Four decades after a hesitant flight from New York, veteran columnist Jack Todd is still chronicling the heartbeats and headlines of Montreal. What began as a one-week trial on the sports copy desk in January 1986 has unfolded into a 40-year love affair with storytelling, a city, and its newspaper.
A Newsroom Homecoming
On January 6, 1986, Jack Todd left his New York apartment, took a pay cut, and started at the bottom as a copy editor on The Gazette's sports desk. He planned to give it just one week. Within an hour of his first shift, surrounded by the chaotic energy and looming deadline clocks of the newsroom, he knew he was back where he belonged.
Over the years, he witnessed the newsroom shrink from around 200 staff to a much smaller team, yet he notes the enduring commitment to quality journalism remained. Initially content behind the scenes, a brief stint as an "inept" acting sports editor nudged him back into writing. Despite a roster of legendary writers like Red Fisher, Michael Farber, and Mike Boone, Todd soon found his own voice and a permanent byline.
Chronicling Triumphs and Tragedies
His assignments quickly escalated from profiling the Alouettes' Johnny Rodgers in California to covering the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis. By 1989, he succeeded Farber as city columnist, a role that plunged him into covering the Oka Crisis and, just months later, the profound tragedy of the École Polytechnique massacre on December 6, 1989.
That event permanently shifted his column's focus, placing gun control and domestic violence at the forefront. The relentless pace of writing five columns a week eventually led to burnout, but after a year back on the desk, another opportunity arose. He returned to sports in time for the 1994 baseball strike and the first of the NHL's Gary Bettman lockouts.
His career spanned seven Olympic Games, three World Cups, the exit of the Nordiques, the return of the Alouettes, the agonizing demise of the Expos, and the decline of the Canadiens following the seismic trade of Patrick Roy on December 4, 1995. He recalls magical moments, like witnessing Jacques Villeneuve's F1 title in Spain and celebrating France's 1998 World Cup win on the streets of Paris at 2 a.m.
A Story That Continues
By 2008, with book deals for his novel Sun Going Down, Todd saw the writing on the wall for newspapers and explored fiction. However, he never fully left The Gazette, continuing as a freelance sports columnist. This longevity has allowed him to cover the current revival of the Canadiens under the management of Jeff Gorton, Kent Hughes, and coach Martin St. Louis, which he calls the franchise's happiest period since he started covering the beat in 1994.
Forty years after that uncertain flight from New York, Jack Todd isn't ready to type "-30-" just yet. He muses about sauntering on for another decade, taking it one day at a time, still passionately listing his heroes and zeros, forever connected to the city he adopted and the stories he helped tell.
