Mike Beamish, Vancouver Sun
Published: Thursday, August 28, 2008
Jim Kearney's most enduring piece of advice for a young man starting out in the sportswriting business was, Don't get hooked.
"Go back to law school," Kearney advised me 30 years ago. "It pays a lot better."
Kearney, the long-time Vancouver Sun columnist who died last Friday at age 86, was right on both scores, but I didn't listen. I got hooked. And Kearney's a reason for that.
His agile typewriter (and, for a brief time, a computer screen, as newspapers emerged from the horse-and-buggy era) turned me and other Sun readers into unabashed Kearney fans. For 17 years, Kearney brightened the fun-and-games department with his entertaining, insightful, must-read columns. He wrote five a week -- a terror for most of us later seduced by the craft because Kearney made it seem so easy. And he became one of Vancouver's first multi-media stars with his regular morning editorials on CBC radio.
A whole generation has gone by -- and then some -- since Kearney left the paper in 1980. Sports talk radio, cable sports networks, a plethora of radio, TV and print outlets, have taken hold and mushroomed in Vancouver since his heyday. But there was a time when sportswriters such as Kearney, Jim Taylor, Eric Whitehead and Clancy Loranger were at the top of the totem pole, their reach and influence so profound that sports addicts felt delinquent if they didn't get their daily fix from The Sun or Province.
Kearney was the first beat writer for the Lions in 1954 when Bob Ackles, who predeceased him last month, was the team's anonymous water boy. And after 11 seasons, five coaches and innumerable crises, Kearney was in Toronto when the Lions completed the long journey from one employee, secretary Vida Scott, operating in a one-room office, illuminated by a 60-watt bulb, to Grey Cup champions.
When Muhammad Ali was heavyweight champion, he made his one and only ring appearance in Vancouver against Canadian punching bag George Chuvalo, in a match promoted by Murray Pezim, the zany stock promoter who later brought his three-ring antics to football as Lions owner from 1990-92. Just out of school, I remember sneaking into a North Vancouver gym to get an eyeful of Ali and Chuvalo during their workouts, and to get a glimpse of Kearney at work in his element.
Like many sportswriters, he was myopic and wore horn-rimmed glasses. Unlike most sportswriters, he was skinny and wore a tweed hat that may have once belonged to Sherlock Holmes.
Despite Kearney's later imprecations to avoid a long run in the sportswriting gig, I've never seen anyone approach the physical act of putting thoughts on paper or computer screen with as much relish. Kearney took almost diabolical glee in pounding it out, using a lightning-fast, hunt-and-peck system to record the glory (the Bannister-Landy Miracle Mile in Vancouver; the first Canada-Soviet hockey series) and the tragedy (the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics) of humankind.
Sports was his metier, but he never let it blind him to a wider world. In the 1960s, while in London, Kearney wrote of a pop culture phenomenon featuring four lads with sheepdog haircuts from Liverpool -- the Beatles. He covered other far-reaching issues beyond the usual daily scope -- terrorist bombings and the coming perils of the drug culture. A pair of columns on steroid use -- more than 40 years ago -- won him a National Newspaper Award.