George Kiseda’s the reason I didn’t listen to my father and become an undertaker.

Humor, irreverence, bad eyes and a brilliant sense of phrase his trademarks, Kiseda was a sportswriter- not only a good one but a great one. Possibly the best there ever was.

And as a kid growing up in Philly, that’s what I wanted to be. A sportswriter like Kiseda. Someone who could dispense pungent, clever prose like a smart assed soda fountain jerk and maybe have some kid from the sticks idolize me from afar.

Except, like other golden opportunities I’d rather forget about, I screwed that pooch, too. Royally. And it had all been there, dropped in my lap, ripe for the taking.

I started out being a reporter at a suburban daily, and I guess was good enough or maybe bad enough to be offered a chance to cover the Philadelphia Phillies back in those days.

These were the same Phillies, mind you, who earlier in that decade lost 23 straight, once, with a band of alkies and misfits, then three years later with some pretty good ball players named Johnny Callison, Jim Bunning, Frank Thomas and Richie Allen messed up winning the pennant with ten loses in a row at the end of the 1964 season – that insult to injury coming after being, surprisingly, in first place most of the year.

So, like the miserable Phillies, I dropped the ball. I turned down the beat. Out of fear, I think. After all, how could I compete or hang in a press box with the same legends I idolized from the shitter- reading, like the Bible, the sports sections of the Philadelphia Bulletin, Inquirer and Daily News?

Guys like Kiseda, Sandy Grady, Bill Conlin, Hugh Brown, Larry Merchant and Stan Hochman? Philly back then, you see, had three great dailies outfitted with what had to be the Murderers Row of sports journalism. Forget New York. Forget LA. At that time, Philly, for reasons mystifying because it had lousy teams [except later for the 76ers], attracted the premier sports scribes in the country. Maybe it was the cheese steaks, cigar smoke and the neighborhood taprooms.

I remember Philadelphia Magazine one time doing a piece on Kiseda. And that pretty much sold me on the whole dazzle of being a writer. You could say it was the Hemingway-thing with the local angle shoved under my nose. With that mag having some formidable talent, as well, – guys like Gaeton Fonzi and Charles MacNamara, I’m surrounded by this startling brilliance. Only I guess it never rubbed off the way it was supposed to.

These thoughts came back this morning as I’m reading the year end obits of sports personalities over a Starbucks. Shocked, I noted Kiseda’s name among them.

Kiseda had died in May at the age of 80 in an Alzheimer’s facility in Orange County. What a crappy ending, I thought, for a once brilliant mind.

How could I have missed this, I thought. The “Silver Quill” dead? [Because of this incredible head of prematurely graying hair and a sharp pen, Kiseda got the nickname from Wally Jones then of the 76ers.]

And this is not only me thinking of Kiseda as legendary. The late Curt Gowdy had called him the greatest NBA writer of all time. And Sandy Padwe, at the time the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism remarked, “I teach Kiseda. He’s the model of what every sportswriter should be.”

Then in 1991 an Esquire Magazine article, “The Death of Sports Writing,” was subtitled: “Where have you gone, George Kiseda? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.”

Along to becoming the DiMaggio of the astoundingly executed conceit, Kiseda managed to piss a lot of people off in the bargain. A Kiseda piece about racism in sports literally turned US Congress on its ear and forced a change to a smaller, racially accommodating venue from the Sugar Bowl where seating was segregated.

This happened during the Eisenhower era’s Little Rock confrontation, so, besides Kiseda being labeled a Communist, you can imagine the death threats he probably got from that piece.

Another time, with one controversial story after another and subsequent arguments with his editor [Kiseda called him a cheerleader], the Philadelphia Bulletin yanked Kiseda off the 76ers beat.

Subsequently in an interview for that same Esquire article, I think, former 76ers GM Pat Williams stated how Kiseda “scared everyone in sports to death.”

On another occasion, Kiseda was assigned the City Hall beat and pissed off Philadelphia mayor James Tate who stopped holding press conferences because of him. Colleague Bill Conlin later called Kiseda “the best City Hall reporter ever around here.”

Moving west, Kiseda arrived at the Los Angeles Times in 1972 and worked as a copy editor until his retirement in 1984.

And maybe this is a Forrest Gump story – who knows- but in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan was about to meet Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland, Kiseda supposedly wrote Reagan’s chief of staff Don Regan:

“Why don’t you get your boss to suggest to Gorbachev there’s a dramatic way he can demonstrate to the world that he is serious about his policy of openness? Ask Gorby to tear down the Berlin Wall.”

Eight months later, in his speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Reagan uttered the famous words, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

My Kiseda story is far less Gump-ish and glamorous. I saw Kiseda one night in a bar off Walnut street in downtown Philly. The place was called Elliot’s Nest and was decorated Prohibition-style.

Unmistakably him, Kiseda was sitting alone, and here was a chance to break bread and talk to my idol. But I was too intimidated and didn’t. After all, this was George Kiseda, and I was a kid reporter. Here I was, a mere mortal among the Gods in a bar darker than sin.

Another ball I dropped. I could always blame the lighting.