In a wide-ranging interview with RealClearSports, AOL Sports columnist Jay Mariotti touched on his vitriolic exit from the Chicago Sun-Times in August and had some choice words for the paper's venerable film critic, Roger Ebert, who criticized the way Mariotti left the struggling paper.
RCS: Staying in Chicago, we have to talk about the Chicago Sun-Times. Many there, including Roger Ebert, said you left in an "ugly way."
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To remain relevant, do you think sports writers must leave situations like you left at Chicago Sun-Times, even if it means taking heat for it?Mariotti: Excellent question. I signed an extension in July under the belief that the paper would try to upgrade its Web site, which is the only way any newspaper can survive in the future. It was a fair request -- I was devoting two more years to them -- but they completely dropped the ball in Beijing. The subsequent "heat" was silly and embarrassing to them -- I laughed at it. Can you imagine the New York Times or any other serious newspaper devoting the thrust of an entire edition to anyone who left the paper? Have some pride. Don't seem so hideously desperate that you're hung up on a sports columnist leaving and handing back about a million bucks. Don't trot out writers to disparage me when, frankly, they should have been directing that fire toward a newspaper war that was lost years ago.
It's my life, not theirs. I wrote 5,000 columns for them in 17 years. I wrote on holidays, spent massive amounts of time away from home. Roger Ebert, whom I've met once, can kiss my ass. No one gave more blood to that place than I did, and if I decide it's going to die an imminent death, it's my call. And based on events of the last four months, I couldn't have been more accurate. The place is dead.
Later in the interview, Mariotti hints that he may be writing for a Chicago outlet again in the future:
And I still might be writing in Chicago very soon, but it won't be with the Sun-Times-like frenzy that I thought was required at the underdog, struggling paper.