BIG FOOT ILESIC STEPS INTO CANADIAN FOOTBALL HALL
Eskimos and Argos punter started playing in CFL at age 17 and won seven Grey Cups
Hank Ilesic is 58. He’s been retired since 2001. That’s a long time to wait for a phone call.
When he finally received it, from Canadian Football Hall of Fame executive director Mark DeNobile, there was silence on the line.
“With Henry, there was a delay in his reaction,” said DeNobile, who had the pleasure of informing Ilesic, Scott Flory, Baron Miles, Brent Johnson, Frank Cosentino, Paul Brule and relatives of the late Tom Hugo that they’d be enshrined in the Hall.
“I think he probably thought his day would never come or that his accomplishments had maybe been overlooked by the selection committee for once and for all,” DeNobile said.
You’d have figured that any player who won a record seven Grey Cups, including all five with the 1978-82 Edmonton Eskimos dynasty and another two in his 11 seasons with the Toronto Argonauts, and played 19 seasons including one in the NFL, would be automatic. With the story he wrote, you would have figured his bust would be in the Hall long before now.
“I was a little shocked and a little surprised,” Ilesic said of his initial reaction to getting the call as CFL Week opened with the introduction of the Class of 2018 here Wednesday. “I don’t know if you’d say I was emotional, but after all these years, it definitely hit me that this was the thing to cap off a career that was very good to me. I knew the second that I was told that it was the perfect ending for my story.”
Returning to Edmonton in 2001 to replace Sean Fleming for three games wasn’t much of an ending, but as stories go, Ilesic’s had an unbelievable beginning.
If you were there the day Henry Anthony Ilesic showed up at training camp in 1977, you figured they’d be commissioning the sculptor to begin work on his bust by Labour Day that year.
Ilesic was 17 years old at the time. He was in Grade 11. He stood 6-foot-1. Weighed 200 pounds. And he was wearing Size 14 shoes.
Head coach Hugh Campbell summed him up in two words: “Unlimited potential.”
Legendary Eskimos scout Frank Morris pronounced him a “can’t miss” prospect on the spot.
“He has God-given talent. A real live leg. He has everything,” said Morris.
He was instantly the best punter in the CFL and had the statistics to prove it.
By the end of the decade, Ilesic had become the only 19-year-old in history to win back-to-back CFL and Western Football Conference all-star selections.
The story of Big Foot actually began to unfold at an earlier age.
“Three or four years before that first Eskimos training camp, I was hanging around a playground,” Ilesic says. “A football ended up over by me, so I picked it up and kicked it. It went about 50 yards.”
Ilesic won the national Punt, Pass & Kick competition when he was 14.
His first punt in a pre-season game against B.C. went 87 yards. It was impossible to ignore him.
The Eskimos were overly cautious about putting Ilesic on the regular-season roster.
“I don’t think it’s happened before,” said Campbell. “Hank had to be the youngest player and the first Grade 11 student I ever heard of in professional football. But the truth was that he was our best punter in training camp. We waited until the seventh regular-season game because we wanted to be as sure as we could be that he could get along in the pro environment, that he had the maturity to go with the position.”
Ilesic looks back on it now like it was a bit of a fairy tale, too.
“When I look back now, I was just a kid having fun. I had no pressure. I had nothing to lose. I wasn’t even supposed to be there. I could just go out there, have some fun and let the ball fly,” he said. “As you get older, it becomes your living. Then there’s pressure.”
Big Foot won the starting punting job Aug. 30 of that first season when the Eskimos cut Gerald Kunyk, the CFL’s leading punter two seasons before.
His first recorded regular-season CFL punt went 55 yards.
Ilesic ranks third in punting yards with 91,753 and second alltime with 8,004 yards in a single season. His seven Grey Cups is tied for a CFL record. He ranks eighth in CFL games played with 259, and played 14 games with the San Diego Chargers in 1989.
So what took so long for the former St. Joseph’s Composite High School grad who now lives in Orillia, Ont., to get in?
“I think it was mostly because I was a punter as opposed to a position player,” he said. “There were a lot of deserving players, more than me, who played a full position.”
Ilesic is only the second punter to make it into the Hall. Criminal when you think about it.
Hank had to be the youngest player and the first Grade 11 student I ever heard of in professional football.