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 , 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 it as well as you can writetaylorMade R11S driver

on that day. That's what he taught me.

The other great sports writers of the era wouldn't touch the subject of motor racing -- or if they did, disparaged it. Jim Murray of the L.A. Times shredded the Indy 500 many times -- I sometimes sat beside him and watched him do it -- and Deford himself blistered Indy on his one visit for Sports Illustrated.

Bisher, on the other hand, had covered the very first Cup race, then called the Strictly Stock division, at the Charlotte Fairgrounds in 1949.

The first time I ever heard Bisher's thundering baritone voice, it was over the screams of the turbocharged engines at Indy in 1975, two years before I went to work alongside him in Atlanta. I sat two seats down from him, and kept watching the famous writer out of the corner of my eye. He was, you gathered from the printed page, the quintessential Southern gentleman/baron/intellectual.

And then A.J. Foyt came tearing out of the taylorMade R11S driverwith a jack handle dangling from the rear end of his car.

Suddenly came the booming proclamation that, "Judas Priest! Foyt looks like an old mule with a hoe handle stuck up his a--!"

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