His new book, “My Big Red Machine: The Tales, Drama and Revelations of a Fan Turned Journalist Covering Baseball’s Greatest Team” makes his point in glorious fashion.
It has wonderful tales of the personal embrace he got from the very start of his career by Pete Rose, his favorite athlete of all time. It recounts how he and Joe Morgan often talked at length about societal issues.
He shares times with manager Sparky Anderson, who remains one of the five most charismatic people he said he’s ever dealt with; and there are revelations from the rest of the Great Eight players of the Big Red Machine which won back-to-back World Series in 1975 and 1976 and, as Moore said, reigns as the greatest baseball team of all time.
His is a tale of a young fan who was fully devoted to the Reds and became a noted national sportswriter, columnist, broadcaster and author.
Woven through all of this is the warm, insightful account of his strong and loving African American family and how – sometimes with the help of sports – it dealt with the ever-changing, often volatile times of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
While his book disputes the thought that people you once looked up to let you down, early in his career he found that maxim to be painfully true.
That was the case in the second game of the 1979 baseball season. He was less than a year into his first sports writing job after graduating from Miami University and was covering the Cincinnati Reds solo for the first time ever for the Cincinnati Enquirer.
He was the young back-up to Reds’ beat writer Ray Buck, who, after covering the season-opening loss to San Francisco, told him he was skipping the next game to recharge after an arduous spring training.
Excited and a little nervous about the challenge, Moore had finished his pregame writing tasks that day and, with some 30 minutes left before the first pitch, he was sitting at his assigned seat in the crowded press box at Riverfront Stadium.
The youngest writer in the press box and the only African American, he had long dreamed of being a sportswriter and admired many of the veterans sitting around him.
But now, as he sat there quietly trying to remember everything Buck had taught him, he sensed someone standing right behind him.
It was a veteran Southwest Ohio sports columnist whose career, as many insiders knew, was littered with a string of professional and personal miscues.
And this one would follow a preplanned script.
“Where’s Ray Buck?” the columnist asked loudly.
“He’s off today,” quipped another guy.
“So, who’s covering for the Enquirer?” the columnist asked.
“Terry Moore,” the other guy answered.
To that, the columnist shook his head and smirked:
“Oh…this ought to be (expletive) interesting!”
As he recounted the scene to me the other morning when we spoke by phone, Moore said: “Almost everybody in the press box started laughing.”
Moore sat there stunned but silent and soon flashed on the lessons of his mom and dad, Sam and Annie Moore, who had given each of their three sons a solid foundation growing up.
His dad, who’d been Sergeant First Class with the paratroopers in the Korean War, would go on to become the first black supervisor and manager at AT&T.
“He told this story to me and my brothers all the time,” Moore said.
“On November 22, 1963, he’d come from South Bend (Indiana) where we lived to Cincinnati for a training meeting. He was the only black person in the room.
“That day someone walked in and announced that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas Texas. My dad said everybody in the room stood up and cheered.
“And then they all turned and looked back at him. JFK was considered pro-African American, and they wanted to see my dad’s reaction. He said he gave them no response.”
Moore also recounted how, when the family moved to Cincinnati in November of 1968, his mom became the first African American employee at a regional office of Associates Savings and Loans.
He told how there was this middle-aged white woman from Norwood there who resented his mom, who was younger, had a bigger desk … and darker skin.
“One day the lady comes up and jingles her keys in front of my mom’s face and says, ‘I can get in your drawer any time I want!’” Moore said.
“Day after day she kept doing it, but my mom didn’t waver. She told us: ‘Don’t let them inside your head.’”
That’s what Moore was trying to do that day when a press box hero finally did emerge.
He told how Paul Meyer, the Dayton Journal Herald’s beat writer, walked over and put his arm around him and said, “Forget these bastards! If you ever need anything let me know.”
As it turns out, that old taunting columnist was right about one thing that day.
From that day on – through almost 50 years in the media - Terence “Terry” Moore has made it interesting.
After three years at the Enquirer, he was a writer and columnist at the San Francisco Examiner and then spent 25 years at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, where he became the first black sports columnist at a major newspaper in the Deep South.
Today he’s a national sports columnist for forbes.com; a visiting professor of journalism at Georgia State University – a position he previously held at Miami University – and a contributing editor to Atlanta Magazine.
For more than a quarter century he’s had a weekly Sunday night show on Atlanta station WSB, the top ABC affiliate in the country.
He’s also made his mark as an author, penning books on his longtime friend, Henry Aaron, and Miami University’s Cradle of Coaches.
Neither though is as personal and close to the heart as is “My Big Red Machine.”
It was officially released Thursday, but already had been selling on-line from the website Moore, who self-published this effort, set up at mybigredmachine.com.
Moore is doing book signings around the country and on Wednesday, Oct. 29, the Lane Library in Hamilton is presenting “An Evening with Terence Moore.” It begins at 6p.m.
‘I thought I was gonna pass out’
Moore spent his first 12 years in South Bend, where his family were big Notre Dame fans. His mom even made sure the sweatshirts she got her boys matched those Ara Parseghian wore.
When his dad got the job in Cincinnati, Moore knew little of the Reds. But that quickly changed when he was at a Cincinnati Royals game and suddenly noticed many of the other kids his age in the Cincinnati Gardens crowd rushing down toward the box seats.
When they returned he asked what all the fuss was about.
“Someone thought they saw Pete Rose down there,” a kid told him.
“Pete who?” he thought.
Soon he knew.
“My first game at Crosley Field was Sept. 2, 1969,” he said. “Pete made a diving catch, but I heard the people behind me say, ‘He’s nothing but a hotdog.’
“I turned to my dad and asked, ‘What do they mean?’ He said,’ They think he’s a show off.’
“I still didn’t get it. I thought he made a great catch and the more I watched him, the more I thought, ‘Wow, I like this guy!’”
Soon Moore – like his pals, half of them white, half black – was immersed in all things Reds.
Although his dad would get relocated to Chicago a few years later and then Milwaukee, Moore felt forever tied to Cincinnati and especially the Reds.
In May of 1976, he was a sophomore at Miami University and on The Miami Student newspaper staff. He came to cover his first Reds game and Joe Nuxhall helped usher him into the clubhouse.
Although in awe as he saw Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan and Tony Perez, he was disappointed when he didn’t see his hero Pete Rose.
Then, just before he left, Rose walked straight toward him and held out his hand, saying: “Hi, my name is Pete Rose. What’s your name?”
“T..T..Terry,” Moore stuttered as he explained he was a Miami student.
Rose told him when he got a job at the Enquirer they’d sit down for an interview.
Finally in May of 1978 – a week after graduating from Miami and the newest member of the Enquirer staff and the paper’s first black sportswriter ever – Moore was sent over to the Reds to talk to Rose, who ushered him up to the dugout.
“I thought I was gonna pass out,” Moore recalled with a chuckle.
The photo that’s on the cover of “My Big Red Machine,” – Rose sitting back on the bench with his legs crossed; Moore standing in front of him in his striped shirt and studious glasses with notebook and pen in hand – was taken by a game photographer that day.
It shows Moore’s definitive first step on his passage from fandom to professional journalism.
‘I save everything’
After he began his career in Atlanta, Moore became especially close to Hank Aaron, who shared stories with him for nearly 40 years and just before his death suggested Moore write a book using his insights.
That resulted in “The Real Hank Aaron: An Intimate Look at the Life and Legacy of the Home Run King.”
Next came “Red Brick Magic: Sean McVay, John Harbaugh and Miami University’s Cradle of Coaches.”
Just 14 months ago, when Moore began writing “My Big Red Machine,” he remembered stories and interviews from his career that would bolster the effort.
“I’m very much my mother’s son,” he said. “I save everything.”
From two decades past, he remembered an interview he’d done with the often closed-mouth Reds general manager Bob Howsam, who, retired when they spoke, gave him all kinds of closed-door stories about the Big Red Machine.
He found that tape in his basement and also an interview with George Foster, who told how he had ended up with Carlton Fisk’s home run ball that gave the Boston Red Sox the dramatic 12th inning victory in Game 6 of the 1975 World Series.
Foster simply tossed the ball in his duffel bag and forgot it until a long time later when someone asked him for a souvenir of the game and he gave them that ball.
Soon after that, the ball ended up at an auction and sold for over $100,000.
It’s stories like that from the Great Eight players that give you a feel for them like never before.
“For people who say you should never meet your sports heroes, they need to talk to me,” Moore said.
“In contrast to what others might say, meeting my heroes was one of the greatest things ever to happen to me in my entire life.”
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