The Press Box - J.R. Moehringer on Writing ‘The Tender Bar,’ the Art of Memoir, and His Career Writing for Newspapers

Episode Date: December 28, 2021

Bryan is joined by journalist J.R. Moehringer to discuss his career working at The New York Times and Los Angeles Times before then discussing his memoir ‘The Tender Bar.’ They touch on details of the memoir including Moehringer’s reason for writing the book, the significance of the bar Publicans, and how it was received by the individuals featured. Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: J.R. Moehringer  Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Head into the Ringerverse to stay up to date with all things superheroes and nerd culture entertainment. Hosted by a rotating lineup of super fans at The Ringer, including Mallory Rubin and Van Lathen, shows will provide instant reactions to blockbuster releases, insightful backstories on canon, and mind-bending theories, as well as fresh takes on the latest news and rumors. Check out The Ringerverse on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Happy holidays, media consumers, and welcome to Pressbox Friday. Brian Curtis of The Ringer here along with producers.

Erica Servantes. This year we made four inductions into what you might call the press box nonfiction pantheon. Back in January, we had John Crackauer talk about Into the Wild. Eric Schlosser described reporting and writing Fast Food Nation. And I was even able to get in a question or two to Bill Walton about David Halberstam's The Breaks of the Game. Today's entry in the nonfiction pantheon is a memoir. It's the Tinder Bar by J.R. Moringer. The Tinder Bar is the basis of a new movie starring Ben Affleck and directed by George Clooney.

No disrespect to those guys, but to me, it will always be a book. Tender Bar is an unbelievably well-written life story. We see Mooringer at the beginning in Manhasset, Long Island as a kid whose father has disappeared from his life. We follow Mooringer through his childhood all the way to Yale, where he falls in love, and finally to the newsroom of the New York Times, where his journalism career gets off to a wobbly start. So Moringer is one figure in the book. The other figure is a bar, a manhasset bar called Publicans, a bar that features all these men who become surrogate dads in Moringer's life.

If you've heard this pod, you've probably heard me say my dad died when I was 11 years old. As a kid, I remember searching sports radio stations for substitute male audio tracks, voices to fill that void in my life. Moringer found those voices at publicans, men throwing back drinks and talking about the New York Mets or old movies or even in great literature. Moringer listened to those voices. And when he was old enough to drink, he'd join them.

And eventually Publican's bar itself became kind of a father figure to him. So doing a pod on a book like The Tender Bar is me telling you, you got to read this. But first, I want to understand how it got written, how you plumb your own life for that kind of insight and beauty. Here's J.R. Moringer on the Tender Bar. J.R., I love to start off by asking about a writer's early days in journalism. In this case, those days were actually in the tender bar.

What was your first job at the New York Times like? I was a copy boy. That was my formal title. I worked the overnight shift, which then I think was 7 p.m. till 2 a.m.ish, but it was pretty loose on the back end. Because sometimes if there was a big disaster or crime, we were sent out to cover that as copy boys. girls. I don't know what they call them these days. But yeah, it was not glorious, you know, a lot of fetching food and coffee, a lot of answering phones. And this will sound totally primitive to a lot of people, but a lot of separating carbons. That was a huge part. You know, there'd be

a machine that would spit out a printout and it would have 10, copies and it would be your job for hours to separate those copies and fold them a certain way because believe it or not editors all wanted it folded a certain way some like to fold it in thirds others like to fold it in half and then you drop that in there in basket i mean that was my start in journalism for and i spent a long time doing those kinds of things and the prize for being a copy of a boy during that period is you get a month long audition as a reporter yeah And you got sent out to write about the murder of a man named Stephen Kelly. Can you tell us what happened during that period?

Yeah. Well, the long and the short of it is that I misspelled his name, the family's name. And I think I made the mistake of taking it off the police report. And police reports are just, you know, they're notorious, the spellings, the misspellings. because the police at the scene have other things to worry about besides, you know, correct spelling. And I had a kind of a, had a very weird exchange with the family. I did ask them how to spell their name. And I said, your name was spelled wrong in another newspaper.

And they said, yeah. And I said, I then said it's K-E-L-L-Y. And they were saying, yeah, back to me as if that was how it was spelled in the newspaper. But I thought that that was what the, anyway, we, I was not a very good communicator. I was nervous. It was one of my first big stories. So it was a series of errors, careless errors on my part. And I made the ultimate mistake, at least, you know, it was a time when mistakes were viewed differently, I think. So the name appeared in the newspaper and it was wrong. And I remember feeling just devastated. And I remember my bosses. My boss is.

being devastated. It really felt like the end of my career. And ultimately, at the end of that audition, I mean, it did weigh heavily on the minds of the editors who were trying to decide whether or not I was going to be promoted to full-time reporter. I was never told if that was decisive. There were plenty of other things for them to find fault with in my performance. I mean, I was very young. I was very inexperienced. So it's not the only mistake I made. And for all I know, it may not have even made their top 10 list of mistakes. But also, you know, as somebody who grew up feeling very self-conscious about my name, not only because it's difficult to pronounce, but also because I felt dissociated from it.

I'm a junior. I'm named after a father I never knew. That always created problems. I'd had a big beef with the New York Times about my byline. I didn't want dots in JR because. it's not my initials, it stands for junior. So I came to the whole question of identity and naming with a lot of emotional baggage. I was not the kind of person who would shrug off making a mistake like that. And I was, you know, I was very hard on myself. I was a perfectionist. So, you know,

maybe I overrated their reaction. I just, I don't know. It was a very kind of, you know, a mysterious process about how you were promoted, why you weren't promoted. But years later, when I sat down to write a memoir, and I looked back at my time at the New York Times, you know, it was one of the darkest memories came rushing back to me. And that's just an experience you never want as a journalist to see your story in the paper the next day and to see an error that you made and to know it's going to have. have to be corrected and to know that it's going to mean a lot to the people that you wrote about. You know, when I mentioned to the sons of the man who was killed, when I mentioned to them

that I noticed your dad's name was misspelled in another newspaper. You know, they looked sorrowful about it. So I thought to myself, I'm going to be the one to get this right. So I went off and I misspelled it also. 1990, you go to the Rocky Mountain News, a paper that's now closed in Denver. And I heard this story once from Adam Schaefter. Rocky Mountain News is looking for its inaugural Colorado Rockies beatwriter. The guy who gets a job was Tracy Ringlesby, legendary baseball guy.

And the two runners up for the job were Adam Schaefter and you. Is that true? Sort of. I don't know that I was a runner up. Adam might have been a runner up. But I don't think I made runner up status. I don't even think I was ever considered that seriously. It was another audition situation, and the audition was you covered a World Series game from your home.

You know, you watched the game and you wrote it up and you filed it just as if you were in the press box at the stadium. And again, it was a case of just not knowing how to do that. In this case, thank goodness, I wasn't learning on the job. I was just learning, you know, in my apartment. The sports editor at the time, he just really had no use for my copy. You know, I loved baseball. I adored baseball, and I found out that is not enough to qualify you as a baseball writer. It was a shock to me.

Wow, you mean you can love baseball this much and really stink at writing about baseball. And I remember that conversation vividly with the sports editor, where he told me that my copy was terrible. And I also remember, again, just as, you know, just the same as the misspelling scandal at the New York Times, thinking my career, my life was over. I was pretty, pretty melodramatic in my youth. But I really thought that this was, you know, a lifelong dream and it was, and I'd fallen short. And, you know, what now? Looking back, I don't know how Adam feels, but looking back, it's just about the best thing that ever happened to me.

in my life. I really, I was not cut out to be a baseball beat writer, you know, traveling around with a team. Those guys are great at what they do, but they have a different metabolism than I do. I like to take my time with a story. You know, I thought I was applying to be Roger Angel, and that was not, that was not the job description. It was run and gun. And just, it's, it's, it's, it's a miracle because I do think that before I tried out, I had a shot. You know, I'd done good work at the paper. So, you know, perish the thought that I like, I might have done a good job of covering that World Series from my apartment and, you know, and gotten signed on as the number two

baseball writer because that would have been a disaster for everybody involved. You've written lots about sports at newspapers and then later at places like ESPN magazine. What's interesting to you about sports writing? Well, you know, early on in my life, when I thought it would be just great to be a writer, I kind of made myself a promise that, you know, I would always find a way to write about sports. Sports is just central to my life. I've always loved sports. You know, as I say, I love baseball, but I love all sports.

And it just, I don't know what sports fan can really explain why they love. love it, why it's so important, but it is just absolutely, you know, it's critical to just my enjoyment of life. And it means so much, like, it's not just a diversion. It's not just entertaining, but I find tremendous meaning, metaphorical meaning, you know, philosophical meaning in sports. The careers of athletes are kind of analogs for our journey through life. The athletes I admire kind of teach me something about, you know, how to live your life. And I, and I, and I, I see a tremendous relationship between athletics and writing, you know, as a lot of writers have, you know, that battle with your own, your own self, that constant struggle to kind of think

clearly and to perform in the moment and to be in the moment and to be selfless. I think there's a lot in sports about, you know, putting the team ahead of your own interests. And I think that there's a lot of, there's a lot that can be learned by writers and that. So I always wanted to write about sports. And I've been lucky that I've always been able to either write about it full time or come back to it periodically. There's a lot of sports in not only my memoir, but in books that I write with other people. and so, you know, I hope that always continues to be true, that I'm always able to dip in and out of writing about this subject that I love, this inexhaustible source of pleasure for me.

Speaking of which, you get to the LA Times in 1994, that's where you meet a man who claim to be the boxer Bob Satterfield, big heavyweight from the 1950s. How'd you get on to that story? A police reporter named Lynn Romney, Lee Romney, came to me one day. I was sitting at my desk and working on something else, and she said she'd gotten this tip from the cops. And she knew I love sports, and she knew I loved boxing, and she knew I was looking for something to sink my teeth into. And she said, the cops say that there's this great heavyweight from the 50s

who's living on the streets right here in Orange County. and, you know, I don't have time to chase this. Will you? Would you be interested? And I, you know, it was out of the door like a shot. I mean, the golden era of boxing, you know, the A.J. Liebling era of boxing, the idea that there was a great heavyweight sleeping on the streets. I wanted to know all I could know about that.

And I found him in pretty short order and started a friendship with him. And that began an absolutely insane adventure. because his name was Bob Satterfield. He was tremendously famous in the 50s, fought some real marquee fights, and knew or fought some of the greatest fighters of the era. And as I was getting ready to publish a huge profile of this guy, discovered that Bob Satterfield had died in Chicago some years before.

So that was a problem because if Bob Satterfield had been buried in Chicago. Who was I spending all this time with? And I ran out and I gave him a test. I said, he went by the name Champ on the streets. And I said, champ, everybody says you're dead. So what's the story? And he said, I'm the champ.

I'm the one. Who says that? So I gave him a test on Bob Satterfield that only Bob Satterfield would be able to pass. And he got an A-plus. So now I had a real problem. Who did they bury in Chicago? And who was this guy I was talking to?

And my editor at the time was Marty Barron, the famous legendary Marty Barron. And to his credit, amazingly, Marty let me chase that story to its illogical conclusion and then write a huge, you know, behemoth, I think 11,000 word piece about, not just about who he was, but how he'd fooled me, why he'd fooled me. all the weird emotional cross currents, you know, my own baggage that I brought to it. And he ran that thing at length in the paper. And, you know, I'll be forever grateful to him for that opportunity. And how many months passed between you finding the man claiming to be Satterfield and this actually appearing in the paper? Many.

I mean, something close to, I'll say nine months, you know, if not more. and I was haunted by it. There was just, this was, I mean, Google existed. This was 97. Google existed, but it wasn't, you know, it's, there was an evolution to what we have, what we take for granted today. You could, you could not really just go to Google and ask things. There was more of a dance.

And there wasn't, just wasn't as much information there. And so, it was, it was really the kind of mystery that made. Maybe you could clear up today in five minutes, but back then it took five months and it took flying around the country. And it took just really figuring out who was in the ground in Chicago and who was on this park bench in Orange County. And how had their paths ever crossed? Why did this guy in Orange County, if he was Satterfield, you know, who'd they bury? If he was in Satterfield, how did he know exactly who, you know, everything there was to know about Satterfield? So it was a great mystery.

And I think that gives the piece some suspense, but it was pretty experimental to let me bring all these, you know, all these parts of me to it. And that, and I was, I was licensed in doing that by an absolutely brilliant editor, the greatest editor I've ever worked with in my life, Kit Rackless. He was the second break, apart from having Marty as my, you know, overall boss. The second break I call it was having Kit Rackless as my day-to-day editor on that. I mean, he's asked anyone who's ever worked with him. He's a straight genius.

And it was his idea to write about why this haunts you, write about why a guy leaving, disappearing, why identity among men is so tormenting to you. So, yeah, I was aided by a lot of people in that story. Yeah, that's right on the edge for newspapers. Stylistically in 1997, no. Lots of I, I, I, I, I. Lots of I, I, I, I.

So much I, I, I. And so many side roads, so many digressions. It was, I mean, it was experimental, was, you know, a total unicorn for newspapers back then. I mean, I don't even know today where a piece like that would run, you know, if anywhere other than your personal, your personal, blog. But we felt at the time that we were doing something, that we were trying something pretty cool. We thought this could really fail spectacularly, but let's have fun failing, you know, if that's to be the case.

Resurrecting the Champs published in May of 97, how did that change your fortunes at the LA Times? There are a few pieces that I've written in my journalism life where I can really point to and say, you know, that one changed my life. And that is pretty close to the top of the list. You know, I was languishing in the Orange County Bureau of the LA Times. I just was not happy there. They weren't super happy with me. I wasn't finding subjects that inspired me.

I just wasn't happy. I was so unhappy that I applied for a job in the PR department at Fox TV. I mean, if that, you know, and so yeah, I mean, Suddenly, I kind of felt like I found what I want to do or maybe just reminded myself what I want to do or, you know, apart from working with Marty and Kit a lot. And then the newspaper, you know, the piece got such a positive reaction. The newspaper promoted me to national correspondent. And suddenly I wasn't in Orange County anymore. I was in Atlanta covering, you know, the deep south.

And doing it in a very autonomous way, you know, I got to decide what was interesting and, and, where to go and just started really just, I don't know, just started growing. I think that I finally started to get a little traction as a reporter and as a writer. I mean, there were struggles. There was a steep learning curve with that job too. But I think I finally felt like I was on the right path for the first time and a long time as a journalist. And it's all a result of that piece.

Come back to the LA Times in a bit. But take us back to your childhood in Manhattan. Hassan on Long Island. What kind of bar was publicans? Yeah, well, when I was when I was quite young, it was called Dickens. And there was a big silhouette of Charles Dickens on the sign and, and also on the jerseys of the softball team. And, you know, that kind of triangulated with the leather-bound set of Dickens in my grandparents' house. And so I was asking people, who's this Dickens guy and why is everything named after him? And I was told, you know, he's a writer who has this incredibly fertile imagination and dreams up all these different people and characters

and writes these huge books and, you know, I became aware of great expectations and Oliver Twist probably, you know, through the movies first. But so, yeah, the bar was called Dickens first. And then they remodeled the bar and they changed the name to publicans, which kind of just really, I didn't know what that, I didn't know what publican was an innkeeper or a tavern. basically a bartender. I just, you know, it was called publicans for much of my young adult life. And the bar was kind of everything to me. I had no father growing up.

My dad was a rock and roll DJ in New York. So I knew what he sounded like. I heard him on the radio all the time, but I didn't know what he looked like. And I was desperate for replacements. I was just the only son of a single mom who would leave me with. with my grandma when she went off to work. So I had a lot of, I had those two strong women in my life

and I felt very loved, you know, and I was very well cared for, but I really felt this deep need for, you know, some male presence, a male voice. And pretty early on, found them in that bar where my uncle was the kind of senior bartender. And so with him as my guide, I started to meet guys in that bar,

and started to spend time with them and go to the beach with them. And so the bar just absolutely became central to me. Like it was, I idealized it. I thought of it as a place where, you know, father surrogates existed for me. And I had the most Disney-like vision of the bar. Like, you know, that's where cool guys hang out,

guys who pay attention to me, guys who tell me stories, guys who, you know, buy me sports illustrated, guys who ask me questions, you know, the way only older guys ask, you know, little boys questions, you know. So it was, the bar was really everything to me. You mentioned your uncle, Charlie, who was the bartender there.

What was he like behind the bar at Publicans? He was so eccentric and so funny and so brilliant. And he had, you know, he was a great athlete in high school and then spent a year or two in college. And that didn't work out. I think he came home on a motorcycle and crashed the motorcycle coming home. You know, I mean, that James Dean kind of guy. So by the time I knew him, he was lanky. He lost all of his hair to alopecia and he was very self-conscious about it.

So the bar was a place where he not only hid but also felt loved and accepted. It was dark and it was smoky and people just kind of looked past this thing that he was so self-conscious about. And he had, you know, with a couple of drinks in him and the bar in front of him between him and the outer world, he had so much swag. You know, it wasn't just that he was a great storyteller and had great stories to tell, stories of his own life, but also stories he heard at the bar. But he had an absolute way of telling a story. the way he used language, the inflections, the facial expressions, the cigarette as a prop. I mean, the guy was just theater. And so, you know, a legend in my hometown, even people who didn't go to the bar knew Chas.

My uncle Charlie was known far and wide as Chas or goose. That was another nickname for him. And I thought this was so cool. I mean, my dad was famous. His face was on billboards and buses. He was one of the good guys. That was the name for a group of really famous DJs who came along with rock and roll, the good guys,

I think WABC or WNBC. And so my dad was famous, but Uncle Charlie was more kind of palpably famous. He was really famous. Like there's some story my cousin McGraw tells about Chaz being driven around far afield of Manhasset. like, you know, somewhere out on the island. They got lost and they stopped and they asked a stranger for,

they rolled down the window and said, can you tell us how to get to somewhere? And this person on the side of the road said, hey, Chas, yeah, you just go down here. And I mean, 100 miles from Manhasset, this person just immediately knew my uncle. So I felt like royalty kind of, you know, to be the nephew of Chas Maguire. That counted for something. And then when I could start going to the bar, when I could walk in the bar, and say, you know, hey, Uncle Charlie and get a kiss and get my hair, you know, messed up,

and get a drink put in front of me by, you know, the crowned prince of Manhasset. That was, that all felt pretty good. So it's a surrogate, so it's a group of surrogate fathers, and then it's also this peak into the forbidden adult world when you're a kid. Yeah. Yeah, and these guys talked about things that my mom wasn't really, you know, interested in, you know, like the Brooklyn Dodgers and Rocky Marciano and Norman Mailer and, and, you know, just they, their point of view was it's that you need that as a boy, becoming a man. You just, you need to hear that kind of, that male conversation.

And I was, you know, I joke about it sometimes I say, my mom trusted these guys more than she, more than she might have, more than she should have. and, you know, they were not, you know, the advice they gave out was not 100% sterling, you know, it was not, this was not the Manhattan Project, but I don't mean to make it seem like more than it was, but the point is that to me at the time it seemed like more than it was. And I was very lucky that these guys, they're all of them, their hearts were in the right place. You know, they weren't, you know, all of these guys weren't exactly thriving. and they hadn't had, you know, the best luck in life, all of them.

But they were really, they were good guys. And they had strong moral compass, each of them. And even though, you know, they had their limits, I was quite lucky in that they were really a good group. They really took good care of me. So I, you know, it was unconventional and it was risky. But my mom thought and told me years later that, you know, better guys who were, you know, limited or not exactly, you know, conventionally role models than none at all. You know, she worried who I might find on my own, if not from my uncle and these guys. And I think that's a legit worry.

I think a lot of boys in my position with no father looking for a surrogate can find themselves in a really bad situation. We know that to be true. So, yeah, I mean, they were really, I look back and when I talk about them, I'm filled with love and affection for them all the time, even though my cousin McGraw, who had the same relationship with them as I did, you know, we laugh sometimes about the advice they gave out. their worldview. It wasn't perfect,

but at the time, it was so essential to us. You mentioned the Dickens silhouette and the Dickens volumes at the bar. What's so entertaining to me about the memoir, one of the things, is that these people really like to read a lot of denizens at the bar.

They really like words. They actually use that dictionary that's behind the bar. Every bar, they actually pull it down and open it up. Did you, is this you learning to be a storyteller

when you're sitting there a little bit later learning to keep up with those guys compete with those guys in terms of being able to tell a story and tell it well you know i don't really know if i i know that i learn to love stories um and and to love books from those guys but my my memory um as limited and as flawed as it as it must be my memory is mostly listening and and watching them tell stories. I didn't, I didn't speak up too much, you know, not until much later when I started going there after college, when I was a copy boy at the New York Times, you know, I started speaking more, but it was a long apprenticeship of just listening to these guys and loving the way they told stories,

loving the way they cracked each other up, loving the way they would carry, you know, a book with them at all times, along with like every newspaper, you know, we'd stop off at at Tiamo stationary store on the way out of town, on the way to the beach or on the way to Shea Stadium. And they'd go in, they'd buy every newspaper in the English language. The Daily News, the New York Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsday, the racing forum. I mean, it was just, how could I not become a newspaper journalist?

And then on top of that slab of newspapers, they'd have a paperback, you know. And then on the way to the beach, they'd talk about not only the news, also what they were reading. The way they revered books and writers, you know, Pete Hamill and just, and Breslin and just that got in. So I listened to that more than, you know, I never really felt like I was auditioning for them. But, you know, they were all, maybe they weren't frustrated writers, but they were all great

readers. And that dictionary behind the bar got pulled out 20 times a night to settle a bed. or because somebody used a word wrong. I think there's a story, and I think I included in the memoir. I used the word panache in a story at the New York Times, and the copy editor just, I mean, absolutely handed it to me. I'd used it wrong, you know, and I shouldn't have even been used. You shouldn't have been used, you should need a permit to use the word panash, you know,

in a newspaper story. So I'd used it wrong, and I went back to the bar, ashamed of myself and down on myself. Uncle Charlie said, well, what does the word mean? And I said, I'm still not here. I'm still not sure. So he grabbed the dictionary and from behind the bar, massive dictionary, held together with electrical tape and he dropped it on the bar next to my drink and said, find out, learn something. And he walked away and I opened the dictionary and Panash was circled and someone had written Chaz next to the word.

And when he came back, I said, did you, this is unbelievable. Did you know that somebody? And he looked, he was so unflable. He said, huh, imagine that. And it didn't really phase. him. But he did, he did have Panash, and that was proof positive that that dictionary was well-loved, well-used. I wonder what became of it, you know, when the bar went out of business. Wish I had it today. So you mentioned being a young journalist and going in there. What kind of needs

is publicans filling for you during that period? Well, booze and cigarettes. That was a big need at that point in my life. But, you know, for me, I was punching above my weight. You know, I was I was lucky enough to get a job as a copy boy at the New York Times, but I just wasn't ready. I, you know, even getting food was a challenge for getting the order right. Never mind, getting the facts right in a story. So I needed encouragement. I needed handholding. I needed guys to tell me, you know, just take a breath, just take it one story at a time.

I needed to just, I just needed to be with people who were loyal to me and who kind of believed in me. that was that was really critical because i was i was filled with self-doubt and it was legit self-doubt you know i was in a job that was uh that was over my head and um so it filled a need that i certainly wasn't aware at the time that it was that it was fulfilling um to have a place where you could go at the end of a shift at the new york times where you know you were you were told either implicitly or explicitly that you are no good to have a place to go after that and have guys, you know, either talk to you about other things or just, you know, hear about, hear about your day or to hear about their day or day and realize it's going to be okay. That was vital.

When did it occur to you to start taking notes on what people in the bar were saying? I forever. I mean, there were, you know, I just thought these guys were so funny. And so my first attempts at short stories, I was either trying to turn. things I'd heard about at the bar, things I thought about at the bar, things I'd seen these guys. It was always taking things they said and putting them into fictional stories or just, you know, putting them in, I always kept notebooks. And so I can't even remember a time when taking notes wasn't a part of my experience of that bar. Yeah. And your first idea was to write a novel about publicans? Forever. That was what I wanted to do. That was what I aimed to do and tried often to do.

I tried to write short stories about the bar. I tried to write a novel about the bar and tried and tried. It's funny because I read the first paragraph of the tender bar. We went there for everything we needed. We went there when thirsty, of course, and when hungry and when dead tired. We went there when happy to celebrate and when sad to sulk. You almost could start a novel that way. You plunge very quickly into journalism and memoir.

It could be the opening paragraph of a novel about publicans. Hmm. Well, maybe that, you know, maybe that novelistic sense never, never leaves you know, maybe that's why I saw the bar as, you know, more than it was because I had, you know, I'd been influenced or corrupted by all the novels I'd read. But, you know, I remember that that opening did not come easily to me. I had to sit for a, a long time and really think about what it was I wanted to say about that bar. But when I did write that opening, you know, it felt like the first time I'd ever really put into words what that bar meant, not just to me, but to my hometown. So behind every memoir is this idea that you can make your life interesting enough that other people will want to read about it. What got you across that threshold? Well, I don't know if that is the idea behind every memoir. You know, I think that,

might be the idea behind the memoirs I like, you know, that the memoirist tried to find something in their life that would resonate with other lives. And then that was certainly my aim, you know, I wanted to, I wanted to write a memoir that wasn't about me, per se, you know. I wanted to write about the people who kind of saved me. There's a line from, an Auden poem where he writes about faces along the bar. And I wanted that to be the title of my memoir, but there was a history of working class saloons in Chicago that had just used that title.

But, I mean, that was the spirit of my intent, you know, it was to write about the faces along the bar, to write about what they taught me and how they shaped me and how they saved me and how they led me astray. So that was my goal. And that grew out of some really magical sessions I had while on a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard with a brilliant, wonderful guy named John Stauffer, an expert in early American literature, among other things, but also in American memoir.

And I knocked on his office door one day and told him I wanted to write a memoir and would he tutor me privately? Can you imagine if somebody came to you? I mean, I was laughing with my wife about this the other night. Imagine somebody knocking on your door, you're busy. And they say, I'm thinking about writing a book, would you maybe create a syllabus for me and spend, I don't know, two or three days a week with me, two hours each shot?

And talk about books. And this wonderful guy said, yeah, that sounds like fun. I mean, I just, it's just God love him for sake. But we had some amazing sessions. And the memoirs that worked for both of us were the ones that were about someone other than the narrator, or about something other than the narrator. So that was my goal. I wanted to write a memoir about this place and about these people, and that's where I wanted the focus to be.

And then, of course, I would be the, I was the lens. So, I mean, my development would just be kind of implicit. It would be, you know, and the central person who saved me was the person who almost never went to the bar. And that was my mom, you know. So, but she sent me into that bar in a manner of speaking. And she saved me from that bar, you know, deliberately. So she is the kind of, she's the beginning in the end, the alpha and the omega of the memoir. So you sit down, you have these conversations you've written down over the years.

What other materials do you have to kind of reference as you try to write and construct this thing? Well, I had interviews. I was very lucky that, you know, pretty much everybody I wanted to write about was still there, still around. And they were as indulgent of me as John Stauffer, you know, when I went. to them and said, I'm thinking about writing a book, will you sit down with me and try and recreate conversations we had or tell me that story you told me 10 years ago? Because I really, they said yes. They all said yes. And so I was doing this Neiman Fellowship at Harvard, but I was running back from

Boston downtown Manhasset, constantly, you know, interviewing people from my childhood. You know, memoirs get a lot of grief for recreated dialogue. It's an impediment to people enjoying a memoir. They said, how does somebody remember these conversations, you know? I don't know, I guess it doesn't occur to people that you can interview people from your life, that you can, you know, first of all, that you might have taken notes in real time, but also I went to people with fabulous memories. And I said, do you remember that time we talked about such and so? And together we would recreate. And sometimes I'd have a note on a bar napkin. And so the dialogue in my book is, it's recreated, but not from thin air. It's recreated with, you know, almost always with the,

with the help of the actual people involved. And my cousin McGraw, a big part of the book, who was often shoulder to shoulder with me in the bar, has a photographic memory. So he was an invaluable resource. You mentioned the people were helpful. What was their initial reaction when you told them you were going to write a book that was going to incorporate not only the bar,

but all these conversations you'd had with them? It was pretty much all over the map. I mean, a lot of disbelief, like, you know, really? somebody's going to want to read about conversations we had in publicans 20 years ago. And who could blame them for that? But also, there was a lot of fear. I mean, if there's a place where off the record is the guiding mantra, it's in a bar on Long Island at 2 a.m., you know, never mind Vegas. You know, what happened in publicans was it was sacrosanct.

Like, we were all bound by a code of, you know, this goes nowhere. So I didn't need their permission. That's, you know, as a memoirist, you're entitled to write about where your life intersects with others. And a lot of memoirists do it. They throw people close to them under the bus all the time. But I felt just, I wanted to do it. And I got permission from everybody, even the people who are most fearful and had the most to lose. And there were some pretty, you know, some pretty dark secrets that people told me about, you know, in the bar.

I really had to I had to be very careful with those people and say, you know, I just think this book is going to be less if you don't let me use that conversation. But I won't use it if you don't want me to. But please let me because. And so I had that conversation a lot with a lot of different people.

And not one person ultimately denied me permission. And you say in the book, you know, you were not only able to get their sort of blessing and permission, but in all but a few cases, you were actually able to use their real names in the book. Yeah. So they were okay with that. I will be portrayed again. Sometimes it's not first name, last name, but I will be portrayed in this book under my real name. Somebody could come figure out who I am and they were they were at peace with it. Yes. I everybody said yes to that.

And then in the case of like, you know, romantic relationships, I didn't even, I didn't even bothered to ask for permission. I just felt like those relationships were so fraught. You know, they were, they were so private that I just, I didn't, I didn't even ask for permission. I just changed the names in those cases. So, um, that's, that's the only, those are the only names that I, I changed in the book. And then the, but the guys I grew up with, my father, all my family members, those are the real names, the actual names. And, um, and I think, you know, there was a moment where I thought about just changing all the

different names. Why, why take a chance that someone's going to feel. exposed or hurt. But then I was then I started to feel like revering into novel territory again. You know, once you, you know, once you change the reader says, well, how much else did you change? You know, so I had to draw the line, uh, somewhere. And, and that's where I chose to draw it. How much of the meaning of the place did you have in your head before you started writing and how much was reveal when you sat down and actually started to write it? You know, what? Those first drafts, it was really, I was exploring and I was questioning and doubting. I, I, I,

I had the same feeling that a lot of the guys from the bar had, like, you know, is this, does this matter? Is this, does it matter to anyone besides me? Does it matter to me even? And I didn't know enough about, I didn't know any other memoirists at the times. I didn't know that that's just part of the process that, you know, you're doing it wrong as a memoirist if you're not asking yourself, who cares? because if you're not asking who cares, then you are, you know, you're in narcissism territory. If you're writing and thinking, oh, wait, of the world, here's this story from my life. That is the wrong attitude.

So it was a healthy self-loathing that I was feeling while I was writing. Who cares is a really, it's a painful question, but it's a valuable question to ask yourself while you're working on a memoir. Because in answering that, you know, you try and position the narrative so that people do care. You know, you look for the things in your story that feel more universal. So even though it's very uncomfortable to wonder if there's any relevance to the way you're spending your days, it's very, very important that you do that. So there's the who cares question. I would also think there's the question of how much of yourself you're going to reveal. Did you catch yourself stopping at the 10-yard line to use a sports metaphor at times and have to push yourself to reveal more?

No, I felt that I was asking so much of so many people. You know, my uncle, deeply private person. My mom was just an incredibly private person, introverts, both of them. And the guys in the bar, even the ones with the most flamboyant personalities, you know, they were all hiding from one thing or another. So to ask them to let me use their stories, I had to, I had to settle the question of whether or not I was going to be brave about what I revealed. And the memoirs, again, that resonated for me and John Stoffer were the ones where the narrator was not just overcoming a certain reluctance, but just, but just brave. It just felt like a settled question before the

first page ever got written. I'm going to tell you the truth about myself, that you can feel that, I think, from a narrator. And I think that's so important. When you're reading a memoir and you feel like things are being withheld from you, very off-putting. And you just think, what's the point here? So, yeah, I didn't have to push myself. I had to have that talk with myself before I ever started writing.

Like, are you ready to do this? Are you ready to go here? And as a journalist, I've been writing so often about people, you know, trying to imagine my way into their life. So it was kind of a relief for me to just to know, you know, and to not have to ask permission, to not have to imagine. So I think that was the stronger feeling like, oh, I have access to these facts and these stories

rather than a kind of squeamishness about it. And I was well past those events. So I'd kind of forgiven myself from my mistakes, you know, most of them. And I'd done the emotional work. Like I'd, I was cried out, you know, and I'd process the traumas and the disappointments. I was ready to write and I was ready to reveal. How long did it take you to write the book?

About two years. I would take, I wrote a good chunk of it while I was on an even fellowship. and then I went back to the LA Times, and so I would write at night and on the weekends while doing my full-time job at the LA Times, which was not easy. And so it wasn't two full years, but I think it was, yeah, it was about maybe closer to three

by the time you factor in, you know, the delays, the editing and so on and so forth. Tenderbars published in 2005, and the people who were in the book reacted, how? for the most part very positively i was so heartened um one of the first things i did was a bookstore event in manhasset and um big turnout you know and um maybe i think there were 300 people there that night and i started off by saying you know i wanted to acknowledge the people in the book who were there in the crowd and so i said names and people like bobo and bob the cop and you know they stood up and

McGraw, and there were gasps in the crowd because people had kind of forgotten that these were real people. And so standing up and getting a round of applause, you know, that was, that was a good feeling for these people. And it felt so good for me to be able to like kind of pay homage to them publicly. And then, you know, my mom is, is just, she's such a, she's the hero of the book or the heroin. And so the reaction to her was so heartwarming, so gratifying. for me, you know, she just, she got fan mail and she got phone calls in the middle of the night from single moms who were, you know, at their wits end about what to do, how to, how to make it, how to survive. And when she came with me to a bookstore event, she was just surrounded by people,

you know, wanting, you know, a few minutes of a time, wanting her autograph. It was just, so the reaction from her was just, she never expected to get, such approval in such a public way. She never wanted it, never sought it. But you can see how you could see at the time how much it meant to her. And that was, boy, that was worth the price of admission for me. Your uncle Charlie is such a huge figure in your life and in the book. And you write at the end of the book that he essentially vanished. Did you ever reconnect with him? He did vanish. He disappeared. And then he had such a flare for the dramatic. He he reappeared on the first day of my book tour very sick he he turned up but a

a hospital uh i think i remember and then um sadly he died on the very last day of my book tour so i was going on stage at the miami book fair and got word backstage that he had just passed it was classic uncle charlie you know so um in the middle of the book tour i ran off and saw him he was too ill, too weak to read the book, which was really so sad. But the nurse is taking care of him in this kind of hospice situation. They were reading the book at the nursing station. And I liked to think that it influenced the way they took care of him, that they thought or they saw that he really mattered to a lot of people.

So that felt, I don't know, that felt important that the book came along in time for the last people who were with him to know about him. And, you know, I do think they took extra good care of him because they saw how essential he was to me and a lot of other people. You're still at the LA Times when the book came out. Did you see this book as potentially being something to propel you out of newspapers and on to another part of your career? No, not at all. I mean, I wasn't looking for a way out of newspapers. I thought I would write for newspapers forever. But I had a view of newspaper writing that was very influenced by my, you know, hero worship of guys like Pete Hamill, like you write for newspapers and then you take a break and you write a book and then you go back to newspapers. And, you know, that's, that seemed like the life.

So this just seemed like part of what you do as a newspaper writer kind of. And so, yeah, that was the farthest thing from my mind, having the book provide a way out of newspapers. But that ultimately wound up being what happened. It's a year later that Andre Agassiz calls having read the tender bar? A little more than a year, I think. And I was in San Francisco doing a story about a restaurant run by. ex-cons and so you know once again I was writing about a restaurant that you know had this tremendous sense of community and and I got a phone call and a very familiar voice said hello

this is my name's Andre I play tennis I'm trying to reach share I said and at the moment he was just he was everywhere in America because he was playing his last US Open and so I mean America was having like Andremania. You know, it was the end of a really iconic career. And people were considering him and placing him in his, you know, in the tennis pantheon. And it was just an Andre love in going on. So the idea that this person, everybody was talking about would call it that moment. I said, Andre Agassi, I thought it was one of my friends just, you know, doing a bit.

And yes, this is, oh, you've heard of me. He's so humble. And I said, yeah, that's, I've heard. heard of you. Yes, wow. And he invited me to his final U.S. Open to sit with his wife and his family in their box. And he said he wanted to talk to me about my book, which he was reading. And he was thinking about writing his own memoir and wondering if I would help. And I said, thank you. No. I'm working on this story. And then I went and ultimately had dinner with him in Vegas. And he kind of made a more formal proposal to do this together. I said, thank you.

That's, you know, but no. And I want to write for newspapers forever. And a friendship kind of began. And then things started to fall apart from me at the LA Times. The paper was going through a lot of turmoil. And I called him and said, can I change my no to yes? And he was so fabulous. He was so excited.

And I moved to Vegas. This is just, I actually moved to Las Vegas and lived down the road from him. and we started working on, we had one goal, which was to write a different kind of a sports memoir. And we had no other goals. And it felt crazy. It felt insane.

Every single friend that I had at the time tried to talk me out of it. You mentioned Adam Schaefter. He was at a dinner at the Super Bowl in Arizona that year. Big round table of some of the most famous us sports writers and one of the sports writers said, okay, J.R has been offered this, this collaborating gig with Andre Agassi, and our job is to not leave this table tonight until we've talked them out of doing that. We've all done collaborations.

We've all sworn we would never do them again. We can't leave this restaurant until we've, and we went around the table, and each sports writer told stories about working with famous athletes and growing to despise the athletes and vice versa and almost coming to blows and being disrespected, disregarded. We were crying. We were laughing so hard about one story was worse than the next. And I still did it. And Andre proved them all wrong. He was a total, total champ. All in here, JR. How did the task of writing your own memoir compare with the task of helping him write his? In many ways, the same and in many ways so profoundly different. You know, ultimately you're trying to tell a great story. So it really does start and end in the same place. But

the thing I learned is we are all the same, but we're also, we're all really different. And so there were so many moments where I'd be trying to describe Andre's motivation, you know, why he did what he did. And there was a long period of self-sabotage with him. And I couldn't, I couldn't get there. And we kept trying and trying. And he got me there. And through that process, I realized, you know, what a gap there is between us and other people. But it's not an unbridgeable gap.

It just takes work and it takes time and it takes patience. And it just, it gave me a broader, richer sense of, you know, what you can learn about people just through dogged effort at your empathy skills. and how, you know, with the tender bar, it was a memory quest, like closing my eyes every day and trying to put myself back in the year 1974, 1984, 1984. And with Andre, it was closing my eyes and trying to put myself on center court at Wimbledon. And, you know, so different kind of imagination and using empathy muscles that I hadn't ever used before. but ultimately it wound up informing all my writing like that those skills that you build trying to figure you're trying to think your way into another person's life they're so applicable to so many you know different parts of what I do whether it's journalism or my own writing

or whether it's writing a novel I just found the experience with Andre was just it had it had so many applications down the road never mind that I came out of it you know with a lifelong friendship that, you know, I cherish to this day. I mean, we were, we became brothers through the process. It was really scary. We were really trying to do something that hadn't, that we felt like hadn't been done before. And, you know, as with the tender bar, you know, we just, we thought this could be, this could be a disaster. But, well, let's have fun failing.

J.R. Moringer, thanks for coming on the press box. I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. Thanks again to J.R. Moringer and to the fabulous bookman of Orange County, California for selling me yet another copy of The Tender Bar. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. If you like this episode, I humbly ask you to share it with all the other nonfiction book lovers on social media. And speaking of sharing, I want to announce next month's inductee into the nonfiction pantheon. It's John Lee Anderson's fantastic biography, Che Guevara, a revolutionary life, which, turns 25 years old next year. I told a friend of mine I was doing, Che, and she said, oh my God, that book changed my life.

I want to ask you, how many 700-page biographies can you actually say that about? This is one of them. So that's coming up in January. I want to do one of these great book pods every month next year, so stay tuned for those and please keep me honest. After New Year's Day,

David Shoemaker and I're back with more lukewarm takes about the media. In the meantime, read some journalism, haunt your favorite, use bookstore, and have a fantastic holiday in a great new year. Talk to you soon.