The Legendarium: A Pearl in Florence County

The story of Pearl Moore is the story of the AIAW and the achievements washed away by the NCAA. But she, and her Francis Marion Patriots team, now hold a unique perch among South Carolina hoop greats.

Courtesy: Francis Marion University

Pearl Moore felt like a deer in the headlights.

After decades of calm and quiet in Florence, South Carolina, the phone suddenly wouldn’t stop ringing. It had been nearly 45 years since her playing career ended at Francis Marion University but now, in 2023, newspapers and TV stations were lining up to get in touch with her.

They wanted to ask her about all the points she scored. All the games she won. The myriad ways in which she impacted the game, big and small. And they wanted to ask about Caitlin Clark.

But what did they want to talk to Pearl for? She wondered that often. Her Francis Marion scoring record stood at 4,061 points. Clark, even with her all her prowess, probably wasn’t going to catch it during the 2023 season. But those around Pearl compelled her to continue picking up the phone for those that would call.

What she did was historic, they’d tell her. It mattered. Her legacy was built, maintained and celebrated because of the simplest action, the one that basketball’s very foundation was predicated upon: putting the ball in the hoop. So, in spite of everything in her body telling her to let the phone go to voicemail, she’d pick it up and do something harder than anything she ever had to do on the floor: she’d have to talk about herself.

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Finding Fun in Florence

Interstate 26 is something of an educational artery in South Carolina. The road starts deep in Appalachian Tennessee where the two forks of the Holston River meet and comprise the beginning of the Tennessee Valley. For hours the road traverses through the mountains before crossing into South Carolina. It takes a driver by Spartanburg, the home of Wofford College and what is now USC Upstate. If you split off onto Interstate 85, you’ll be at Clemson within the hour. But if you stay on 26, you’ll pass by the University of South Carolina, South Carolina State and end in Charleston.

At almost every stop along that highway you’ll find schools steeped in some degree of athletic tradition. And yet if you decided to turn north on Interstate 95, into an area without many college campuses, you’d find Francis Marion University, home of one of the richest women’s basketball histories in the state. It was in this area in 1957 that Pearl Moore was born, the seventh of 11 children. Her father, she recalls, was a sharecropper and her mother a domestic worker. In the early 60’s, Pearl would go to school with her siblings and occasionally work in the fields. In the summertime, the Moore kids would find ways to entertain themselves.

“We played stick ball and red light, green light,” she remembers. “And we had a rubber ball, a tire rim and a peach basket.”

Both her parents had played basketball in their younger lives and most of her siblings played at least one sport. She would learn from them, see what basic fundamentals she could pick up with the rudimentary setup they had. It wasn’t state-of-the-art but it was what would have to do.

“That was what we used to play basketball,” says Moore.

But in 1970, the United States Justice Department ordered the Florence School District 1 to desegregate its schools, a full 16 years after Brown v. Board of Education. Pearl, who was about to enter high school, would now be attending Wilson High and experiencing White America for the very first time.

“That was a culture shock!” she laughs. “It was different because it was the first time mingling in a class with somebody that didn’t look like you and that was probably what I remember most.”

While she found new faces and a different way of life at Wilson, she also found something else: basketball courts, parks with real hoops and leather basketballs. She’d go out and play against the boys and people bigger than her. To win, Pearl would have to be shifty enough to get to the basket or be able to stand outside and shoot jumpers.

“I just learned to maneuver and the repetition of things when nobody was there or I was playing against somebody smaller than me or somebody bigger than me,” she explains. “It makes you decide how you want to do it the next time it happens. That’s why basketball came very easily to me.”

In spite of her success — four years on Varsity, a 1975 MVP Award and trip to the 1976 AAU Junior Olympic Games — she wasn’t sought after by major college programs. What she was told, by her high school coach Anne Long, was that the junior college in Anderson was the place to play. It was a few hours away from Florence but the team was led by a dynamic young head coach named Annie Tribble. So Pearl spent a semester on campus, played eight games and scored 177 points.

But she was homesick and wanted to come home. So Anne Long called Francis Marion’s brand new head coach, a 23 year old named Sylvia Hatchell and asked her if they could meet at Wilson High School.

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Pace, Points and Patriots

In 1975, Sylvia Hatchell couldn’t actually believe that she had ended up in Florence. None of it was a part of the plan. She was in graduate school in Knoxville with her friend Pat Summitt and the two were coaching the Lady Vols basketball team. Sylvia handled the JV squad while Pat led the senior group. But a job at nearby Roan State opened up and the two thought of an idea. Summitt would continue to coach in Knoxville, Hatchell would take the job at Roan, they’d get an apartment in West Knoxville and live and coach together as young women in their early 20’s.

“They offered me the job and two days later called me up and said ‘we got a problem’,” Hatchell recalls. “They said ‘we’ve had a cut in our funds and our women’s basketball coach is going to have to be the assistant baseball coach.”

The job ended up going to a young man from Tennessee named Andy Landers.

Which is how Hatchell found herself at Wilson High School in Florence, South Carolina, preparing for a game of two-on-two. Pearl Moore and her younger brother, Jeffrey, against Hatchell and Pearl’s high school coach Anne Long.

“Sylvia really wanted me to come and she didn’t know how bad I wanted to be back,” Pearl says. “So I came back. Francis Marion hadn’t started yet and it was her first year.”

Back under the auspices of the AIAW, there weren’t any transfer eligibility rules. But even luckier for Moore, Francis Marion didn’t play any games in the fall semester. So with eight games and 177 collegiate points already under her belt, she got the chance to play FMU’s entire schedule her freshman year.

Within a couple of weeks, it became clear that Pearl was a different kind of player. She could score and pass. She would run the floor ahead of everyone then craftily wait for chasing defenders to bump into her, drawing a foul and getting a three point play.

As a freshman, she led the Patriots with 25 points and 8.9 rebounds per game, making 44 percent of her 648 shot attempts. What’s more, she and her teammate LaRue Fields were quickly establishing Francis Marion as one of the best programs in the state. Back during the early days of the AIAW, four year colleges and two year schools could play each other. Size and institution didn’t matter. Anderson, the four time national champion junior college Moore transferred from, was on the schedule the same way Clemson and South Carolina were.

“I think there was a lot of pride in the city of Florence,” says Michael Hawkins, whose father taught at the school. “Pearl was a player ahead of her time.”

“I thought we were all on the same playing level because of the scholarship thing and, for some reason, sometimes we’d have better players playing for us than the largest schools did,” Pearl adds. “I just felt that it was good we could play them.”

While postseason success continued to be elusive, the Patriots continued to have major success across South Carolina. Pearl just kept scoring, surpassing 1,000 points in a single year in 1978. On the tartan floor of the Francis Marion gym, a player would get the ball out, Hatchell would release the two guard and from there it was long passes the length of the court to get easy baskets.

“We were a fast breaking team and the kids liked playing that style,” she says. “We got it out and we also played a half court trap. Partly zone and partly man and people struggled with it.”

It wasn’t just the local programs that found themselves unable to counter Moore’s scoring most of the time. In the 1978 AIAW Small College National Tournament, Eastern Washington State College (now Eastern Washington University) was buried under a 114 point barrage. Moore scored 60 that game, then a single game women’s college record. It was one of three times in her career that she’d surpass 50 points in a matchup.

By her senior year, Pearl’s averages had ballooned to 31.1 points and 12 rebounds per game. She shot the ball 824 games over 29 games. For reference, the current WNBA record for field goal attempts is 770 over 38 games. But Pearl never tired. She’d be content to run the floor, shoot a jumper, draw a foul or make a layup. Over her four years, Francis Marion finished as high as 6th in the country and never lower than 15th.

When all was said and done, Pearl Moore had scored 3,884 points over four years. Add the 177 points from Anderson Junior College and her total crossed over 4,000. But the chance to play pro basketball was on the horizon and so Pearl finally decided she was going to try something new: leave home and head to New York City.

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A Pearl That Shines Bright

The Women’s Professional Basketball League was one of the first real post-Title IX attempts at giving women’s players the opportunity to play professionally. But even before the league got off the ground it ran into some trouble.

Carol Blazejowski and Ann Meyers, arguably the top best players in America at the time, didn’t want to come to the league during the 1978 season to retain their amateur status for the 1980 Olympics. Ironically, the United States’ boycott of the Moscow Games due to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan destroyed any hope that those players had of a gold medal. So by 1980, Meyers, Blazejowski, Pearl Moore, Nancy Lieberman, Donna Orender, Gail Marquis and others were playing professional basketball stateside.

Moore played for the New York Stars, leading them to the WBL Finals against the Iowa Cornets and the legendary '“Machine Gun Molly Bolin”. It was a matchup of early superstars going blow for blow in the close out game for New York. Bolin scored 36 while Moore countered with 27 as the Stars eliminated the Cornets 3-1 to win the WBL Title.

It was a high point for the league, for women’s professional basketball players and Moore herself. The following year she was a WBL All-Star for the St. Louis Streak but the broader discussions around the league portended disaster. The New England Gulls, an expansion franchise, were disqualified after 12 games after refusing to play a game. Players for the Minnesota Fillies walked off the court to protest unpaid salaries. Nebraska Wranglers star Connie Kunzmann was murdered in the middle of the season, with authorities conducting an over one month search to find her body. Her Wranglers team would go on to win the final WBL title before the league collapsed in 1981-1982.

Pearl would go on to play a bit in South America before returning home and settling down in Florence, working for the Postal Service and giving back to the basketball community.

Hatchell continued to coach at Francis Marion until 1986, finally winning that elusive AIAW Small College National Title in 1982 right as the NCAA was about to take over governance of the sport. The very next year, FMU became an NAIA institution and eventually won another national championship.

In many ways, Hatchell credits Pearl and fellow teammate LaRue Fields for setting the table for those title teams that would come later.

“She laid the foundation,” Hatchell explains. “We had Tracy Tillman and South Carolina wanted her and we got Daphne Donnelly. She got MVP of that National Championship. There were a bunch of others. Kim Slawson…and they liked Francis Marion. They liked that we’ve been winning.”

Michael Hawkins, whose family came to Florence for his father’s professorial job at the University, realized that his interest was in following the women’s basketball program. He kept stats during the AIAW National Tournament in 1978, before he had even graduated high school.

“I didn’t really know what I wanted to do,” he says. “And one of the vice presidents out here knew me from church and said ‘hey, we need someone to come out and keep stats, be kind of a student SID (sports information director).”

For a scholarship and small stipend, he did the job for four years until a full time position happened to open in 1985 when he was out of school. He’s still in Florence now, 38 years later. Which is where the story picks back up with Pearl and a lot of phone calls from the media.

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Records That Stand

“They don’t have the number,” Pearl jokingly laments. “They can’t get the number and [Michael] is gonna give it to them. And I dreaded it.”

As Caitlin Clark approached multiple scoring records in 2023, it was a simple photobomb that thrust Pearl Moore back into the spotlight. During a segment on ESPN’s “College Gameday” in which reporter Holly Rowe stood in front of thousands of Gamecock faithful, USC student Sarah Royal held up her phone with a screenshot.

“What about Pearl Moore??????”

Funny enough, she told The State later, she didn’t know anything about basketball. It was her friend Mack Ramage, who wanted to hold up a sign that said “We Want Sarah Strong!” instead of her phone, who had learned of Moore and wanted to highlight her achievements.

As the screenshot started to gain traction online, Michael Hawkins knew his time had come.

“It really started two years ago,” he explains. “Even before chaos started getting close to those big numbers. Sylvia Hatchell, being a member of the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, had pushed for Pearl and Pearl was inducted into that. And then, after Sylvia was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame, she continued to push for Pearl through a veterans committee to get her inducted there.”

She had been nominated years before but she hadn’t managed to get in via vote. Once her name was finally enshrined in Springfield, it began to breathe life back into a legacy that had somewhat faded into legend. As Clark’s star ascended and Sarah Royal’s viral moment coalesced, newspapers and media outlets were calling Pearl left and right to get a quote out of her.

“I didn’t like all the attention but I had people call and say ‘you got to do it’,” Pearl says. “Because it’s history.”

The throughlines from Moore to the modern game exist in places one might not expect. Clemson’s assist and scoring leader, Florence native Loyal McQueen, is something of a protege of Pearl’s. Jolette Law, one of Dawn Staley’s key lieutenants at South Carolina, would face off against Pearl’s cousin in the Florence Youth League. Law would eventually star at Wilson High herself before playing under the legendary C. Vivian Stringer at Iowa.

Clark did not end up eclipsing Moore’s record of 4,061 which still stands as the most career points scored by a women’s college basketball player and is now third all time among men’s and women’s players. The media coverage could be forgiven, in some ways, due to the NCAA’s complete phase out of AIAW history after the 1982 takeover. Moore, for her part, believes that it played a major role in the quiet elimination of Immaculata, of Delta State, Wayland Baptist and Francis Marion’s contributions to the game.

“As far as the NCAA is concerned, it’s basketball started when they took over,” she says. “How are you gonna take history out of basketball, out of any sport? You allow the coaches to take their wins, but you’re not looking at anything the players have done. How are you going to all of a sudden, just eliminate history before you took over?”

In a way, she says, the discussion about the scoring record did allow the AIAW to come back into the conversation and Francis Marion by extension. Patriots forward Lauryn Taylor brought the discussion back to Moore again after an NCAA record breaking 44 rebound performance last February.

“That got national publicity, like SVP on SportsCenter,” Hawkins says. “And so again, people said, ‘wait a minute. Isn’t it the same?’ Did Pearl Moore go to that same school? And so we got kind of additional publicity.”

The hidden legacy of Francis Marion is rooted in the program built by Moore, Hatchell, Fields and that first group of AIAW competitors. Since 1986, the Patriots have been something of a coaching hotbed. Trudi Lacey got her start in Florence and eventually coached the Washington Mystics. Heather Macy would have a successful eight year stint at East Carolina. And, perhaps most notably as of late, Wes Moore’s tenure at FMU catapulted him to Chattanooga and then to NC State.

In a way a lot of women’s basketball roads in South Carolina, be they via Interstate 26 or 95, lead back to Florence. To a tartan floor and a gym that had blue seats on the baseline. Where the Patriots ran the floor and a 5’7 guard from Wilson High was putting the ball in the hoop, over and over and over again. And even if the game has advanced, new players have come in and records are continuing to be broken, Pearl Moore thinks fondly of the foundational figures of the sport and hopes that they also get their just due.

“You always got to have a base somewhere, a foundation,” she concludes the interview. “The foundation for me was somebody started women playing basketball and we’re gonna keep following that path that they started and keep building.”

“I think about when Dawn came to South Carolina…and when Dawn starts winning, all these people just come out of the woodwork. They all come out of the woodwork and they woke up there when you started building. So it’s always going to be somebody that’s not there, that’s going to start following the sport as it grows.”

And while the phone might be ringing a bit less this year, Pearl Moore is watching more women’s basketball on TV than ever. The clearest sign of all that those standing on her shoulders are moving the game forward just fine.