He was the hero of my heroes, a beacon the best sports writers turned to reflexively, the writer the writers I wanted to write like wanted to write like, if you will, and they reminded me that we all essentially walked and wrote in his shadow.

I never met him.

Maybe five years ago, having heard enough of his singular character, having memorized enough of his leads as they passed through the oral history of sportswriting's comparative literature, and having come to understand that George Kiseda's influence had long since escaped the sports pages and burned itself into a nation's history and sociology, I figured maybe George himself was a story.

So I called him.

It went badly.

"Like to come out to L.A.," I said. "Spend a few days. Do a feature story about you."

He wasn't impolite, but it was clear he found the very notion misguided at the minimum, if not foolish. This is what happens when you're allergic to flattery. Every time someone spoke aloud the notion that George Kiseda was the best baseball writer, the best football writer, the best basketball writer, or, the flat out best sports writer in the country, Kiseda got himself booted off stage.

"I am not a story," he later told Roy McHugh, the former Pittsburgh Press sports editor and columnist, about our conversation. Kiseda, retired in California, didn't want me spending the Post-Gazette's money on something that wasn't a story.

Yeah, we never do that.

Maybe you came across his obit in the A section the other day. They'll bury him today in his native Monessen. Whatever final little fuss there is, we'll know he'd have disapproved.

"Wrote the best game stories I ever read," McHugh said yesterday, having read game stories for only about 80 years. "He wrote leads I can still remember word for word. Once on a Pirates road trip, 1957, Joe Brown fired Bobby Bragan and made Danny Murtaugh the manager. George's lead the next day was, 'Jayne Russell came to the ballpark here yesterday, but the biggest bust in Wrigley Field was still Danny Murtaugh's debut as manager of the Pirates.' "

In the back room of a Mount Washington saloon, McHugh poked at a salad and some ziti as he emptied an envelope of Kiseda correspondence. McHugh, whom some people in my building still identify as the best sports writer to come through Pittsburgh, is a kind of unofficial Kiseda bureau chief, although George wrote to a lot of people habitually, some would say ambitiously.

"He wrote to the Pope saying he was 'ticked off' about priestly pedophilia," McHugh said. "He then wrote a letter to William F. Buckley asking how the translators in the Vatican would convert, 'I am ticked' into Latin.' Here's Buckley's reply:"

And there it is, neatly typed.

"Furiosus iracundusque sum."

In the mid-80s, Kiseda wrote to Donald Regan, President Reagan's Chief of Staff, wondering why he didn't have his boss tell Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin wall. Books have been written since, including one by Reagan speech writer Peter Robinson, without such a note being cited in the ramp-up to Reagan's famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate. But when Kiseda wrote to the Reagan Library, asking if his letter might be among the source material for the Brandenburg speech, the Library sent him a copy of the original letter. The now historic phrasing "tear down this wall" is exactly as Kiseda wrote it.

And that was, of course, far from his best stuff.

Writing about reliever Jack Baldschun after he'd pitched six days in a row, Kiseda went out to Connie Mack Stadium and found Baldschun in the trainer's room engaged in some isometric arm-wrestling exercise with the Phillies' trainer that was part of Baldschun's preparation. The result for the Philadelphia Bulletin:

"Jack Baldschun pitched Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and on the seventh day he wrestled."

Kiseda landed in Philadelphia after a stint at the old Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph. In the late '50s, Pitt's football team was having itself chronicled on a daily basis by Kiseda, McHugh and the great Myron Cope. When, in discussing an opening at Newsday years later, McHugh told sports editor Jack Mann that he once competed on the beat against Kiseda and Cope, Mann said, "My God, that's like being in the ring with Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis at the same time."

McHugh said Kiseda was the first Pittsburgh sports writer to go into the locker room after a game, the first to pay any attention to a rookie named Roberto Clemente, and, as has been well documented, one of the first to put his job on the line when he felt some kind of compromise was upon him, especially one related to racial or social injustice.

"When he was sports editor at Parade Magazine, they asked him for three ideas for a cover story," McHugh said. "Wilt Chamberlain was one, and two other black athletes. They said, 'George, we can't do that. We're in newspapers in Jackson, Mississippi.' "

Bye, George said.

In some of these remembrances, Kiseda comes off as a diligent crusader, perhaps a lecturer, a flinty moralist. Not true, quothe McHugh.

"He was just great to be around," Roy said. "Witty, funny."

Blind in one eye, Kiseda had the bad one removed in 1977. He wrote to Roy:

"I'm sure I told you about my concern that they would take out the wrong eye. I considered putting an arrow under the left eye, but then it occurred to me an arrow was no guarantee. They'd be standing there debating whether the arrow meant this is the eye to remove or this is the eye to keep. I made a deal with my doctor; they wouldn't put me under until I saw the doctor in the operating room and reminded him which eye was to be removed.

"Well, naturally the lines of communication broke down. The anesthesiologist came into the pre-op room to work on me and I said, 'Wait a minute.' I explained to him my concern and the agreement I had with my doctor. In one of the great put-the-patient-at-ease conversations of all time, he said, 'That's an understandable concern. It happened in a hospital in South Jersey. When the doctor realized he had taken out the wrong eye, he jumped out the window.'

"After a wonderful anecdote like that, how could I be concerned?"

I could go on, but then, George was not a story.