Members of the Kansas University football family mourned the loss of a friend Friday. Mike Fisher, who didn’t let a broken neck end his football career half a century ago, died of heart failure Friday morning in a Veterans Administration hospital in Tucson, Ariz., according to friends. He was 70.

“He’ll be missed,” close friend John Hadl said. “He was a dandy. He’s got a million friends. He touched a lot of people.”

Fisher was a fullback/

tackle for KU from 1959-61. A major in the U.S. Marine Corps, Fisher did two tours of duty and suffered a leg injury in battle in Vietnam and received multiple Purple Hearts, according to Hadl. Fisher also was an author who wrote military books and “Deaner: Fifty Years of University of Kansas Athletics,” the biography of beloved trainer Dean Nesmith.

Fisher went to work for KU as the athletic department’s academic counselor in 1977. He later held similar positions with Kansas State and the University of Arizona.

Hadl said he and friend Larry Hatfield visited Fisher “a couple of months ago” when they heard his health had been failing, after a leg infection led to heart problems.

“We went there kind of expecting the worst,” Hadl said. “We got there and he was sitting in a chair and said, ‘What the hell are you guys doing here?’ That was Mike. Mike was the most all-around talented guy I’ve ever known.”

Hadl said Fisher told him recently that doctors advised him to have his leg, long a source of health problems since he injured it in Vietnam, amputated.

“He didn’t want to do that,” Hadl said. “… He was getting ready to write another book (on Lieutenant Colonel Van D. Bell Jr.).”

Bob Marshall, athletic director at Fort Scott Community College, remembered how he roomed with Fisher his first night in football camp at KU.

“Then we were roommates again in the hospital,” Marshall said. “Mike had broken his neck in spring practice and I (suffered a vertebrae injury), and we ended up in the same room of the student hospital. I’m in a body cast and he’s in traction. We were a real pair. There he was with his head in traction, can’t do anything but look straight up, can’t even turn his head or anything, and his buddies were sneaking him in whiskey in Listerine mouthwash bottles. That was Mike Fisher. He was a brilliant, brilliant man.”

Advised to give up football, Fisher left school to join the Marines and played service ball for two years. He returned from the service to KU to play three seasons for Jack Mitchell. Fisher received the Arthur Weaver Award as the senior player with the best scholastic average. After Fisher was cut from the Philadelphia Eagles’ tryout camp in 1962, he went back into the Marines and went on to serve in Vietnam.

Funeral arrangements for Fisher, who will be buried in Arizona, are pending.