While growing up, Gene Asher had three goals in life: to become a boxer, a sports writer and a Marine.
He accomplished all three.
As a teen, Asher won the state Golden Gloves championship and later became a highly respected sports scribe and a decorated Marine. Along the way, he also had a successful insurance career.
The Atlanta native died Dec. 28 at the age of 87 of complications from a fall 10 days earlier.
His funeral will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday at Crest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Atlanta.
Eugene Samuel Asher was born May 5, 1928, to Baron Hirsch Asher and Erna Fromme Asher. He was the youngest of three children.
He began taking boxing classes at the Atlanta Boys Club (now the Warren/Holyfield Boys & Girls Club). The four-time city boxing champion became the state Golden Gloves champion in 1949.
While at Tech High School, he became associate editor of the student newspaper and captain of the boxing team.
Asher initially attended Michigan State University on a boxing scholarship – becoming the college’s lightweight champion. He later graduated from the University of Georgia, where he worked as a sports writer for the Red & Black.
After dreaming of becoming a Marine since the fifth grade, Asher finally joined in 1948. He served as a rifle platoon leader during the Korean War and was awarded the Purple Heart.
He later served as a national director of the Marine Corps Reserve Officers Association and headed the annual Toys for Tots drive at Christmas for several years before retiring as a colonel from the Marine Corps Reserve.
After the war, Asher returned to sports writing at The Atlanta Constitution before becoming the prep sports editor for The Atlanta Journal.
While at the Journal, he worked for legendary columnist and sports editor Furman Bisher, who once called him “the most creative prep sports editor on The Atlanta Journal in my days there.”
Asher was a stickler for punctuality and clean copy, as author and former editor Lee Walburn soon learned after he joined the Journal sports department in 1962.
“His intolerance of sloppy journalism, his insistence that to be only 10 minutes early was to be five minutes late still haunts me at deadline time,” Walburn said. “From the beginning of our friendship and even to the onset of the illness that took his life, his loyalty knew no limits.”
When Asher announced he was quitting the newspaper to become an insurance agent, a surprised Bisher offered him a raise but could not persuade him to stay.
“Daddy knew with his determination that he could make more money selling insurance,” said his daughter Susan Kay Asher of Marietta. “He was such a likeable guy and very amiable. He was great at sales.”
Walburn became Asher’s first life insurance customer. The two closed the deal on a $500 policy at a café on Forsyth Street. Asher had to call his manager to help him complete the paperwork.
During his first year, he made his insurance company’s Million Dollar Round Table and later became a lifetime Million Dollar Club member.
Nevertheless, Asher wasn’t done with writing.
In 1990, after retiring from the insurance business, he founded The Jewish Georgian newspaper.
From 1998 to 2013, he wrote a monthly column for Georgia Trend magazine on sports legends and other people he knew and respected. He published a compilation of those magazine articles in “Legends: Georgians Who Lived Impossible Dreams” in 2005.
Friends said Asher also will be remembered for his generosity to charity and his caring spirit.
As a mentor, Asher instilled discipline, self-esteem and confidence in his young boxing students at the Atlanta Jewish Community Center.
“He elevated me. He helped me combat my adolescent fears,” said Atlanta attorney Robert Fierman, who won the 1965 Atlanta city Golden Gloves championship while in high school.
In addition to his daughter Susan, Asher is survived by his daughter Laurie Lynn Asher of Atlanta.
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