Famed Province sports columnist Jim Taylor dies at age 82
Famed B.C. sports columnist Jim Taylor died Monday, and it didn’t take long for the accolades to pour in.
Edmonton Sun sports writer Terry Jones referred to Taylor as “skull”.
“Skull was a legend,” Jones wrote on Twitter. “Jim Taylor had the best wit in Canadian sportswriting and loved to tell the story of how he started in the biz reviewing records for the Victoria Times and once wrote a column explaining why one guy would never make it. Elvis Presley.”
Dozens of other industry players, as well as longtime fans, weighed in on social media.
Squire Barnes of Global TV referred to him as “one of the greatest sports writers this country has produced.”
Postmedia News entertainment writer Dana Gee got her first big job through Taylor.
“I first met Jim Taylor through a mutual family friend when I was working as the sports editor at a small newspaper in Kelowna. He encouraged me to apply to The Province sports department and he put in a word for me. I got in and Jim became a great mentor.” Gee said.
“I remember him telling me to not take any you-knowwhat from a certain old school football coach and to laugh, after all we got to cover sports.”
Taylor, 82, started his journalism career in 1955 at the Times Colonist and worked there until 1965, when he moved to The Vancouver Sun’s sports department for 13 years and then The Province for 17 years.
In the mid 1990s Taylor worked for the short-lived Sports Only magazine, before writing a syndicated column for The Calgary Sun. He retired in 2001, at the top of his game.
Taylor was inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in 2005, the CFL Hall of Fame, received the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jack Webster Foundation for journalism in 2010 and a lifetime achievement award from Sports Media Canada.
As well as a newspaper man of great wit, Taylor was a prodigious author of books. He wrote books on Wayne Gretzky, Walter Gretzky, Dal Richards, Rick Hansen, Greg Moore, Jim Coleman, Bob Lenarduzzi and more.
In a statement, Harbour Publishing described Taylor as one of Canada’s most entertaining sportswriters.
“Name any memorable event — from Canada-Russia 1972 to Rick Hansen’s Man in Motion tour — or any famous name from Wayne Gretzky to Muhammad Ali to the San Diego Chicken, and Jim Taylor was there giving his insightful, witty and occasionally skeptical take on the subject. As Taylor wrote, ‘when sport makes instant millionaires out of kids who can hit a ball or a puck with a stick or stuff a leather balloon through a fishnet, what’s not to laugh?’ ”