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| No. 10 tee, Augusta National, April 11, 1994. |
Secretly, I always hoped one day my name would be a minor character
in a Ken Burger book like my friends Scott Michaux, Bob Gillespie and the late
Furman Bisher. In my heart, though, I always knew that I was far down on the
list of people he might eventually include in his fiction.
Burger, even after all his years of writing newspaper
columns and novels, has so much more material to use. I hope he gets to.
From friends in South Carolina and Georgia, though, I hear
that Ken’s future is darkly clouded by his longtime fight with prostate cancer.
He’s battled and battered it gallantly since 2007. (You can read about it, and
hear Kenny’s pleas for regular screenings for men, at his blog, Unexpected Journey.)
Like Lowcountry tides and deadlines for 9 p.m. basketball games, cancer has
a way of wearing down even the boulders in our business.
Or, I should say, our former business. Newspapering isn’t it
used to be, and it hasn’t been close to the same since 2011, when Burger
retired as the columnist and executive sports editor for the Charleston Post and Courier, so he could turn his attention to writing books, all of which are available online.
If you ever worked for a South Carolina newspaper, as I did from
1990-94, you knew Burger. He wouldn’t let you not know him.
He’s always been the cool guy in pressed khakis and a popped
collar, someone you wanted to sit with at the same table, like at junior high
lunch. Make him laugh and it made your day. And Ken is the kind of guy who
laughs at someone else’s joke, even though he had probably made it, and told it
funnier, years before.
In the press box, Ken always suffers fools…frequently.
Other writers who are closer to Ken and far more capable
have written of their recent visits with him, as he goes back and forth between
his home near Charleston and the hospital where he receives treatment. They say
his time is limited. Ken has asked folks who are so inclined to write their
memories of him now, so he has a chance to read them.
Yes, that’s a little self-absorbed, crass and beautiful.
Like sportswriting itself.
Hats off to Gene
Sapakoff and Joe
Posnanski for their fine living memories of someone they consider a friend
and a mentor. (Both wrote their pieces before this week’s flooding overwhelmed
South Carolina. Ken and his wife Bonnie Grossman had to be rescued from their
home by boat, and Ken returned to Roper St. Francis Cancer Center in
Charleston. When it rains…)
Certainly, I can’t claim the same kind of closeness as they
have with Kenny. We saw each other infrequently, except those few years when we
covered the ACC Tournament, the Final Four and the Masters all in the span of
six weeks. We spent a lot of time together at the Centennial Olympics in 1996,
having dinner with other writers at the empty restaurants in downtown Atlanta.
He’s a friend who would always say yes to dinner but cleverly decline an
invitation to meet up for drinks. (That’s the kind of stupid friend I
am—always forgetting that among the many evils Ken beat over the years was
alcoholism.)
He was always willing to suggest things I could do with my
kids when we visited Charleston on family outings. Fort Sumter. City Market. A
carriage ride. A ghost walk. And, he once told me, “Don't
forget the ever-popular ‘Places Where Ken Burger Got Married Tour!’”
Yes, Ken has been married five times, the
source of infinite pressroom hilarity. (Ken joined me and Steve Elling as the
only people I knew with our own shirt sizes: a 2X was a “Peeler” because of
general girth. A 3X was an “Elling” because that’s the average number of holes
he had no recorded score in any given round. And 4 Exes was a “Burger” because,
well, that seemed pretty damned funny at the time.) He laughed louder than anyone at the jokes.
Ken’s the kind of friend that would meet you and your wife
with his wife-at-the-time at The Peninsula Grill to show off one of the world’s
best restaurants—and pick up the tab.
Few people have enjoyed Charleston, or his profession, more
than Burger. A native of tiny Allendale, South Carolina, he grew up wanting to be
a journalist and ended up having the kind of big-time jobs all of us wanted, first
as a political reporter in Washington and then as a sports columnist. He’s
always been so much better at it than most, as he proved in 1989 while writing about Hurricane Hugo.
In newspapers, you end up being friends with reporters from
other papers far more than your co-workers. That’s because you work in the office
and bond on the road. Those friendships evolve gradually. I never told Ken how
much I admired his work and enjoyed his company; never had to.
What I should have done a long time ago is properly
apologize to Kenny for what had to be the worst good day of his life. On April
11, 1994, we
played Augusta National Golf Club together. It’s a tradition at the
Masters—isn’t everything?—to allow 20 writers and 20 broadcast reporters to
play the course the day after the final round. Players were chosen by lottery
on Saturday morning. Those picked were worthless to their media outlets the rest of the tournament.
When I saw that Kenny and Al Muskewitz of the Anderson
(South Carolina) Independent-Mail also
won the lottery, we worked up a group to play that day, along with another writer I did not
know. With all apologies to my wife and kids, despite the number on the scorecard, it was the greatest day of my
life.
Kenny was in the cart playing his
steady game, not unnerved by the stupidity of my interaction with golf’s most
solemn masterpiece. It was the same golf he played at some of the best courses
in the country whenever he had a chance and at his regular offseason game at
Patriot’s Point.
He was silent through my overzealous joy of being on the
same greens as the best players in the world. He was calm on the tee box at No.
12, as we attempted the hardest shot in golf. He endured every muffed tee shot,
every raked iron, every scalded wedge, every freaking four-putt on the elephant
burial mounds. He helped me line up the putt for the only par I made all day—a
saved 5 from a sandbar in the middle of Rae’s Creek on No. 13. And he kept
quiet when I made an 11 after hitting the scoreboard on No. 15, ruining the
best drive any of us had all day. Occasionally, he said something like “Maybe
you shouldn’t swing so hard”—but that
was about his only critique.
I’m sure, between Muskie and me, we ruined a perfectly
spectacular day.
Sorry about that, Kenny. I wouldn’t trade the memory for
anything.