Maya Moore, regarded by many as the best ever in women’s basketball, has returned.
No, she won’t be on the hardcourt for this summer’s season, five years after her 2018 WNBA sudden departure at 29 years old.
Instead, she is back in the spotlight as co-author of “Love & Justice” with Jonathan Irons, wrongfully convicted of armed robbery as a teen, who she encountered while engaged in prison ministry. She helped to free him from a Missouri state penitentiary, they wedded within days of his 2020 release, and the 325 pages close with a photo of the beaming couple cuddling their newborn son. They named him Jonathan Jr.
This is a book that someone should consider if they share concern about injustices in a supposed criminal justice system. But it will not come across as something you have to force yourself to read, for the sake of being a good citizen.
Like Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy,” which was gaining momentum just before covid struck, it’s a heart-rending story with great real-life characters and drama. In fact, a movie should be made in this case also.
Statuesque 6-foot Maya is not the lone athlete here. Jonathan is a 250-pound bodybuilder who appears ready for the NFL, and within his otherwise soft-spoken persona, he makes clear that he kicked some butts in Jesus Christ’s name in the requisite prison respect challenges.
The protagonists take turns speaking in passages marked “M” and “J.” Both are standouts as writers, Maya with her 3.7 college GPA and Jonathan through two decades researching and typing on the machine in the prison library, during the times when he was not thrown into the solitary hole because the guards and the warden resented his legal challenges.
Maya and Jonathan’s chosen title is a spinoff on “Love & Basketball,” but for Maya as opposed to Sanaa Lathan, it’s more like “Love & No Basketball.” The couple’s bonding took years to move beyond sibling-type platonic, with Jonathan equally evangelical. He’s the one who spoke the first romantic words, with Maya eager and ready, during a rare person-to-person prison visit in their basically email relationship. Moore didn’t take their faith-based story public for years, until she became totally fed up with all the barriers involved in exoneration and decided her fame could help the cause.
Even then, she did not announce her b-ball “retirement.” She simply decided to take a season off. Then another and another. She didn’t know at the time that she would never feel inspiration to return. It wasn’t only Jonathan’s struggles, but besides that, even the top women pros (witness Brittney Griner) are compelled to play winters overseas in addition to summers in the WNBA, just to be paid a fraction of the contract sums for the men, and many like Maya become exhausted.
She lost any desire to add to her four pro championship rings in eight Minnesota Lynx seasons, on top of the pair she achieved with the UConn college dynasty, along from others in high school and later in international competition.
Jonathan’s story is tragically like others, with the common thread of, “How could they in good conscience convict someone on such a weak and flimsy case?” Without spilling the book’s details, this will rank among the classic examples with falsified reports, missing evidence, the whole gamut. The “State,” as Maya describes the Mizzou authorities, actually stalled for six months AFTER the exoneration, keeping Irons behind bars for that much longer. This tells us something about all the years prior.
All-white law enforcement, all-white jury. And so forth. Jonathan and Maya take note of the racism, but not page-after-page. She modestly does not mention her leading role in WNBA player activism with Black Lives Matter after the 2014 police slaying of Michael Brown in the St. Louis area near where she had been raised. At one point, Moore describes her future husband’s prosecutors as “saving face” without noting that their faces are white.
In that way, they are similar to Maya’s hoops hero, Michael Jordan, who also takes a lower-key approach to civil rights. Moore wore Jordan’s No. 23 and became his protege to first bring women into the Nike sneaker endorsement realm, Jonathan was wrongly incarcerated for 23 years. She even looks for the numeral in the Bible, and from anxious times in the case, she quotes Exodus 23:1-3: “You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to become a malicious witness . . . siding with the many, as to pervert justice.”
M.J.’s liner note: “Maya and Jonathan’s story is truly inspiring. ‘Love and Justice’ is about faith, sacrifice and perseverance in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. It’s also a personal reminder to challenge injustice when we see it.”
“Love & Justice” is available at any branch of Public Libraries of Saginaw, either on hand or to order via book exchange.
