Bisher’s son–a man devoid of football talent–was given a full scholarship to GA Tech at a time when Tech was a perennial football power. Unfortunately for Tech and its coach Bobby Dodd, Bear Bryant began beating Bisher’s beloved Tech practically every year after Bryant’s return to Alabama in 1958. Bryant’s teams excelled in playing hard and in being better conditioned than their opponents, and those teams dominated the SEC. Bisher hated Alabama as a result.

The stories–particularly the one alleging a fix of a football game–was thoroughly discredited at trial. Anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of college football knows there was no fix involved in the GA/ALA game. The resulting bad press, legal fees, and settlements to Bryant and Butts bankrupted the SEP. Within a few years of the stories, that magazine ceased to exist.

Bisher was up to his neck in his involvement in both stories having written the first and assisted with the second. His integrity as a journalist will forever be tarred by that legacy.

A very talented writer, yes he indeed was, but a man of journalistic honesty and integrity he was not.

I agree that Bisher has been a great sports columnist, though I am am fairly sure I do not agree with his slant on sport. For example, I would not necessarily agree that because a guy has a journalism degree he is more worthy of a job in the field than an ex-athlete. I suppose I am influenced in this by Joe Namath’s response to a New York writer who asked, “Hey Joe, what did you major in at Alabama, Basket weaving?”, to which Namath answered, “Naw, man, journalism. It was easier.”

There is a book waiting to be written about the whole Butts-Bryant-Bisher-Post-Holt-Granning-Benny Marshall episode of the sixties. Just to give you an example, my brother, while working for Bisher in the sixties, told me that Bisher picked up a copy of the Birmingham News sports page, perused it for a while, and remarked, “There is not a thing in here about Bear Bryant or Charlie-O!” Of course, Benny Marshall, as sports editor of that paper, wrote a long list of editorials about Bryant, and he would occasionally write about Charlie-O, the mule mascot of Charley Finley’s Oakland A’s, the Birmingham Barons being a AA farm club of the A’s.

Bryant never forgave Bisher, as was evidenced by the fact that Bisher made one last effort to speak with Bryant, only to be left waiting outside Bryant’s office in Tuscaloosa, never to be invited in by the Bear. Bisher, in return, seems never to have forgiven the Bear. And, if some of the stuff I have read recently on the Internet is any indication, Bisher has kept the pot stirred all these years, so that the bitterness between himself and Bryant has been continued in the minds and hearts of some sports fans in Georgia.

To my mind, Bisher has always been the southeast’s version of Dan Jenkins. There has been a certain anti-down-home-in-the South attitude on the part of Bisher, which seems to me to have been the antithesis of what Benny Marshall stood for. Yet Bisher was as big a homer for Georgia Tech as Marshall was for Bryant and Alabama. (I am told that Marshall was an Auburn supporter until Bear turned him around.)

We are all probably the poorer because these two giants of Southern Sport did not make up. I personally wonder what really happened. I have spoken with one Alabama player on the 1962 team, and he vowed that there was no fix. I have read through the book FUMBLE, and I have read the rationale against such a thing happening. I buy the explanation that it would be next to impossible to fix a game in the way alleged by the POST. Teams are scouted every day in football season. Butts may have grunted something to Bryant over the phone, and this was interpreted as a “fix.” Whatever happened, Bear never wanted to talk with Bisher again, and Bisher obviously intends to carry this to his grave also.

My brother has never liked Bryant or Alabama football. He became a Bobby Bowden-FSU fan, having written sports while a student at FSU during the Bill Peterson- Fred Biletnikoff era. And he didn’t like Benny Marshall’s flowery editorials about Bryant. “You have to get up early in the morning,” he said, “to be able to read that stuff.”

SELAH OLD FART

Dang, Furman.
That’s a parting shot if I ever heard one!