Jaylan Moore’s standout play, off-field success serve as carrots for his mother as she battles Stage 4 cancer
By Shane Hoffmann
There’s a story Tai Harden-Moore wants to tell.
Nowadays, the memory makes her chuckle, although 12 years ago when it happened, it filled her with gratitude for the presence of her then-5-year-old son, Jaylan Moore. It’s a story she doubts the rising high school senior, a star cornerback for the Sherwood Bowmen, recollects, but one she won’t soon forget.
Moore’s year of kindergarten roughly coincided with the onset of Harden-Moore’s Stage 3 Inflammatory Breast Cancer in 2011. She was attending Florida A&M University College of Law in Orlando, living in Windermere, Florida, with Jaylan and her husband, Andre.
One day, a classmate of Jaylan’s told him his mother didn’t look right, that she looked strange — “weird,” even. By then, her head was devoid of hair after undergoing chemotherapy, and Jaylan was deeply distraught by the comment. The tears flowed and flowed. He wanted to lash out and fight the boy.
“I had to talk to Jaylan and say, People are gonna say all kinds of things about me; this is certainly not the worst thing you're ever going to hear about your mom,” Harden-Moore said. “You know I'm not weird.”
“You look beautiful, Mama,” he responded in the moment, “and I didn't like it.”
So, while Tai urged her son to try, as best a 5-year-old boy could, to contain his emotions and avoid resorting to a physical outburst, there was something deeply settling about observing her son’s reaction and the protective nature he flashed.
Far more grown now, Moore is rapidly ascending the ranks of the Oregon high school football scene as one of the state’s top defensive backs. A Newberg district kid originally, Moore chose to attend Jefferson for his first two years of high school, following in the footsteps of his father and grandparents. But after his sophomore season, Moore was ready for change — a more welcoming environment, a bigger community. Somewhere closer to home.
He’s found that, and more, at Sherwood, where he became a first-team all-league cornerback last season. Another season like that this fall would go a long way toward helping him find a Division I home.
As Harden-Moore reflects on the kindergarten incident more than a decade later, she can’t help but notice the connective tissue. The reaction her son displayed all those years ago doesn’t surprise her one bit now. That’s who he is, who he’s continually grown to become. He’s every bit that protector, keeping things locked down — be it receivers traversing the football field, his academic endeavors or, naturally, his mother’s well-being.
“Just to get him to kind of get over that as a young boy,” Harden-Moore said, “I think it helped shape his approach for when it happened later.”
After undergoing chemotherapy, a double mastectomy and radiation, Harden-Moore was deemed cancer-free less than a year after the original diagnosis. But in 2017, when Moore was 12, it returned with a “vengeance,” this time in the form of Stage 4 Metastatic Breast Cancer.
It had spread to both lungs. Doctors prognosticated that she had one to two years to live.
Almost six years later, she’s still here.
“When I was younger, I knew what (cancer) was, but not really on (the level I do now),” Moore said. “I thought she was just sick, but (that) she’d get over it pretty soon, hopefully. … The second time it came around, I realized it was really serious. It’s something that she has to deal with for pretty much her whole life now.
“Anything she asks for, I do it for her. I’ve gotta step up.”
Sometimes, just doing his thing is enough.
“That Friday night, game time, is her carrot,” said Sherwood head football coach Mark Gribble.
Harden-Moore is still in active treatment. She will be for the rest of her life. As of now, it’s going well. She’s stable and, to her, that’s a blessing amidst endless ups and downs.
Her chemotherapy rolls back around every three weeks. She’s gotten used to it after dealing with it all these years. The treatment itself changes — it’s a different drug now — but it’s all seemingly the same, she said. It still takes quite the physical toll on her.
The hardest part is keeping her energy up. Over the years, that’s been one of the things she’s so often cried about — having to miss Moore’s games, or other events she wishes she could have been there for, but couldn’t physically bring herself to attend.
Moore knows his mother, though. He knows she wants nothing more than to be there every time, for everything and every moment. He knows that her heart is with him, but her body won’t always let her be there. That soothes Harden-Moore to a degree.
If you were to walk into the center where she undergoes her treatment and ask the other patients and the staff what she talks about while she’s there, she’s confident the unanimous answer would be her son. Everyone sees the pictures, watches the videos, hears all the stories.
During football seasons, Friday nights fuel Harden-Moore. She has every game marked down in her calendar. Fridays are blocked off starting at 4 p.m.
Gribble has made it a priority to assist the family in any way possible, whether it be helping coordinate parking or special seating during away games when Harden-Moore is feeling strong enough to attend (she made it to six of Sherwood’s 11 games last season) or providing her with live streams when she isn’t.
Moore often dons pink arm sleeves during games to honor his mother and raise awareness for breast cancer.
“Having her presence there makes me feel better,” Moore said. “Even if she's not there, I’m still thinking about her and still thinking about what I have to do, what has to be done, to get to the next level.”
He added: “Every time before a game, I glance over and give her a little wave. That's just one of the things I do just to let her know that I know she's there. And I see her.”
Harden-Moore loves when her son forces incompletions. The hand gesture that often ensues for Moore — a sweeping motion with his arms to signal “no good” — is her favorite thing to see.
“That's like my move,” she said. “It gets me so hyped.”
She vividly remembers the early days, back when Moore’s helmet was “bigger than his body” and he looked like a “bobblehead” running around the field. He was often the smallest player on his team, but he remained undeterred.
“I just remember all those moments of kind of grimacing and being like, My baby, he's so small, don't hurt him,” Harden-Moore said, “but him popping right back up and being like, Give me some more! I'm ready for the action!
“He knew what he wanted. He wanted to play football, and he was going to play. And I just love it. I've had so many great moments watching him over the years.”
Moore grew up playing a combination of running back and receiver. He still plays stints at receiver, but it’s at cornerback where he’s cut his teeth at the high school level, transforming into a player with Division I talent on the field who holds Ivy League academic aspirations off it. Among schools showing significant interest in the soon-to-be senior are Stanford, Harvard, Dartmouth and Princeton.
“He’s a lockdown guy for us on defense,” Gribble said, adding that Moore’s methodical preparation and study habits regarding scouting the tendencies and nuances of his opponents are some of his best traits.
“We ask a lot specifically of our secondary at Sherwood to kind of lock in and be 100% committed to their particular job,” Gribble said, “because we're going to gamble and stunt and send pressure up front. Sometimes, you feel like you're on an island back there.”
Moore, with the ability to man up and run deep with the fastest threats on Sherwood’s schedule while still being an active contributor in the Bowmen’s defense against the run, fits in swimmingly. And while it’s not the most common sight, he’s not afraid to mix it up back there and let his opponents hear him on occasion, even if those spurts of trash talk starkly fly in the face of his off-field persona.
“His mental approach is very seldom rattled,” Gribble said. “Football's an emotional game. A lot of times, you see guys come in and process certain things and then the emotions will get going and things change. Jaylan doesn’t change.”
He’s exceedingly even-keeled, described as a quiet kid with an unwavering demeanor, one who moves through life in a way that masks the hardships. Harden-Moore even went as far as to joke that it can be hard to tell whether he’s excited about things. He doesn’t wear any extreme emotions, on either side of the spectrum, on his sleeve.
“I think he just doesn't want to show too much excitement,” Harden-Moore said, “because he wants to make sure things work out the way they're supposed to.”
Whether that inkling holds validity, he’s on the right track. Things are going so well for Moore, in fact, that it can almost be “scary” for his mother. She wouldn’t want anything to affect this stride he’s hit.
“There's nothing more we could ask for from a child,” she said.
Moore readily acknowledges his mother’s condition can be upsetting. But it’s in those moments he tries his hardest to think back and remind himself why he’s doing what he’s doing on the field, in the classroom, in life as a whole. He’s at peace with it now. He can’t let it be something that gets in the way of what he wants to accomplish, he said, and what he knows his mother wants him to accomplish.
“Whatever time I have left on this earth, he knows I want to see him do well,” Harden-Moore said. “Every day, even if he’s not consciously thinking of that, I think it's something that's internally motivating.”
Added Moore: “Everybody has their own thing that gets in the way. You have to find a way to get through it.”
Just like when he was a kindergartener defending his mother, her well-being is still at the forefront of everything Moore does. He just knows how to better cope with the emotions which surround it now.
