Recently, I’ve heard several elite female athletes say they want to be more than athletes. They want to use their success — and their position in the media spotlight — to achieve other personal goals.
This seems to me like a sign that Title IX is doing its job. For a woman to have the opportunity — and the luxury — of choosing how to leave her mark on the world is not a case of abandoning hard-won opportunity, but of embracing a life that has been made possible by the gender equality law.
This certainly has been the case for Maya Moore.
Maya ruled the basketball court, no doubt about it. She played forward for the University of Connecticut, winning national championships in 2009 and 2010. She was the first overall pick in the 2011 Women’s National Basketball League (WNBA) draft, joining the Minnesota Lynx.
From 2011 to 2017, Maya led the Minnesota Lynx to four WNBA championships and in 2014 was named league MVP. Her team made the playoffs in all eight of the seasons she played, and she was named to the All-WNBA squad seven times. She won two Olympic gold medals.
So why did she walk away from it all?
Life off the court
Off the court, Maya and her family were part of a Christian prison ministry at Jefferson City Correctional Center in St. Louis, Missouri. There, in 2007, as an 18-year-old, she met Jonathan Irons, a Black prisoner who had been convicted in 1998 of breaking into a suburban St. Louis home and shooting the homeowner in the course of a burglary. He was serving a 50-year sentence.
Maya became convinced of Irons’s innocence. His lawyers said he was convicted on the basis of false identification, a false confession and the omission of crucial evidence at trial. Maya backed the legal team with her own money, convinced that Irons was the victim of a racist justice system. In 2019, she stepped away from her basketball career to focus on social justice issues.
In March 2020, a judge ruled that the case against Irons was weak, with a lack of evidence linking him to the crime, and further efforts to keep him imprisoned failed. On July 1, Irons walked out of prison after 22 years behind bars. As Maya watched, she dropped to her knees, cradling her head in her hands.
“It was kind of a worshipful moment, just dropping to my knees and being so thankful that we made it,” she said. “When I stepped away two springs ago, I wanted to shift my priorities to be more available and present for things that mattered more than being a professional athlete. This is one of the biggest and most direct results of that.”*
A new freedom
In September that year, Maya and Jonathan married, and the couple began working together to help others who they believe have been treated unfairly by the justice system. In 2021, Maya won the Excellence in Sports Performance Yearly (ESPY)’s Arthur Ashe Award, an honor given to individuals whose contributions transcend sports, joining the ranks of Muhammad Ali, Pat Summitt and Billie Jean King. ESPN produced a “30 for 30” feature on Maya titled “Breakaway,” and through their nonprofit, Win With Justice, the couple is using their own story as an agent of change.
“There is a life we want to live, things we want to do, things we feel called to do together to help make our world a better place,” she says. “This sense of freedom is huge for both of us now.”
And that’s the kind of freedom made possible by Title IX.
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* ABC’s Good Morning America program. Robin Roberts’s interview with Maya Moore and Jonathan Irons (June 25, 2020).
** Kurt Streeter, “After Helping Her Husband Gain Freedom, Maya Moore Savors Her Own,” New York Times (May 17, 2021). Irons has filed a federal lawsuit, naming those he says caused his wrongful imprisonment.
PHOTO CREDIT: Maya Moore