Furman Bisher's final column

He's 90. What do any of us do better at 90 than we did at 40? You made a judgement of his career based the past few years (in your first post, it was one year you had been reading him ... which is it?).
And if none of us had a right to tell someone else to stfu, this board wouldn't exist. I think it's your turn to lighten up.

 

Try this one on for size.

http://www.ajc.com/sports/bisher-i-saw-him-159002.html?cxntlid=daylf_artr

 

Can't say I ever read his stuff as I had no ties to the Georgia sports scene that provided the inspiration for much of his writing. But I'll always remember him through the Bisher stories in Lewis Grizzard's book, If I Ever Get Back To Georgia, I'm Going to Nail My Feet To The Ground—a book that while somewhat outdated should be required reading in all college journalism departments.

 

"I saw him take his first breath in life and I saw him take his last."

Say what you will. But there was a time when the man was one of the best going. You want proof, look at the line above.
God knows how many columns, gamers, sidebars, etc., I've written in 20-some odd years. Nothing as good as that. Nothing.

 

Clearly, his age would show in the material he wrote on some subjects, and I've probably been as guilty as anyone on here of poking fun at Bisher for that.

But, he could always write about golf, and never lost his touch with that topic. If I opened the paper and it was Furman on golf, it was going to be well worth the read.

 

It would be great if someone posts 15-20 of Bisher's columns from the 1960s to 80s, or even earlier. Might be hard to find links.

 

Here you go:

http://www.ajc.com/news/furman-bisher-s-best-159110.html

Includes his 1951 column on the death of Shoeless Joe Jackson. I believe Bisher was the only person who ever got a post-career interview with Jackson, which was published in Sport magazine.

 

Thanks much.

 

Very good stuff.

http://www.ajc.com/sports/bisher-the-steady-drumbeat-159006.html

 

Here's the original Jackson article (from 1949), which is actually a first-person account "as told to" Bisher:

http://www.blackbetsy.com/jjtruth.htm

 

Not the only one, just the most famous one.

The AJC reprinted Bisher's interview in 1998, when Williams/Feller were heavily involved in trying to clear Jackson's name, and subsequently on the Internet in this decade.

But Shirley Povich also got a pretty well-known interview in 1942, Scoop Latimer (who gave Joe his nickname) got one in the 1940s on Joe Jackson Night in Greenville and a few other local (Greenville, Savannah, Waycross) reporters talked to him throughout the 1920s-30s.

It's a common perception -- perpetuated by Eliot Asinof and many others -- that Jackson and the other Seven disappeared from the public eye or were shamed from ever showing their faces again, but that's not true in any way.

 

Corky Ramirez: The Nicklaus incident involved not Furman but the late Tom McCollister. T-Mac, whom Nicklaus and many other golfers liked and respected, wrote a little negative ditty about Jack among his AJC pre-Masters evaluation of contenders and also-rans. So i heard, second-hand, Jack crossed paths with T-Mac afterward and called out the 5-foot-8, middle-aged golf writer as being a champion's motivation.

Now, about Furman. For the unfortunate folks who haven't read him for 20 years, or (not that i have) for his more than half-century of sports-writing service: The man writes elegantly. Almost effortlessly. He did in his youth. He did at a generation-past retirement age when most of his peers were long gone. Such consistency should be a modern-day writer's motivation.

To repeat a phrase I have told him for the quarter-century I've had the pleasure to know him: I just want to be able to stand and urinate past 70. The heck with trying to write regularly, . . . and consistently elegant.