http://joeposnanski.com/a-drive-to-charleston/

“There’s an easy trick to this column writing business,” he told me. “Write about people.” That, I remember vividly. Write about people. Kenny was the sports columnist at The Charleston Post & Courier in Charleston, S.C., which made him a hero to me. All sports columnists were heroes to me, but Kenny was in particular. He lived the only life I ever wanted. “Forget the sports,” Kenny said. “Write about people,” That’s what he did. I have never known a sportswriter who cared so little about sports. He was surrounded by people (like me) who had gotten into this business, at least in part, because they loved the games. Kenny did not. He got into it because had had just finished being a political writer, and the Charleston paper had a lousy sports section. and the executive editor was an ex-Marine who’d had enough. One day he called Ken into his office and said, “Fix it.” Ken stayed in it because, he quickly realized, sports gave him a unique opportunity to see people as they really are, under the strain and tension and elation of victory and defeat. People can in daily life spin scandals into triumph, tragedy into political gain, but in sports there is the black and white reality of winning and losing, and Ken loved to see how people handled each. He could be as unsentimental as a hanging judge — he invented the term “fire a friend day,” for that moment when coaches are on such a hot seat that their only hope of survival is to sacrifice a longtime coach or coordinator. He also could be deeply nostalgic and wistful and Southern. He loved to tell the everyday stories of people who overcame failure or defeat or adversity or their own blunders. The writer Pat Conroy has said nobody ever wrote about the wonders of sweet tea as well as Ken Burger. Write about people. I cannot tell you how many times those three words crossed my mind over the last quarter century. He was amused by how much the sports themselves bewitched me (“Lots of numbers in your column today, Bubba,” he’d say. “Nobody to write about?”). For him, the sports were barely a backdrop. He played golf, but other than that I doubt Kenny ever spent a single afternoon of his free time watching or playing a game he wasn’t writing about. I know he never got an autograph in his entire life. Well, that’s not quite right. He got one. That’s a story.