Will his incredible “outside opportunities” include running a gambling website, like Mike North is currently doing?

This guy was garbage. He had no heart and wrote for the sole purpose of controversy. He would praise and rip teams for the same reasons in the same week:

The Bulls are back and have endeared themselves to the city by being scrappy hard-workers! The Bulls suck because Reinsdorf is cheap and is content with scrappy hard-workers instead of stars!

Dusty Baker has reinvigorated the Cubs and the team is poised to take its loyal fans to the promised land! Wrigley never looked better and it’s because the guys in Trib Tower finally got it right! Baker is the worst manager in MLB history and the team is trash, but that’s what the Cubs’ drunken idiot fans deserve! The Trib blew it because they are cheap money guys who know nothing about baseball! And Wrigley should be demolished!

Based on second-hand reports, he was just as hated by his co-workers as by his readers.

crosses fingers

I thought you were a reactionary, sanctimonious, disingenuous moron, but I give credit where credit is due. Hence, I have to say that I absolutely, positively will not miss your daily strident screeds, your irrational musings, your pompous diatribes, your petty and transparent personal agendas, your prosaic writing, your nonsensical nicknames, your awkward attempts at pithy wit, your disdain for Chicago, nor your fat, plasticine, rouge red, jowly mash face.

Worst of luck to you.

Rick Telander confirms it here, and has a few parting shots for Mariotti:

“Finally, hopefully forever, they called this person’s bluff,” said Telander. “You can only hold your breath and lie on the floor and pound your fist and kick your feet so many times. Why it took the paper so many years to do this is really just a tragedy.” The antipathy between Telander and Mariotti was mutual, but other sportswriters around town didn’t like Mariotti either. “I’ve got a lot of reporters jealous of me. To hell with them,” Mariotti told me a couple of years ago, when Ozzie Guillen called him a “fucking fag” and the press corps didn’t exactly rally round.

A tragedy? I asked Telander.

“Because the damage a ‘humorless loner,’ as you described him [I did], can do to an overstressed sports department is incalculable.” He said the sports department lost its cohesion and became “sinister and secretive and fuck your buddy. It was the worst possible teamwork conditions.”

Telander wondered, “Why, if you have somebody like this, do you wait for him to quit? Why don’t you just cut him? I will never know. The good thing is that this is a chance for rebirth. This is joy. A whole shitload of guys called me last night joyous! Ding dong, the witch is dead! I want to get everybody together. I want to have a team meeting. I want to give a fiery pregame prep talk and I want us to come charging out of the locker room with our guns blazing, not slinking out like a bunch of dirty little rodents.” He said, “Even on a sinking ship, if we’re going down let’s go down standing up and not on our knees.”

Is Stu Courtney the man to lead you? I asked.

"He’s been so undermined that I think this is his moment to shine too. He sounded like a new man today. He did, he sounded like a new man. He’s been made to eat shit for years because of this guy.

“I don’t even know to feel,” Telander went on. “I just don’t know. But if he’s gone forever, praise the lord.”

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080828/COMMENTARY/808289997

Dear Jay,

What an ugly way to leave the Sun-Times. It does not speak well for you. Your timing was exquisite. You signed a new contract, waited until days after the newspaper had paid for your trip to Beijing at great cost, and then resigned with only an email. You saved your explanation for a local television station.

As someone who was working here for 24 years before you arrived, I think you owed us more than that. You owed us decency. The fact that you saved your attack for TV only completes our portrait of you as a rat.

Newspapers are not dead, Jay, although you predicted the death of the Sun-Times and the Tribune. Neither paper will die any time soon.

Job-hunting tip: It is imprudent to go on TV and predict the collapse of a newspaper you might hope would hire you. Times are hard in the newspaper business, and for the economy as a whole. Did you only sign on for the luxury cruise? There’s an old saying that you might have come across once or twice on the sports beat: “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” Newspapers are not dead, Jay, because there are still readers who want the whole story, not a sound bite. If you only work on television, viewers may get a little weary of you shouting at them. You were a great shouter in print, that’s for sure, stomping your feet when owners, coaches, players and fans didn’t agree with you. It was an entertaining show. Good luck getting one of your 1,000-word rants on the air.

The rest of us are still at work, still putting out the best paper we can. We believe in our profession, and in the future. And we believe in our Internet site, which you also whacked as you slithered out the door. I don’t know how your column was doing, but we have the most popular sports section in Chicago. The reports and blog entries by our Washington editor Lynn Sweet have become a must-stop for millions of Americans in this election year.

After a recent blog entry I wrote about the Beijing Olympics, I woke up at 5 a.m. one morning, when North America was asleep, and found that 40 percent of my 100 most recent visitors had been from China. I don’t have any complaints about our Web site. So far this month my Web page page has been visited from virtually every country on earth, including one visit from the Vatican City. The Pope, no doubt. Hope you were doing as well.

You have left us, Jay, at a time when the newspaper is once again in the hands of people who love newspapers and love producing them. You managed to stay here through the dark days of the thieves Conrad Black and David Radler. The paper lost millions. Incredibly, we are still paying Black’s legal fees.

I started here when Marshall Field and Jim Hoge were running the paper. I stayed through the Rupert Murdoch regime. I was asked, “How can you work for a Murdoch paper?” My reply was: “It’s not his paper. It’s my paper. He only owns it.” That’s the way I’ve always felt about the Sun-Times, and I still do. On your way out, don’t let the door bang you on the ass.

Your former colleague,

Roger Ebert