Canadian Columnist Calls Rick Reilly 'Overpaid Millionaire Hack'

Rick Reilly, the ESPN columnist whom the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association has chosen as America's Sportswriter of the Year 11 times, has been the subject of a brutal takedown on Twitter from a prominent Canadian columnist after Reilly insulted our neighbors to the north in his latest column.

First, take a look at Reilly's column, which tells us things about Canada like this:

This is a country that has human-chomping grizzlies on every corner and yet chose the furry beaver for its national animal.

And this:

if Canada doesn't win the gold in men's hockey this time -- something it's only done once since 1952 -- fans here might all throw themselves under stampeding moose.

Basically, it's your typical column portraying Canada as a vast land of furry creatures and cheerful idiots who are obsessed with hockey, beer and donuts. In my experience (having grown up not far from the Canadian border in Detroit), Canadians aren't exactly offended by the kinds of jokes in columns like that, but they're not exactly amused, either, because they've heard all those jokes about 25,000 times.

And if the jokes have been made 25,000 times, they're probably not the kind of original commentary and brilliant insight you'd expect from an award-winning columnist who got millions of dollars from ESPN when he agreed to leave Sports Illustrated.

That's the prelude to this tweet from Bruce Arthur, a Toronto-based columnist for Canada's National Post: