your childhood and some key lessons from it.

I grew up in the country in Florence, S.C. My mom was a domestic worker. My father was in the military, then he worked marking wooden and wire poles at a plant.  

If you’re living in the country, there’s not much to do. Houses were far away, so we just made up games. It was either stickball, basketball with a peach basket or tire rim and a rubber ball. There wasn’t a lot of money, so we just played. We moved to the city, and it became more of a challenge to play and see how much I could score on a real goal.

I learned hard work pays off. My parents told us if you work hard, you get what you worked for. It’s not always true, but have to put the work in and just keep at it.

You end up going to junior college, then to Francis Marion, where you played for the famous Sylvia Hatchell. What did you learn from her?

The biggest thing was how much (Coach Hatchell) cherished her players — and still does. We still talk frequently, about four times per month. She was good at pretty much every aspect of coaching. Practices were lined up. Our team wasn’t very tall, so she had all of us rebound, and we were forced to work even harder. We had girls 5-foot-2 going against girls who were 5-foot-9. It was hard, but it made us tougher.  

She was on a committee and called me on a Sunday a few years ago. She said, “Pearl, you know your name’s on the Naismith Hall-of-Fame nominees?” I said, “Yeah, but that’s been on there for about seven years.” The week right after, she was calling me every single day. I kept thinking, “Why is she calling me like this?” She was doing it because she knew I was getting enshrined.

Your name has been in the news a lot recently with Caitlin Clark breaking the Division 1 scoring record. What are your general impressions of her impact?

Sometimes, I’ll still be in awe. She’s just a really impressive player. She’s a great team leader, a great passer, and a great shooter. Those are the three components a great player should have.

When I was getting ready to get enshrined (for the Hall of Fame), Mike Tirico asked me a question about women’s basketball. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I said when we get a woman who could shoot like Steph Curry, we’d step over the threshold. That was 2021. Now, Caitlin Clark has stepped over the threshold.

You ended up playing professionally in several different places, including New York, St. Louis and Venezuela, and have also run a variety of camps. Is there any advice you’d give young athletes about pursuing a professional career?  

Everyone’s trying to be emulate someone else. My advice is be yourself, work on you, and the rewards will come. You really can’t be somebody else. You can emulate some things they do, but that’s pretty much it.

You may have a coach telling you this, and of course you play for the coach. Then, you might have a parent telling you that you’re better than what you are. There are pros and cons to all of that. Now, it’s so different than when we were coming up. There weren’t that many scholarship offers back then.

Now, there’s a silver plate out there for you where you can go wherever you want.

What do you make of the attention you’re getting these days and that so many people are finding out about you years after your playing career ended?

When I was playing, I never looked for any accolades or attention. I just played the game and loved it, and everything just came. I didn’t play to make the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame, I didn’t know nothing about Naismith. You just played.

My first contract in New York was for $6,000. We didn’t even get all of it, and the team folded. My contract in St. Louis was for $16,000. I didn’t even get all of that, then the league folded. We had to play for the love of the game. I’m humbly blessed is all I can say.

You did a lot of things after your playing career ended, working for the Postal Service and running camps across South Carolina. Looking back, is there any career advice you would give younger self?  

Whether it’s basketball or anything else, you have to work at it or somebody else will. If you don’t work and better yourself, you’re not going to progress. If a college team, for example, is practicing and winning all season long and thinks it’s better than everybody else, a team they beat up on early can grow because they were tired of getting beat.

You better keep working at your craft, regardless of what it is, because you can always be substituted.  

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