Ex-Ravens, Gee-Gees look back on first Panda Game,
1955 team members say the first game was a much smaller deal, GORD HOLDER writes.
It has been 58 years since the Ottawa Gee-Gees faced the Carleton Ravens in the first Panda Game, long enough that Norman Sheahan, Bob Pelletier and Gérald Couture claim they can’t recall where it was played.
“I don’t remember,” Sheahan says. “I don’t want to remember.”
This would be a good time to note that the Gee-Gees lost 14-6 at Lansdowne Park on Oct. 10, 1955. Coincidence? Probably not. The Gee-Gees also lost the 1956 Panda Game 14-10, but, after Sheahan, Pelletier and Couture graduated in ’57, U of O’s football team won seven in a row by a combined score of 204-49.
Another coincidence? Perhaps, but it’s a good story, the likes of which will be swapped when more than 20 surviving members of the 1955 Ravens and Gee-Gees gather for the revived Panda Game at U of O’s new Lees Avenue football stadium on Oct. 5.
The concept of Panda Game is credited to Brian McNulty, at that time associate editor of The Fulcrum, U of O’s student newspaper. He convinced Sparks Street jeweller Jack Snow to donate a stuffed panda as a prize for the winning team and, to hype things more, enlisted Fulcrum sports editor Thomas White to assist with a fake robbery at the jewelry store.
Carleton students, naturally, were blamed.
Support for the Panda Game wasn’t universal, though, not even on the U of O football team. Head coach Matt Anthony didn’t like it, Couture says, because of “the way the concept came in. It was being pushed from the outside.”
However, the game went on, as did Anthony, whose efforts on behalf of Gee-Gees football included literally providing hot water for players’ showers. A Canadian Football League player before he began coaching, Anthony was also a Hydro Ottawa electrician, so, whenever the hot water tank broke, he installed its replacement.
“But those weren’t big tanks,” Pelletier says. “We would empty those tanks in no time.”
Remarkably, the Gee-Gees’ 1955 roster featured a future Ottawa mayor (Pierre Benoit) and a future member of Parliament (Jack Richardson), plus a half-dozen or more who became doctors, among them neurosurgeon Brien Benoit, Pierre’s brother. Pelletier, himself, was University of Ottawa athletics director between 1962 and 1970.
The Benoits made their sporting mark in another way, too. After Brien played eight seasons of Gee-Gees football and Pierre played seven, the national governing body now called Canadian Interuniversity Sport implemented a fiveyear maximum for eligibility.
Anthony coached the GeeGees until 1969, going 11-4 in Panda Games.
Those contests alternated between Carleton’s home field and Lansdowne Park in the 1960s, but were held consistently at Lansdowne after that. Crowds in excess of 10,000 were common, and anyone who was there might remember water balloons flying from one grandstand to the other and classmates in assorted states of inebriation, although the universities and municipal authorities eventually cracked down on such behaviour, particularly after a 1987 incident in which a broken railing allowed more than 20 Carleton students to tumble from the north Lansdowne grandstand onto the concrete at ground level. Several were badly injured.
Panda Games continued, though, at least until Carleton administrators dropped football for cost-cutting reasons following the 1998 season. Despite that 0-2 start, the Gee-Gees hold an overall advantage of 31-13.
With the original stuffed panda already in retirement and replaced by a bronze replica, Pedro went into extended hibernation, but the return of Ravens football this year has also led to the return of the Panda Game and a chance for the original participants to reflect on what they helped kick off.
“I think it’s a really deeprooted pleasure to see that (the rivalry) was alive and working,” Couture says. “I was there when it wasn’t appreciated by Anthony and so on, but, the way it grew, that was really nice.”