100 Grey Cups

by Stephen Brunt

  The game was clean throughout, only two men were ruled off, both Parkdale players, Brady for tripping and Ross for holding. Both were off at the same time in the third quarter.…

  The most sensational player on the field was Gage at outside wing for Varsity. He seemed possessed of phenomenal speed and endurance, and though jarred badly in a tackle in the third quarter, played like a fiend to the very end. He made some great catches in a broken field, and if there was a loose ball he was sure to get it. Thomson, the other outside wing, not only followed down splendidly, but was used with great success in carrying the ball. Gall did some great punting and made his kicks effective by booting the ball close to the scrimmage, and giving his outside wings time to get well down the field. His on-side kicks were not so successful, as Parkdale laid for them all the time.

  Ritchie played his usual strong game and kept the team on their toes, while his side partner, Jimmy Bell, with the cracked ribs, was always in the midst of the doings, tackling fearlessly despite his injury. Lajoie and Muir also did good work on the line, and Dixon made few mistakes at full back.

  The Varsity players were not keyed up like they were in the Ottawa game, but they played a strong game nevertheless and gave Parkdale credit for having a splendid team. “They have a better line than Ottawa,” said Ritchie.

  Parkdale surprised Varsity several times by working the on-side kick. On one occasion they made a big gain when Cromar got the ball, a beautiful tackle by Foulds, who played a fine game throughout, saving a touchdown. The Parkdale back division played in streaks. Sometimes they couldn’t miss anything, while at other times they couldn’t catch anything, and Varsity profited by every mistake. Their backs received the very best of protection from their line, and Killaly had all kinds of time to do the kicking. He punted very well, indeed, varying his distance to suit the occasion. Cromar played a very useful game throughout, and Brady made some spectacular catches. The Varsity wings were invariably on them like wolves, and gave them little time to return kicks.

  Barber and Brockbank, the Parkdale ends, were usually down under every kick, and the former made quite a name for himself by smothering Lawson’s attempted runs. Harper and Meegan were both good on the offence and defence, and Frank Dissette was the best line plunger on the team. Brother Jimmy played a good game at quarterback, his passing being accurate and nervy. The scrimmage was as solid as a brick.

  What beat Parkdale was Gall’s fine punting and the unerring tackling of the Varsity wings, and the west-enders’ inability to carry their trick plays to a successful completion owing to the magnificent defences of the champions. “You’ve got to watch them all the time,” said Captain Newton of Varsity, and he certainly did. There’s a great rugby player, probably the hardest worker and the most effective man on a team of champions. His work is not spectacular, but he has the happy faculty of always being where he is needed and doing the right thing at the right time. He has the “football sense” acutely developed, and his effective playing is best appreciated by those on the inside.

  A feature play of the game that was not seen by those in the stands occurred in the first quarter, when Varsity tried to buck over for a try. Lajoie was carrying the ball and hit the line hard. Meegan went low to stop the buck and grabbed the ball as the College backs joined in behind Lajoie. Meegan hung on desperately, and the force of the buck tore the ball out of Lajoie’s hands. Meegan got the oval, but he turned his ankle painfully, and played under a handicap for the balance of the game.

  “WIRELESS” CARRIERS

  JUST AS CANADIAN FOOTBALL has evolved, there have been many advances in the way news about the on-field action has been relayed to fans across the country. Radio coverage dates back to 1928, and the Grey Cup was first televised – in a limited way – in 1952. Today, fans can follow every play in great detail via the Internet. Each drive is charted using advanced Game Tracker software, with graphics illustrating the movement of the ball up and down the field.

  Throughout the history of Canadian football, there has been one constant: then as now, newspaper reporters filed stories on the game. As a result, we have access to wonderfully rich, detailed accounts of every Grey Cup game, allowing us to revisit and verify scoring records and other details. But not even newspaper coverage has escaped the forces of change. From a few reporters at the 1909 Grey Cup game, media coverage has grown to the point where hundreds are transmitting stories about happenings on and off the field. Telegraphs, typewriters, and telephones have given way to laptops connecting sportswriters, instantly and wirelessly, without having to leave their keyboards. News of the game disseminates in seconds to all points on the globe.

  But it was another form of “carrier” that stands out from early Grey Cup accounts. In 1915, the Hamilton Tigers travelled to Varsity Stadium to contest the Grey Cup with the Toronto Rowing Club. The Globe and Mail of November 22 provides some insight into how news from the stadium reached anxious fans back in the Steel City: “Hamilton sent down a deputation of several hundred rooters, and they were a silent lot until after halftime. They seemingly could not understand the whys and wherefores of their favourites being beaten so soundly in the first and second periods. Even the homing pigeons, which were released at halftime … appeared dazed and loath to take the 4 to 1 adverse score back home.”

  So, in 1915, we have evidence of the first “wireless carrier” – in the form of the carrier pigeon!

  Souvenir scrapbook for the University of Toronto 1909 Grey Cup win.

  It wasn’t until March 1910 that the champions from Varsity were finally presented with the Grey Cup. The following year, the championship game was played in Hamilton, where a huge, rowdy crowd turned out at the grounds of the Hamilton Amateur Athletic Association (HAAA) to watch the hometown Tigers lose 16–7 to Varsity – a precursor not just of Grey Cup celebrations to come, but of the great, enduring rivalry between a gritty industrial burg and the shiny metropolis down the road. There is no record of Earl Grey having been in attendance. By the time the next championship game rolled around, in 1911, he had returned to the family home, Howick Hall, Alnwick, Northhumberland, his term as governor general, and thus his duties in Canada, having ended. Lord Grey died in 1917, too soon to have seen any hint of what his modest trophy would come to symbolize.

  In 1911, the University of Toronto again captured the Dominion championship, this time defeating the Toronto Argonauts. A Hamilton team – the Alerts – finally triumphed in 1912, but they never got their hands on the trophy. Claiming that it was a challenge cup, and that they hadn’t been challenged or defeated, the U of T declined to give it up. The champion Hamilton Tigers of 1913 were similarly denied their just reward. Varsity wouldn’t allow the Grey Cup back in circulation until 1914, when they lost the championship game to the Toronto Argonauts, and by then the sport, like the country, like much of the planet, had much bigger things on its mind.

  The Hamilton boys, though, would find a way to gain a small measure of revenge. After winning the 1915 championship over the Toronto Rowing and Athletic Association, the Tigers players took the trophy to a silversmith in their hometown, whom they asked to add to the base not only an inscription recording their own victory but another commemorating the 1908 national championship team from Hamilton, as though they had been the first Grey Cup winners. The extra inscription wasn’t noticed until years later, when the Cup was taken in for repairs in 1951, and at that point the decision was made to leave it, as a permanent record of the Canadian game’s idiosyncratic history.

  After that 1915 championship game, Canadian football was suspended for the duration of the First World War, and the Grey Cup, still to acquire its iconic status, was locked away in a vault for safekeeping, its future very much uncertain.

  Hamilton added their 1908 Dominion Championship win to the Grey Cup after their 1915 victory.

  1935

  THE YANKS ARE COMING

  John Bonk being awarded the Grey Cup for the Blue Bombers in 1984.

  The revolu
tion began, as most do, in a meeting behind closed doors. In Winnipeg, in the year 1935, the men who operated the local football club, including future Canadian Football League commissioner Sydney Halter, made a decision that would change the course of the sport and finally bring the Grey Cup west.

  The Winnipeggers weren’t going to take it anymore. They weren’t going to make the long trip east and play the patsy, play the role of hopeless, hapless cannon fodder in the national championship game, as western teams had since 1921. Instead, they were going to beat the odds, defy the lessons of history. And to do so, they were going to put their money where their mouth was – no small thing in the depths of the Great Depression.

  That group of Winnipeg businessmen pledged $7,500, a considerable sum in those days, to be used to pay for football talent – though, since the game was still technically all amateur, they’d have to be discreet about it. (The truth was, finding the players off-field jobs in a time of sky-high unemployment would have been worth nearly as much to them as whatever they were paid to play.) Those players would, by necessity, come from the much larger talent pool in the United States. The football powers back east wouldn’t understand what was being hatched on the Prairies – and even when they were given a clue, their arrogance prevented them from acknowledging it. They didn’t know what was coming until a cold, wet day in December, on a sloppy field in Hamilton, when the sport of Canadian football and the character of the Grey Cup game changed forever, and a whole country learned about a remarkable athlete from Perham, Minnesota, named Fritzy Hanson.

  For the first time, the great east-west rivalry that would become the championship’s hallmark was not just posturing, but a living, breathing thing, because now both sides understood that the west could win. For the first time, the game was heard across the country on radio, the precursor of television broadcasts that are now routinely among the most-watched sporting events on the Canadian calendar every year.

  The 1958 Bombers after winning their first of four Grey Cups in five years.

  And, for the first time, the role of American stars in the Canadian game really came to the fore. Two of the great themes in the struggle to define a national identity were acted out by football-playing proxies: western alienation and Canada’s complicated push-pull relationship with our neighbours to the south. They remain part of the CFL mix – and the Canadian mix – to this day.

  Ken Ploen (11) was the quarterback through Winnipeg’s most successful seasons.

  Fritz Hanson led Winnipeg to its first Grey Cup in 1935.

  GAME BREAKER

  A SCAN OF THE list of Dominion rugby football champions, beginning with the inaugural contest in 1892, and well into the Grey Cup era that began in 1909, would lead anyone to conclude that the Canadian game was dominated by eastern clubs. Differing sets of rules of the day made east–west encounters difficult to stage, perhaps explaining why no western team managed to win the Grey Cup until 1935, when Winnipeg’s stellar club travelled to Hamilton. The feat was accomplished at last by a great ’Pegs team led by no fewer than eleven future members of the Winnipeg Football Club Hall of Fame, including Canadian Football Hall of Fame members Russ Rebholz, Eddie “Dynamite” James, Greg Kabat, and the star of the 1935 game, Fritz Hanson.

  Accounts of the game abound in praise for Hanson’s kick-return talents: “The most elusive individual seen on a Canadian gridiron in years was the greatest of them … brilliant Tiger tacklers were completely baffled by this tricky little fellow.” With the score just 12–10 in favour of Winnipeg late in the third quarter, Hanson caught a punt 78 yards from the Hamilton goal and, surrounded by tacklers, “sprinted to his left, wheeled, reversed his field, and then cut sharply right ahead.” Though individual statistics would not be kept in our game for another fifteen years, the best evidence that we have points to some 300 yards of kick returns for Hanson that day, including seven gains between 35 and 50 yards. Hanson and an incredible ’Pegs defence resigned Hamilton to being the first losing eastern team in a truly national final game. On the day, the Tigers managed just three first downs and completed 2 of 15 passes against a western champion side stacked with American stars.

  Hanson proved that great kick returners are not limited merely to the modern-day game but may be found throughout our history. Fritz went on to play in six Grey Cups (winning four) and ended his career as a member of the first-ever Calgary Stampeders winning side in 1948. Hanson was elected to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame as a charter member in 1963.

  Winnipeg football teams have enjoyed a glorious Grey Cup history, playing in the big game twenty-three times – more than any other team – and winning ten times, most recently in 1990.

  In all of that, there were three true golden eras. The first began with the championship in 1935, and extended for a full decade, during which Winnipeg teams appeared in eight Grey Cup games and won the trophy three times, in the process becoming the first western teams to win the trophy. In 1936, the Winnipeg team also acquired a nickname – Blue Bombers, coined by a local sportswriter in an echo of Grantland Rice’s famous alliterative moniker for Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber” – that has stuck with it ever since.

  Immediately following that era, and in the wake of two Winnipeg-based RCAF teams who represented the west and lost Grey Cup games during the Second World War, came a series of excellent Bomber sides. They represented the west in the Grey Cup in 1945, 1946, 1947, 1950, and 1953, but never won the trophy, losing all but the last of them to the Toronto Argonauts. Those Winnipeg teams of the early 1950s featured one of the great stars of the era, the fine quarterback from Oklahoma, Jack Jacobs.

  The transition from very good to great began with the arrival of Harry “Bud” Grant, who had played for the 1953 Bombers after leaving the Philadelphia Eagles in a pay dispute (Grant also played two seasons in the National Basketball Association). Grant became the Bombers’ head coach in 1957 and stayed in the post until taking the same job with the Minnesota Vikings in 1967. In Winnipeg, he assembled the greatest Bomber team of all time, with stars like Ken Ploen and Leo Lewis, the fabled “Lincoln Locomotive.” They won four of the five Grey Cups played between 1958 and 1962 (all over their great rivals of the time, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats), bookending those wins with losses to the Ticats in the 1957 and 1965 Grey Cup games. Grant then went on to become that most rare of species, a Hall of Fame coach in two different leagues.

  Bud Grant led the Bombers to four Grey Cups in his ten years as coach (1957–66).

  The last wave of Winnipeg greatness – so far – came in the late 1980s. Cal Murphy was the coach, and then the general manager, as Bomber teams quarterbacked by Tom Clements, Sean Salisbury, and Tom Burgess won championships in 1984, 1988, and 1990, respectively.

  But although those other teams earned a special place in the hearts of their fans and had their names engraved on the Grey Cup, it was the very first Winnipeg champions who altered the course of Canadian football history.

  The first western side to challenge for the Grey Cup were the 1921 Edmonton Eskimos, who made the journey east by train only to be clobbered by Lionel Conacher and the Toronto Argonauts by a score of 23–0. In succeeding years, the western representative changed, but the story remained much the same:

  1922 Queen’s University 13, Edmonton Elks 1

  1923 Queen’s University 54, Regina Roughriders 0

  1925 Ottawa Senators 24, Winnipeg Tammany Tigers 1

  1928 Hamilton Tigers 30, Regina Roughriders 0

  1929 Hamilton Tigers 14, Regina Roughriders 3

  1930 Balmy Beach 11, Regina Roughriders 6

  1931 Montreal Winged Wheelers 22, Regina Roughriders 0

  1932 Hamilton Tigers 25, Regina Roughriders 6

  1934 Sarnia Imperials 20, Regina Roughriders 12

  Leo Lewis was one of the many stars of the 1958 team. He is seen here playing in the 1962 Fog Bowl.

  That’s a cumulative score of 213–29, and that doesn’t take into account the four years during that stretch when
for one reason or another western teams wouldn’t participate in the Grey Cup game. In 1924, the Winnipeg Victorias didn’t make it east to challenge Queen’s because of a dispute between players and team executives over – you’re reading this correctly – which railway they would use. (The players subsequently had a change of heart but were told not to bother making the trip – on either rail line – because, as the Toronto Star reported, “Tickets had been destroyed, Queen’s had packed away their football togs for the winter, and the Varsity field had been rented for other purposes.”) In 1926, the Regina Roughriders declined to make the trek because the season had run too late for their liking. In 1927, the eastern administrators of the sport decided that no western team would challenge for the Cup. And in 1933, for one year only, a new playoff system was instituted that required the western finalist to play the Big Four champion for a place in the Grey Cup game. The Winnipeg ’Pegs continued a familiar pattern, losing to the eventual champion, the Toronto Argonauts, 13–0.

  And the streak of futility wasn’t confined to the Grey Cup. Not that the two football solitudes confronted each other on the playing field very often, but in the entire history of the Canadian game, from its nineteenth-century origins all the way through to the 1934 season, no senior team from the west had ever beaten one from the east.

  American players had been suiting up with western Canadian teams as far back as 1929, no more than one or two on a squad, normally quarterbacks or halfbacks – “ringers” brought in and paid under the table to give the local boys a boost. Entering the 1935 season, Winnipeg had their two Yanks – quarterback Russ Rebholz and halfback Greg Kabat.

  But with that $7,500 to spend, team manager Joe Ryan headed south in search of more, beginning his quest in nearby North Dakota and Minnesota. By the time preparations for the 1935 football season had begun in earnest, the Winnipegs, as the team was known, had nine Americans on their roster, including the holdovers Rebholz and Kabat, plus Bud Marquardt, Joe Perpich, Herb Peschel, Bob Fritz, Bert Oja, a former New York high-school star named Nick Pagones, and Melvin “Fritzy” Hanson, a twenty-two-year-old, 145-pound scatback who had been a star at North Dakota State and signed on with Winnipeg for $125 a game plus room and board. The fans would soon take to calling him “Twinkle Toes,” at least when they weren’t calling him the “The Golden Ghost.”