He had a jump shot out of a cannon that sparked the University of South Dakota's best two years in Division I hoops (2016-18), then Texas Tech's historic run into overtime of the national championship game (2019). Matt Mooney was a cold-blooded sharpshooting machine in those three years, and he is just as to-the-point and entertaining when he tells stories about them.
In a one-hour sit down with Happy Hour host John Gaskins from his home in Puerto Rico — the latest stop in a six-year pro career that took him all over the continents of Europe and Australia — Mooney reminisces on high times like a couple wins over Mike Daum's South Dakota State and beating Tom Izzo's Michigan State in the Final Four.
The Chicagoland native also extracts the pain he felt in the low moments, like the Coyotes' heartbreaking losses to SDSU and the Red Raiders' oh-so-close overtime thriller against Virginia for all the March Madness marbles in Minneapolis in his final collegiate game.
Along the way, Mooney weaves in colorful stories about Daum and SDSU's buzzer-beating Coyote killer Michael Orris, plus the rock star existence Mooney and his teammates experienced in Lubbock — a fan wanting to buy him a beer made how much from betting on Tech? — and his journeyman career as a pro from the NBA G-League, to NBA call-ups, to Spain and Turkey and Germany and Australia and New Zealand and Puerto Rico, oh my.
Prolific and electric? Yes. Glamorous? Sometimes, but not as much as you'd think. But it has certainly been a journey worth telling, and Mooney tells it well.
USA