Given the nearly-forgotten controversy over his 2008 HOF ballot, and his recent spat with Jay the Joke, Rick Telander has been in the threads around here a bit. Well, he "sat down" with a sports blogger this past week and gave a pretty nice interview, ranging from his thoughts on how the Cubs have grown such a large fanbase:

The Bears are the unifying factor, but the Cubs are insane - the reason being that every young person who moves to Chicago, moves to the North Side-somewhere in Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, Lakeview, Wrigleyville, Evanston, Bucktown, near DePaul - always the North side.

To the odd conditions under which he came to The Sun-Times:

I was hired away from Sports Illustrated in 1995 because Mariotti had been suspended by the Sun-Times and was out of the paper. I was told by then-sports editor Rick Jaffe, "He will never be back. Never." That’s why I took the job. He got an attorney, got busted down to reporter and somehow came back.

to his opinion of Mike North:

Instigators like North who take things out of context and screech are hard to deal with, since you have to set the record straight with facts, again and again. If people can’t understand nuance and hyperbole and symbolism, I don’t think they should read and make judgments.

And about that supposedly Dawson-indicting HOF ballot:

I show my readers what I do each year - hence alarmists seemed to think I had killed Andre Dawson with an axe this year, since I didn’t vote in protest over Selig’s head in sand on steroids. But unsent ballots don’t count against percentage needed to get in....I got Dawson’s number and called him - he was angry, but so was I over this disinformation - and I said, "Did you read my column?" and he said, "No, someone was going to send it to me but I didn’t get it." So I read my column to Dawson over the phone. "Now I see what you mean," he said.

All in all, a neat read and a interesting look into Telander's career. It's a shame he's the one getting censored by The Sun-Times whilst Mariotti is allowed to publish whatever puerile bullsh*t he dreams up.