B.C. sports commentator Jim Taylor, left, with Rick Hansen in 2005 when the BC Sports Hall of Fame produced a small exhibit at Oakridge Shopping Centre that celebrated the 20th anniversary of the start of Ricks Man in Motion World Tour.BC Sports Hall of Fame
Jim Taylor was a sportswriter more entertaining than the teams he covered. He was certainly more popular.
Generations of Vancouver sports fans knew that however disappointing the performance of hockey’s Canucks, soccer’s Whitecaps or football’s BC Lions, they would be treated the following day to a funny, acerbic and satisfying sports column.
Mr. Taylor, who has died on Vancouver Island at 81, showed little patience for prima donna athletes, or wannabe jocks in the press box. He abhorred cliché, eschewed the bland quote and took delight in eviscerating the pompous.
His bon mots were shared at office water coolers, stuck to refrigerators, kept folded inside wallets and purses. In the days when he wrote for the afternoon Vancouver Sun, sports-obsessed schoolchildren raced home after the final bell to read his column.
Over the years, he wrote more than 15,000 newspaper columns, many of them produced on deadline. He did at least twice as many radio commentaries, as well as countless television appearances, and found the time to write more than a dozen books, including collaborations with wheelchair athlete Rick Hansen, big-band leader Dal Richards and the father-son duo of Walter and Wayne Gretzky. Collections of his columns were titled, You Mean I Get Paid to do This? and Forgive Me My Press Passes.
His writing displayed a deft, conversational touch leavened by sarcasm and wit. It had been his ambition as a young man to be a humourist like Eric Nicol.
When a hockey team agreed to pay out the remaining $60,000 on a player’s contract, Mr. Taylor conjured an epistolary exchange with his editor in which he offered to not write for a similar amount.
Mr. Taylor once explained to readers the positions of a curling foursome: “Each rink is made up of a ‘lead,’ who is first to the bar; a ‘second,’ who is a step slower; a ‘third,’ who arrives in time to buy the round; and a ‘skip,’ so called because he’s always in the washroom when the tab arrives.”
“It’s Minor Hockey Week in Canada,” he once suggested. “Take a Canuck to lunch.”
The concluding series of never-ending hockey playoffs he described as “the Stanley Cup Finally.”
Mr. Taylor as a knight is circa early 1960s when he was still writing for the Victoria Daily Colonist.BC Sports Hall of Fame
He dismissed baseball except for its soporific qualities. “To be properly appreciated,” he wrote, “baseball requires a great sofa.”
There was nothing athletic about Mr. Taylor, who was bald in his 20s and squinted behind thick glasses. He had a braying laugh and a habit of testing one-liners on fellow sportswriters. Colleagues nicknamed him Skull for his barren scalp. When he and fellow Sun columnist Jim Kearney both took ill during a road trip, Mr. Taylor branded them as “Butch Casualty and the Sunstroke Kid.”
His humour about gender roles and conjugal relations dated from the Mad Men era, yet he helped at least one aspiring woman to break into sports writing. He was known for his generosity to young reporters, offering words of praise. His opinions about newspaper management were mostly unprintable. He left the Vancouver Sun when a new publisher forbade freelance work. Mr. Taylor’s impressive output in print, radio and on television was fuelled by a desire to provide the best possible care for a daughter rendered a quadriplegic when crashed into by a reckless skier in 1976.
James Edgar Taylor was born on March 16, 1937, in the Saskatchewan village of Nipawin, population 892. “To get to Nipawin,” he wrote, “you headed the dog team north and when the last dog died, you were almost there.” He was the youngest of four children born to the former Ethel Florence Quinton, the daughter of a Winnipeg sheet-metal worker, and James Edgar Taylor Sr., known as Ed, a grocer.
The family eventually opened a coffee shop down the street from their home. Taylor’s Lunch Room served fresh pies and doughnuts, as well as sandwiches for the lunch crowd. His mother cooked, a sister served and an older brother chopped wood to keep the stoves roaring. By then, his father had been left bedridden with cancer in a room off the dining area. He died two weeks after Jim’s seventh birthday.
The family struggled financially, shuttling between the village and Winnipeg before moving to Victoria. An English and journalism teacher at Victoria High School spotted the young man’s facility with words and got him a part-time job at the Daily Colonist covering high-school sports. The youth was so inexperienced that for his first story, he set the margins of his typewriter at the exact same width as a newspaper column. So uncertain was Mr. Taylor of his future that for a year he retained his morning paper route for the same newspaper.
Mr. Taylor also wrote a column about popular music for young people, notable only for his prediction of the flash-in-the-pan popularity of a young singer named Elvis Presley.
In 1963, Mr. Taylor travelled from Victoria to Vancouver to cover the Grey Cup. After the final whistle, Mr. Taylor raced to the ferry, wrote his stories while aboard ship, dropped them off at the newspaper office and then covered a local hockey game.
After a decade in the British Columbia capital, Mr. Taylor was lured to Vancouver to join the staff of the fledgling Vancouver Times, a daily founded by hustling advertising salesman Val Warren. The city’s third daily lasted less than a year before folding. By then, Mr. Taylor had already retreated to the Colonist.
The Vancouver Sun hired him to cover the football beat in 1966. Four years later, he joined Mr. Kearney as a columnist in replacing the great Denny Boyd. The sports department also included the fine horse-racing writer Archie McDonald and a stellar cast of beat reporters in a golden age for the department. Mr. Taylor covered the 1972 Winter Olympics in Japan, as well as hockey’s legendary Summit Series in September, which placed him in Moscow to witness Paul Henderson’s famous goal.
Mr. Taylor left the Vancouver Sun by moving down the hall of a shared building to write columns for The Province, his home for the next 16 years. In 1995, he was hired away to become the associate publisher and marquee columnist for a tabloid weekly called Sports Only, a tentative foray into the Vancouver market by the Toronto Sun newspaper chain. After the weekly folded soon after, Mr. Taylor became a nationally syndicated columnist with the Calgary Sun until his retirement in 2001.
Mr. Taylor was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame (1989), the Greater Victoria Sports Hall of Fame (2006) and the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame (2005) in Vancouver. In 2010, he received the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jack Webster Foundation, the province’s highest journalism accolade.
Mr. Taylor died on Monday at his home at Shawnigan Lake, outside Victoria. He leaves a son, Christopher, and a daughter, Teresa. His wife of 56 years, the former Deborah Easton, died in 2016.
For all his accolades, Mr. Taylor readily acknowledged missing out on the sports scoop of his career. At the teary 1988 news conference announcing his trade from the Edmonton Oilers, Wayne Gretzky opened by saying, “I want to apologize to my friend Jim Taylor in front of everyone.” Mr. Taylor had learned of the pending deal but out of loyalty to the family pledged to hold the information until an approved time. Instead, news leaked and Mr. Taylor lost the scoop. He did not regret it, he said. After all, he had given his word.