Terence Moore: A trailblazer who started his career at The Miami Student

Terence Moore was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, but moved around due to the nature of his father’s job, working as a supervisor for AT&T, living in Cincinnati, Chicago and Milwaukee over the course of three years.

“We moved to Cincinnati in 1968, the first year of the Bengals,” Moore said. “I always call myself the only true Bengals fan, because I've been a Bengals fan since they first came into being in ‘68, win or lose.”

In 1968, Moore visited Miami University for the first time when going to a high school basketball tournament with his father.

“It was sort of like the Wizard of Oz, everything in black and white and then all of a sudden, it turns to living color because we're in a city called Oxford, Ohio,” Moore said. “We're going to this brand new building called Millett Hall, it had just opened up. At that moment, at 12 years old, I said to myself, ‘This is where I want to go to school.’”

Moore was first interested in journalism after a sports editor from the Milwaukee Journal came to speak to his high school English class. He jumped in with his high school paper, becoming the news editor while balancing playing varsity football and baseball. Moore chose a path in economics at Miami University and became involved with The Miami Student his first day on campus in September 1974.

“My English teacher said ‘everybody wants to be a journalist now because of Woodward & Bernstein, so major in something else but still write,’” Moore said. “So I was an economics major at Miami, and my passion was writing.”

In his junior year, Moore became the first Black sports editor at The Student, and its first African American editor of any kind. After graduating from Miami, Moore continued his journalism career just eight days later at the Cincinnati Enquirer, becoming the first Black sports writer for the organization.

“One of the reasons I was able to make it at a very high level, from the day I left The Miami Student, for the next 45 years to where I am right now, is because of The Miami Student,” Moore said. “There's no doubt in my mind. We ran it like a real newspaper, we took it seriously, and we had a lot of gifted people on the paper.”

During his undergrad, Moore experienced one of the greatest eras of Miami sports. From 1973 to 1975, Miami’s football team went 32-1-1 and ranked tenth in the final Associated Press poll in 1974. Miami’s baseball team made the NCAA tournament twice during Moore’s time.

Residing in Hepburn Hall, Moore lived with Bill Doran, Houston Astros Hall of Famer, Ron Zook, former head football coach of the University of Florida, and Sherman Smith, Super Bowl champion and former coach with the Seattle Seahawks.

Moore recently published his second book, “Red Brick Magic,” about Miami’s sports leadership legacy, profiling Sean McVay, John Harbaugh, Paul Brown and other coaching greats.

““I read about all these coaching legends that went to Miami,” Moore said. “What was so striking, many of these guys, traditionally, were guys who had not been noted to be very friendly to the media. But once these guys, these Miami legends, found out I went to Miami University, their eyes would light up and they would say, ‘Well what do you want to know?’ Because it just had that magnetism about it.”

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Photo by Terence Moore | The Miami Student

Moore is also the author of "The Real Hank Aaron," a book of one of the greatest sluggers in baseball history (pictured with Moore above).

Moore is currently a national sports columnist for Forbes.com and has a weekly TV show in Atlanta called Sports Zone Sunday. Moore is also a contributor for the NFL Network, MSNBC Sports, and ESPN Outside the Lines. He previously wrote for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 25 years, becoming the first Black sports columnist in the South.

“[Being the first], I was always aware that it was bigger than me and that however I reacted, or didn't react, was going to affect people for generations to come, and certainly immediately,” Moore said. “What made it easier for me to do was the examples I had of my parents.”

Moore has been surrounded by “firsts” his entire life. His father was the first Black supervisor of AT&T. His mother was the first Black supervisor of the Milwaukee branch of the Federal Reserve Bank. His younger brother, Darrell, was the first Black baseball player at the University of Wisconsin.

“I came from a family of Jackie Robinsons,” Moore said.

In 2014, Moore returned to Miami as a visiting professor where he taught journalism to students like former Miami Student Editor-In-Chief Chris Vinel.

“I used to follow him out to his car after class, he and I would walk out to his car together and he’d still kind of continue on with a story he was telling in class and go just a little bit beyond what we talked about that day and share an extra tip with me,” Vinel said. “It was just incredible stuff. I ate it up.”

Vinel, a 2021 graduate, served as sports editor before becoming editor-in-chief for The Student. He is currently a sports reporter for the Daytona Beach News Journal covering high school and college sports.

“Every time I sit down to write it's almost like I can hear Terence in my head, telling me the things that we went over in class or that we talk about all the time,” Vinel said. “He said he learned these principles from mentors he had early on in his career and he's carried them with him throughout the decades.”

sachanz@miamioh.edu

@NissoSacha