TACKLING A NEW RIVAL
Ex-Lion Jackson wouldn’t trade CFL career despite lapses in memory
Glen Jackson looked small in the defensive backfield of the B.C. Lions, but once the ball was snapped he’d lower his head, then lower the boom on any rival player unfortunate enough to be holding the football.
Despite tipping the scales at just over 200 pounds, light for a linebacker, the six-foot-three Jackson hit like someone who weighed 250 pounds, Lui Passaglia said recently of his friend of 50 years.
Jackson played 12 CFL seasons and only once — because of a knee injury — missed a game. He will be inducted Thursday into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame.
“He was determined, tough, competitive every game, even every practice,” said Passaglia, Jackson’s longtime teammate. “No one wanted to practise against him.”
The Grey Cup champion 1985 Lions, which included Jackson, were inducted as a team in 2000. Induction as an individual is huge, Jackson said in an interview earlier this month.
“To be lifted up to this level is a great, great honour,” he said.
Jackson can remember just about everything there is to remember about the 1985 Grey Cupwinning Lions season. He has great stories to tell about late greats Ray Nettles and James “Quick” Parker, about fellow Vancouverites Nick Hebeler, Kevin Konar and Gerald Roper and about John Henry White.
But he needs help to remember not only how old he is (64), but how long he has been married to his wife Barb (40 years last month). The couple have two daughters and are grandparents.
He assumes his memory issues are related to playing football starting at 10 years old.
“The hits to the head have not helped at this later stage of life,” he said.
A beloved social studies and physical education teacher at Holy Cross regional high school in Surrey for just shy of 30 years, Jackson couldn’t quite get to the end of the current school year and retired at the end of April.
His memory started to noticeably deteriorate over the past few months, he said.
“My wife would say, ‘You forgot to do this,’ or, ‘You were supposed to do that and you never did it.’ I took it from her that it’s time to step away from teaching, that memory really is a problem with me.”
Asked how he’s feeling now, he said he’s “hanging in there,” but even small lapses worry him. “Until you go through it … this is major to me.
“So I really, really, really try to focus and concentrate so I don’t make that blunder, but I sort of beat myself up over it.”
‘WHERE AM I?’
Jackson has no idea how many concussions he may have suffered in 22 seasons of football.
One does stand out, however. “One time I had a concussion, and that’s just one time (of many), I just sat at the end of the bench looking around,” Jackson said while showing visitors around the Coquitlam home he built in 1980.
“I was thinking, ‘ Where am I?’ It was such a weird, weird sensation I was feeling. I’m in a stadium full of 25,000 people, looking around and I’m thinking, ‘What is this?’ I had no clue.
“It was so strange. You sit there and it slowly, slowly,” — he dragged out the words — “slowly, like somebody is opening a door really slowly and you start recognizing what’s going on.
“It’s a weird, weird sensation, no fun.”
Still, he’d do it all over again, he said, after taking some time to think about it.
“I don’t think I’d say no. I definitely think I would do it again even though I’m in a state of repair right now. Yeah, I’d do it.
“I tell this story: I was 10 years old, walking by a park and some adult said, ‘Hey, would you like to play football?’
“I was new to the neighbourhood in south Vancouver. I said sure. I’d never played football before.”
So he put on the gear he was provided, practised, then played a game.
“I hit somebody, I went down and the coach ran over to see if I was OK. Then he said, ‘You know, you’re going to do something with football, you’re going to be good.’
“Nobody had told me I’d be good at something before, nobody ever, ever had said anything positive to me in my life. This was the first positive comments I’d received in my life and I believed them. That’s how powerful it was, that’s what started me off in my football career.”
Jackson went on to play football at Notre Dame regional secondary in east Vancouver, where he and Passaglia met. They were also teammates for four years at Simon Fraser University and then joined the Lions together in 1976.
When Jackson joined the Lions, it was unusual to have a Canadian playing linebacker. A team had to have seven Canadians among its 24 starters and they were usually big, slow guys on the offensive line of scrimmage, a receiver or fullback, maybe a safety.
In some ways it seems not that long ago that he was injecting fear into opposing running backs and pass-catchers, said Jackson.
‘HE COULD HIT’
Jackson was the best 200-pound linebacker the CFL “ever” had, said former Province sports editor and columnist Kent Gilchrist.
“That you aren’t supposed to play linebacker at only 200 pounds was a point ‘Jake’ spent his entire 12-season CFL career disputing with distinction,” Gilchrist said.
Jackson was a six-time West Division all-star and Gilchrist believes he should have won a like number of all-CFL berths. He was selected to the Dream Team of alltime Lions as well as to a Province all-time Lions roster.
“Jake just had remarkable recuperative powers,” Gilchrist said. “He wasn’t particularly fast … he always looked lean, almost undernourished. But he could hit.”
In January 2005, Jackson spoke to The Province about all of his physical aches and pains — knees, back, shoulder, neck and the many nights he couldn’t sleep because of the agony.
But those don’t worry him today. He’s focused on his brain, on his memory.
“On my head. The rest of my body, I work out on a five-day routine. As long as I work out, it seems to be all right, the body. But the body’s not my concern, it’s the mind.”
The CFL and NFL have pledged to take more steps to make the game safer.
Several former players, unable to live with their brain injuries, have committed suicide.
In two of the better-known cases — former NFL stars Junior Seau and Dave Duerson — post-mortems revealed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage caused by concussions that leads to depression.
“What are they going to do? I don’t see how you stop it,” Jackson said of butting heads in football. “When you say we’ll have this rule, well, you can have any rule you want, but things do happen. When you lead (while tackling) the body is coming, the head is in front of it.
“No matter what you do, at some time during the game you are going to get hit in the head. I see they’re trying to cut down and when they use the words cut down, that’s the best words they can use. You cannot get rid of it.”