MODDEJONGE

Fans mourn death of CFL legend Coffey

Adam Coffey wasn’t born until the year after his grandfather hung up his cleats.

But if he ever wanted to know just how much Tommy Joe Coffey once meant and still means to the Canadian Football League, he found out Wednesday.

The messages began rolling in from across the country in the morning.

He had just posted an old player card with news of the death of his Pop, as he calls him, a Canadian Football Hall-of-famer whose name has the distinction of appearing on the Wall of Honour on not one, but two franchises — Edmonton and Hamilton.

“My grandpa passed away last night, he was 83,” Adam wrote. “RIP, Pop.”

By the afternoon, it had surpassed 1,000 likes and almost half as many comments that were from one end of the country to the other.

“I couldn’t believe the response that I got on Twitter,” Adam said on a phone interview with Postmedia from his home in Hamilton. “It’s got to be close to 20,000 people who have seen it now, I was surprised. From all over the country, I got a bunch of them, like: ‘He was my favourite player.’ Or they posted a jersey with his autograph on it.

“Still, like 40-whatever years after he retired, people remember him. So that felt good to see that and it’s pretty cool.”

Tommy Joe Coffey spent the first half of his 14-year pro football career as a receiver and place kicker in Edmonton, before moving on to Hamilton where he won Grey Cups in 1967 and ’72, before finishing with the Toronto Argonauts in ’73.

The West Texas State product was an eighth-round pick by the then-baltimore Colts in the 1959 NFL draft.

“But the CFL, at the time, offered him more money than the NFL and a job teaching in Edmonton, as well. He couldn’t pass it up. It is crazy, the guys on the practice rosters down there make more than most players in the CFL now,” said Adam, who recalls stories of his grandfather playing golf with Arnold Palmer during a charity event, as well as having his name among the first four put up at old Ivor Wynne Stadium in Hamilton to a standing ovation. “I think it was him, (Angelo) Mosca, Garney Henley and Ellison Kelly, I believe. What a list, right?

“The whole family was there, they gave us all tickets and brought us down to the field at half time. I always knew he was famous, but that, that was when it hit me.”

Fellow Canadian Football Hallof-famer and former Edmonton Football Club quarterback Frank Cosentino, a first-round pick of the Ticats in 1960, was on the other end of the trade that sent Coffey to Hamilton in 1967.

“I didn’t know him, personally, all that well, but I certainly noticed him playing against him because it seemed like every other pass was going to go to Tommy Joe Coffey. And not only that, he would catch them all the time, he had sure hands,” said Cosentino, who has authored 18 books, including a trio on the CFL, since earning his PHD from the University of Alberta in 1973 and going on to coach two Vanier championship teams.

Funeral plans are being organized.

“Pop is going to be buried in Oklahoma because that’s where his parents are buried,” Adam said.