CANDY-COATED MAGIC
AUTHOR UNVEILS THE REAL STORY BEHIND THE ARGONAUTS’ UNFORGETTABLE 1991 GREY CUP SEASON
Any football fan who was in Toronto — or really anywhere in Canada and possibly even parts of the United States — in 1991 knows that was the year the Argonauts made their biggest splash.
In Hollywood, throughout the NFL and NHL, and certainly within CFL circles, the Argos were prime water cooler conversation, having been bought by former L.A. Kings owner Bruce Mcnall, along with Canada’s funniest man ever, John Candy, and the greatest hockey player that ever lived, Wayne Gretzky.
Oh, and if that weren’t enough, that high profile trio also brought in the hottest NCAA football player, swiping him away from a handful of salivating NFL teams — a move reminiscent of heartier times for the CFL — to add to a Double Blue roster already laden with talent.
His name was Raghib Ismail, but everyone referred to him as The Rocket, both because it was such a perfect nickname and how completely it encapsulated him as a football player.
A wide receiver and kick returner with the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Ismail was runner-up in the 1990 Heisman Trophy voting and the consensus pick to be selected No. 1 overall in the 1991 NFL draft. But that was before the Argos’ new ownership group swooped in and signed him for four years and an unheard of — for the CFL, at least — sum of $18.2 million.
Even after all these years it doesn’t seem believable. But it all actually happened. But if you think you know the story, Paul Woods is here to tell you that you know only part of it.
Woods, a lifelong Argos fan and a retired Canadian Press editor, has pieced together the 1991 whirlwind season in Year of the Rocket: John Candy, Wayne Gretzky, a Crooked Tycoon, and the Craziest Season in Football History.
Woods isn’t now, and wasn’t then, simply a fan of the Argos. He remains an avid collector of everything ever written, televised or broadcast about the team.
He’s already filled all the available space in his own house with so many scrapbooks of clippings and news releases and the like that he’s now storing stuff at his daughter’s home.
“I have so much material,” Woods said over the phone. “I have newspaper articles of just about everything that happened to the Argos, not just in ’91, but pretty well since 1977.
“I have it documented. I have clippings. I have a ridiculous amount of paper in this house. In fact, some of it is now in my daughter’s house. I’m eventually going to have to find homes for it.
“But I documented everything,” Woods said. “So I was able to read what was written by Christie Blatchford in the Sun or Steve Simmons in the Sun or what was in Sports Illustrated or Sport magazine. I had all that stuff.”
All of that, along with interviews from countless Argos players, management, staff, and even those who chronicled the team in real time, were put to good use in Year of the Rocket.
It’s a book that, at first glance, sounds like the story of a young superstar’s impact on an entire league and, to a degree, that is what it is. But in the end, the story is more about a season with so many characters and personalities that getting it down to just 100,000 words — later professionally edited down to 80,000 by his publishers at Sutherland House — proved to be a gargantuan task.
“At times, it felt overwhelming,” Woods said. “How am I going to figure out what’s important and what isn’t and what to use, and how am I going to stitch it all together and then, of course, the video footage ... it just goes on. It’s endless.
“To try to absorb it all and figure out where it all fits, this was the real challenge.”
Year of the Rocket is actually a story of three years, the one leading up to that Grey Cup championship season of 1991 with plenty of Harry Ornest anecdotes, and the year after the title game, which describes the fallout after an unsustainable year.
Woods spent 14 full months doggedly pursuing The Rocket and the expected protagonist of the story to sit down for an interview. Ismail, though, wasn’t back in 1991, and still today isn’t a man who views himself as deserving of that kind of attention.
After more than a year of refusing to answer emails, phone calls, or even responding to entreaties sent via former teammates, Ismail finally reached out through an associate to say he didn’t feel comfortable being the focus of the book, and suggested the author write about the team.
Under just about any other circumstance, this could have killed the book before a single word was written, but then this story was never going to be about one man, or even mostly about one man.
“There are two sort of heroic figures in the book,” Woods says. “(Quarterback Matt) Dunigan is a heroic figure because he played that Grey Cup game with two fractures in his clavicle, but John Candy is the (real) hero, and I knew that almost from the beginning.
“The very first interviews I did, people were raving about how much they loved Candy and how much he meant to them as individuals and to that team, and I never heard a negative word about John through the whole process,” Woods said.
“When I started hearing about the stuff he was doing, flying out a day ahead of the team and getting up at five in the morning and going to every single radio station in Regina. Or going to 10-hour (league) board-of-governors meetings and eating little salami sandwiches for breakfast.
“To me, the saddest part of the story is Mcnall starting to sell the team without telling John. When John finally found out, it was too late for him to do anything about it.”
Candy, who died three years after the Argos won that Grey Cup in 1991, immersed himself in the team and league in that one year, as few had before or since.
It’s not hyperbole to suggest that, without Candy’s input and tireless work that 1991 season, there might not have been a league to contest a championship. Candy didn’t just promote the Argos. He sold the entire league.
“As I say in the book, (Candy) was the only owner the Argos have ever had in almost 150 years who truly, genuinely loved the team,” Woods said.
A lifelong fan of the game, Candy wasn’t about to let the opportunity to actually be a part of it pass by without leaving an imprint. Unfortunately, in doing so, he exposed himself to some truths about the league that were tough to swallow.
“As the year goes on, it becomes an eye-opener for John,” Woods said. “You read some of the clippings and watch his interviews and, as the season went on, it became evident probably by September that (he realized): ‘Man, this league is in a lot worse shape than we thought it was.’”
By the final chapter though, Woods has accomplished his initial goal.
“I really wanted this book to pay tribute to the legacy of John Candy,” he said.
As for the Rocket’s reluctance to co-operate on the project, well, looking back on it now, Woods believes it might have been for the best.
Frustrated by this major hurdle, Woods nevertheless soldiered on and, truth be told, the book is probably better without an after-the-fact account from Ismail.
There’s still plenty about Ismail in the book, including his own observations from published articles at the time. All that’s really missing is the thoughts, in retrospect, of a now much more mature and self-aware Ismail.
“In the end ... I realized it was actually freeing and liberating,” Woods said.
“It meant I could write the story the way the reporting led me. If I had interviewed Rocket, I would have had to ask him about various things where he doesn’t come across as looking so well. He would have been able to tell me his perspective on that and I would have been duty-bound to incorporate that.
“This way, I just had to go with what was on the record. What he said at the time, what others said at the time, and what people have said to me since then. It was kind of liberating in a bizarre way.”
Woods is adamant that the accuracy of his account wasn’t compromised by this exclusion.
“Pinball (Clemons) did a blurb where he said my words were both powerful and accurate,” Woods said. “Matt Dunigan’s blurb says: ‘He nailed it,’ basically. So I did the best I could and I actually think, in some ways, it’s almost more accurate because it loses the possibility of retrospective justification.”
What the book delivers in spades is a bevy of anecdotes and detail that makes it a treasure trove of moments for even the reader who was pretty sure he already knew the story of that once-in-alifetime season.
Even those with a passing interest in the Argos those years knew Ismail was dealing with loneliness and even some culture shock, but did anyone know that one of his greatest disappointments about his temporary homeland was the lack of packaging on straws?
“I would go to a sub shop and they would have straws that weren’t wrapped in paper,” Ismail said in an interview years after his short stay in Canada. “That sucks. I hated that. I don’t want someone touching a straw that I’m going to drink through. But other than that, I loved it up there.”
Who knew, for instance, that it was Gretzky and Candy who Mcnall had step in when Rocket started avoiding his media duties, to explain to the young man in no uncertain terms that the lucrative personal services contract he signed when he joined the team extended beyond the football field?
Woods doesn’t believe this reluctance to be a failing of Ismail’s, but a failure by the ownership group to do the proper due diligence on the man they were going to be asking so much of.
“I sort of wanted to make the point: If you are going to blame anybody, blame the owners,” Woods said.
“They thought this guy would be the Gretzky of Canadian football and, in many ways, I could see why they would think that. He was good looking, an incredible athlete, one of the greatest nicknames you will ever find. He had a gigantic following in the U.S. He ticked a lot of boxes.
“But nobody actually interviewed him to see how comfortable he would be doing what they needed him to do, which was basically be the face of the franchise and the face of the league.”