‘A bit of an icon as a sports editor’

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This article was published 18/01/2012 (5190 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

HAROLD (Hal) Sigurdson used to joke that the players, coaches and sports executives he met over his career spared him “the need of getting a real job.”

However, his many readers during his 45-year career in the newspaper business would likely agree he had a real job, and did a real good job.

The former sports editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, died Monday at age 79 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.

A memorial service is tentatively planned for Sunday at the Neil Bardal Funeral Centre.

Sigurdson was the Free Press sports editor from 1976-1989 and worked as a Free Press sports columnist until his retirement in 1996.

“I first met him when I worked at the Trib in 1954 and he was covering women’s golf at the Freep,” said Sigurdson’s one-time assistant sports editor and long-time colleague Ralph Bagley, also the retired Free Press golf and curling writer. “Back in that time, the two sports departments were very friendly. We had no Sunday papers then, so there was a lot of hanging out on Saturday nights at parties and the press club.

“I certainly remember him as a very astute observer of the sports scene.”

Jeff Blair, former football writer at the Free Press, now of the Globe and Mail, got his sportswriting start under Sigurdson.

“I’m thinking the people who worked for Hal remember we all lived in fear of the pink memo,” Blair said. “The guys in the office called it the pink blizzard.

“But I remember Hal, too, as really fair. Back then was a different time and Hal was a guy who stressed pride and craft. He went over the paper every day. He had a real eye for detail. I believe he was a great mentor, because when you’re doing well, you don’t really need someone to tell you you’re doing well. It’s when you’re not always doing well that you need someone to kick you in the ass and give you a second chance, and he gave me at least 30 second chances.”

Sigurdson is fondly remembered by Bob Picken, formerly of CJOB and CBC radio, with whom he served on the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame committee as well as covering professional and amateur sports in Manitoba.

“He was a good journalist and, even when he was living away for a while, he was always proud to call Winnipeg home,” Picken said. “He was a bit of an icon as a sports editor in giving many sportswriters a start in the business.”

Though he had Icelandic roots, Sigurdson was raised on the family farm in Churchbridge, Sask. until he moved to Winnipeg in the 1940s. He attended Daniel McIntyre Collegiate before starting at the Free Press in 1951 as a copy boy and worked his way up to reporter covering the Canadian Football League and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. From 1963-1966, he was the sports editor of the Calgary Albertan. He joined the Vancouver Sun in 1966 where he became the assistant sports editor and hockey writer covering the National Hockey League and the Vancouver Canucks before returning to the Free Press in 1976.

A father of four children, Katherine, Valerie, Michael and Paul and a grandfather of seven, Sigurdson was a media member of the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame and the CFL Hall of Fame.

In his farewell column, published in the Winnipeg Free Press sports section on June 28, 1996, Sigurdson used his well-known, self-deprecating humour to describe his exit from the sports journalism business:

“It is now 45 years, three months and one week since that kid (Sigurdson) filled his first glue pot. Today he is a cranky curmudgeon. He is also fat, bald and a grandfather as well as overpaid. That’s why he’s elected to scram lam before management figures it out. But it’s been one hell of a ride.”