Romeo Langford and Rondale Moore: National stars, New Albany neighbors

INDIANAPOLIS – They bond now over Fortnite, these future millionaire professional athletes from the same small town in southern Indiana. Romeo Langford is in his dorm room at IU, Rondale Moore in his at Purdue. Separated by 100 miles, connected by the internet, they play Fortnite until 2 in the morning — they played as recently as Sunday night, in fact — and they get after it. They taunt each other. Talk trash. Get angry.

“You suck,” Rondale will say when Romeo dies in Fortnite.

“Nah, you suck,” Romeo will say when Rondale dies.

“We definitely get in each other’s head,” Rondale Moore is telling me by phone from West Lafayette, where the Purdue football team is preparing for the Music City Bowl. “We get mad, and I’m completely serious. We’re pretty competitive.”

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They’re used to winning, these two glorious athletes from New Albany, a town of barely 35,000 just north of the Ohio River. Can you imagine? Romeo Langford is the No. 1 scorer on the IU basketball team, a freshman averaging 17.5 points, an All-America candidate, a projected lottery pick in the 2019 NBA draft. Rondale Moore is the Big Ten’s leading receiver with 103 catches for 1,164 yards and 12 touchdowns, the first true freshman in Purdue history to be named consensus All-American, a possible first-round pick in the 2021 or 2022 NFL draft.

Classmates at New Albany. Teammates. Best friends. How small is this world? Romeo and Rondale grew up on the same street, five houses away from each other. They rode the bus together to school.

Romeo and Rondale on the football field

It’s crazy, I’m telling Romeo after the Hoosiers beat Butler on Dec. 15 at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, that New Albany had two of you guys.

He’s nodding. I keep going: I mean, Rondale’s a pro.

“Mm-hmm,” he says.

And you’re a pro.

Silence. Romeo doesn’t brag on himself. I keep going: We all knew you were a pro a long time ago. Did anyone know that about Rondale?

“We knew,” Romeo says. “The guys we played with, we saw what he did on the football field and we knew what he was capable of doing. We all knew that sooner or later, people were going to recognize and wake up and see what he could do.”

You played AAU and high school basketball together, I’m reminding Romeo. Did you play football together?

“I played football, but never on his team,” he says. “I played against his team.”

Did you ever tackle him?

“Nah,” says Romeo Langford. “Nobody tackled Rondale.”

Rondale and Romeo on the basketball court

Rondale Moore wanted to play college basketball, then go to the NBA.

He played alongside his buddy Romeo, the state’s highest-rated recruit in years, maybe decades, and he held his own. Romeo was the shooting guard, taller than everybody else, and more skilled too. Rondale was the point guard, a defensive demon and a capable scorer. When New Albany demolished rival Jeffersonville during their sophomore year in January 2016, Romeo did what he does, scoring 24 points and grabbing 13 rebounds, but Rondale had 11 points and four assists. A few months later New Albany beat Bloomington South 73-66 at the Seymour Regional. Romeo had 34 points, but it was Rondale Moore who scored eight points in the fourth quarter and overtime to help seal the win.

“Yeah, he could have gone (Division) I,” Romeo says of Rondale. “He was mainly a defender and attacking guard. He could pass really well because he was so fast, and he would break a defender down. Then he’d just dump it off for one of us.”

As for Romeo on the youth football field, here's Rondale's scouting report:

"He hit his growth spurt, so he was a lot bigger than everyone else and could cover a lot of ground," Rondale says of Romeo. "He'd run past people and they'd just throw it up to him."

Back to basketball and that 2015-16 season: New Albany won the state title that year, but soon thereafter Rondale’s personal trainer gave him the hard truth.

“At some point,” trainer Chris Vaughn told Moore, “you’ve got to give it up and go be a big-time football player.”

Says Moore: “That was a turning point, realizing the odds of making it in the NBA. I wanted to pursue a career in professional sports, and football was my best shot.”

Moore left New Albany for Trinity, a Catholic school powerhouse in Louisville with more than 20 state championships and an alumni list that included the football coach at Western Kentucky, a man named Jeff Brohm.

On one side of the Ohio River, Romeo was blossoming into the top basketball recruit in Indiana. On the other side, Rondale was doing the same in football in Kentucky. Romeo was a cultural icon, Indiana’s most popular schoolboy since Damon Bailey, scoring 3,002 career points — No. 4 in Indiana history — and winning IndyStar Mr. Basketball as the state player of the year and committing to play for the new coach at IU, Archie Miller. As for Moore, he was catching 109 passes (second in Kentucky history) for 1,478 yards and 16 touchdowns in 2017, winning his state’s player of the year, and committing to play football at Texas.

Same as IU with Archie Miller, Purdue had a new football coach that season: Jeff Brohm. While Brohm was working the Trinity connection, Rondale Moore got to thinking: I’m from Indiana, and love this state. Why leave?

“I wanted to help change things around here at Purdue,” Moore says.

They know their story is crazy

They talk every day. Well, they talk the way kids talk.

“We’re close friends,” Romeo says. “We basically text every day.”

At times they will talk — sorry, they will text — about the oddity of their shared athletic experience, their background, their future. At Purdue, the record for all-purpose yardage was set in 1972 by Otis Armstrong at 312 yards. In his first college game, against Northwestern, Rondale had 302 yards by halftime (he broke the record in the second half). At Indiana, Romeo had 17 points in the first half of his first career game, against Chicago State. Both college debuts set social media aflame.

It’s not just fans of IU and Purdue who are blown away by the story of Rondale and Romeo. These guys talk about it as well, conversations they didn’t have at New Albany, or even after Moore left for Trinity. Only now, as the stakes get higher, the future brighter, do the two young college phenoms — the IU basketball star, the Purdue football star — marvel that they once lived five houses apart in New Albany.

“Back then it was just normal for us,” Moore says. “We were having fun then, but right now it’s a little eye-opening.”

It’s weird, right?

“I wouldn’t say weird,” Moore says, “but cool.”

Cool works. So does their friendship, though this next little bit might scare the football coaches at Purdue and the basketball coaches at IU. These guys are friends, right? Two athletes, both physical, both competitive. When they get together, things happen.

“We’ll wrestle,” Rondale Moore says of his good buddy Romeo Langford, “but not anything serious. I think he might have got me last time. We were at a friend’s house in New Albany, and yeah, he got me last time. But we’ll have to test that again next time I get home.”

This is the story of Rondale and Romeo. It's crazy. And the next chapter awaits.

Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar or at facebook.com/gregg.doyel.