A STADIUM, A GAME, A MOMENT
Mosaic Stadium will have hosted 747 Saskatchewan Roughriders games when it wraps things up Saturday. We look at the old place through the prism of one game, played in 1975, and long-lost photos that tell a tale all their own.
This is the story of a stadium, a football game, and an old envelope. The envelope occupied a sliver of space in an abandoned filing cabinet, which is where this story finds its traction. Death pushes its way into our tale. There’s a long run, blood, a career that ends with a pratfall, the wardrobe choices of a vast mob. Steve Mazurak, with that long run, is a character in this story. He’s frozen in a moment that’s spent four decades on a photographic negative buried in that envelope in downtown Saskatoon, until it was discovered and scanned onto a laptop.
The image, freed from its shackles, settled last week into Mazurak’s inbox, just a few blocks from where he once led the life of a football player.
Mazurak, during his gridiron days with the Saskatchewan Roughriders, was a sure-handed receiver, a precise route-runner, skilled in negotiating a crowd. He self-effacingly calls himself “a lumbering sloth” and a “lunch boxtype player.”
He examines the photo — there’s him, 41 years younger, running alone on the Taylor Field turf, towards a vast throng of celebrating fans. There’s not a defensive back in sight, because two of them collided, 40 or so yards away, and are still picking themselves off the turf. One of those two backs was making his CFL debut. He lasted one half, got benched, never played professional football again.
You can examine every face in that photo, hundreds of them, as Mazurak nears the end zone. Arms are upraised. Mouths are open in midscream. He is, at this frozen moment, a conquering hero.
“It’s 1975, a good old end zone shot, there must be 15 or 20 rows of folks, and it’s absolutely jam-packed,” Mazurak says, the pixels spread out before him. "The look of delight on those peoples’ faces … it’s just crazy.”
The game in question? Oct. 19, 1975. The Saskatchewan Roughriders won 36-27 over the Edmonton Eskimos at what was then Taylor Field, and is now Mosaic Stadium, and was before all that, Park de Young.
It is, according to research by Tom Fuzesy, one of 747 games the Roughriders will have played on that particular old patch of Regina real estate, which is headed for a wrecking ball when the new stadium opens next season.
Every one of those 747 games — the last one goes this Saturday — carries its own sense of immediacy. Each is representative of the other. We picked this 1975 clash as our Mosaic Stadium prism, because those negatives tell a story all their own.
Roughriders’ receiver Rhett Dawson remembers nothing of the day, save for one broken play, which he can recite with great detail.
He marvels at players who, decades later, retain an encyclopedic knowledge of their games.
“I was moment-to-moment every game,” Dawson said this week from his office in Austin, Tex. “Each moment was its own world.”
Of the fans who crammed into Taylor Field that afternoon in 1975 — those still alive, anyways — we’re sure just a handful still remember this game that rocked their worlds for three hours on a breezy autumn day.
The StarPhoenix sent photographer Peter Wilson, and ran two photos in Monday’s paper. The rest, more than 120 different shots, sat untouched in a filing cabinet. They were discovered a few weeks ago in a dusty corner of the StarPhoenix basement, and brought to life.
They show the players, the fans, the band with its tuba. The best photo is the one showing Mazurak’s 73-yard touchdown run, with the fans freaking out. It’s never been published.
The game itself is historically notable, for a couple of reasons.
First, it was the last regular-season game the great Roughriders’ running back George Reed would ever play on that patch of grass, though nobody knew it at the time. He retired unexpectedly during the off-season.
Second, the game was played against a tragic backdrop. The day before, during a game with the host Calgary Stampeders, 23-year-old Hamilton Tiger Cats linebacker Tom Pate absorbed a clean block from Rick Galbos.
Pate started dying right there on McMahon Stadium’s brand new Astroturf.
It was an aneurysm, and he went from promising young man, to tragic figure, in the time it took to snap a football and collide with an opponent. One province over, one day later, they played a football game as Pate’s life slipped away in a Calgary hospital. He was still dying on Monday. Tuesday, he was gone.
The Roughriders knew all about Tom Pate.
A few months earlier, he was in their camp, wearing their colours, fully dressed for a practice when he got the tap on his shoulder. They’d just acquired Roger Goree, and had no need for him.
Pate, who won a national championship with the Nebraska Cornhuskers, salvaged his career with a trek to Hamilton. And late in the season, they made that trip to Calgary.
“I remember watching the game, seeing all that unfold,” Mazurak says. “Hoping and praying he was going to make it through. But it was gawdawful. Unnerving.
“A young guy, just coming up. It’s a dark memory.”
A short time later, Reed won the firstever Tom Pate Memorial Award, which to this day is given to a CFL player for outstanding community service.
Thoughts of the young man, and his waning life, temporarily dissipated as the Eskimos and Roughriders took the field on Sunday afternoon.
Reed, one of the greatest running backs the CFL has ever seen, took a shot to the nose on his third carry from scrimmage. He played the game with blood stains on his pants, carried the football 23 times for 101 yards, absorbed a brutal beating that turned into a talking point at game’s end. In the fourth quarter, he ripped off a 17-yard run. Head coach John Payne sent backup Terry Bulych in to give Reed a breather, but the veteran shooed Bulych back to the bench.
“He gets hit so often, it’s a wonder he can walk,” Payne told reporters later.
“You wonder how he can take it, getting hit on all the time. But he knows how he feels more than I do.”
Wrote the Leader-Post’s Bob Hughes: "(Reed) has played with his usual defiance of injury and pain. He is hurt again, and they’re worried about him.
“The Man physically is wounded, but somewhere inside of him there is a rare kind of a gut instinct that will not let him quit. To him, quit is a four-letter word meaning loser. Now, there is nothing left to get hurt.”
In the interest of full disclosure, here’s how the game played out: The Roughriders, fighting for first place, improved to 10-4-1, and Edmonton fell to 10-4.
Mazurak scored touchdowns of 73 and 31 yards, less than two minutes apart in the second quarter. Reed, Dawson and Steve Molnar also scored majors.
Dave Cutler booted four field goals for the Eskimos, who got touchdown catches from Calvin Harrell and George McGowan.
Reed broke the Roughriders old record of 302 carries in a season, pushing it to 305.
Creaking old quarterback Ron Lancaster? Superb.
Attendance was 22,628.
Back in Regina, Mazurak — currently employed as the Roughriders vice president of sales and marketing — studies the picture of himself, and those fans.
“I’ve never seen that photo, and a couple of things come to mind,” Mazurak says. “No. 1, people talk about Rider Nation, the avid fans, our merchandise. I keep telling people the modern-era Roughriders didn’t invent Rider Nation. The Rider Nation was around a long time before the Jim Hopson and Steve Mazurak years in marketing.” And the second thing? “I look through the photograph,” he says, “and there’s only one Roughriders pennant showing up. There’s not a hat, not a green jersey, not a T-shirt, not anything green. The Rider Nation was alive and well and noisy, all of the above, but they weren’t green. It’s funny. You go back to those days and what we did for retail — we didn’t call it retail, and we didn’t call it merchandise back then. We called it people buying souvenirs. It was a different kind of a culture, I guess. A different kind of fan. A different kind of way the fans represented their club.”