FROM HERO TO KINDRED SOUL STORY BY
DO NNA BO E N ’83 MTS C ’96 PHOTOS COU RT E SY O F
T ER ENC E M OORE ’ 78
Over a 40-year friendship, baseball icon Hank Aaron often advised sports columnist Terence Moore ’78 on how to deal with racism
“I think that I kind of look back (at the death threats and the hate mail I received while chasing Ruth’s record) and say, ‘You know, things are the same, really.’ ” Hank Aaron at age 86 (excerpt from The Real Hank Aaron: An Intimate Look at the Life and Legacy of the Home Run King by Terence Moore ’78)
22
miamian magazine
TERENCE MOORE ’78 WILL NEVER FORGET THE DAY HANK AARON DIED. At home the evening of Jan. 22, 2021, Moore was on the phone consoling the baseball legend’s new widow, Billye, and helping her write the obituary and a program for the funeral. Now a nationally known sports columnist and commentator, Moore first spoke to Aaron over the phone during the spring of 1982 while working on a “Blacks in Baseball” series for the San Francisco Examiner.
In the nearly 40 years since, their relationship grew to the point where Moore considered Aaron a second father. When Billye Aaron asked Moore to be an honorary pallbearer, he felt overwhelmed. To use his words, that question “felt like a Hammerin’ Aaron line drive slamming against the logical part of my mind.”
POSTER COMES ALIVE In Moore’s second-story home office, a framed poster of Aaron dominates one wall. Aaron is in his 1960-ish Atlanta Braves uniform, slightly crouching with his bat, while looking over his right shoulder. Moore has treasured this poster since he was 12 and sacrificed his model car money to buy it. The poster traveled with Moore when his family — his father, Samuel, AT&T’s first Black manager in the Midwest, his mother, Annie, and he and his two younger brothers — moved from South Bend to Cincinnati to Chicago to Milwaukee. It accompanied him to Miami University and watched over him in Dennison Hall and then in Hepburn Hall while he majored in Economics. It was with him during his early reporting days at the Cincinnati Enquirer and then the San Francisco Examiner, and during 25 tumultuous years at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Moore fulfilled one of his bucket-list items during his first month in Atlanta in 1985, stopping by Aaron’s office at Fulton-County Stadium to introduce himself in person and ask the man to autograph his poster. Their bond grew from there. “He was famously private,” Moore said. “Even so, he was totally open whenever we huddled, either in person or on calls. We were kindred souls, and here’s why: Jackie Robinson.”