The biggest choke in Canadian history?
Normally, it would be a pleasure and an honour to have been involved in an event that was covered by the late, great, Dick Beddoes, the larger-than-life writer and broadcaster whose fedora and opinions made CHCH must-watch TV all through the 1980s. Ah, but this was not the 1980s, and when Beddoes wrote about the 1971 Senior ORFU (Ontario Rugby Football Union) championship series for the Globe and Mail — where he was a featured columnist for nearly 20 years — it was neither a pleasure, nor an honour. Not for me. The ORFU is long gone now. It died after the 1972 season, but it was Canada’s first formal major football league, lasted 89 years and until the mid-1950s its winners could, and did, challenge for the Grey Cup. The Hamilton Tigers’ very last two seasons were in the ORFU, before they amalgamated with the Wildcats to form the Tiger-Cats in 1950. In 1971, the ORFU’s London Lords were actually a farm team of those Tiger-Cats. Because of the territorial protection rules in existence then, players with the Lords were the Ticats’ CFL property. Future Hall of Fame defensive tackle Glen Weir, who’d nearly made the Ticats that summer at age 19, was among the Lords’ CFL-bound guys. And the Toronto Argonauts had first right of refusal on any player with the Bramalea Satellites. The Satellites had predicted they would win the 1971 ORFU pennant and league title and had finished first in the regular season with an 8-0 record, with London second at 6-2, both losses coming to the Toronto-based team. But, in the two-game total point league final, London won the first game 42-6 before a big crowd in London. The Lords also scored the first touchdown of the return game at Toronto’s Centennial Stadium before 1,000 people, 80 per cent of whom had bused down from London. So, with 45 minutes of play left in the championship series of a league some fans still considered highly relevant, the Lords led the Satellites by 42 points. And … they went on to surrender 48 points in the final 45 minutes to lose the title by five points. “The Lords were not so comical on offence as they were on defence, but it was a close race,” Beddoes wrote a couple of days later, in his weekly commentary on all things Canadian football. “On defence they were papier mache.” Unfortunately, I was a co-captain of that defence. Not for long, though, as I was benched after the first half. Combined with lots of turnovers from our offence, we had given back 28 points of our 42-point lead in the second quarter alone. The team stunk and, playing cornerback, I stunk even worse. I talked recently with the quarterback of that team, our biggest star, Tony Passander. The year before, Passander had won a Grey Cup ring as backup to the Montreal Alouettes’ Sonny Wade. He was by far the best player in the ORFU, but he told me he had pushed the 1971 final so deep into the recesses of his mind he never, ever, thinks of it. A star at the Citadel, he had never thrown as many interceptions as he did that day. “Everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” Passander said. “All game.” Which did not escape the sharp mind and acerbic prose of Beddoes. Most people were fans of his latter years on TV, and the almost-audible haberdashery that strongly influenced Don Cherry’s TV career. But I loved the way Beddoes controlled the language, and fit sports into a larger-world context. He’d quote Jacques Brehl or William Butler Yeats to illustrate a point. And he was damned funny. I had always thought Beddoes had written that our loss was “the greatest choke in the history of Canadian sport,” but apparently he said that on TV or radio. I read his partialcolumn on the game the other day and it wasn’t much more complimentary — but oh, was it fair. “The Ontario Racing Commission has ordered saliva tests for less peculiar reversals of form,” wrote the man who referred to himself as “Bedclothes.” And when he listed his “Frawzi’s Futile Five” of terrible teams in Canada, we were No. 1, ahead of the Alouettes who had gone from Grey Cup to last place. His adjective for us was “hilarious,” while the Als got “ludicrous.” Under “Next Team Loss” for us he wrote “At the Team Party.” We actually did have a civic “reception” back in London that night, with 800 fans originally planning to show up. Exactly zero did. For a long time, every five years I’d get a call from my friend, Jim Kernaghan, (now gone, too) of the London Free Press asking me to look back on the inconceivable thing we’d allowed to happen in 1971. So, unlike Passander, I could never quite “disremember” the game. I didn’t know Beddoes, but certainly knew of him, and what he meant to sports in Southern Ontario; and particularly the way he put Hamilton on the electronic media map later in his career. I just wish he would have written about our team the next season, the final year of the venerable ORFU, when we went 11-0 and nobody could beat us — not even ourselves.