Bye-bye Todd

Well, well, well...Jack Todd is finally leaving the Montreal Gazette sports pages he luckily littered and inhabited for far too long. I could have quietly let him ride into the average sunset and give the Gazette a shot at redemption however given his parting shot this morning quiet and humble is not his style.

Over the years, Jack Todd has been nothing but a big, thin-skinned, unoriginal, humourless, vitriolic and contradictory wanna be sports writer with a penchant to state the obvious. To hard core sports fans (though I freely admit he had his fans who appreciated his "tell it like it is" style) his column amounted to little. Though it did provide a raised eye brow or two. He's managed during his tenure to exponentially increase the ire of many knowledgeable and thoughtful sports junkies on numerous occasions. There's provocative writing and then there's just plain pointless proclivities that don't contribute much to sports discourse.

I'm just glad his act is over.

Here's what he wrote in possibly North America's worst MMQB column:

...(And to think that at one time I thought sports talk-radio (which he had no problems contributing to for a buck) was the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to sports "journalism." That was before the Internet.)

Brilliant stuff. Thank God for the Internet. It is there people had an outlet and escaped the madness of Todd's words. It is on the "Internet market" we realized just how bad he really was. We all know the Internet (and blogging) are both a blessing and curse; filled with brilliance and crap. Get over it.

Typical, short sighted words from a man who watched the Internet blow him by leaving him in a perpetual state of self-importance surrounded by a parochial and stagnant Montreal sports atmosphere. I never got the sense that he ever grew as a sports writer. Never.

I'll tell you one thing: I've seen some amazing sports writing on the Internet. Stuff that often surpasses most of what Todd could scribble on paper.

This is the type of "hard hitting journalism" Montreal readers were subjected to for years. In some ways, the IQ of Montreal sports fans decreased thanks to him. No, Jack. The bottom of the barrel was your time spent and wasted on the sports pages. You can delude yourself into believing only the "illiterate" didn't get you. I can assure you the very literate were not impressed.

Step aside gracefully.

Sometimes I wonder how many talented writers had to move on or wait on the sidelines while this pylon took up space in the papers.

Let's see how The Gazette fills this "void."