Furman Bisher

James Furman Bisher was born in Denton, North Carolina, in 1918, and by the time the Associated Press Sports Editors gave him the Red Smith Award in 1988 he had already been writing about Atlanta sports for thirty-eight years. He kept going for twenty-one more. His run at the Atlanta papers began on April 15, 1950, and ended on October 11, 2009, which works out to fifty-nine years of columns about the same city, most of them written before that city had a major-league team of any kind.

That is the useful way to think about Bisher. He arrived when Atlanta was a minor-league baseball town with a golf tournament up the road in Augusta, and he was still filing when it had hosted an Olympics, built two domed stadiums and lost one of them. He did not so much cover Atlanta sports as sit through their entire adult life.

The road south was short. Bisher edited a small weekly, the Lumberton Voice, at twenty, straight out of college in 1938. After the war he worked at the High Point Enterprise and then, from 1948, ran the sports desk of the Charlotte News. It was at Charlotte that he produced the story people still bring up first.

In 1949 he sat down with Shoeless Joe Jackson, then running a liquor store in Greenville, South Carolina, and got the only interview Jackson ever gave about the 1919 Black Sox scandal. The piece ran in SPORT magazine. Jackson had been banned for three decades and would be dead within two years; nobody else got him on the record. The same year Bisher covered a stock-car race that would, in hindsight, count as one of the founding events of NASCAR. He was twenty-two years into his career before he had a big-city column, and he already had a career.

Bisher did not confine himself to the Atlanta sports section. In 1962 the Saturday Evening Post published a piece under his name alleging that Georgia athletic director Wally Butts and Alabama coach Bear Bryant had rigged a college football game. Butts sued the magazine for libel and won. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which in 1967 upheld the verdict and in the process helped define how far the press could go in writing about public figures.

It is not the kind of episode that appears on an award citation, and it is worth stating plainly rather than glossing. A columnist who spent six decades on the job accumulated one very large, very public error, and it became a constitutional-law precedent. He went on working. The Atlanta readership did not desert him, and neither did the profession, which is its own kind of verdict.

Time magazine named him one of the country's five best columnists in 1961. The next year he was in a libel suit that reached the Supreme Court.

Bisher joined the Atlanta Constitution in 1950 and moved across to the Atlanta Journal, where he was sports editor and lead columnist, then carried on after the two papers merged into the Journal-Constitution. He wrote about the Braves' arrival in 1966, the Masters every April, the Kentucky Derby every May from 1950 onward and every Super Bowl but the first. At Augusta his seniority in the press room lasted until he was ninety.

The voice was unmistakably Southern and unmistakably his. He wrote in a conversational register, a story-teller's cadence rather than a pundit's, and he was better at the anecdote than the argument. When the Braves moved from Milwaukee in 1966 he wrote the book on it, and two years later he wrote the first serious biography of Hank Aaron, six years before Aaron passed Ruth. Time magazine had already put him among the five best columnists in the country in 1961, and the Atlanta papers ran his column as a front-of-section fixture for the better part of five decades.

Georgia named him its sportswriter of the year sixteen times. The Associated Press recognised his work as the state's best story more than twenty times. He served as president of the Football Writers Association of America in 1959-60 and of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association from 1974 to 1976, and both the NSSA and the Georgia Sports Hall of Fame later inducted him.

His last Journal-Constitution column ran in October 2009. By January 2010 he was writing for the Gwinnett Daily Post, a suburban paper north of Atlanta, at ninety-one. He died of a heart attack in Fayetteville, Georgia, on March 18, 2012, at ninety-three.

The 1988 Red Smith Award, then, landed somewhere near the middle of the story rather than the end. That happens with a handful of recipients, and Bisher is the clearest case: the honor recognised a long career, and he answered by roughly doubling it.