A Sporting Life. This item is unavailable.A Sporting Life

Ken Burger says he was an “accidental sports writer” because, coming out of college he had no intention of covering athletic events. He hardly knew which baseball teams were in the National League and which ones were in the American League. Doug Nye, sports editor of The Columbia (S.C.) Record, said that didn’t matter. He liked Ken’s style and hired him as a 20-something sports reporter in June 1973. That launched a long and distinquished career in which Ken earned so many S.C. Press Association writing awards that he lost count, a double handful of S.C. Sports Writer of the Year citations from the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association, three nods from the Associated Press as one of the best sports columnists in the country, the title of South Carolina’s Journalist of the Year in 1996, and a special place in the journalism wing of the S.C. Athletic Hall of Fame. Privileged to be writing in what many considered the United States’ heyday of sports journalism, Ken traveled far and wide to file dispatches from a dozen Super Bowls, several Final Fours, and almost every major golf tournament, including more than 20 Masters Tournaments. Well-armed with an impressive homeboy vocabulary, a keen sense of story, and an empathetic ear for human emotion, Ken consistently gave readers something timely that they could not get anywhere else, something he jokingly called “literature in a hurry.” He spent more than a quarter-century covering Palmetto State sports — a gift, as you will read in this book, that keeps on giving. Like in his other five books, the final paragraph of his bio in this one says: “Born and raised in the town of Allendale, S.C., Burger graduated dead last in his class at the University of Georgia, has been married five times, is a gratefully recovering alcoholic, a cancer survivor and a happy man.”