Jim Huber: Sports World Mourns the Loss of an Irreplaceable Voice

The sports world has suffered a great loss. This particular loss does not come from within, but rather from the perimeter, the place where the chroniclers who describe the action and tell the tales stand at attention.

Jim Huber, one of the very best chroniclers the sports world has ever known, passed away on Monday. He was diagnosed with acute leukemia very recently, and he leaves us at the age of 67.

Huber is best known for the work he did for Turner Broadcasting, where he worked for close to three decades, primarily as a golf and NBA analyst.

"We are saddened by the passing of our colleague and friend Jim Huber," said president of sales, distribution and sports for Turner Broadcasting, David Levy, per CNN.com.

Huber is the author of three books, and he started his career as a print journalist, working the Miami Dolphins beat at the Miami News before moving on to cover football and basketball for The Atlanta Journal. His television career started in 1984 when he joined CNN.

Despite the amount of time he spent on television, an arena that has made insufferable bores of a great many writers and thinkers, Huber never lost his unique point of view and trademark eloquence. His role was mainly to take big stories and put them in a proper, more human perspective. To this end, he never disappointed.

Thankfully, Huber's takes on the biggest stories of the past decades live on on YouTube. You can go back and find the obituary he did for New York Yankees great Mickey Mantle for CNN, and you'll find that it still digs deep:

Concerning more recent events, you can dig up Huber's take on the 2011 NBA Finals between the Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat. It was a series that capped a truly remarkable year for the NBA, and Huber nailed it:

Videos like these serve to remind us all what we're going to be missing now that Huber is gone. There are a lot of writers and TV personalities who try to perfectly capture important goings-on, but Huber had a way of doing it that will be impossible to duplicate.

To call him an analyst or even an essayist doesn't quite cut it. It's more appropriate to refer to Huber as a bard, a man hired to tell us all what's going on in a way we won't forget.

Make no mistake about it, Huber is going to be missed. That much becomes clear when you take a stroll around the Twitterverse.

Renowned golf pundit Ron Sirak is sad to see Huber go:

The same is true of basketball pundit David Aldridge, who did plenty of work alongside Huber at TNT:

Beyond these two, there is no shortage of people coming out and offering their condolences. The one thing everyone agrees on is that a very special person has been lost and that he will be missed.

Huber most certainly will be missed. In a day and age where old-fashioned yarn-spinners are in short supply, losing one as good as Huber hurts.

May he rest in peace.