Best in the business

A year ago this week, upon Brian Burke's second anniversary at the helm of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Sportsnet columnist Jim Kelley filed his take on Burke's work to the Sportsnet web desk at 1:30 in the morning.

It was 1,283 words of Kelley's finest. He pointed out that this rebuild was bigger than Burke was letting on, that with time and some patience it could succeed.

That afternoon, Kelley succumbed to a long battle with pancreatic cancer. As for Burke's rebuild, it looks like Kelley was right, right up to the end.

That a newspaper man would file a column the night before his passing makes Kelley a legend among sports writers. It speaks to a sense of responsibility to the job. A love for it that so few people ever are fortunate enough to attain, in any profession.

That last hit of the "send" button, as strange as it may sound, is something that a little part of every one of us writers hopes they'll be saying about us after our time has come and gone.

"The guy was filing right to the end. There goes a sportswriter's sportswriter."

There are, of course, a decreasing number of us who think that way, and maybe that's a good thing. The print business has turned on so many of my colleagues that romanticizing about the job is something you do only after looking around the room, and taking stock of who is listening and how many jobs they've been fired or laid off from.

For those of us who are lucky enough to have survived, it's still a hell of a gig. And if you broke in as young hockey writer under the wing of a Kelley (Buffalo News), a Frank Orr (Toronto Star), a Trent Frayne (Globe and Mail), a Jim Matheson, (Edmonton Journal), a Jim Coleman (several Western papers), a Kevin Paul Dupont (Boston Globe), a Red Fisher (Montreal Gazette), or a Michael Farber (Sports Illustrated), there is a love affair with the craft that has been bred into you.

It was always a work-hard play-hard business for those men, and if you were going to hang around with Terry Jones (Edmonton Sun), Neil Stevens (Canadian Press), or Dwayne Eriksson (Calgary Sun, Herald), you'd better be able to handle both ends of that bargain. That meant a lot of day games after night games, if you know what I mean - but it was the night spent next to a guy like Kelley that made you a better reporter the next day.

There was no Internet at the ready when these men needed to know something, no texts or emails to reach out to contacts. So they picked up a phone, or walked across the press box and had a conversation. Or they did the research (some better than others), and in doing so unearthed something else about the topic beyond the fact they had sought.

Now, a guy like Red Fisher isn't going to teach today's reporter about the dangers of Twitter, or linking readers with your Facebook account. But hang around Red, Cam Cole (Vancouver Sun) or Al Strachan (Globe) for long enough, and they'll teach you how to recognize, report and write the kind of angle that will allow your Twitter and Facebook accounts to take care of themselves.

And how did they know? Because they learned the same way, from the men who came before them.

"Many of them are the guys who won the Elmer Ferguson award before me," Jones said yesterday in Edmonton, before the Oilers honoured him for being recognized by the Hockey Hall of Fame. "I mentioned about a dozen of them in my speech.

"You'd end up covering great events with them, like the Brier, CFL games, the World Hockey Association, then the National Hockey League. Jim Matheson's dad Jack wrote for the old Winnipeg Tribune. There were a lot of good sportswriters in Western Canada when I was young."

There were a lot of good ones when I was young too. Somehow, I was smart enough to recognize the way Matheson treated guys like Kelley, Dupont, Orr and Fisher when they came through town.

In my eyes, Matheson knew everything. If he was asking questions of a guy like Kelley, how smart must he be?

They named a street outside the rink in Buffalo after Kelley yesterday. Called it "Jim Kelley Way."

It was a hell of a way, Jim Kelley's way. No short cuts, and damned good for the entire length if it.

Mark Spector is the senior columnist on sportsnet.ca