page_title: Jim Coleman (journalist)
section_title: Canadian football
hierarchical_section_title: Jim Coleman (journalist) / Career / Canadian football
caption_attribution_description: The Grey Cup
context_page_description: James Alexander Coleman CM was a Canadian sports journalist, writer and press secretary. His journalism career began with The Winnipeg Tribune in 1931, and included tenures with The Province and The Globe and Mail. He became Canada's first national print syndication sports columnist in 1950, writing for The Canadian Press and Southam Newspapers. He also appeared as a radio sports commentator and hosted The Jim Coleman Show on CBC Television, and served as press secretary for the Ontario Jockey Club and Stampede Park in Calgary. His father was D'Alton Corry Coleman, a former journalist and later president of the Canadian Pacific Railway. While travelling about North America to sporting events as a youth with his father, Coleman developed a lifelong love of horse racing, Canadian football and ice hockey.
  Coleman was active for 70 years as a journalist, preferred to use a typewriter instead of a computer, wrote four books, and his final column was published on the day he died. Fellow journalist Milt Dunnell felt that Coleman "was one of the finest sports writers in North America".
context_section_description: Coleman regularly reported on Canadian football. His first Grey Cup coverage was completed as a freelancer for The Winnipeg Tribune. He was in attendance at the 17th Grey Cup in 1929, when the first forward pass was thrown in the championship game, by centreman Jersey Campbell. He later attended the 20th Grey Cup in 1932, where Warren Stephens threw the first touchdown pass in a Grey Cup game. In 1941, Coleman was a co-founder of the Vancouver Grizzlies team that played in the Western Interprovincial Football Union.
  The summary of the celebration by Calgary Stampeders supporters at the Royal York Hotel after their team won the 36th Grey Cup in Toronto, was noted by fellow journalist Jim Taylor as one of Coleman's finest columns.
  "The football game for the Grey Cup was contested officially in the stadium and was continued unofficially in the hotel lobby. At 5:01 p.m. the goalposts were borne triumphantly through the front doors and were erected against the railings of the mezzanine. At 5:02 p.m. two platoons of bellboys circumspectly removed the potted palms, flower vases and anything that weighed less than three thousand pounds. The gaudily caparisoned Calgary supporters were boisterous and noisy but well-behaved and courteously declined to ride their horses into the elevators. Any minor untoward incidents were occasioned by youthful local yahoos who suffered from the delusion that the consumption of two pints of ale and the acquisition of a pseudo-western twang entitled them to ride the range astride any convenient chesterfield".
  — Jim Coleman, November 28, 1948
  Coleman was later a regular guest on radio half-time shows for Hamilton Tiger-Cats games, where he was introduced by the local colour commentator as the "Southam communist".
caption: Grey Cup trophy
exif: {}