Schools gamble for revenue share
August 16, 2011
Nancy Cherie McCollum
August 18, 2011
“Bang, bang, bang,” pounded a youngster’s fist on the outside window of South Lafourche High School on a beautiful afternoon in early March of 1998.
On the other end of the glass, Clarence Moore sat inside a window seat of one of the school’s classrooms.
“It’s just after lunch and you hear this boom, bang, boom, bang, pow, bang sound on the windows,” Moore recalls with a laugh. “Talk about it scared me half to death.”
Then a 6-foot-5-inch junior, Moore overcame the initial shock and rose from his desk to see what the fuss was all about.
“I knew it was a prank,” he said. “It just had to be someone pulling a fast one. What else could it be?”
It wasn’t a prank.
When Moore opened the shades and saw the source of the noise, he and his classmates stopped dead in their tracks.
“There were people out there,” he remembers. “Hundreds of them. Our friends, our neighbors, just people we knew. People we’d see in the store or whatever. And they were doing the strangest things, they were cooking and stuff, just out there having a good time. It didn’t matter to them that school was going on. They were just out there relaxing and enjoying themselves. It was unreal. It was then that I sort of understood how big-time this was.”
The ‘this’ Moore referred to was basketball and on this particular night the stakes were pretty high.
Moore’s Tarpons were about to lock horns with fellow state power Jesuit in a Class 5A state quarterfinal game. With a win, South Lafourche would return to the Cajun Dome for a second-straight season to try and chase their first-ever state championship.
If they were defeated, not only would the Tarpon players be let down, but so would the entire southern portion of Lafourche Parish, most of whom lined the stadium’s gym and halls to see Moore and his classmates play.
“What happened in those days was nothing short of magic,” Moore recalled. “Pure magic. God works in mysterious ways. I’ve never seen a team be loved the way that team was loved. When we had joy, they had joy. When we felt pain. They felt pain. Pure magic.”
His name may be Clarence Moore, but around the bayous of southern Louisiana, this big man is known strictly as Moe.
Moe was the driving force behind the Tarpons’ success throughout his four-year stay in Galliano.
The power forward holds the Tarpons’ career scoring and rebounding records with 2,697 points and 1,186 rebounds.
He was a three-time All-State selection and an Honorable Mention All-American in his senior season.
He is widely regarded as the greatest player to ever take the court in South Lafourche, maybe even in all of Lafourche Parish.
“Every community has that great player that comes along every so many years and he was that player,” said Myron Fischer, a Tarpon fan who followed the team during its title run. “For our community, he was that guy.
“It just so happened the stars aligned this time and those guys had a lot of other players around them to allow them to succeed.”
But this Tarpon king wasn’t always on top of the world. He actually comes from very humble beginnings in Norco, a small suburb situated in St. Charles Parish.
His story is one even the most skilled novelist would struggle to script, blending perfectly good, bad and fate.
The end result is a local legend, one who will be remembered in the Tri-parish area forever.
“It’s been a long road,” Moore said. “But I can guarantee you it’s never been easy. But I live life with no regrets. Everything happens for a reason. My story happened the way it did for a reason. I take comfort in that.”
“The Bayou’s Blind Side Story”
Moore was born to a poor family.
His father, Clarence Sr., was legally blind, which limited the amount of work he could do and, ultimately, the income his family netted. His mother, Avis, battled respiratory illnesses for years and tended to the family at home.
Like many teenagers in inner cities, Moore had difficulty adjusting to adolescence and ran into trouble at his middle school.
“I was 13 in the seventh grade and, I promise you, my mother prayed for me every day,” Moore said. “Every single night, she’d pray that something would happen that I could possibly go to another school or that something, anything, could happen to make things better for me.”
Throughout his childhood, Moore said he was always outside staying active. Through that, he discovered a love for basketball.
It was through “this beautiful game” that he met a friend who would grant his mother’s wish.
The friend was Ross Chouest, the son of wealthy Galliano businessman Gary Chouest. Moore joined Ross’s AAU basketball team.
After the two’s friendship continued to grow, he was eventually asked to join Chouest’s high school basketball team at nearby Archbishop Hannan High School.
“I grew fond of the guys I was playing AAU with, so I knew I wanted to do it,” Moore said. “But I was 13 at the time, so I told them to ask my parents.
“When they did, it was like my mom’s prayers had been answered. She was so happy, I can just see that smile even today when I think about it.”
Hannan’s coach Joe Schick resigned following Moore and Chouest’s eighth-grade season. The coaching change caused the Chouest family to move Ross back to the family’s home in Galliano, where he would enroll at South Lafourche.
“It kind of felt like my dream was over and it was time to wake up, honestly,” Moore recalls.
Little did Moore know, his dream was just getting started.
Not wanting the teen to return to Norco because he had gotten back on the right path, the Chouest family offered to become Moore’s legal guardian.
Clarence Sr. and Avis Moore agreed and young Clarence was officially an adopted son of the Chouest family.
“It’s one of those things that I honestly feel like should be made into a movie,” Moore said. “It was almost like the Bayou’s version of ‘The Blind Side.’ I think it was one of those things that people realized how special it was a few years after it happened.”
“You look at a movie like ‘The Blind Side’ and I can tell you, Mr. Gary and Ms. Carolyn have done that 20 or 30 times over for Clarence,” Tarpons’ coach Scott Bouzigard said. “With no recognition. But special people do special things for other special people and it all plays a part in life.”
Learning to swim as a young Tarpon
Moore and Chouest arrived at South Lafourche in their ninth-grade season and their teammates didn’t really know what to expect.
The Tarpon players said they believed they’d have a successful career at the school well before they knew they’d play with Moore and Chouest.
Some admit they wondered if the new players would help at all.
“We had our guys from junior high and we had all played together and we all knew we were going to be good,” Ashton Dillion said. “Honestly, the only thing we didn’t know is if this thing would work with Ross and Moe.”
It didn’t take very long for those questions to be answered. The first week the Tarpons practiced for the 1995-96 season, all doubts were erased.
“No coach has to make players accept one another,” Bouzigard said. “Players decide for themselves whether they’ll play with one another. … I talked to a few of the seniors who were on the team after a couple of days and I asked them what they thought. Were these guys good enough to compete on this level? But after a couple more days of practices and working together and seeing how these boys were willing to sacrifice to fit in … it didn’t take long for everybody to be in agreement that these boys did belong on that court.”
The results showed.
As freshmen, Moore and Chouest led the Tarpons to the postseason, where they advanced to the second round of the playoffs.
The next year, the sophomores led the team to the state semifinals, losing to Byrd in a close game where three of their starters fouled out.
Now a junior, Moore wouldn’t take no for an answer in his bid to win a state title.
“I was hungry, man,” he recalls. “Losing was getting pretty old.”
Losing a loved one, winning the state title
Widely regarded as one of the favorites to win it all, South Lafourche struggled with a tough schedule in the 1997-98 season and played just .500 basketball the first few weeks of the season.
Moore admitted being the new kid on campus wasn’t always an easy transition and sometimes he had a hard time staying focused on the floor amidst the daily grind of being the most popular teenager in the school.
“Just typical high school drama,” Moore said with a laugh. “Nothing major. I was just hardheaded.”
The Tarpons were in Lafayette playing in an early season tournament during Moore’s junior season when Bouzigard’s phone began to buzz.
He picked up and the voice on the other line changed life for everyone in the South Lafourche community.
Moore’s mother Avis’ fight had finally come to an end. She passed away at a New Orleans hospital.
“That’s where our whole relationship turned,” Moore said. “Ross and my family was really there for me. Knowing how close I was to my mom, it meant so much that he would be there and would be someone I could talk to, someone who could get me out the house to get my mind off my things. Before, it felt like it was a sleepover every night, or like I was the friend living in the Chouest house. When my mom died, Ross, he became my brother.”
When Moore was able to get back on the basketball floor, the team’s struggles immediately ended.
There was no way anyone would stop the Tarpons short of the state championship this time around.
Moe was on a mission.
“I think that put him on his spiritual journey to fulfill what he wanted to do,” Bouzigard said.
His teammates took Moe’s lead and followed suit.
Chouest served as the second in command. He was joined by guards Jamar Jones, Ryan Guillory and Beau O’Quin and forwards like Blake Lee, Ashton Dillon and Zyrone Richardelle to give the Tarpons one of the deepest teams in the state.
“Without these guys here,” Moore said pointing to Lee, Dillon and Richardelle, “nothing we did was possible. It was always a team.”
“Everyone wanted to come and see the Ross and Moe show,” Lee added. “And we knew that, but at the same time, everyone had their roles and we understood that and we all understood that it didn’t matter who had this amount of points or that amount of rebounds … it was all about winning, together.”
The Tarpons did just that.
South Lafourche stormed back to the semifinals for a second-straight year and pounded Glen Oaks to move onto the championship game.
Up next was Slidell, another team without an answer for the Tarpons, who rolled to an 88-74 state victory.
Mission accomplished. For the first time in history, a Lafourche Parish prep boys’ basketball team was the state champions. It did so by setting the all-time assist record for any team playing in the Final Four.
“That will show you that these boys weren’t worried about points,” Bouzigard said.
Virtually all of the South Lafourche community was there to see it live and in person. The team’s triumph remains one of the most highly attended playoff games in Louisiana history.
“That’s the best feeling you’ll ever feel in your life,” Richardelle said. “It’s amazing.”
“To this day, it gives me chills thinking about it,” Lee added.
Moore was named the Most Valuable Player of the playoffs. He fouled out of the game late in the fourth quarter. As the final seconds ticked off the clock, he finally let loose and cried out of love for his mother.
Newspaper clips show a teary-eyed Moore hugging Chouest and Bouzigard in triumph.
“Clarence was finally able to rejoice,” Bouzigard said. “When he got called up there to get his MVP trophy, and he pointed up to the sky, he was truly overcome with emotion. He knew his mom was looking at him and he knew she was proud. I think that gave him a little bit of closure he needed.”
Answering the tough questions and moving onto college
Right at the peak of South Lafourche’s dominance, people around the state began to ask questions about why a Norco boy was playing at South Lafourche.
And more importantly, why was he adopted into the Chouest family.
“No one [outside of the area] wanted us to succeed except for us and the people of our community,” Moore said. “And even some people here had doubts because of the way I got here. … Some said recruiting. Others said it was just because I could play ball. Whatever it was, everyone had a theory.”
Adding fuel to the fire, a multi-page article titled “The Best Team Money Can Buy” ran in the Feb. 28, 1999 edition of the Times Picayune.
In it, sources alleged that the Chouest family used its financial resources to influence Moore and other top players to play in Galliano. They went so far as to state a handful of guys who “almost attended the school.”
Carolyn Chouest fired back with a letter to the editor, shooting down the claims made in the report.
“Clarence has been a part of our family since 1994. He and our son Ross developed a deep friendship when they were in eighth grade at Archbishop Hannan High School,” Carolyn Chouest wrote. “Clarence did not want to be left behind. They are like brothers, and we feel privileged to have been able to help Clarence and his family.”
On the floor, the Tarpons had an even bigger bulls-eye.
“Everyone wanted to get us,” Moore said. “Every time we stepped on the floor, they wanted to get us.”
The Tarpons made it back to the Final Four and the state finals that year, despite the adversity they faced on and off the floor that season.
They ran out of fight in the finals and were defeated by St. Augustine.
“They were just a little bit fresher than us,” Bouzigard said. “Just a little more hungry than we were.”
Following the season, Moore and Chouest had a decision to make.
They would again stay together.
Both players committed to Georgia Tech and moved onto the next chapter of their careers.
One last championship run
After one season in Atlanta, Chouest decided Georgia Tech wasn’t for him. He quit the team for personal reasons and transferred to LSU, where he played for a few months before hanging up his sneakers for good.
That left Moore alone in Atlanta.
Like he’d done everywhere he’d ever played, it didn’t take long for the forward to excel. Following his second full season with the program, he averaged nine points and five rebounds per game for the Yellow Jackets and had a stretch of six-straight double-digit scoring games toward the end of his sophomore season.
“This guy,” ESPN analyst Len Elmore notably said during the season, “will be a force in the ACC next season.”
Following the completion of that season, things changed for Moore, however, and he said his mind began to wander.
He had a hard time getting motivated to play.
The love he had for the game was gone.
“I always played so I could someday take care of my mom and get her the best care I could,” Moore said. “And I never had time to grieve because of how fast everything happened in high school. I think I missed one game to grieve in high school, but in college, I had a lot of lonely nights where I had to think about what I wanted to do. I decided that it was time to take a step back.”
Moore left the team following his redshirt sophomore season and sat out the 2002-03 season.
Georgia Tech struggled in his absence. Luckily, the South Lafourche legend started to get the competitive itch after a few months away.
“Oh, I wanted to be out there so bad,” Moore admits.
Following that season, a tough one for Georgia Tech, Moe went to Yellow Jackets coach Paul Hewitt. It didn’t take long for him to get back his spot.
“I was talking to Coach Hewitt at the end of that season and he told me, ‘Moe, if you’d have played this year, we’d have gone to the Final Four’,” Moore said. “And he told me ‘You know, if you play next year, we’d still make it to the Final Four.'”
Moore admits he didn’t necessarily believe his coach’s predictions, but after a year away, he returned for his senior season.
He immediately became the spiritual senior leader of the Yellow Jackets team in the 2003-04 season after earning back the trust of his teammates.
“To come back and hold the respect of those guys was one of the most amazing things I’ve seen in my career,” Georgia Tech coach Paul Hewitt told the Atlanta Journal Constitution during Moore’s comeback.
With leadership came success as the Yellow Jackets slowly climbed the ladder nationally and advanced to the NCAA Tournament.
It was there where Moore made Hewitt look like a prophet as the senior poured in 14 points, 6 rebounds and five steals in the team’s 79-71 win against Kansas to send the team to the Final Four.
“I thought Coach Hewitt was crazy when he said we would go to the Final Four,” Moore said. “But lo and behold, we did it.”
The Jackets were eventually defeated in the NCAA Tournament Finals by Connecticut, but to this day, Hewitt credits Moore for the team’s run at the title because of the command he held over the team’s locker room.
“He’s the biggest difference in the team from last year to this year,” Hewitt said during the season. “I’ve said a number of times that so many people have focused on what we didn’t have, but they didn’t realize what we had. We had a guy come back that, in my opinion, when he left, he was one of the top all-around players in the ACC.”
Moore explored professional options but played his last competitive game as a Georgia Tech Yellow Jacket.
Today, a reunion 13 years in the making
More than a decade later, the magic is still in the building as the former Tarpons take the floor.
Just like the good, ol’ days, Moore, Lee, and Richardelle are on the floor, grinding it out for a victory.
A guard tosses it to Moore in the post.
The double team arrives.
He zips a pass to Richardelle, layup.
“Zy always has my back,” Moore says later with a laugh. “No matter what, Zyrone always has my back. I could make some kind of crazy Pistol Pete pass over my head and I know he’ll be there.”
A shot goes strong off the rim. Lee is there for an offensive rebound and a put back.
The game wears to its waning moments. The former Tarpon trio trails by 10 with two and a half minutes left.
“We’re old,” Lee says with a laugh.
Ignore the former Tarpon forward’s modesty, Father Time hasn’t quite worn out these guys just yet. The Tarpons erase the lead to two with less than 10 seconds to play.
Moore has the ball in his hands. He scores with ease to send the game to overtime, where they eventually won.
Men, women and children all know who these guys are. As soon as they walked into the gym, they stood stunned by the reunion they saw.
The entire building was soon eating out of their hands.
“Just like old times,” Moore said.
The reunion took place at the South Lafourche Biddy Invitational earlier this month and it marked the first time the guys were back on the floor since high school.
It is one of a handful of times they’ve been able to spend time together since high school.
“It’s always good to come be back with these guys,” Moore said. “This is like my family.”
Moore is now 30 and is an executive of Edison Chouest Offshore. He dabbled in coaching following the completion of his playing career. Moore made it as high as to become the head coach of Kentucky State University, before deciding to get out of the profession and move home.
He is married to former Georgia Tech track athlete Lynn Houston Moore and the couple has a son and a daughter.
But the present isn’t on anyone’s mind at this reunion, everyone is reminiscing about the past and the good times they had.
“I was instant offense,” Dillon boasts when prep basketball comes up in conversation.
“Ashton, all you ever did was miss open layups and 12 footers,” Moe zings back to laughs from the teammates.
The one thing they all agree upon, amidst the ribbing is that these were special days in the South Lafourche community, days that may never be seen again.
Moore and Dillon don’t believe the team’s feats will ever be replicated, even though they say they hope they are wrong.
Bouzigard added that forever is a long time, but he, too, doesn’t know if there will ever be another bunch of Tarpons like these guys.
“In 70 years, we were the first boys’ team from Lafourche Parish to win a state championship,” the coach said. “Since then, it’s been 10 more years, so you’re looking at a team that’s close to being a team of the century. … It may happen again, but it will take everything falling in place perfectly like it did for us.”
“There may be another winner, you know, another state champion,” Dillon said. “But another team that will change the lives of everyone in an area as big as this? I don’t know. Those were special times.”
The banging on the window no longer occurs before South Lafourche home games.
But its memory will forever live on in Galliano.
Former South Lafourche and Georgia Tech forward Clarence Moore, top, taps in a rebound during his senior season. Below, Moore and the 1998 South Lafourche state championship boys’ basketball team poses after receiving their first place trophy. COURTESY PHOTO
