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Bisher, the Loss of a Legend
By LYNN ZINSER

The press room at the upcoming Masters just got a lot quieter and a lot less fun. For the first time in more than 50 years, legendary Atlanta columnist Furman Bisher won’t be filling it with his booming laugh and charming cantankerousness. Bisher always showed up like a force of nature, so full of life and bluster that people managed to be surprised when he died Sunday at age 93. He had battled time like he battled his sports column topics, relentlessly and with such flair that you always thought he would win.

Back when he retired at age 91, that struck some people as a little soon.

Bisher was a poetic columnist, fearlessly blasting through several eras of sports writing and starring in every one of them. A little while back, I noticed Bisher had a Facebook page. It struck me as hilarious, but of course he had a Facebook page. Bisher was a true Southern institution, but he didn’t shrink from progress or change. He just kept climbing on board.

As Jeff Schultz wrote so poignantly in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he was Bisher’s colleague for more than 20 years, he was a walking sports museum, having written about Ty Cobb and “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. But he was so much more than that. He never let himself be of the past, even if he could talk about it with such wisdom.

“Before news traveled with the speed of a Tweet, Furman Bisher painted pictures for us,” Schultz wrote. “He wrote with a voice. When he was revved up about a topic, and that was more often than not, the words jumped off the page. It was as if he was sitting next to you, talking into your ear.”

His most recent editor claims he never wrote a bad column. There were some, though, where he truly shined:

From his column on Joe Louis’s death in April 1981:
Joe Louis became Barrow again Tuesday. In death they returned the name by which he began life and returned the body to the soil. The beginning and the end were of contrasts as broad as a chasm, and reflect the American legend. Joe Louis Barrow came out of a sharecropper’s cabin in east Alabama and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, a ground sacred to Americans who come here to honor their military dead. Just a few days ago, Gen. Omar Bradley was put to rest here. Just up the hill from the old heavyweight champ’s grassy spot is the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In death, he’d be keeping good company.

And this, from Bisher’s saddest column, when he son Roger died in April 2000:


The subject of Roger comes up today because I have lost him. A beautiful, handsome, loving man, no finer son has any parent ever had, and I grieve. Old men like me should be going first, not one who had so much to give to the world as he. Roger Chisholm Bisher passed away Monday afternoon. I saw him take his first breath in life and I saw him take his last. He was just 44, but in my heart he shall always be that smiling child blowing up his workshop. Thanks for giving me your time.

We count ourselves lucky that Bisher gave us his time.

http://onpar.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/bisher-the-loss-of-a-legend/?ref=golf