Jim Taylor proudly wore a shirt, jacket and tie to the book launch because Jim Coleman would have insisted it was proper for such an occasion.
Taylor, the long-time West Coast sports journalist, stood on the dais in the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame yesterday, proudly explaining how he came across 2,500 of Coleman's newspaper columns, dated from 1939 to 1986, and read them all.
He carefully compiled 150 columns for the book The Best of Jim Coleman: Fifty Years of Canadian Sport from The Man Who Saw It All.
"No one was more amazed than me when I found those columns and found out what a great writer he was," Taylor said. "I had no idea how good he was. He was absolutely brilliant. He was Red Smith, Jimmy Breslin, any great sportswriter you want to name. What Coleman loved to do was tell stories."
Taylor recalled being with Coleman during the Summit Series in 1972.
They were in a Moscow hotel after Paul Henderson's dramatic goal late in the final game that won the hockey series for Canada.
"Jim had been told the room would be bugged," Taylor recalled. "He climbed up very carefully on his bed, leaned into a sprinkler head and screamed, 'How do you like them apples, Ivan.'
"Jim was impeccably dressed, as usual."
Taylor and Coleman became close friends over the years and that led to Taylor's being summoned by the widowed Maggie Coleman to help her move to another apartment after Coleman died in 2001 when he was 89.
The move was almost complete when Maggie remembered there was an old filing cabinet in a basement storage locker.
Inside the cabinet, Taylor found 14 flower boxes stuffed with Coleman's old columns.
"What a great discovery we made in that bottom draw of the filing cabinet," Taylor read from Maggie's prepared statement yesterday. "I will treasure your collection the rest of my life."
So will Taylor, who at first couldn't find a Canadian publisher willing to undertake the project Taylor dedicated himself to.
Taylor found one publisher who said, "But he's dead." Taylor persevered on the basis that many of the world's great authors also are dead, and their books keep on selling.
Coleman wrote three books and his characters from newspaper columns and books were legendary, including Johnny Needle-Nose, the Blow-Back Kid, Knifey, the Good Kid and Sir Benjamin Stockley.
Vancouver businessmen Gerry Strongman and Peter Kains, with ties to the Coleman family, decided to back the book after they read of Taylor's discovery in an article by Canadian Press reporter Jim Morris.
Harbour Publishing got involved in the process, and copies were selling for $34.95 yesterday.
"The reason I did this book," Taylor said, "is that old stories get lost. There are people in our business that don't know who Jim Coleman was. These stories shouldn't get lost."
The cigar-smoking Coleman went everywhere as a journalist. He saw the Victoria Cougars win the 1925 Stanley Cup, saw Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig swat home runs and chronicled the great 1972 Canadian victory over the Soviets.
Coleman's real love, though, was horse racing and the characters who populated the tracks and barns across Canada.
Taylor singled out a March 14, 1946, column in The Globe and Mail entitled Just Julia. It was about Johnny Needle-Nose and a dying mare.
"You find strange people around a racetrack," Coleman wrote. "Good men, bad men and men that are just plain shiftless and lazy.
"The best thing about racing is the horses: honest, loyal and uncomplaining. It would be difficult to classify Johnny Needle-Nose, but you couldn't call him a bad man.
"Sometimes it's not wise to ask too many questions around a racetrack because the yesterdays are nobody's business and it's only an even-money bet that the sun will rise again tomorrow morning."
Another column in The Globe and Mail was about Jackie Robinson of the Montreal Royals on Aug. 30, 1946.
Robinson would later become the first African American to play major-league baseball.
"So you've been wondering about Jackie Robinson, eh?" Coleman wrote. "Well, he's a big, clean-cut guy with an easy smile and a firm handshake. He has the legs of a hard-driving football player and the shoulders of a wrestler, and he possesses a calm detachment that belies the fact that he is an earnest and incisive thinker.
"Ostensibly his only worries are that despite the fact that he is leading the International League in batting, he is in the midst of a bit of a hitting slump and he is suffering from an injured right ankle that has kept him out of several games.
"From the cut of his jib, it is obvious that Robinson is a big-leaguer."
The last column selected by Taylor was written on Feb. 21, 1983, for Southam News in which Coleman told a story of Taylor Field in Regina, which Coleman considered a unique Canadian sporting shrine.
The final paragraph: "Piffles Taylor must be revolving in his grave if he has heard that his fellow Reginans have become such softies that they're contemplating putting a domed roof on the fabled stadium that bears his honoured name."