Road to Duke
The Capital Classic All-Star Game in the spring of 1992 featured what was, at the time, one of the most loaded high school senior rosters in the country. The visiting United States All-Stars had Jason Kidd from St. Joseph Notre Dame in Alameda, California, headed to Cal. They had Chris Collins from Glenbrook North in Northbrook, Illinois, headed to Duke. They had a host of future ACC, Big Ten, and Big East starters. The hometown Capital All-Stars — the DC-and-mid-Atlantic select team — had Donta Bright (Massachusetts), Exree Hipp (Maryland), Serge Zwikker (North Carolina), Duane Simpkins (Maryland), and a 6'8" forward from Newport Preparatory School in Kensington, Maryland, named Tony Moore.
The Capital All-Stars lost 103-101. Moore went 3-for-5 from the field, 2-for-2 from the line, and finished with eight points. The coach of his side that night was Stu Vetter, the longtime DC-area prep coach who had built his own program at Harker Prep in Potomac. Vetter remembered Moore years later. "He was one of the top players for sure," he told the Montgomery County Sentinel. "He was an outstanding athlete and was a player that was very coachable and someone that you liked to be around."
Moore had grown up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington and had attended Newport Preparatory School in Kensington, a small Montgomery County private school whose basketball program under coach Harold Gaither punched well above its enrollment. By the spring of 1989, Moore was a sophomore center who USA Today had identified as one of the best in the Washington area. "He's the one everyone is raving about," Gaither told the Sentinel that year. Marcus Wiggins, Newport's point guard at the time and later the head coach at Blake High School, was more specific: "In the Urban Coalition League, Tony matched up against some of the best like Michael Smith, and that says a lot." Smith, of Dunbar High and Providence College, would go on to be drafted by the Sacramento Kings in 1994. Moore was already holding his own against him in DC pickup leagues as a sixteen-year-old.
By his junior summer he was on the AAU circuit, matching up against the best teenagers in the country. Glenn "Big Dog" Robinson, the future Purdue All-American and 1994 NBA No. 1 overall pick, was one of the names Moore was running against in those summers. By senior year — by the spring of 1992, the spring of the Capital Classic — the recruiting letters were piling up. Duke, Virginia, NC State, Kentucky, Iowa, and others. Mike Krzyzewski's program had just won its second consecutive national championship. There was no harder ticket in college basketball than a Duke scholarship offer, and Moore had one.
The Duke pitch was personal. Calvin Hill — the former Cowboys, Redskins, and Browns running back, four-time Pro Bowler, 1969 NFL Rookie of the Year, and at that point the father of Duke's just-finished freshman All-American Grant Hill — made frequent recruiting trips to Newport's Kensington campus to woo Moore for Krzyzewski. Hill the father had played football at Yale; Hill the son was already, by his sophomore year at Duke, one of the most celebrated college basketball players in America. Their family endorsement of the Duke program was the kind of recruiting weapon no other school could match. It worked. Tony Moore committed to Duke in the spring of 1992 and arrived in Durham that fall as one of two freshmen brought in to a roster that had won back-to-back national championships and was about to begin the long descent that defined the rest of the Krzyzewski 90s.
At Duke
The 1992-93 Duke roster Tony Moore arrived on was the morning-after roster. Bobby Hurley was a senior. Grant Hill was a junior, and the team's emerging leader after the graduation of Christian Laettner. Antonio Lang was a senior forward. Cherokee Parks was a sophomore center on his way to becoming an All-American. Erik Meek and Marty Clark were on the roster. The forward rotation that Krzyzewski had built was the deepest and most decorated in the country. A 6'8" freshman power forward from suburban Maryland was going to play behind every one of them.
Moore played in 12 games as a freshman, averaging 6.4 minutes a game. He shot 59.3% from the field on 27 attempts — sixteen makes in twelve games, mostly garbage time in lopsided wins. He finished the season with 35 total points, 24 rebounds, and 5 blocked shots. The team went 24-8, lost in the second round of the NCAA Tournament to Cal — Jason Kidd's team, the same Jason Kidd Moore had played against in the Capital Classic less than a year earlier — and the Grant Hill-Bobby Hurley axis ended with the program's first NCAA tournament exit before the Sweet 16 in seven seasons.
The 1993-94 season was Moore's sophomore year and Grant Hill's senior year. Hill played 34.9 minutes a game and averaged 17.4 points, 6.9 rebounds, and 5.2 assists; the team went 28-6, reached the national championship game, and lost 76-72 to Arkansas. Moore was on the bench for all of it. He played 18 games, 3.8 minutes a game, and scored 19 total points across the season. By the time the championship game tipped off in Charlotte, he had not played a meaningful minute in months. He was a 6'8" Duke scholarship forward watching from the bench as Antonio Lang and Cherokee Parks split the frontcourt minutes that Christian Laettner had once owned.
The 1994-95 season was the season that changed everything for the program — and not for the better. Krzyzewski underwent back surgery in October 1994 and was given an indefinite medical leave by the university. Pete Gaudet, longtime Krzyzewski assistant, took over as acting head coach. The team that had reached the previous year's title game lost Grant Hill, Antonio Lang, Marty Clark, and Bill McCaffrey to graduation or NBA. Cherokee Parks was a senior and very nearly carried the team by himself, leading Duke with 19.0 points and 9.3 rebounds a game, but Duke went 13-18, lost 18 games for the first time in twelve years, and missed the NCAA tournament. Tony Moore played 19 games as a junior, started one, averaged 7.3 minutes, and put up 2.7 points and 2.1 rebounds on 66.7% shooting. The 67% shooting was meaningful — it was the highest field-goal percentage on the team for any player who took more than ten shots. The story everyone wanted to tell about Tony Moore was that the bench guy was efficient when he played. He just didn't play very much.
The 1995-96 season was supposed to be Tony Moore's year. Krzyzewski had returned from medical leave. Cherokee Parks had graduated to the NBA. Erik Meek had graduated. Kenny Blakeney had graduated. Antonio Lang was gone, Grant Hill was gone, the entire front line that had buried Moore on the depth chart for three years was gone. He was a senior, 6'8", 230 pounds, and he was going to start at power forward for Duke University. Duke Basketball Report, looking back at the team years later, captured the moment exactly: "Senior Tony Moore, an athletic 6-8, 230-pound power forward. Moore had spent three years backing up the likes of Parks, Meek and Tony Lang but now his chance had arrived."
The team opened the 1995-96 season on November 27, 1995, against Iowa. Moore started. He started the next game and the one after that. Through the first seven games, he averaged 24.6 minutes a game — almost four times the playing time he had ever gotten before. He averaged 5.1 points, 4.0 rebounds, and 0.9 blocks per game. He was making 58.6% of his field goal attempts. He was the starting power forward on Coach K's first team back from his medical leave. And then he was gone.
In the words of longtime DBR analyst Al Featherston, written years later in a piece about thin Duke rotations: "Duke, with K returning from his bad back sabbatical, started the year with nine scholarship players. But senior Tony Moore flunked out after the first semester (seven games), leaving him with eight." The Duke student alumni piece written by another classmate is even blunter: "Tony Moore flunked out." It is the kind of sentence that gets written in a single sentence because nobody at the time wanted to write any more than that. A 6'8" senior forward, a four-year scholarship athlete who had finally — finally — earned a starting role on Krzyzewski's team, was academically dismissed after his first semester of senior year. He played his last game in a Duke uniform sometime in December 1995 — a starter through seven contests, his final box-score lines among the strongest of his career.
The 1995-96 Duke team finished 18-13, made the NCAA Tournament as a #8 seed, and lost in the first round to Eastern Michigan, a year that would be the last losing-tournament-game season of the Krzyzewski era for another fifteen years. Moore's spot in the rotation was filled, eventually, by a combination of freshman center Taymon Domzalski, walk-on Stan Brunson, and the rest of the scholarship players who were already on the roster. The team kept going. Tony Moore did not. He had been, by any honest reckoning, a Duke basketball player for four years and three months. He never came back.
After Duke
Of the twenty years between Tony Moore leaving Cameron Indoor Stadium and his February 2016 death in Georgia, the documented record is thin. What is known begins with the ending at Duke. The 1995-96 season had given him seven games as a starter and a chance to be the senior power forward the Krzyzewski rebuild needed. The chance did not last. A Duke Chronicle alumni reminiscence written by a member of the class of 1998 — a freshman at Cameron during Moore's final months on campus — recalled the season's roster in one stark and unsentimental sentence: "Tony Moore flunked out." The academic dismissal happened mid-season, between the December 13, 1995 win over UCLA and the January 4, 1996 ACC opener at Virginia. Greg Newton inherited the starting center role. Carmen Wallace got the power forward slot until his February knee injury forced Coach K to move the 6'7" Wallace to forward and play 6'7" walk-on Stanley Brunson at center. The roster Coach K finished the 1995-96 season with was the roster after Tony Moore had already left.
What happened in the twenty years that followed is largely undocumented in public sources. He did not surface in a professional basketball record. He did not surface in a coaching career, the way so many Duke seniors did. He did not surface in a steady civilian profession the way most of his Brotherhood teammates did. The Mark Robinson obituary written in the Montgomery County Sentinel in February 2016 — by the same writer who had covered Moore as a Newport Prep senior in 1990 — settled for one careful sentence on the long stretch: that Moore's health had declined in his last years, that he was now at peace, and that he had lived a wonderful life. A contemporaneous Duke Basketball Report forum thread written the week of his death added the medical detail that the obituary had not: Moore had been ill and had needed a heart transplant, and had run out of time before one became available. The heart that had carried him through Capital Classic games against Jason Kidd and Cherokee Parks practice battles in Cameron had given out before his forty-third birthday.
He died in Georgia. The exact circumstances — which Georgia city, which hospital, who was with him at the end — are not in the public record. What is in the record is what happened next. Kenny Blakeney, his lifelong friend from the Washington DC area Duke 1991-95 alumnus, was the one who got the call. Blakeney learned that the family did not have the resources to bring Tony's body home. Within hours he had set up a GoFundMe campaign with a $9,000 goal to cover the costs of transporting the body, the Atlanta service at First Iconium Baptist Church on February 22, 2016, and the Maryland memorial service at New Dawn Baptist Church in Hyattsville on February 26, 2016. The Brotherhood responded within hours. Coach K's daughter Debbie Krzyzewski contributed. Robert Brickey contributed. Kenny Dennard contributed. Ron Burt contributed. Former Duke football players Tijan Redmon and Orlando Adwaters contributed. Jay Bilas, the Duke 1986 graduate then in his eleventh year as ESPN's lead college basketball analyst, contributed. The goal was reached in under twenty-four hours. The Brotherhood paid for Tony Moore to come home.
Where Is He Now
Of the post-Duke years of Tony Moore's life, very little has been written publicly. The Brotherhood network does not surface a coaching career, a professional playing career, a steady civilian profession the way it does for nearly every other Duke senior who walked off the floor in the Krzyzewski years. The Sentinel obituary, written by Mark Robinson in Montgomery County in February 2016, settles for two words on the long stretch between Duke and his death: "I'm told Moore's health had declined in recent years but he's resting in peace now after living a wonderful life. Amen."
He died in Georgia in February 2016. He was 42 years old. He had grown up in suburban Washington, gone to a small Montgomery County prep school, gone to Duke as one of the most coveted recruits in the country, and ended up somewhere far from home with a body that had failed him. The Brotherhood found out about his death the way the Brotherhood usually does — through one of its own. Kenny Blakeney, the DeMatha graduate and Duke 1991-95 alumnus and lifelong DC friend of Tony Moore, learned that the family did not have the resources to bring his body back to DC. Blakeney launched a GoFundMe campaign. The goal was nine thousand dollars. The point was to get T-Mo home.
The campaign succeeded. Tony Moore came home to Washington, DC, where he had grown up and where most of the people who had loved him most were still living. He was buried in the city that had produced him. The Brotherhood — the same Brotherhood whose roster he had been a part of from the fall of 1992 through the December of 1995, who had held banners over his head in Cameron, who had practiced with him every day for three and a half years — paid for him to come home.
The Tony Moore who matters in the long memory of Duke basketball is not the one who left in December of 1995. It is the one who arrived in 1992 — the 6'8" senior from Newport Prep with the soft hands and the 67% field-goal percentage, the kid Calvin Hill had personally recruited at Kensington, the high school star Stu Vetter remembered as "an outstanding athlete and a player that was very coachable and someone that you liked to be around." It is the one who played for the Capital All-Stars against Jason Kidd. It is the one who, for seven games in November and December of 1995, started at power forward for Coach K and made every other shot he took. The basketball career was complicated. The friendships endured. Kenny Blakeney's GoFundMe was the proof of that. So, in its quieter way, was the Sentinel obituary, written by a man who had watched Moore play at Newport Prep three decades earlier and had never forgotten. "He's the one everyone is raving about," Coach Gaither had said in 1989. The people who knew him remembered.