Redblacks, fans cherish their victory
Thousands gather along the parade route as long-suffering fans celebrate Grey Cup triumph
OTTAWA — Spectators lined both sides of Bank Street for a city mile to catch a glimpse of the oncoming parade.
When the floats and vehicles approached, fans did more than look — they ran up to their football heroes and slapped hands in congratulations, reaching up to touch the Grey Cup trophy.
In what will be remembered as one of the most joyous sports scenes in recent Ottawa history, thousands flooded the neighbourhood known as the Glebe before marching alongside the parade route to join a fan rally near TD Place.
Mothers carried babies, some dressed in Redblacks plaid. Old men leaned on walkers. At Mutchmor Public School on Fourth Avenue, pupils and teachers filed out of the building en masse to watch the parade. As they walked, the children chanted, “Let’s Go, Redblacks!”
Others skipped class to be part of a moment they would never forget.
Looking on among the burgeoning crowd was veteran football fan John Leech, 74.
“The first Grey Cup I attended was in 1960, in Vancouver,” Leech said. “The Rough Riders won!”
Leech was a fan of a Rider powerhouse Frank Clair was just starting to build, with Ron Stewart, Bob Simpson, Kaye Vaughan and quarterbacks Russ Jackson and Ron Lancaster.
“They were fun to watch,” Leech says.
Like so many, Leech tips a cap to the Redblacks ownership and management which built a championship organization “amazingly fast,” in just three seasons.
“It took a lot of effort by a lot of people,” Leech said.
Quarterback Henry Burris was the last player introduced, hobbling to the microphone on crutches because of a damaged knee that nearly kept him from starting Sunday’s game. Burris joked that many U.S.-based players don’t know that Ottawa is Canada’s capital city.
Ottawa is also “capital of where the Grey Cup is,” Burris said, as fans cheered. OSEG Sports president Jeff Hunt said this championship scene “was the vision 10 years ago” when a football relaunch was planned.
The weather was fitting: a grey, overcast day on which to celebrate the victory. The early morning rain and freezing rain preceding the parade symbolically washed away 40 years of anguish.
Just as Bill Buckner, Boston’s World Series goat, was reprieved by the Red Sox title in 2004, and Chicago’s Steve Bartman was forgiven in the aftermath of the Cubs championship last month, so too are the characters of ‘Lansdoom’ vindicated by the Redblacks’ stunning victory over the Calgary Stampeders.
Where once they cried, longtime Ottawa football fans can finally laugh about former Riders owner Lonie Glieberman trying to “exorcise the demons” at Frank Clair Stadium during a halftime show in the early 1990s. This was the franchise that had to be taken over by the league and operated by the bean-counter commissioner Donald Crump.
While Ottawa spent 40 years in the desert in a biblical sense, in only 26 of those years did it even have a team in the CFL.
Lansdowne was dark from 19972001 and again from 2006-2013, before the lights came on at a refurbished TD Place in 2014.
Fans weren’t the only ones celebrating Ottawa’s long-awaited championship. Former players, who grew to be embarrassed by the association with Bytown football, stand taller today.
How else to explain the worry etched on the face of the great Russ Jackson, 80, sitting in the stands at BMO Field Sunday, agonizing over Calgary’s successful onside kick, which led to their game-tying drive in the final minute of regulation. Overtime delivered the impossible dream.
Jackson’s stature in the game is safe, preserved for all time by his Hall of Fame credentials, which include three Grey Cup championships with the Riders in the 1960s.
Yet, after years of disconnect, the Redblacks revival and title has renewed Jackson’s pride in his Ottawa football roots.