I remember when I got my first job out of college, at the High Point Enterprise in North Carolina, and longtime sports editor Benny Phillips told me he was good friends with Furman Bisher.
I was awestruck that someone I knew knew Furman Bisher. That's how much of a giant Bisher was.
Bisher died Sunday at age 93, and there have been a bunch of eloquent, moving pieces written on his life and his impact on not just sportswriting, but sports itself. Beyond one or two brief conversations in press boxes, I only knew the man through the words that jumped off the pages of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. So the reflections should be left to the people who were lucky enough to know him well and consider him a friend.
My pal Scott Michaux of The Augusta Chronicle has a good one.
Mark Bradley of the AJC writes of driving Bisher to the 1984 South Carolina-Clemson game and soaking up Bisher's wisdom on the ride to and from Death Valley.
And the best I've seen is from ESPN's Ed Hinton, a dear friend of Bisher's.
A compelling passage:
"Keep a clear eye," he once advised me on writing columns. "Don't ever be steered by what others may be writing."
Most of all, "Write what you feel, and tell everybody else to go f--- themselves."
In 1981, I learned just how fearless Bisher really was and always had been. The city of Atlanta was abuzz with a controversy I had detonated from the Sugar Bowl, when I poked harsh fun at the University of Georgia's national champion football team and its unruly fans.
The other great Atlanta columnist, humorist Lewis Grizzard, a Bulldawg to his marrow, shredded my column in his column. Bisher then verbally nuked Grizzard in his column. The publisher of the papers wrote a front-page "Apology to our Readers."
Tom Callahan, then of the Washington Star and later of Time magazine, was the only other columnist in America who had ripped Georgia's triumph -- "Them Dawgs are dogs," he wrote. Callahan and I were shot in effigy -- not hanged, shot -- at a rally on the Georgia campus, with Grizzard as emcee.
"Just trying to defuse the situation," Grizzard told me later. "They wanted to kill you. I'm serious: They really wanted to kill you."
Then one evening, the top commentator on Atlanta's top TV station, WSB, aired a piece on "the columnist war at the Journal-Constitution."
Moments after the piece ended, my home phone rang.
"Ed," said an aged female voice, "this is Becky."
Becky was Bisher's housekeeper. Twice divorced, he'd hired her decades earlier to run his household and be the nanny as his three sons grew up. "Daddy" was what she called Bisher.
"I just wanted to tell you: Right on, right on, right on!"
Guess it didn't hurt that Becky was a lifelong Alabama fan, even in a household where she knew Daddy and Bear Bryant were bitter if not mortal enemies.
"There've been times," she said, "when Daddy could get awful rough in his writing. There were times I had to get the children out of the house because somebody had threatened to bomb it.
"So I'm just telling you from experience, this will pass. So don't you worry."
Bisher's passing compels some inevitable reflection upon the fact that sportswriting isn't as important as it used to be. That's not a lament or a complaint as much as a statement of fact. Long ago, in a land that seems far away in our current warp-speed times, the voice of the newspaper columnist used to be the only voice.
Now everyone has a platform, and that's certainly not all bad. But the old-school newspaper columnists have to adapt to achieve relevance, and they have to accept the reality that their dispatches don't have the gravity they did when folks eagerly awaited the morning paper hitting their doorstep each morning.
Used to be, the biggest challenges facing a sportswriter were finding a way to turn a phrase and make deadline every night. Those stresses are still present in different forms, but they're superseded by the task of being essential. It harder now to remain relevant, to remain a part of the daily conversation of the people you're writing for, to compel people to think: "I wonder what such-and-such thinks about this event?"
Bisher's insights and one-liners were powerful enough to survive in any medium or culture. He was a great one, and he'll be missed.
Sad to hear about Bobby Cremins' retirement and the reasons behind it. David Teel of the Newport News Daily Press has some great anecdotes from Cremins' career.
Including:
The year is 2000, and Cremins, as capable as Yogi Berra of butchering the language, is marveling at all the nice things people have said about him since his resignation.
“If I didn't have so many skeletons in my closet,” he says, “I'd run for office. ... Little did I know I was going to be utilized.”
That is quintessential Bobby. Before he resigned Feb. 18, it never dawned on him how many lives he's touched, how many friends he's made.
The year is 1997, and Cremins is speaking to his team in the visitor's locker room at North Carolina. “Drew,” he says to Tech guard Drew Barry. “You've got Calabria. He's a shooter.”
North Carolina's Dante Calabria had graduated the year before.
Michael Carvell of the AJC asks Lane Kiffin and Urban Meyer about this new, groundbreaking phenomenon they call ESSS....EEEEE....SEEEE SPEEEEEEEED.
Kiffin:
“I believe there is a difference of speed in the SEC. The difference to me is in the front seven, especially the defensive line. There are so many good front seven players in high school in the Southeastern region. Obviously a lot of them go and play in the SEC. Every week in the SEC, you’re usually dealing with a matchup issue somewhere up front. Out here [in the Pac 12] you don’t have as many dominant front seven, and specifically defensive linemen. That’s not a knock on anyone. That’s just studying the NFL Draft. The draft will show you that … where out here, you get better passing games sometimes with quarterbacks and wide receivers. You get different things in different areas of the country.”
Florida State is starting spring practice, and the Seminoles have an intriguing talent at receiver named Kelvin Benjamin.
Mark Schlabach of ESPN.com, subbing for ACC blogger Heather Dinich, says FSU's offensive line has a foreign flavor.
And we'll close with an eye-opening blog post from Georgia offensive lineman Watts Dantzler, who thought it might be useful to share the details of his long, strange trip back from spring break.
Um ... wow?
LW
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