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Unsung Tennis Legend Maurice ‘Mo’ Hunter to Be Announced as 2024 Regional Legend in Black Tennis Hall of Fame

Harry Johal

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Unsung Tennis Legend Maurice ‘Mo’ Hunter to Be Announced as 2024 Regional Legend in Black Tennis Hall of Fame

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The Black Tennis Hall of Fame will recognize renowned tennis legend Maurice “Mo” Hunter as its 2024 Regional Legend. The organization will make the formal announcement in February with an inductees ceremony planned in September at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture.

Hunter began his start in tennis in Detroit, Michigan, in 1968 at 11 years old. It was the start of a Golden Age in tennis, where an emerging new generation of Black, talented and athletic, grassroots-trained tennis players were rising and challenging the sport’s traditional norms.

Hunter picked up an old wooden Wilson racket and took off for his public park courts and started hitting against the backboard. Nine months later, under the tutelage of a local tennis club, he won his first trophy. Since that time, his winning was unstoppable.

In 1973, The Detroit News listed Hunter as one of the finest tennis players in the Public School League, crediting him for having collected 63 trophies in his prep career. He also was the reigning Public Parks Champion and the Northwestern Open Singles and Doubles Champion.

Tennis Illustrated Magazine (May 1974, page 26 article) reported that the ATA Championships boys’ 16 singles winner was Maurice Hunter, along with Juan Farrow, who also competed and was a finalist.

During the 1978 season, Hunter was the Southeastern Michigan Tennis Association (SEMTA) No. 1 Men’s Singles player for the second straight year and was also the first from Detroit to hold a World Computer Ranking in Professional Tennis (ATP) No.1 SEMTA 2nd year.

In Midland’s 1979 Michigan Open Tennis Championships, held Sept. 1-3, sponsored by First Midland Bank and Trust Company, the lithe 22-year-old Hunter, now living in Hollywood, California, with his sister, entered the Men’s Open Singles. Having just won the 1979 Michigan City Invitational Championships, he had an ATP of 290.

It’s described that Hunter was impressive during the three-day event that included a top-notch field of opponent players from over 18 states and 26 countries. He dominated his opponents with impeccable form, deep serves, clutch volleys, and unerring overheads and speeds to reach every ball hit in the court. At the end, Hunter was given a warm standing ovation for the historic first-place finish, making him the first Black player to ever win the Men’s Singles Title in the tournament’s 30-year history. He was also the first player to win the title without the loss of a set.

Unfortunately, Maurice’s sister Cherisse M. Goedhart, executive producer and CEO at CMG Company, was recently conducting research for her movie project about her brother’s historic record and, using Bing AI and other popular search engines, the generated results were disappointing: “I found no evidence of an African-American player winning the Men’s Singles Title Championship at any Michigan Open Tennis tournament.”

Sadly, Maurice Hunter passed away Oct. 17, 2022, in Los Angeles. But it remains to be seen whether his tremendous career in tennis will be remembered in Black History.

Those who knew his generosity of sharing his skills with many underserved students will recall him echoing in training: “Top rankings never scared real tennis champions and legends … actually, it was the other way around!” And sometimes, ”Privilege means nothing!”

For media inquiries, please contact;

Sheila Curry, CEO of Black Tennis Hall of Fame
Tel: (804) 982-9459
sheilacurry@blacktennishalloffame.com

For media inquiries and special appearances of the family of Maurice “Mo” Hunter, please contact:

Cherisse Wilson Goedhart
CMG Company
(657) 385-9066
cherisse.wilson@icloud.com

Source: CMG Company

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Scottsdale Author Joe Reina’s New Novel Follows a Killer Who Gets Away With It

H Johal

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Scottsdale Author Joe Reina’s New Novel Follows a Killer Who Gets Away With It

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Joe Reina has published a new novel, "Shadows over Scottsdale: An Unsolved Murder Mystery," built around a scenario true-crime statistics make uncomfortably familiar: a man commits a devastating crime and simply disappears, leaving investigators and a grieving community with no resolution.

The book follows a character named Robert, who flees the country using forged documents and a cargo ship after an act of destruction that leaves behind, as the publisher describes it, charred remains and an unanswered investigation. The case goes cold. The novel, according to its publisher, is less concerned with the mechanics of the escape than with what happens afterward, to the people left waiting for answers that never come.

Reina, now retired in Scottsdale, spent decades in international business across apparel, footwear, and real estate, with extensive time in Europe and a particular connection to Italy that shaped two earlier books, "The Goat Sleeps in the Kitchen" and "A Love Affair in Tuscany." "Shadows over Scottsdale" marks a different direction, built instead around the real scale of unsolved homicide in the U.S. The publisher’s materials cite roughly 346,000 unsolved homicides since 1965, with more than a dozen occurring unresolved each day. Separate reporting on the book has cited a figure of about 7,778 murders in 2023 alone, which it similarly frames as more than a dozen a day going unresolved.

"Writing ‘Shadows over Scottsdale’ forced me to confront uncomfortable questions about justice itself," Reina said, according to the announcement. "Too many crimes go unsolved, too many families wait endlessly for answers. I wanted readers to understand that behind every cold case statistic is a real story, real suffering, and real questions that may never be answered."

The publisher positions the novel as an examination of institutional limits as much as a crime story: the toll of a case gone cold on the people who can’t move past it, and what it means for a community when accountability simply never arrives.

"Shadows over Scottsdale" is published by Covenant Books and is available in paperback and hardcover through the publisher’s website and major retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple Books.

Cold-case statistics tend to get cited and then forgotten. Studio CarryOnHarry is curious whether fiction built directly around that number does more to stick with a reader than the number alone ever does.

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

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Joe Reina’s ‘Lost Masterpieces’ Imagines a Fictional Farewell Among Renaissance Painters

H Johal

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Joe Reina’s ‘Lost Masterpieces’ Imagines a Fictional Farewell Among Renaissance Painters

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Joe Reina has published a new novel, "Lost Masterpieces: Three Paintings, 500 Years A Journey Through Time," built around an imagined scene from Renaissance history: the night before Leonardo da Vinci leaves for Milan, when three fellow painters each hand him a small work carrying a private message.

According to the announcement, those three gifts come from Sandro Botticelli, Titian, and Andrea Mantegna, each painting standing in for a different kind of counsel. Botticelli’s piece is described as layered with allegory and coded warnings about power and patronage. Titian’s is framed as warm and sensual, suggesting reinvention and a break from convention. Mantegna’s is austere and classically precise, encoding discipline and endurance. According to the announcement, these three paintings form a wordless exchange between masters, transmitting wisdom, mutual regard, and assurance across generations through visual means.

Reina comes to this material from outside the art world. His career was built in apparel, footwear, and real estate development in Chicago, and the publisher’s materials trace his interest in European history, and in Italy specifically, to years of international business travel. He has published several previous books, including "The Goat Sleeps in the Kitchen," "A Love Affair in Tuscany," and "Shadows over Scottsdale," before turning to this account of a fictionalized moment at the hinge of the Renaissance.

"I wanted to capture that extraordinary moment when masters speak to each other across time through their work," Reina said in the announcement. "These paintings represent not just gifts, but a conversation about what it means to pursue greatness while remaining grounded in purpose and principle."

The book is published through Covenant Books and is available in hardcover and paperback, as well as through Apple Books, Amazon, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.

Studio CarryOnHarry is intrigued by novels that build fiction around real historical figures at a specific, dramatized turning point rather than attempting straight biography — the approach succeeds or fails based on how seamlessly the fictional moment integrates with documented historical fact.

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

Are you an author with a new release? We’re always looking for books to cover and authors to interview — tell us about yours here.

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