100 Grey Cups

by Stephen Brunt

  The Tiger-Cats were the premier club of this era, reaching the Grey Cup nine times in eleven years before fading out of the picture after their 1972 last-play, 13–10 win over Saskatchewan on Ian Sunter’s 37-yard field goal. They have been back to the Grey Cup just six times since then, and Winnipeg has not won since 1990.

  It’s no small irony that an Als revival coincided with the return of Etcheverry, this time as head coach. He had come back to Montreal after his NFL playing career ended to coach the Quebec Rifles of the United Football League for a single season in 1964, and then helped out as an assistant at Loyola College. In 1970, Etcheverry was hired as head coach for the Alouettes in the hope that he might bring back some of the old magic. Working alongside another great Alouette of the past, the team’s new general manager, Red O’Quinn, Etcheverry almost completely turned over the team’s roster with 24 new players, including an All-American quarterback and punter named Sonny Wade.

  Hal Patterson was one of the standout stars for the Alouettes in the late 1950s, though he wouldn’t win a Grey Cup until he was traded to the Tiger-Cats in 1960.

  After finishing third during the regular season with an unremarkable 7–6–1 record, the Als embarked on an unlikely playoff run, going on the road to beat the Toronto Argonauts in the eastern semifinal, and then upsetting the first-place Tiger-Cats in the two-game, total-points final to reach their first Grey Cup game since 1956. Their opponents were another third-place team, the Calgary Stampeders, and the site was Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium, where two teams walked out to find one of the worst fields in Grey Cup history (which was saying something). The natural turf came up in pieces – at one point, Wade picked up a clod and flung it away before taking a snap – turning the game into a bit of a fiasco. But in the end, Montreal fans weren’t complaining, as the Als won 23–10, giving Montreal its first championship in twenty-one years.

  Marv Levy led the Alouettes to two Grey Cups in the 1970s.

  That second Etcheverry Era didn’t last very long. Following two more losing seasons, he was forced out as coach (though he would return briefly a decade later as general manager of the Montreal Concordes). Hired as his replacement was a diminutive gridiron intellectual named Marv Levy. Before taking his talents to the National Football League, Levy would be the architect of the greatest era in Alouettes history, as the team played in five Grey Cup games in six years and won two, in 1974 and 1977 (Levy’s successor, Joe Scannella, was actually in charge for the last one).

  In the 1974 Grey Cup, the Als beat the Eskimos 20–7 at Empire Stadium in Vancouver. On a windy day, which made things difficult for both offences, Levy made a key decision, replacing his ineffective starting quarterback, Jimmy Jones, with the veteran Wade. Wade didn’t throw for a lot of yards, but he managed the game beautifully, and placekicker Don Sweet provided all of the necessary scoring, with 14 of the Als’ 20 points, including four field goals – a Grey Cup record (at the time). On the other side of the ball, following an early first-quarter touchdown that would be the western champs’ only score of the game, the Montreal defence completely shut down the Edmonton attack.

  By rights, the Als should have won a second consecutive championship a year later, but the normally reliable Sweet was the goat this time (along with his holder, Gerry Dattilio, who bobbled the snap), missing a chip-shot field goal in the final minute that could have been the margin of victory. Instead, the Eskimos escaped with a 9–8 win.

  The 1977 Grey Cup, played at the then brand-new Olympic Stadium in Montreal, will always be remembered as the Staples Game, after defensive back Tony Proudfoot had the bright idea of firing staples into the soles of his shoes to help gain a bit of traction on the icy field, and all of his teammates followed suit. The Als won, going away 41–6.

  Montreal lost two more Grey Cup games to the Eskimos, in 1978 and 1979 – the first of five straight championships for the great Edmonton dynasty – and then, entering the 1980s, football began its rapid decline in the city, sped along by bad ownership, unwise attempts to stir the market with the signing of big-money marquee American players, and by briefly rechristening the team as the Concordes, a name that proved to be meaningless in both official languages.

  Barry Randall with the Grey Cup after the Alouettes’ 1977 win.

  The fans – especially francophone fans – turned off.

  When finally in 1987 the sad day came and they turned out the lights, it seemed as though hardly anyone cared enough to mourn. There wasn’t even a conversation about the CFL someday returning to Montreal.

  And then, fast forward fifteen years, when it all came together.

  By 2002, the new Alouettes in their new/old home were firmly re-established in the hearts of Montrealers, and Percival Molson Stadium had become the fashionable place to be.

  Anthony Calvillo holds the record for most CFL passing yards (over 70,000), most of those coming in his fourteen seasons with Montreal.

  Though the team was stacked with talent from the day it unpacked, the Als in the early years of their revival failed to deliver a championship – and in fact earned a reputation for not being able to win the big one. They did reach the Grey Cup game in 2000 against the B.C. Lions, but fell agonizingly short, as a two-point convert attempt in the dying seconds, which could have sent the game into overtime, fell incomplete.

  Two years later, the Als dominated the east during the regular season, rolling up a 13–5 record, and then dispatched the Argonauts in the division final to secure a berth in the 90th Grey Cup. There they faced the best team in the west, the Edmonton Eskimos, who enjoyed the advantage of playing at home in Commonwealth Stadium.

  The Als’ leader and star, as he had been since succeeding Tracy Ham as the starting quarterback, was Anthony Calvillo, whose tumultuous CFL career in many ways mirrored the challenging times the league had endured – and overcome. Calvillo arrived from Utah State, signing on with a brand-new team called the Las Vegas Posse, which held its training camp in the parking lot of a casino/hotel. There were nine other guys vying for the same job in what were obviously circumstances unlike any in the history of professional football. The then twenty-two-year-old Calvillo came out on top, and was the Posse’s starter through the franchise’s lone wild-and-wacky season of existence.

  After the Posse folded, Calvillo was claimed by the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in a dispersal draft. But his confidence went south, as did the team, and after three seasons, many were ready to write him off. Calvillo signed as a free agent with the Alouettes as a back-up, where he was patiently groomed to take over when Ham retired.

  He would mature into one of the greatest quarterbacks in Canadian football history, an accurate passer, a runner when necessary, but most of all a thinker, someone who fully understood the nuances of the game. That said, respect and recognition didn’t come right away, and entering the 2002 Grey Cup, his doubters were still legion.

  Calvillo’s head coach, Don Matthews, was not among them. A man with a strong and sometimes polarizing personality, arrogant, condescending, and brilliant, Matthews had bounced from city to city, team to team, winning wherever he landed. He had coached Baltimore to the 1995 Grey Cup, but didn’t follow the team to Montreal, instead signing on with the Toronto Argonauts, where he won consecutive championships with Doug Flutie as his quarterback. In 2001, he was out of football for the first time in his adult life when he received a call from the Als, who had just endured a disastrous backward step of a season.

  Matthews now had a chance to win his fifth Grey Cup – a feat only Lew Hayman and Frank Clair had managed before him.

  The 2002 game itself will not be remembered as a classic. Somehow, despite relatively mild temperatures and little precipitation, the grass at Commonwealth Stadium – the only stadium in the league to still have the real stuff (artificial turf wasn’t installed till 2010) – was slippery enough to badly affect the play. The Alouettes handled the conditions better, and took control early, when Calvillo hit wide receiver Pat Woodcock for what turned into a
99-yard catch-and-run touchdown, the longest in Grey Cup history.

  Edmonton made it close in the second half, and only a failed two-point convert attempt – shades of Montreal two years earlier – kept them from tying the game late in the fourth quarter. Jeremaine Copeland fielded the ensuing onside kickoff and ran it all the way back for the clinching touchdown in what finished as a 25–16 Montreal victory.

  Though his statistics on the day were unspectacular, Calvillo was named the game’s most outstanding player and understood that he had proved a point. “The critics can say what they want to say,” he said. “But as long as I had the confidence of the guys in that locker room, that’s all that mattered.” If there remained any doubts, they were fully erased over the next eight years, as the Als appeared in six Grey Cups, and won back to back in 2009 and 2010. Meanwhile Calvillo surpassed the all-time career record for passing yards, not just for the CFL, but for all of professional football.

  But leave it to a Canadian kid to sum up how it felt to have your name engraved on Earl Grey’s famous mug.

  “I’ve watched this game so many times growing up,” Woodcock said amid the celebrations in the Alouettes dressing room. “It’s the biggest day of the year for a football fan in Canada. You get together with family and friends, to make a big pot of chili and you watch the Grey Cup. To be able to score a touchdown in a game that I’ve watched so many times and dreamed of being in is the most exciting thing I can think of.”

  2007

  RIDER PRIDE

  The Roughriders ended a twenty-three year drought by winning the Grey Cup in 1989.

  Sometimes, the Grey Cup is more than just a football game. Sometimes, it can signal something larger, like the emergence of a whole new identity.

  Eighty-four years before, a team representing Regina first made the trip east to challenge for the trophy, just the third western club to do so, facing an opponent it knew only by reputation. It might as well have been a trip to the moon.

  Regina lost 54–0 to Queen’s University that day in Toronto, which still stands as the worst beating in the history of the championship game. When they boarded the train for home, humiliated and ridiculed for their trouble, the Regina players must have wondered if it had really been worth the effort. Over the ensuing decades, other Saskatchewan sides probably felt the same way, suffering a series of gutting Grey Cup defeats while winning the big game only twice.

  But early in the twenty-first century, change was afoot. As other parts of Canada fell into decline, Saskatchewan was in economic ascendance. After decades of out-migration, young people were sticking around to forge their future, and some of the province’s vast diaspora were happily heading home.

  A rising football team that twenty years before had teetered on the brink of extinction seemed to embody the province’s new swagger, and its fortunes became even more of a focal point of local identity. Rider Pride had always been there, in good times and bad, but now it was even bigger and bolder than ever.

  When the Saskatchewan Roughriders took the field at Toronto’s Rogers Centre on November 25, 2007, to meet their regional rivals the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the 95th Grey Cup game, they were well on their way to becoming the wealthiest club in Canadian football. Saskatchewan games drew sky-high television ratings. ’Rider merchandise sold in astounding quantities. Game tickets were scarce and coveted. When the home team played, it seemed that nearly everyone in the province, male and female, young and old, was tuned in.

  All they needed now was for the Roughriders to reward their passion by living up to growing expectations.

  Enter a hero from another time. In 1989, in one of the most memorable Grey Cup games ever played, Kent Austin was Saskatchewan’s quarterback, engineering the drive in the dying seconds against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats that led to Dave Ridgway’s game-winning field goal, arguably the single greatest moment in Saskatchewan sports history.

  Austin, long retired as a player, had no head coaching experience prior to the 2007 season, and had actually been fired from his job as the Toronto Argonauts’ offensive coordinator the year before, allegedly because he failed to build a winning game plan around superstar running back Ricky Williams. Handed the reins to the Roughriders by general manager Eric Tillman, he quickly established himself as one of the brightest minds in the Canadian game. The ’Riders finished second in the west with a 12–6 record, edged the Calgary Stampeders at home in the semifinal, then upset the B.C. Lions in Vancouver in the western final, to earn their first Grey Cup trip since a longshot bid against Doug Flutie’s Argonauts in 1997.

  In 2007, for a rare instance in Saskatchewan football history, they arrived at Toronto’s Rogers Centre – the site of that glorious 1989 triumph – as clear-cut favourites over the Bombers. That was in large part due to the fact that Winnipeg’s starting quarterback Kevin Glenn, coming off a stellar season, had broken his arm in the fourth quarter of the eastern final victory over the Argos. Glenn’s back up, Ryan Dinwiddie, was thrust into starting his first game, ever, and in the most difficult circumstances imaginable.

  QUARTERBACKS

  THE MAJOR THEMES of the 2007 Grey Cup were the state of each club’s quarterbacking heading into the contest, and the long Grey Cup droughts of each club. The Roughriders had had just two wins, and none since 1989, while the Blue Bombers, who had ten wins to their credit, hadn’t won since 1990. So, relief was on the way for one team, but which would it be? Winnipeg, on the hunt for its eleventh title overall, and aiming to enrich its long history of success, seemed like the better bet.

  Both teams revolved around the fortunes of their quarterbacks, with Saskatchewan led by the CFL’s Most Outstanding Player that season, Kerry Joseph. A career-best 5,117 passing yards were enough for Winnipeg’s Kevin Glenn to be named as the Most Outstanding Player in the east. The two would not meet in the Grey Cup, however; late in the East Division final, Glenn suffered a broken arm that put him out and thrust the starter’s job on CFL rookie Ryan Dinwiddie, who had thrown just 24 passes during the regular season, largely in a mop-up role. In all of Grey Cup history, no quarterback had ever started a game with so little experience.

  Dinwiddie did a creditable job in the first half, completing 8 of his first 13 passes, and Saskatchewan was only able to lead 10–7 on the strength of two late scores, one of which came off the first of three interceptions of Dinwiddie passes. The Bomber pivot bounced back, however, and his 50-yard touchdown strike to Derick Armstrong delivered the game’s longest offensive gain and evened the score at 13.

  Kerry Joseph overcame a slow start to engineer two second-half scoring drives as Saskatchewan gradually took control in Glenn’s absence, which the Bombers keenly felt. That 13 of the ’Riders’ 23 points came after Winnipeg turnovers highlights how much the Bombers missed Glenn. James Johnson’s third and final interception of a Dinwiddie pass attempt was a Grey Cup record, and it allowed the ’Riders to run out the clock and achieve their third Cup victory – after a wait of almost two decades.

  Dinwiddie turned out to be part of the story – he had his moments, but the three interceptions he threw, one of which was returned for a touchdown by the game’s MVP, defensive back James Johnson, were crucial to the outcome. Still, it was Saskatchewan’s tough and aggressive defence and wide-open offence that ruled the day.

  Fittingly, the clinching touchdown in a 23–19 victory came on a pass from quarterback Kerry Joseph to receiver Andy Fantuz, a graduate of the University of Western Ontario who, like Reed and Lancaster and Austin before him, would be adopted by the Green ’Rider faithful as one of their own. (Fantuz’s popularity in the province would soar so much that they’d start selling a breakfast cereal with his picture on the box – Fantuz Flakes – as a way to raise money for charity. It flew off the shelves.)

  The celebration of Saskatchewan’s third Grey Cup victory, within the province and among those inside and outside of Canada who had a soft spot in their hearts for the place and the team, was one for the ages.

  T
he ’Riders’ Jermese Jones celebrates their 2007 win.

  Austin departed after that single season of coaching, leaving for a job at his alma mater, the University of Mississippi, but this Grey Cup wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t a fluke. More like a declaration.

  And though they would lose close, heartbreaking championship games to the Montreal Alouettes in 2009 and 2010 (the phrase “13th man” will forever after have unpleasant connotations in Regina), the Roughriders were now a force to reckon with. Gone forever were the sacrificial lambs.

  FORWARD THINKING

  THE BRAND OF FOOTBALL played in Canada up to 1928 was largely an offshoot of the game of rugby brought over from Great Britain. It evolved quickly from pure rugby into “rugby football,” as evidenced by the original name of today’s CFL East Division: the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union, or IRFU. Of course, the very innovation that makes football exciting, the forward pass, has always been a game-stopper in rugby, where it is illegal.

  Most accounts of how the pass entered Grey Cup history point to 1931 and the Montreal AAA Winged Wheelers. Warren Stevens tossed a pass to Kenny Grant, and they combined for a 37-yard scoring play in the third quarter on the way to a 22–0 win over the Regina Roughriders. It is notable that Stevens was not the Wheelers’ quarterback but a “flying wing,” a player who could switch, or “fly,” between what we would now call the forward line and the backfield and who was often the better passer in those days. (Similarly, Joe “King” Krol, primarily a halfback, did much of the passing for Hamilton and Toronto teams in the 1940s.)

  The first actual use of the forward pass in Grey Cup play had come two years earlier, in 1929, by Regina and the Tigers at the old Hamilton AAA Grounds. The first attempt was thrown by Regina’s Jersey Jack Campbell to Jerry Erskine. Reports of the day indicated that the Roughriders’ 11 passes gained them around 100 yards and that Hamilton, a very conservative and traditional team, tried just one that went for a TD but was called back for being inside the 25-yard line. The Tigers contended that it should have been the first-ever Cup TD pass. Afterwards, one reporter commented: “The pass is alright and serviceable in Canadian football. The CRU will legislate the pass into all series for next fall.” The prediction turned out to be premature – forward passing was not allowed in the 1930 Grey Cup.