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

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? Gimme 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.