Furman Bisher’s primary competitive outlet in sports was on the golf course. He swung left-handed, an oddity he could not explain, having milked cows, swatted tennis balls and conducted more mundane tasks from the right side.
And he did so without aspiration of gaining a PGA Tour card, not with a handicap hovering between 7 and 18. Bisher played the exclusive, daunting Augusta National Golf Club course often enough that it was widely -- and falsely -- assumed he wangled a membership, but he never lowered the total on his first scorecard, an 83.
“I wasn’t scared of it then,” he explained.
Bisher did belong to three golf or country clubs, teed it up once in Indonesia and Morocco, almost annually in England or Scotland, regularly on the to-die-for courses of America. Sharing rounds with golfing greats such as Gene Sarazen and Ben Crenshaw, he grew to appreciate the sportsmanship at the core of a game in which participants are beholden to call penalties on themselves. It ultimately topped his list of cherished sports.
He was particularly fond of top-flight amateurs, those who embraced golf as a passionate hobby, not as a means to an end. Nobody drew more admiration than the gentlemanly Bobby Jones, for whom the carrot on the stick was hardly an oversized check awarded to a tournament champion. Jones’ four U.S. Open wins did not directly earn him a dime.
For Bisher, the game also was a way to connect with famed entertainers whom he befriended.
He once commissioned crooner Bing Crosby, who wrote the foreword of Bisher’s first book, to write a daily column for The Atlanta Journal from one Masters. (In truth, Der Bingle ruminated orally as Bisher transcribed.) They corresponded by letter, some of which Bisher revealed to a reporter in 2006. Crosby signed off once in his with “Your friend, Bing,” after thanking Bisher for sending his son a Georgia Tech jacket.
Another golf-connected running mate was Phil Harris. In one letter, the actor/comedian reminisced about their dinner of “big steaks that were alive and breathing.”
-- Mike Tierney
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