Can't remember if we were at a football game, a basketball game or a baseball game, but a few years ago Ken Burger and I encountered a logjam of fans at the entrance to a stadium.
The game was hours away, and we really had nowhere to be other than a buffet line. I started to do the thing most media folks do almost as a reflex: self-importantly push my way to the front of the line, past all the people who actually paid their hard-earned money to attend the game.
Burger grabbed my arm and told me to hold my horses, to wait our turn just like everyone else.
"This is what gives people like us a bad name."
Instantly, I realized he was right. It was just something I'd never really even thought about, but Burger was good at presenting real-life insights and observations that were revelations to those of us who were too young or too busy or too selfish to notice.
Burger, longtime columnist for The Post and Courier of Charleston, has successfully kicked alcohol, cigarettes and prostate cancer. Now he's giving up the newspaper business, and readers of the P&C will find it difficult to proceed without the habit of his regular columns.
The state's sports discourse experienced a loss a few years ago when Burger decided to try something new and write a metro column for the paper, instantly making press boxes decidedly more boring places. Now, as he announced in this column that ran Sunday, he's calling it a career.
This is my last column.
I've decided to retire, mainly because I can, but partly because I want to be that rare commodity -- a columnist that left too soon, instead of too late.
Timing, as they say, is everything. I don't want to become that muttering old man in the newsroom.
I first became acquainted with Burger's columns when I moved to Charleston as a 10th grader in 1990. A few years later, as a scraggly college student who thought I knew everything (and knew nothing), I summoned the courage to introduce myself to him at a sporting event. It was a little jolting because, unlike the other professionals who didn't have time to acknowledge someone who didn't do it for a living, Burger actually seemed interested in the conversation and was curious about me.
Years later, after I joined The Post and Courier and was lucky enough to spend a lot of time with him, I realized Burger was interested and curious during every conversation he had with strangers. It's a big part of what made him accomplish the rare and remarkable feat of becoming a voice that embodied a city and its culture.
I'm convinced Burger was born to be a newspaper columnist because what you saw of him in person is almost exactly what you saw of him in print: energetic, curious enough to notice things everyone around him did not, and always turning phrases no one else could.
He also had the guts to say what he thought. Before his arrival on the sports pages, this state's sports columnists were as watered-down as O'Doul's. It's probably not a stretch to think that Burger's presence inspired competitors in Columbia and Greenville to produce opinion columns that contained, you know, an actual opinion.
Burger and a lot of columnists like him have become a bit of a relic in today's world of talking heads and Tweets and interminable news cycles. Newspapers in their physical form have gone the way of phone booths, phone books and a jug of milk on your doorstep every morning, and self-inflicted wounds have hastened their demise. But it's hard to dispute the notion that we've lost something important with the absence of a daily account of events, all in one small and affordable package.
Burger's columns will be missed. And so will his words of wisdom that helped a young sportswriter stop, look around and realize what we do isn't the most important thing in the world.
LW
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