Furman Bisher Breaks the Real Tiger Woods Story

If you grew up in the South, you probably remember Furman Bisher (pictured above, interviewing Shoeless Joe Jackson in 1949)  as the sports columnist from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Bisher's ninety years old now and started a blog in his retirement. On Saturday, the old man thought he had the scoop about what really happened at Tiger's house on Thanksgiving scoop.

You might have seen the email, the one with all the cloak-and-dagger details about the private jets and the secret plastic surgery in Phoenix.

Bisher calls it "a legitimate message from a trustworthy journalist I have know for years." Unfortunately, he didn't use the Google and learn that Deadspin had already called it a hoax on Christmas Eve.

Bisher's story has been getting a lot of coverage today, having been picked up by the UK's Daily Mail, Huffington Post and True/Slant. Before this is all over, expect to see Bisher on Larry King's show refusing to identify that "trustworthy journalist" he used as a source.

Maybe Bisher shouldn't feel too bad, since the not-written-by-old-people New York media blog Gawker briefly ran with the story this morning, picking it up from the always-unreliable Mark Ebner's Hollywood Interrupted blog.

(For the record, I wore out several copies of Bisher's Strange But True Baseball Stories when I was a kid and still consider it maybe the best book I've ever read. But, come on, use the search before you publish).