Sports journalism lost one of its giants this past Friday when Hamilton County native Bill Millsaps died at the age of 77 in Richmond, Virginia, where the man affectionately known as "Saps" had been everything from the Richmond Times-Dispatch's sports columnist to its executive editor during a career that spanned nearly 40 years.
But for Barney Ottinger - like Millsaps, a 1960 graduate of Central High School - the loss was personal.
"We were friends for more than 60 years," Ottinger said Wednesday from his current home in Norfolk, Virginia. "We didn't see each other that often, but each time we did he was the same Bill he'd always been. He never changed from being that kid from Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee."
Millsaps was actually a native of Daisy, which did not unite with Soddy to become one city until 1969. By that time he was working for the Times Dispatch after earlier being employed by both the Chattanooga Times and the Knoxville Journal during his college years at the University of Tennessee, where he briefly played basketball.
Ottinger believes his friend's writing talents were formed long before then by Millsaps' parents: father Hobart, once the Central principal, and mother Myra, a teacher.
"I think Bill got his writing skills from Myra," Ottinger said. "He was a good athlete, but he was also a serious student. School was always important to him."
In a 1978 column for the Times-Dispatch, Millsaps wrote of his early infatuation with journalism: "Every morning I'd wonder how those people at the (Chattanooga) Times made all those words and all those lines in the paper fit so nicely. It appeared to be a wonderful jigsaw puzzle, a daily miracle of stories, headlines and pictures."
His own talent for nicely fitting words together in 2011 won him the prestigious Red Smith Award, arguably the most cherished honor in sports writing. The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association named him Virginia's sports writer of the year a stunning 11 times.
In 2013, Central put the husband of Nancy and father of two daughters, Katherine Millsaps Renick and Camerian Millsaps, in its distinguished alumni hall of fame.
A single glimpse into his writing talent: When the third game of the 1989 World Series between the Oakland Athletics and San Francisco Giants was postponed by an earthquake that struck the Bay Area 31 minutes before the first pitch was to have been thrown inside the Giants' ballpark, Millsaps phoned in the following lead to his column:
"At first, I thought I was dizzy. Then I realized it wasn't me. It was Candlestick Park."
Said Ottinger of such creativity: "Bill had this easy clarity in writing all sports. He made you feel like you were at the game with him."
In perhaps the ultimate compliment to his talent as both a writer and an editor, John Feinstein - the award-winning author of such best-sellers as "A Season on the Brink" and a "Good Walk Spoiled" - wrote of Millsaps in a Washington Post column Sunday: "He was a newspaper man's newspaper man."
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @TFPWeeds.