Patterson turned in one of the most significant regular-season performances in history on September 29, 1956, when he caught eleven Sam Etcheverry passes for an incredible 338 yards and two touchdowns – the convert on the second of those TDs provided Montreal with the margin of victory in a 44–43 win over Hamilton. (On the day, Etcheverry passed for 561 yards.) Since then, only two CFL receivers have gone over the 300-yard mark in a game, but no one has topped Patterson’s mark.
Notwithstanding his great 1969 Grey Cup performance, Ronnie Stewart proved to be one of the most outstanding Canadian football players throughout his regular-season career from 1958 to 1970. His finest moment came on October 10, 1960, with only 16 touches of the ball all day and not a single reception. In 15 carries, Stewart set the single-game rushing record with 287 yards in a 51–21 win at Montreal. The next nearest mark by any CFL player (and the next eight best totals were produced by imports, in what has long been a position dominated by Americans) was by George Reed, on twice as many carries (30 for 268 yards). Stewart’s mark remains among the finest efforts in any game by a Canadian-born CFL player.
The Ottawa offence finally came to life in the second quarter. Just as planned, Saskatchewan’s rush had pretty much eliminated the eastern Riders’ trademark long passing game to Tucker and Adkins. So Jackson, turned to the run, handing the ball to Stewart and fullback Jim Mankins, and to quick, short passes. He hit tight end Jay Roberts for Ottawa’s first touchdown, closing the gap to 9–7.
Ford ran the ensuing kickoff back 77 yards, but the Roughriders blew that opportunity when Reed fumbled at the Ottawa 19-yard line. Soon after came the signature play of the game. Anticipating a Saskatchewan blitz, Jackson called a screen pass to Stewart. Just before the rush swallowed him up, he flipped Stewart the ball in the flat, with two huge offensive linemen already roaring down the field in front of him, ready to clear the path. Eighty yards later, Stewart crossed the Roughrider goal line, essentially untouched, giving Ottawa a lead they would never relinquish.
Saskatchewan had their chances to get back into the game. In the third quarter, they were first and goal on the Ottawa 7-yard line, but stalled there, and Jack Abendschan’s short field goal attempt went wide for a single, narrowing the score to 14–10. Later in the quarter, Ford slipped behind defensive back Don Sutherin, but he dropped a perfectly thrown pass from Lancaster.
Then, a fumbled punt set Ottawa up for what would be the clinching score: scrambling away from the Saskatchewan pass rush, at one point completely reversing field to escape McQuarters in a way that would remind younger CFL fans of Doug Flutie, Jackson bought time, and then hit Mankins with a touchdown pass, making the score 21–11 Ottawa after three quarters.
Jack Gotta had a 30–26 record in his four seasons as Ottawa’s head coach.
In the fourth quarter, Jackson stepped under centre, anticipated the blitz coming again, and changed the play, signalling to Stewart that he ought to run a quick route over the middle. “He was watching for it,” Jackson remembers. “He knew they were coming. I almost got tackled before I delivered it.” Stewart caught the ball and ran 32 yards for a touchdown, making the score 28–11.
“I think we got ’er,” Clair said to assistant Jack Gotta, secure now that the win was assured.
Trudeau awarding the Cup to the Grey Cup champion Rough Riders, 1969.
A single point off a missed field goal by Sutherin created the final margin of victory: Ottawa 29, Saskatchewan 11.
Trudeau presented Jackson with the Grey Cup. As Jackson remembers it, he jokingly opted to swap his football helmet for the prime minister’s cap.
“I can’t,” Trudeau said. “Margaret knit it for me.”
Then Jackson sprinted off the field, holding the trophy high. It wouldn’t quite be the final glimpse Canadian fans would have of the great number 12. The following spring, he made a cameo appearance in the CFL all-star game as the defending Grey Cup champions took on the best from the rest of the league (and there, with Prince Charles looking on from the stands, Jackson’s last pass as a professional football player was intercepted). Everyone agreed that he could have played on, and played well, and at least one other team, the B.C. Lions, attempted to lure him out of retirement, but Jackson stuck to his guns and went on to a career as a high school principal. With his departure, the 1960s Ottawa Rough Rider dynasty came to an end.
But that wasn’t quite the end of the Grey Cup story in 1969. Three weeks after Ottawa’s victory, the Cup itself was stolen from Lansdowne Park. It wouldn’t be recovered until the following February, when a tip led police to a locker at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel. There, the old mug, which had survived so much over the previous sixty years, was discovered, safe and sound.
Commissioner Gaudaur decided then and there that there would be no more risks taken with the great historic relic. A replica Cup was commissioned by the CFL, one that could be used as a standin in certain circumstances – just in case.
1978
COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE
Tom Wilkinson and Danny Kepley after defeating the Alouettes at the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, 1979.
The name certainly has a nice ring to it: City of Champions. Edmonton is many things, including the capital of the province of Alberta, but that title has stuck now for nearly four decades, and it’s not hard to understand why. The most northerly outpost of big-time professional sport on the continent is famous for the way the community rallies both around events and behind the iconic, title-winning teams that helped put it on the map. If Edmontonians have an extra bit of swagger – especially when they look down the road towards their great provincial rivals in Calgary – it is because of that legacy of sporting success.
Hockey is obviously a major part of that, in the form of the Edmonton Oilers who, during the heydays of Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier, won five Stanley Cups in seven years and played fast and beautifully. But long before then, football was Edmonton’s game, especially during two landmark dynasties when the Eskimos dominated the Canadian Football League. Since the Second World War, no franchise has won more Grey Cups than the Esks (all time, they trail only the Toronto Argonauts, 15 Cups to 13, but the Argos enjoyed a head start of almost half a century), and no organization has enjoyed such a consistent reputation for doing things the right way, for being one step ahead of the competition.
That winning image was forged during the most dominant championship run in CFL history, beginning with the 1978 Grey Cup game, the first of five consecutive victories, a string that no other team has come close to matching. It’s fitting that the opponents were the Montreal Alouettes. No two cities, never mind two cities so geographically and culturally distinct, have so rich a shared Grey Cup history, having met a remarkable eleven times in the championship game.
The 1893 Edmonton Eskimos.
Edmonton’s victory in 1978 came in their fifth Grey Cup appearance in six years, with the foundation for future triumphs fully in place. The roster already contained the beginnings of what would become a long and unbroken succession of brilliant quarterbacks – extending all the way to Ricky Ray thirty years later. Tom Wilkinson, the wily old vet from Wyoming, was under centre that day. Backing him up on the sidelines in the absence of the injured Bruce Lemmerman was a rookie fresh from the University of Washington named Warren Moon. Moon was the latest in a long line of African-American quarterbacks who came north for the chance to play a position that in the National Football League had been all but reserved for whites, an informal prejudicial policy that, as an unintended consequence, enriched the CFL enormously.
By the time the dynasty had played out, Wilkinson would be retired and Moon would be established as the starter – and as one of the greatest players in CFL history. The line of quarterbacks – and regular Grey Cup appearances – would continue through Matt Dunigan, Tracy Ham and Damon Allen. That’s five Hall of Famers in a row, a feat no other franchise has come close to accomplishing.
The Edmonton Eskimos won three consecutive Grey Cup
s between 1954–56. Seen here in the 1954 Grey Cup game.
The first Edmonton football team was established in 1893, early days for the Canadian game, and nicknamed the Esquimaux. But in the decades that followed, as western leagues came and went, there would be long stretches in the 1920s and 1940s when there was no Edmonton club at all.
Two Edmonton teams were the first western clubs to venture east and challenge for the Grey Cup. In 1921, an early version of the Eskimos made the trip to Toronto, where they were beaten 23–0 by the Argonauts in the championship game. Canada’s athlete of the half century, Lionel Conacher, played in his first and only Grey Cup game that day, scoring 15 points for Toronto. He gave the home team an edge, plus it didn’t hurt that several American college players recruited by Edmonton were not entirely familiar with the Canadian rules. A year later, the Edmonton team, renamed the Elks, arrived in Kingston, Ontario, at midnight on Grey Cup day – following a four-day train trip – to challenge the powerful side from Queen’s University. The Elks actually led 1–0 at the half, but the heavily favoured home team woke up after the break and cruised to a 13–1 win. Afterwards, unhappy both with the officiating and with what they interpreted as tepid hospitality, the Elks turned down an invitation to attend a post-game dance with the Queen’s student body.
In 1923, that Edmonton team went out of business. The modern Eskimos were formed in 1949, the product of local enthusiasm (and perhaps just a little bit of local envy) whipped up when the Calgary Stampeders became the first western team to win the Grey Cup in 1948. Twenty thousand Edmontonians paid a dollar each for a share in the club, which remains to this day one of the CFL’s publicly owned franchises. The task of building the new team, which adopted the colours of green and gold, was handed over to a very familiar face in Canadian football circles: Annis Stukus, who a few years later would take on the same task with the expansion B.C. Lions. Stukus got things started, selling tickets, pumping up local enthusiasm, and recruiting talent wherever he could find it. From the foundation he constructed emerged a team that, in only the fourth season of its modern incarnation, made it all the way to the Grey Cup game, where the Eskimos were beaten by the Toronto Argonauts.
Jackie Parker was the star of the Eskimos consecutive Grey Cup victories in the mid-1950s. His most famous play came in the 1954 game, when he recovered a fumble and returned it for an 84-yard touchdown, which remains a Grey Cup record to this day.
Two years later, the Esks were back representing the west at Varsity Stadium as prohibitive underdogs against the powerful Montreal Alouettes, a team that featured the all-world quarterback/receiver tandem of Sam Etcheverry and Hal Patterson, along with a host of other stars. No one gave Edmonton much of a chance, but they hadn’t fully factored in the genius of one of the greatest players ever to grace the three-down game.
Jackie “Spaghetti Legs” Parker came to Canada from Mississippi State, taking the advice of one of his college coaches, Darrell Royal, who had spent the 1953 season in Edmonton before going on to a long and storied career at the University of Texas.
Parker could do just about everything that could be done on a football field – he played running back and defensive back and quarterback, he kicked, and he ran back kicks, all with remarkable athleticism. In the 1954 Grey Cup game, the entire country discovered his talents, most famously when he ran Chuck Hunsinger’s fumble back 90 yards for a touchdown in the final minutes, just as Montreal was driving to put the game away. Instead, with the convert, Edmonton won 26–25, and then beat the Als for the Grey Cup the next two years in succession, 34–19 in the 1955 game and by a lopsided 50–27 margin in 1956.
That would be Edmonton’s last Grey Cup win for nearly twenty years. In 1960, the Esks again made it as far as the championship game, temporarily interrupting the run of Grey Cup appearances by Bud Grant’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers, before losing to the upstart Ottawa Rough Riders. It would be another thirteen years before they got that far again, a rise in fortunes directly tied to the arrival of Wilkinson in 1972. He had originally come north to play for the Toronto Rifles of the Continental Football League (a team coached by the flamboyant Leo Cahill), where he spent two seasons before being signed by the Argonauts as a backup in 1967. Wilkinson became the team’s starter, with moderate success, but was never really allowed to settle into that role, as the Argos seemed determined to find somebody to replace him. Wilkinson was traded to British Columbia in advance of the 1971 season. He played there for a year, and then was cut during training camp before the 1972 season began.
It’s easy to understand why coaches had their doubts about Wilkinson. He didn’t have much of an arm, wasn’t much of a runner, wasn’t an imposing physical specimen by any means – in fact, he tended to look a little soft around the middle. And while most quarterbacks seem to have been born with a kind of Big Man on Campus swagger, Wilkinson was modest and self-effacing and certainly not straight out of Central Casting.
Edmonton, with the very capable Bruce Lemmerman established as its starter, decided to give Wilkinson a look as a possible backup. Wilkinson said later that if he’d been cut again, he might have stopped by the Calgary Stampeders’ camp on the way home to Wyoming to see if they were interested, but otherwise would have been finished with football forever. Instead, he stuck with the Esks in ’72, and by 1973 he was the starter as they advanced to their first Grey Cup since 1960, losing to the Ottawa Rough Riders, 22–18. They were back again a year later, with Wilkinson again under centre, and again they lost, this time 20–7 to the Alouettes.
Hugh Campbell won ten Grey Cups, the first coming as a player in 1966, then five as a coach for the Eskimos dynasty, and the final four as GM or President of the Eskimos.
Finally, in 1975, on a frigid day at Calgary’s McMahon Stadium – the first Grey Cup ever played on the prairies – the Eskimos defeated the Als 9–8, when Montreal kicker Don Sweet missed a final-play field goal that could have won the game. For Edmonton, this victory was but a taste of greater things to come.
In 1977, the Eskimos organization took a huge leap of faith. When head coach Ray Jauch decided to leave the sideline for a job in the front office, the Esks hired as his replacement thirty-six-year-old Hugh Campbell, who during his playing career as a wide receiver had been Ron Lancaster’s favourite target with the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Campbell had no professional coaching experience and was barely older than some of his players, though he had successfully rejuvenated the football program at tiny Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, after retiring from the ’Riders.
There were plenty of experienced alternatives at the time who had paid their coaching dues and would have seemed a far surer bet. But Campbell turned out to be something special, one of the finest football minds of his generation. For the next three decades – interrupted only by a short foray into the United States Football League and National Football League in the 1980s – he was the central figure in Edmonton football, and one of the most influential in the entire CFL.
Campbell led the Esks to the Grey Cup in his rookie season, where they once again faced the Alouettes, this time at the brand new Olympic Stadium in Montreal. Because of the scramble to get the building ready in time for the 1976 Games, a few of its frills had fallen by the wayside – including the innovative, retractable canopy-style roof that was supposed to be suspended from a monumental (though also unfinished) tower. As a result, the Big O remained open to the elements, and in the late autumn of 1977, those elements included a heavy snowfall the night before the big game. The grounds crew took care of that, clearing the field; but then, in order to prevent the still-wet field from freezing solid, they decided to seed the artificial turf with salt pellets. The result by kickoff time was a slick, icy mess that no variety of athletic footwear, no matter how state-of-the-art, could get an adequate grip on.
Tom Wilkinson and Danny Kepley with the Grey Cup after the Eskimos’ 1979 win.
It was Tony Proudfoot, the Als’ defensive back, who improvised a solution that proved
key to the Als’ eventual victory. As legend has it, during the pre-game warm-up, with the terrible field conditions already obvious, Proudfoot spotted an electrician working on the sideline set-up, employing a heavy-duty staple gun. He borrowed it, fired a few staples into the end of his cleats, and found that it gave him better traction. Soon enough, nearly all of his teammates followed suit. Montreal beat Edmonton 41–6 in what would become known as the Staples Game.
LAST-MINUTE GREY CUP HEROES
OF THE FIRST 99 Grey Cup games, twelve have been won by a team scoring the deciding points in the final minute of play or in overtime. The most recent of those finishes came in 2009, when Montreal kicker Damon Duval made a 33-yard field goal on the final play to overcome a 27–25 deficit and win the game. The Alouettes’ comeback was aided by Saskatchewan’s now famous “too many men” penalty, which negated Duval’s miss from 43 yards out on the previous play.
The first of these late-game heroics came in 1939, when Winnipeg’s Art Stevenson punted the ball out of the end zone with the score tied at 7. Joe Krol turned the very same trick in 1947, for Toronto. Since then, there have been two overtime games, the first of which was won on an 18-yard end run by Winnipeg quarterback Ken Ploen in 1961. The most recent overtime decision came in 2005, under the new shootout format in which teams alternate possessions. Edmonton took the lead at 38–35 with a field goal by Sean Fleming and then stopped Anthony Calvillo and the Alouettes to secure the win. Another seven contests have been decided in regulation time by field goal kickers, the first of them by Hamilton’s Ian Sunter in 1972. Lui Passaglia did the same thing in 1994, but this time in front of a home crowd at B.C. Place Stadium.
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