At the Carrier Dome: Moten's jersey was retired in 2018. Credit: Credit | Syracuse University Athletics

I teach at Le Moyne College, where my official position is journalist-in-residence. Yet my focus is always on the transformative power of true stories, and a few days ago, with all my classes, I pointed out how this city has a staggering history of monumental basketball figures, men and women who helped elevate Syracuse into a place of lasting impact on the game.

Within that lineage, I made this request of my students:

Please don’t ever forget the role of Lawrence Moten.

Moten died last month at 53 in Washington D.C., news that still seems impossible for so many of us who remember his arrival here, just past his teenage years. He went on to build a significant life and a beautiful family after his playing days, as evidenced by a powerful account of his emotional funeral on Friday from Mike Waters, an old friend at The Post-Standard | Syracuse.com.

It’s been many years since I spoke to Moten, and most of my students were born roughly a decade after he played his last men’s basketball game for Syracuse University, where his 2,334 points still rank him as the greatest scorer in program history.

That’s certainly a powerful legacy, as is the idea that for 25 years — until Marquette’s Markus Howard finally eclipsed the mark in 2020 — Moten reigned as the leading scorer in the history of the Big East Conference, a longtime conduit of staggering talent.

Still, I also teach my students about the power of chance, how that quality is a key part of any lasting story. With Moten, I wanted to be sure my classes understood that even his lofty and enduring statistics don’t fully communicate what he meant to this town at the moment he arrived, or why longtime Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim once said Moten was as important to men’s basketball at Syracuse as anyone Boeheim ever coached.

You want a number that reinforces just how he mattered?

29,918.

That’s what Syracuse basketball averaged in home attendance in 1989-90, a mindblowing figure that 35 years later — especially in a midsized metropolitan area, like ours — only grows in wonder. Those crowds turned out for a team that included such college megastars as Billy Owens and Derrick Coleman and Stevie Thompson, and it’s hard now — in this new world of muddied conferences, NIL payments and transfer portals — to remember the kind of glamorous hold the players and teams of the 1980s held over all of Central New York.

The old Carrier Dome — whose 30,000+ capacity for basketball felt at the time like an architectural and cultural revelation, a nothing-else-like-it spectacle that became synonymous with this city’s national identity — would be sweaty and shaking for SU showdowns with such Big East adversaries as Villanova or St. John’s or Seton Hall or especially Georgetown… those great and fierce John Thompson Georgetown teams.

Lawrence Moten, at Syracuse University Credit: Credit | Syracuse University Athletics

The atmosphere in Syracuse felt so energized, such a part of something major: Major coaches, major players, major arenas, major conference. That only magnified the hard jolt early in 1991, when an NCAA investigation rocked the SU program. At one moment of particular tumult, seven Orange players were declared ineligible for a few hours, then reinstated — all of it a premonition of eventual sanctions for rule violations that would include a one-year ban from the NCAA tournament.

The 1991-92 team began the season in the middle of those spasms. The roster seemed far more mortal than the squads of celestial talent immediately preceding it — a sobering change for a town still hungry for the national championship that had eluded Syracuse by a point in 1987, against Indiana.

The program was at a crossroads, seemingly without the kind of superstars who had defined it for years, and the NCAA penalties — coming just down the road — loomed like an abyss.

That was 34 years ago. I remember, vividly. I was barely 32 when the 1991 season began, only a few months into a new gig as a sports columnist with The Post-Standard. What I particularly recall about the dome at that moment was the simmering tension and unease… in the locker room, in Boeheim’s news conferences, among spectators in the stands…

And then this 6-5 freshman, weighing maybe 185, changed the way everything felt.

Lawrence Moten wasn’t some high-profile, big-spread-in-Sports-Illustrated hotshot recruit. He came from Washington D.C. — hometown to many Orange legends, including Wilmeth Sidat-Singh and Dave Bing. Moten attended Archbishop Carroll High School. He was terrific in basketball and football at Carroll, where he was a close friend of soon-to-be-SU quarterback Marvin Graves.

Certainly, people around Washington knew Moten was a tremendous competitor — but in Syracuse, for the big crowds gathering to watch Syracuse basketball in autumn 1991, he was hardly anyone expected to emerge as the new face of the program.

Almost instantly, he won those spectators over with the do-the-simplest-things-magnificently-right beauty of the way he played.

He was a superb athlete. But he wasn’t one of the most formidable rebounders to ever walk the planet, like Coleman, and he couldn’t jump over gymnasium rooftops, like Thompson, and he didn’t play the game in some frenetic cosmic explosion, like the fabled Pearl Washington.

In a sense, it was almost the opposite. In a 1994 column for The Post-Standard, I described it in this way:

If you play basketball, you know the move. The ball comes to you on the baseline. One dribble, shoulder down, step toward the basket, jerk your head. Man goes up, you stay down. He comes down, you go up. Bank it in. Hang there long enough, and you might get the foul.

Every kid learns that move. Every kid. It is an easy one to practice alone, in the driveway. Every kid does it for a while, feeling good about the rhythm it gives you with the ball. And sooner or later, every kid runs into a center who ignores the first fake, then shoves the ball right down your throat.

Except, somehow, that never happened to Lawrence Moten.

He owns the move. The simplest fake on playgrounds anywhere, at a time when so many Americans play this game, and we have the master performing it right here. It is like being the absolute best at doing a cartwheel. He has shown it to Alonzo Mourning, and Eric Mobley, and Luther Wright, and Michael Smith. If he played them tomorrow, they would curse his foolishness, then flail at it again.

For me, at least, that is the essence of Moten — hanging there, ball down, taking the foul, releasing the shot.

I vaguely remember the first time he did it. Was it against Cornell? Or UNC-Asheville? We smiled, shook our heads: Look at this. Skinny kid inside with this basic playground stuff. Wait until he gets into the Big East! He went around once, and no one could stop the move, and then we said:

Now they’ve seen it, and they’ll kill him.

Three years later, he’s averaging 19 points a game, making 49 percent of his shots, getting his five rebounds a game. Barring injury, he will become the leading scorer this season in the history of the program. More points than Billy. Or Pearl. Or Derrick. Or Dave Bing.

That was Moten’s aesthetic, his art. In a town where college basketball had become glittering high theater, he was a fundamental purist who brought it back to something else…

At exactly the moment that something else was needed most.

It wasn’t just his tireless and graceful mastery of the little things, the way he could worm his way to the hoop to put back an offensive rebound when two or three massive bodies blocked the path, or his ability to follow his own shots with a kind of mystic radar, or how he grew increasingly skilled at 3-pointers that he fired up with the faintest trace of classic throwback set shot. Opposing coaches described him with admiration as a mesh of a sleek finesse player and the tireless lunchbucket guy, doing unsung dirty work — the kind of player who will beat you in 50 different ways.

Lawrence Moten, leading scorer in the history of Syracuse University men’s basketball. Credit: Credit | Syracuse University Athletics

The community embraced that talent and that ethic, affection compounded by Moten himself. He had a keen sense of humor and this distinctive and wonderful train whistle of a voice. As a child, he’d been a fan of eventual Hall of Famer Ralph Sampson, and he wore 1970s-style high socks — and made it look good — at a time when that trend was long out of the game.

After Moten scored 19 in a victory against Georgetown in Washington D.C., his proud mom, Lorraine Burgess, joined others in their family — waiting near the lockerroom — in recalling how Moten had been deeply influenced by his late grandfather, Lazell Ellison, a cab driver and construction worker who always found time to show up at the youth games of the grandson he called “Sam.”

Lazell died a few years before Moten emerged as a bright light in Syracuse, and Moten quietly said at the time that every game he played, he played for his grandfather. 

During his freshman year, he would call home collect — that’s how long ago this was — and his family laughed about how his 3-year-old sister would pick up the phone and accept the charges.

He was warm, he was funny and he was relentlessly sincere. Looking back on it now, he represented a reset — a reminder that college basketball, even in a place like the dome, was particularly joyous as an anything-can-happen game played by young people, not so far out of high school.

It was what the program needed. Moten stayed his full four years. By the time he graduated, SU was again in the national hunt, as proven in a heartbreaking way by his last game as a senior in 1995, before he went on to the NBA. During a second-round NCAA tournament matchup in Austin, Moten helped keep Syracuse close by scoring 27 as the underdog Orange collided with powerful Arkansas, the defending NCAA champion, who returned Corliss Williamson and most of his key teammates from that title-winning squad.

Lawrence Moten in action for Syracuse University, with Adrian Autry – the SU head coach today – following upcourt. Credit: Credit | Syracuse University Athletics

Moten and his teammates put together one of the gutsiest and most exhilarating performances in school history. Syracuse went blow for blow with the Razorbacks, until there were only seconds left, SU led by one and Luke Jackson made a superb stretched-to-his-fingertips defensive play to tie up the ball and seemingly end the game. In the mayhem, Moten — a guy who almost never made a mistake — called a timeout when SU had none left.

Arkansas made a foul shot that got the game into overtime, where the Razorbacks won, 96-94. The “what ifs” about how far that SU team might have gone were keen and aching, but even in the days immediately after that painful loss, Boeheim was quick to note how much the as-good-as-it-gets level of the team’s performance said about Moten.

Over four years, he had carried a staggered program from the uncertainty of an NCAA investigation to the point where the Orange could again play nose-to-nose with the absolute best.

A year later, behind John Wallace and Lazarus Sims, Syracuse would go all the way to the NCAA title game, before falling to Kentucky.

Seven years after that, a legendary team led by Carmelo Anthony would knock off Kansas for the first men’s basketball championship in school history.

Moten, within all of it, became a kind of pivot, and I simply wanted my students at Le Moyne to understand: There was this guy who arrived at Syracuse with scant fanfare when so much about the program seemed at risk, and he won over the big crowds in the dome by doing the simplest and most important things with grace and grit, and in the end his role both in life and in Orange history matches what he did with mystic timing, on the court:

He was always where he ought to be, at exactly the right time.

Read more of Central Current’s coverage

Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...