He taught me there was no shame in covering stock car racing, and no arrogance in writingTitleist Men's Vokey SM4 Wedge - Tour Chrome Finish

 well.

Here was the singular, undisputed titan of all Southern sports writers, who for more than 50 years running covered the Kentucky Derby and the Masters, many a Wimbledon fortnight and British Open, and nearly all the World Series and Super Bowls of his time.

And he unabashedly wrote about NASCAR, never once condescendingly, even though no one -- and I mean no one -- despised the stuff more than the genteel classes of the Deep South that made up his primary readership.

To them it wasn't even a sport. It was more an embarrassing, garish exhibition by and for the white trash, shameful to the region. Yet Bisher stuck it right under theirTitleist Men's Vokey SM4 Wedge - Tour Chrome Finish

 in the Atlanta Journal and later the Journal-Constitution, whether from Daytona or that misbegotten track down in Hampton, Ga., below the south side of the greatest New South city.

Written or spoken, Bisher's words always resounded. Always. A tiny excerpt thunders in my mind on this, the day after his passing, Sunday evening of a heart attack.

"I knew Ty Cobb, who fixed baseball games, and Shoeless Joe Jackson, who didn't and Herman 'Turtle' Beam, the slowest stock car racer who ever lived "

He included a journeyman racer in a litany of dozens if not hundreds of great sports characters he'd known, in a speech he delivered upon his Titleist Men's Vokey SM4 Wedge - Tour Chrome Finish

 into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame. He went in with Frank Deford, who later would become another mentor of mine, that year. I think it was 1989.

Once I sat beside the legendary Red Smith at an NFL game. I was not at all starstruck, because I'd sat so often beside one of Smith's closest friends, Bisher, at so many football and baseball games, so many Olympic events and so many races.

Bisher never differentiated. He took the Atlanta 500 as seriously, for that day, as he did the Run for the Roses on its day, or the final round of the Masters on those pollen-raining Sundays.

If you go to an event, you write Titleist Men's Vokey SM4 Wedge - Tour Chrome Finish

 as well as you can write it on that day. That's what he taught me.