Maya Moore walked away from basketball in the prime of her career as arguably the best women’s player in the world. She’d won two college national championships at the University of Connecticut, four WNBA titles with the Minnesota Lynx, two Olympic gold medals, and both a regular-season and WNBA Finals MVP award. When she left the league in 2019 after just eight seasons to focus on social-justice activism—which included working to overturn the conviction of an inmate whom she would then marry—fans wondered how much more damage she would have done to the record books if she had continued to play. Would she now be considered the greatest women’s player of all time?
When I interviewed her two weeks ago, ahead of her induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Moore ruminated over a different “what if”—one that she had never considered and that occurred to her mid-thought, as she was reflecting on her brilliant career. Would Moore still be playing if she’d been able to make more money in the WNBA?
“If we were getting paid more of our fair value while I was still playing,” Moore said, before her voice trailed off. She paused. “I’m not a big what-if person, but it’s actually a really intriguing what-if question.”
The prospect should be embarrassing for the WNBA. Over the course of her career, Moore made $646,000 in salary. (For comparison, the minimum one-year NBA salary during her final season was just shy of $900,000.) Under her final contract, signed when she was the women’s equivalent of Lebron James, her salary was just $117,000. During the offseason, like many WNBA players, she played overseas—in her case, in Spain, China, and Russia—to supplement her income. Playing internationally, Moore was making more each year than the value of her entire WNBA career.
When Moore was in the league, the WNBA was still finding its financial footing, and had yet to prove that it could be a solvent league, let alone an extremely lucrative one. That dynamic has changed dramatically over the past few years. The league is in the middle of a contentious labor negotiation with its players, who want a larger piece of the revenue now that the league is enjoying record attendance, has a massive media-rights deal that kicks in next season, and has consequently seen a historic surge in franchise valuations. During WNBA All-Star Weekend a few months ago, players were criticized for wearing T-shirts during warm-ups that read Pay Us What You Owe Us.
The reaction to the T-shirts was polarizing, but the players’ show of solidarity and outspokenness is an extension of the standard Moore helped create when she played. Moore was among the early wave of athletes who strongly embraced the Black Lives Matter movement. Weeks before former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to draw attention to police brutality, Moore and her Minnesota Lynx teammates engaged in their own demonstration before facing the Dallas Wings. Moore and her teammates wore T-shirts during pregame warm-ups that read Change starts with us—justice & accountability after police killed Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. The team’s public plea was met with backlash, especially from their local police force. Four off-duty Minneapolis officers who provided security for the Lynx games walked off their posts in protest.
“That time in 2016 was a powerful time, but also an exposing time,” Moore recalled. “For us to say that Black lives matter; we’re not okay with what happened—for that to be seen as disrespecting police officers, why is that the only option?”
In 2017, Moore co-wrote an op-ed for USA Today with a district attorney and a federal prosecutor to shed light on prosecutorial misconduct and highlight her “Win With Justice” campaign, which advocated for more fairness in the criminal-justice system. It was an issue that was personal for Moore, who had become captivated by the case of Jonathan Irons. In 1998, at the age of 18, Irons had been convicted of burglary and assault and sentenced to 50 years in prison despite flimsy evidence against him.
In 2019, Moore announced that she was sitting out the season to focus “on the people in my family, as well as on investing my time in some ministry dreams that have been stirring in my heart for many years.” Her primary focus was freeing Irons. Amazingly, she succeeded. The conviction was eventually overturned, and Irons was freed in 2020. It became more than just a story of freedom and justice, but a love story as well: Moore and Irons married nine days after his release.
Moore never returned to basketball, and officially retired in 2023. When Irons was freed, it was during the height of a national conversation about social justice, policing, and the criminal-justice system. Athletes, especially Black athletes, were embedded in the conversation as deeply as anyone else. But much has changed since then. Despite the political turmoil of the current moment, the widespread dismantling of DEI, and the growing right-wing acceptance of overtly racist ideas, the resistance in sports has mostly given way to capitulation. The prominent voices largely have been silent.
I asked Moore another question that’s in revisionist-history territory: Given how the movement she was part of has sputtered out, was leaving basketball for a bigger fight worth it?
“I don’t think it was wasted,” she said. “Anytime you model human dignity, you plant those seeds. It’s going to continue to grow.”
Moore might be right. At the moment, though, it’s hard to tell.
The post The WNBA Superstar Who Left the Game in Her Prime appeared first on The Atlantic.
