I cannot survive in a 140-character world, so here are more tweets that grew up to be too big for Twitter…
Ladies and gentleman, from the department of “Things You Thought You’d Never See,” I give you Ed Tait, once believed to be a newspaper lifer and now the official deliverer of glad tidings for those whacky practitioners of pigskin pratfalls—the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
Oh, yes, my main man Eddie has gone over to the dark side of the moon. He is now one of them.
No more will readers of the Winnipeg Free Press sports section delight in Tait’s superb-yet-quirky brand of reportage, whereby his detailing of the daily tribulations of the Bombers and Winnipeg Jets was thorough, thoughtful and measured, and also often would include colorful descriptives that made reference to male body parts (read: gonads, cojones), passing gas, cans of whup-ass and bubbles of snot.
Tait has departed the rag trade and now is the exalted Director of Content for all things Blue Bombers on the Canadian Football League club’s website, which means, one supposes, that we’ll be reading not so much about cojones, farting, whup-ass and snot bubbles anymore.
It also means the newspaper business has lost a good one. Check that: It has lost one of the best.
I was privileged to have had a front row seat in Eddie’s evolution from pup reporter with hair to the big dog with a chrome dome. And make no mistake, he was the big dog on the Bombers beat, for both the Freep and the Winnipeg Sun, where he got his start just in time to witness the rarest of the rare—a Grey Cup celebration painted in Blue and Gold. That was more than a quarter century, about three dozen starting quarterbacks, one heart transplant (Cal Murphy), one biker head coach (Jeff Reinebold) and a whole lot of Bob Marley tunes ago.
Other than play-by-play voice Bob (Knuckles) Irving, I don’t suppose anyone has been as tuned in to the Bombers as Tait since that last Grey Cup crusade in 1990, so it makes sense that the deep-thinkers in the ivory tower at Football Follies Field in Fort Garry would want him on board to trumpet their message. It can’t hurt to have the city’s top sports scribe/reporter preaching your version of the gridiron gospel, right?
Does this mean that Tait has sold out? Piffle. You will hear not but favorable natterings about Eddie taking his bon mots to the Big Blue side of town.
I’m convinced he’ll still be delivering the good stuff and, quite frankly, with his hands on the wheel, bluebombers.com quickly will become the go-to destination for the inside word on all issues Blue Bombers. For one thing, he’ll have something that none among the mainstream news scavengers has—uninhibited access to coaches and players. And he’ll know what to do with it. Eddie is in a position to unzip some lips, so perhaps now we’ll actually get to know the athletes on a more personal level, rather than be fed nothing but bland, stock-in-trade sound bites.
This is a huge (Eddie would call it ginormous) win for the Bombers and a huge (ginormous) loss for the Freep and newspapers.
Good on you, Eddie.
Tait’s is the second significant defection from the Free Press toy department in the past seven months. Earlier, of course, columnist Gary Lawless flew the coop for the bright lights of TSN, although his departure left a void that has been filled seamlessly, comfortably and competently mainly by Paul Wiecek, who, by any measurement, is a much better writer and columnist. The loss of Tait is a different head of lettuce, though. Freep sports boss Steve Lyons can put somebody in his place, but nobody can replace Tait. Unless, that is, Lyons were to poach Kirk Penton from the Sun/Postmedia. That’s what I’d be attempting to do. My guess, however, is that the Freep will operate on the cheap and promote from within.
Interesting piece this week by Wiecek about the abuse heaped upon female sports reporters via social media channels like Twitter. It’s disgraceful. It’s also one of the main reasons I now confine my scribbling to my own blog rather than write for other websites. I control the comments on my blog. If someone wishes to challenge my position on an issue, go for it. We’ll have a discussion. But if he (it’s always a he) can’t do it without making crude references to my body parts that rhyme with the words “bits” and “runt” his voice shall not be heard. It should be about what is written, not whether the writer has a penis or vagina.
Got a kick out of one of the comments that accompanied the Wiecek piece on sexual harassment on social media. A reader wrote: “Anonymous soapboxes are the death of civilized society. I would gladly pay double for my FP subscription if the paper did away with anonymous comments. Remove them altogether, or use real names.” And, naturally, he didn’t use his real name. Unless Graymalkin is his real name.
Say what you will about the Winnipeg Sun, it doesn’t win any National Newspaper Awards but it sure develops top-drawer talent for the CFL. Not only is Ed Tait now the exalted Director of Content for bluebombers.com, but Mike Petrie is entering his fifth season as assistant general manager with the Calgary Stampeders. Both are former Sun sports scribes.
Patti Dawn Swansson has been writing about Winnipeg sports for 45 years, longer than any living being. Do not, however, assume that to mean she harbors a wealth of sports knowledge or that she’s a jock journalist of award-winning loft. It simply means she is old and comfortable at a keyboard (although arthritic fingers sometimes make typing a bit of a chore) and she apparently doesn’t know when to quit. Or she can’t quit.
She is most proud of her Q Award, presented in 2012 for her scribblings about the LGBT community in Victoria, B.C., and her induction into the Manitoba Sportswriters & Sportscasters Association Media Roll of Honour in 2015.
The River City Renegade 
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