James Mirtle: My dear Tom letter… – A hockey journalist’s blog

James Mirtle: My dear Tom letter… – A hockey journalist’s blog:


I promised Tom a response to his very critical portrayal of the hockey media, something he nicely highlighted in a recent comment on his site.

James Mirtle (sports journalist and blogger) and Tom Benjamin (blogger at http://www.canuckscorner.com/ and a very vocal critic of, well, pretty much everything in hockey) have been having a bit of a back and forth. Well worth reading to see both sides of the discussion.

I’ve really come to appreciate Mirtle’s knowledge and middle-of-the-road attitude about things. He’s not a league suck-up, neither is he a players syncophant; he calls them as he sees them, and agree or disagree with him, he’s a fun and informative read.

Tom — Laurie and I have been reading Tom going way back, well before his blog, in places like the Vancouver Canucks mailing lists. He’s an extremely intelligent, well-informed hockey fan. He knows his stuff, and that’s why I read him.

But — jesus. At his best, he’s a suspicious cynic. More normally, he runs between rampant negativism and outright hostility to, it seems everyone and everything in hockey. He comes across as if, as I’ve been known to put it, the entire Canucks organization once slept with his dog and left him with the vet bill — and he’s never gotten over it.

It’s one thing to be critical — but Tom spends his time angry. I long ago got tired of that act, to be honest. It ends up more about Tom, less about the topic — and Tom comes across as that angry, bitter old phart (“I used to have to walk uphill, in the snow, five miles, each way, to go to hockey games, and I was HAPPY!”) that makes him a parody of himself.

Which is too bad. When Tom talks hockey, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that comes out. But these days, and for a while, that’s not what Canucks Corner is about. Instead, it’s about how much smarter Tom is than everyone else in hockey, and how angry and bitter he is that we don’t just all shut up and acknowledge that. And I find that rather hard to enjoy. As — if you read Tom’s stuff — he seems to find hard to enjoy, too.

And as I’ve told Laurie and a few others — if my writing ever gets to be like Tom’s, just have me shot. I’d rather stop writing than turn into the kind of writer Tom is, one for which there seems to be no purpose other than to be angry about something, and use it as a soapbox to export than anger at others.

Makes me wonder what kind of person Tom is in person. Part of me is curious. Most of me is glad I only have to deal with him from the far end of a browser window. One wonders if he’s really aware of how he presents himself on the net — or whether he’s proud of it.

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