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

Jim Taylor, author or co-author of fourteen books and a veteran sports columnist with the Vancouver Province, writes with first-hand knowledge of the problems of the disabled: his daughter became a quadriplegic with diffuse brain damage as the result of a skiing accident in 1976 at the age of fourteen. Jim Taylor lives in Vancouver with his wife, Deborah.

Rick Hansen's profile page