Judy Mosley-McAfee (1968-2013)

Judy Mosley-McAfee, who played for the University of Hawai'i from 1987-90 and in the WNBA for one season with Sacramento in 1997, passed away on September 16th from cancer.  She was actually younger than I am, which should give anyone reflection about how short life really is.  We tend to believe that we have an unlimited supply of time until we go to the cupboard and find it empty.

She is survived by her husband and four children.  My condolences to them; their sadness must be hard to measure.

According to the obit published at the University of Hawai'i website, she played nine years professionally overseas.  She set a ridiculous number of records at Hawai'i, including most points in a game (46) and most points as a Rainbow Wahine (2,479, over 600 points more than the second place finisher.

(There have been two WNBA players who were Hawai'i grads.  One was Mosley-McAfee and the other one was Amy Sanders, who played for nine minutes over two games in 2007 for the Detroit Shock.)

In her WNBA career, she actually did fairly well, by which I mean she wasn't a washout.  She didn't score a lot of points (4.6 ppg in 12 games) but she shot 45.8 percent from the field.  Given that the WNBA was about to expand in a big way in the next three years, I can't see why she didn't hang on for a little longer.  It might have been a height thing - there isn't much of a demand these days for 6'1" forwards.  We'll never know.

She played for a lot of European teams from 1990-97.  Which teams are those?  No one can say.  After her year in Sacramento, she played for two more years overseas (1998-99) and then hung up her sneakers.

I was lucky enough to find the photo up there which might be the only visual record of Mosley-McAfee playing WNBA ball.  Given the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of Euroball, many of Mosley-McAfee's European teams might not even exist.  The Sacramento Monarchs don't exist anymore either - they folded in 2009.  Maybe somewhere if the WNBA film vaults (if such a thing exists) there's a film record of Mosley-McAfee.

I remember that Bill James pondered about the push to put George Van Haltren, a 19th-century ball player, into the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Yes, Van Haltren deserved it, but James's questions was why we were doing it?  We couldn't say that we were doing it to honor his memory because no one alive had seen him play and his descendents (if he had any) probably didn't remember him either.  (Aside for a couple of interesting facts about my great-great grandparents, I certainly don't remember them.)

However, we can remember Mosley-McAfee's contributions to professional women's basketball.  There are still people alive who remember her and who loved her.  Basketball was an important part of her life, but it wasn't all of her life, and even though we don't know her very well, through basketball we can make that connection and feel that loss to some small degree and to sympathize with the sadness that others who knew her more closely must feel.

Rest in peace.