• Age: 15
• Grade: 10

At age seventeen, Jim Taylor began a career in writing as part-time high school sports reporter. Forty-eight years, some 7,500 five-a-week columns, three times as many radio shows and twelve books later, Jim Taylor is undeniably one of Canada's most loved sports writers. In Hello, Sweetheart? Gimmie Rewrite!, Taylor looks back at half a century of sitting in on the sidelines with "the kings and queens of second-guess, the heroes of hindsight."

Taylor's career spanned an era when columns were pounded out on typewriters on actual paper, the copy set in hot lead slugs and bolted into place in page molds before going to press, and extended into the age when computers could eat your copy and send it who-knows-where. But he, too, could foul up: In his fifth year as a football writer, Taylor said the BC Lions rookie placekicker he had just checked out wouldn't make it to the next season. His name? Lui Passaglia, a twenty-five-year career Lion who scored more points in that time than any football player in CFL history.

Mostly though, Taylor looks back at a career of triumphs. He has drank beer from the Stanley Cup, was there when Paul Henderson scored "The Goal" in Moscow in 1972, followed Rick Hansen's wheelchair around the world and even lived a while with the Gretzkys. From the "room at the top of the stairs," Jim Taylor writes a very funny and frank memoir about life in the press box.

Born on March 16, 1937 in Nipawin, Saskatchewan, Jim Taylor of West Vancouver was B.C.'s most widely-read sports columnist. Taylor began his newspaper career in 1954 as a part-time sports reporter at the Daily Colonist in Victoria and later wrote for the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Province and the Calgary Sun. He became a nationally syndicated sports columnist, author, and broadcaster. His 1987 chronicle of Rick Hansen's wheelchair journey, Man In Motion, reputedly had a record first printing for a B.C. book. In addition to Taylor's books on Wayne Gretzky, entitled Gretzky:The Authorized Pictorial Biography with Wayne Gretzky, and B.C. Lions` Jim Young, entitled Dirty Thirty. Taylor is credited with the re-write of a Soviet journalist's biography of Igor Larionov. In 2004, he compiled The Best of Jim Coleman: Fifty Years of Canadian Sport from the Man Who Saw it All. A member of the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame and the Canadian Football League Hall of Fame, Taylor was awarded a lifetime achievement award by Sports Media Canada in 2000. He began his writing career as part-time high school sports reporter, drank beer from the Stanley Cup, saw Paul Henderson score "The Goal" in 1972, predicted rookie placekicker Lui Passaglia wouldn`t last with the BC Lions more than one season and wrote more than 8,000 newspaper columns. He recalls his half-century as a sports writer in Hello, Sweetheart? Gimme Rewrite!

Jim Taylor's profile page

“Hello Sweetheart? Gimmie Rewrite!” My Life in the Wonderful World of Sports