Montreal is Buono’s city of ‘angels’
CFL legend’s coaching career was shaped by likes of Phaneuf, Levy during his time with Als
AMONTREAL s he makes his way through his CFL farewell tour, Wally Buono tries his best to distance himself from the emotion and the finality of his impending retirement.
That’s to be expected. Buono has always maintained there are two aspects to his personality. One is expressed through his family life and the many relationships he has built over 50 years in football. The other, the colder, more ruthless side, has allowed him to make the difficult decisions necessary to his calling.
It’s the latter you generally see during football season and he said it has served him well over the years. It has also served him well in this, his final year of active duty.
“Why would you make a big deal of this?” he said as the Lions prepared to fly to Montreal for Friday’s game against the Alouettes. “All my special things about Montreal have already happened. I just want to go back for one more win.”
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But as Buono prepares for what figures to be his final game in his hometown, this one is about a little more than one more win and, while it takes some coaxing, the Lions coach will finally cop to everything this city means to him.
It’s the place that shaped him for his incredible journey. It’s the place he learned about the richness and rewards of life. It’s also the place he learned about its cruelty.
In short, it’s the place that is responsible for the man he is: The compassionate warrior, the dispassionate autocrat. From a distance, that life reads like a Dickens novel. But when it’s your life and you believe in the things that Buono believes in, it all makes perfect sense.
“I’m saying this is where I came from and what I had to go through,” he said. “It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t hard. It was just the reality.
“When you’re this age (68), you can look back and look at your life and all the things that God prepared you for. Whether it’s good or bad, whether it made you hard or soft, it’s all there. It was part of His plan.”
And that must have been quite a plan because it has been quite a life.
Born in Potenza, Italy, Buono arrived in Canada as a three-year-old — on a ship from Naples to Halifax, then by train to Montreal — with his mother Carmela and older brother Rocco and reunited with his father Michael, who’d left the old country to find work in the new world.
Five years later, Michael Buono died in his sleep. With his mother unable to provide for the family, the brothers were shipped to the Shawbridge Boys Farm, a sort of orphanage/juvenile detention centre in Quebec where they lived for three years.
Buono has since said you could take two paths out of Shawbridge — into trouble or into sports. On their release, he and Rocco were hanging around a field near their Montreal North home when future Alouette Al Phaneuf recruited them to play on a peewee team he was coaching.
That would be his introduction to the game. Phaneuf would coach the brothers through bantam, Buono would eventually earn a scholarship to Idaho State, then landed a job with the hometown Als as a hard-rock linebacker.
His rookie year in 1973 also coincided with Marv Levy’s first year as the Als’ coach and the beginnings of a golden age in Montreal sports for the Alouettes, Expos and Canadiens.
He’s asked if he wonders what his life would have been like without Phaneuf’s intervention.
“More than once,” he said. “Without football, without the direction he gave us, who knows? It’s not that we were bad kids, but you don’t have to be a bad kid to find trouble. We got into sports and that’s all we did. We were fortunate.”
He said men like Phaneuf are “angels,” people who point you in the right direction and prepare you for your ultimate purpose. Levy, the legendary former Buffalo Bills coach, was another of his angels and Buono has borrowed liberally from Levy’s coaching canon.
“Because Marv Levy gave the players ownership, we were involved in the game planning,” he said. “Marv didn’t motivate his players. He had veterans he trusted and turned the team over to them.
“He expected you to go out and play and if you didn’t, he’d get rid of you. But if you helped him win, he’d keep you around.”
And he kept some memorable characters around during Buono’s playing days: Johnny Rodgers, the former Heisman Trophy winner from Nebraska, Tom Cousineau, the first-overall pick in the NFL draft, Tony Proudfoot, his good friend who would succumb to Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Chuck Zapiec, a linebacker and the dirtiest player in the CFL.
A year after he retired, he took an assistant’s job with then-Concordes over a teaching position before moving on to the Stampeders. The Concordes’ staff included Dave Ritchie, George Cortez and Chuck McMann, who he’d work with throughout his career.
As for the Stamps, we don’t have the time or space to list all the notable figures who were part of his career in Calgary.
So it all comes full circle for Buono on Friday night in this, the city he came to as a boy, the city that shaped him, the city that will always be a part of him. It wasn’t always a happy story, but the ending turned out all right.
Just ask him.