PROMISE KEEPER
Transfer guard Moore fulfilling his own wishes and his grandmother’s
When Taze Moore needs a moment of clarity, that peaceful place he can go to escape life, basketball, school, or all three, he looks up at a wall in his bedroom.
An oversized, nondescript shirt is pinned to the wall. It’s the one his grandmother would always wear to his high school basketball games.
“I just sit there and talk to the shirt,” said Moore, a 6-foot-4 transfer guard playing in his first season for the University of Houston men’s basketball team. “A beautiful lady. I pray to my grandmother a lot. I just try and visualize me talking to her sometimes.”
Katy Sutherland passed away a week before Moore left Southhaven, Miss., for college at Cal State Bakersfield. Before her death, Sutherland, a career educator, made Moore promise to earn his degree.
Now Moore is fulfilling a promise to himself.
It’s been a long and painful journey. Far beyond the dunk highlights Moore posts on social media or the freakishly athletic plays he makes on the basketball court.
Five surgeries.
Six hundred thirty-four days. Too much personal loss. An uncertain basketball future. “I can honestly say I didn’t even want to play basketball anymore,” Moore said of the multiple fractures in his right leg that sidelined him for most of his first two college seasons.
Moore had a stress fracture from high school that was never examined and continued to play in college.
“I knew something was wrong with my leg,” he said. “I just tried to tough it out.”
On Feb. 11, 2017, against TexasRio Grande Valley in the 24th game of his freshman season at Bakersfield, Moore’s leg finally gave out. As he grabbed his fourth steal, Moore went up for a dunk. He felt a snap. Then he fell to the floor.
Moore sat out the rest of the season and the entire 2017-18 season. He had his first surgery to repair the fractures to his tibia and fibula — the two long bones of the lower leg — and went through the rehab and recovery process.
Moore suffered a setback with
another stress fracture that did not fully heal. Then a bone chip. Those setbacks led to his second and third surgeries.
“I might not be able to play basketball again,” Moore relayed the message from doctors after his second surgery.
Moore had a rod and screws put into his leg. Eventually they were replaced by a metal plate. A graft procedure involved transplanting bone from his hip to repair the damaged bones in his leg.
Before his fifth surgery — which came in spring 2018 — Moore came to a decision. He finally had enough. Enough of the grueling physical therapy with one setback after another. Enough time in bed, his leg propped up, as he watched games on television. Enough needing crutches every day to make the one-mile trip from his on-campus room to classes. Enough staring at the calendar as days turned to months and longer.
“I told my coaches after my fifth surgery that if it doesn’t go the way I wanted it to go, I was going to quit,” Moore said. “If basketball didn’t work, I was going to get my degree and call it even.”
Then he remembered why he was here. He was the first male in his family to get this far. How he’s lost so many family members and friends to violence, including Lonnie B. Jones, a “little brother” who was gunned down back home just a few weeks after Moore suffered his injury.
“I give it all to God, my grandmother, my great- grandmother, to the people that raised me,” Moore said. “They always told me not to give up. If you have to stop something you love, try something new. I just always try to keep that in my head.”
Moore made his return to the court on Nov. 7, 2018 — 634 days after the injury — and scored three points in a season-opening loss to TCU in the Junkanoo Jam in the Bahamas. How would the leg respond? Would Moore still be the bouncy, athletically gifted player?
“You might not be able to run or jump the same,” Moore recalled doctors telling him. “I went through more mental pain than physical pain. I took it as a personal thing to try and fight through it.”
Moore played in 30 games as a redshirt sophomore, his first season back. His final two seasons at Cal State Bakersfield were his best. He led the team in scoring both years.
An elite defender, Moore was named to the Western Athletic Conference’s All-Defensive team as a junior. He was first-team AllBig West as a senior.
Last May 21, Moore graduated from Cal State Bakersfield with a bachelor’s degree in child, adolescent and family studies.
“Granny I kept my promise,” Moore wrote on social media.
A call from Houston
The next chapter in Moore’s basketball career was beginning to take shape in a hotel room in downtown Indianapolis. There, UH head coach Kelvin Sampson and his staff went over players in the transfer portal that could help fill holes from expected offseason departures. Sampson landed verbal commitments from a pair of transfers, guard Kyler Edwards and forward Josh Carlton, before the team returned home from the Final Four. The Cougars had choices for the third spot.
“We chose the right one,” Sampson said of Moore.
First, though, Sampson wanted to know why Moore — in his final year of eligibility — would be the right fit in the Cougars’ guard-oriented lineup that included Marcus Sasser, Tramon Mark, Jamal Shead and Edwards.
“We felt we had enough playmakers, enough creators and distributors,” Kellen Sampson, UH’s assistant coach and head coachin-waiting, said. “What we needed was a wide receiver. Somebody who didn’t need the ball in his hands to be a good player.”
Kellen Sampson went down the list: Could Moore be a natural cutter? Could he help with offensive rebounding? Could he be a plusdefender?
Most of all, did Moore have the type of toughness that’s a staple of Kelvin Sampson-coached programs?
“I thought Taze’s best days are ahead of him,” Kelvin Sampson said. “My biggest concern with Taze was could we get enough mud in his blood? Kids with sugar in their veins don’t do very good here. I was just worried if could I get some mud in his blood. Since he’s been here, he’s gotten muddy.”
One day during the team’s offseason conditioning program, Reid Gettys, a member of UH’s Phi Slama Jama of the early to mid-1980s who serves as a television analyst for games, stopped by to watch a workout. Kellen Sampson pointed out Moore.
“That one could have played on your teams,” Kellen Sampson recalled as Moore took corner 3point shots in a mostly empty Fertitta Center early this week. “He has that kind of crazy, freakish pop. He’s so much more than an athlete. He’s a really good basketball player.”
With season-ending injuries to Sasser and Mark, Moore has increased his playing time since returning from COVID-19 protocols in early January. He made his first seven shots and matched a season high with 17 points in Saturday’s 76-66 win over Wichita State. For the season, Moore is averaging 7.4 points and 4.5 rebounds with 19 steals and 11 blocks.
Kellen Sampson calls Moore “the best cutter we’ve had” in eight seasons. In most games, it’s not uncommon for Moore to make a baseline cut and take a lob from Shead, the team’s point guard, and deliver a dunk.
“Those aren’t set plays,” Kellen Sampson said. “Those are plays he just naturally feels.”
It all seems natural for Moore, who regularly posts videos of his dunking exploits on Twitter (@TazeMoore). Tomahawk dunk. A 360 dunk. Off the backboard dunk. The video from high school he takes off just past the freethrow line and jumps over a teammate for a one-handed dunk.
“I love flying,” Moore posted on the video.
Other times, Moore seemingly come out of nowhere to swat away a shot.
“We challenged him to use his athleticism in more ways than just dunking,” Kellen Sampson said. He later added: “The good Lord either gifted you with it or he did not. The good Lord gave him some things he did not give the rest of them.”
A fitting finish
Along with what Moore offers on the court, he’s been equally invaluable in a locker room that has dealt with a rash of serious injuries.
“Here’s a guy that’s had his love to play and had his mettle tested in ways that nobody else can even imagine,” Kellen Sampson said. “What a cool resource and sounding board he can be for those guys that are going through an injury.
“We have a guy that was staring at a career ending injury and found a way to bounce back. When Taze tells you that you are going to be OK, you’re going to get to tomorrow, it carries more weight.”
As he stands in a hallway inside Fertitta Center, Moore points to a six-inch scar that runs down his right leg. He shows a smaller one on his right hip.
“I know at the end of the day if it doesn’t go where I want, the NBA or playing overseas, I had a hell of a run in college and I got my degree,” Moore said.
A promise fulfilled.