When legendary sportswriter Furman Bisher died in 2012, his obituary in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution repeated a claim that had been casually tossed around for many years — including by Bisher himself:
One of the biggest “scoops” of his career occurred in 1949, when “Shoeless” Joe Jackson gave Bisher and Sport Magazine his only interview since 1919, the year Jackson was ousted from baseball in the “Black Sox” scandal.1
Shoeless Joe Jackson and sports writer Furman Bisher, 1949The interview between Bisher and Jackson, conducted at the latter's home in Greenville, South Carolina, appeared in Sport's October 1949 edition with the headline “This is the Truth!” Jackson's firstperson account of the 1919 World Series fix and his subsequent banishment from baseball is, in the words of author Gene Carney, “one of the documents that nobody curious about Jackson can pass up.”2 Thankfully, BlackBetsy.com now makes a copy of the article available online.3 But even the Internet's most comprehensive Joe Jackson website has erroneously claimed that it is “the only interview Joe Jackson ever gave concerning the infamous World Series.”4
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