FORTY YEARS OF MEMORIES
Members of the 1973 Rough Riders relive that season, the Grey Cup Game victory and what has happened since
Mark Kosmos had already played for two Grey Cup champions, the 1970 Montreal Alouettes and 1972 Hamilton Tiger-Cats, before the Ottawa Rough Riders acquired him in a trade during the 1973 season.
Kosmos joined his new team during its 9-1 run to end the regular season, playing in six games, and he made an impact in the Grey Cup game by forcing one of five Edmonton Eskimos fumbles, one of three that ended up in Rough Riders hands.
“The quarterback ran (an unblocked bootleg play) to the left, and I was blitzing from the right, and he had his back to me,” Kosmos says. “So, now, I’m thinking, ‘Oh! You’ve got to get him.’
“In my head, I’ve got God on our side. I’m saying, ‘Please, God. Don’t let him throw the ball.’ He stopped to throw the ball, I hit him, he fumbled, we recovered.
“There are special things that happen in a football game where you get an opportunity to say, ‘Hey! You know what? I’m doing something for all the team, not just for me. … It just fills you up with a little of, ‘Let’s get it again, let’s do it again’.”
Kosmos played four more seasons with the Rough Riders and received another Grey Cup ring after the “Clements-to-Gabriel” victory over the Saskatchewan Roughriders in 1976.
Now 67, he says of the 1973 final, which ended with Ottawa prevailing 22-18: “It was that kind of enjoyment as a team, where you’re joking on the field, joking with your players, joking with the officials. If I could go back (and play one game), that would be it.”
Tom Pullen played tight end for Rough Riders championship teams in 1968 and 1969, when Frank Clair was head coach, and he was Kosmos’ teammate with the Alouettes squad that won in 1970. It certainly didn’t look as if there would be a chance for Pullen’s fourth Grey Cup ring after Ottawa lost its first four games of 1973.
Then, he says, something strange happened on the first practice day after that fourth loss.
Linebacker Dan Dever was nowhere to be found when practice began on the small field south of the Lansdowne grandstands. A half-hour later, a gate leading to the field opened and in came Dever, dressed head to toe in a Governor General’s Foot Guards uniform. Head coach Jack Gotta fell to the ground, laughing, as Dever strode the length of the field.
“That was our team. We turned everything around after that point,” Pullen says.
A longtime member and past president of the Kiwanis Club of Ottawa, Pullen was asked by that organization to arrange a luncheon appearance by Jeff Hunt of Ottawa Sports & Entertainment Group, which has an agreement with the city to redevelop Lansdowne Park and is starting a CFL expansion franchise to replace the long-departed Rough Riders and Ottawa Renegades.
Pullen was game, and he had a plan. Knowing he couldn’t attend the annual Rough Riders alumni golf tournament because of a family trip, he suggested linking the 1973 Riders reunion to the luncheon and the CFL’s impending rebirth in Ottawa with the REDBLACKS.
He wrote to all his 1973 teammates and asked them to vote. Ninety per cent said yes.
Like others, Pullen says he’s most pleasantly surprised by the impending arrival of Roger Perdrix, the retired offensive guard who hadn’t attended previous reunions in 1983, 1993 or 2003.
Pullen says he’ll most miss Gotta, who died in Alberta in June at age 83. “I’m not sure he was the best coach, but he was my best coach because he got the most out of me,” Pullen says. “He knew how to push my buttons, and I loved playing for him … for whatever reason.”
Roughly two generations of Canadians are less likely to know Bob McKeown as the 1973 Rough Riders’ centre and more likely to recognize him as a well-respected investigative journalist with CBC’s The Fifth Estate. He knows how to find people, generally speaking.
Just not Al Marcelin, Art Green or Wayne Smith.
Marcelin, who played defensive back, was in New Orleans when McKeown last spoke to him a decade ago, and the retired running back Green was in Atlanta, but they’ve since dropped below McKeown’s radar. Smith was never there.
A 10-year CFLer at defensive end, Smith was inducted into the Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame in 1984, but McKeown hasn’t found anyone who can say where he has gone since. “He’s an icon in Halifax. It should be easy to find Wayne Smith, but it hasn’t been. I’m still trying, though.”
McKeown joins in describing Gotta as a players’ coach, adding that he was perhaps the only pro coach who would have wanted McKeown to play centre on his offensive line and that Gotta had a special way of keeping things in perspective. One story involves a play drawn on a blackboard, using circles to denote offensive lineman and Vs for defensive lineman. The problem, according to Gotta, is that circles and Vs on a blackboard are the same size. On the field of play, though, little circles line up against big Vs and big circles oppose little Vs. McKeown also displays great recall about the handful of players who spent only a few games with the Rough Riders in 1973 and weren’t in the official team picture late in the season.
Quarterback Frank DiMaggio, running back Lee Fobbs Jr., defensive back Willie McKelton and guard Bob Rickenbach appeared in one game each. After a half-dozen, halfback Billy Cooper was traded to Edmonton, and he played Ottawa for the Grey Cup. Linebacker Chuck Zapiec was in seven games before being dealt to Montreal with running back/slotback Skip Eaman. Defensive back Herb Marshall was in the lineup three times. McKeown says he still has the helmet worn by Marshall, who had the neighbouring locker.
“I knew if I took my helmet, they’d charge me for it, so I took Herb’s,” he says.
Forty years is a nice, round anniversary number, and Ottawa pro football alumni members are excited about both the city’s return to the CFL with the REDBLACKS in 2014 and construction of a new Lansdowne Park stadium, former Rough Riders kicker Gerry Organ says.
Plans for this week’s reunion germinated even before Gotta’s death in late June, but the coach’s passing and those of former team surgeon Dr. Rudy Gittens and such as Hugh Oldham and Jim Evenson provided additional motivation, says Organ, whose two converts in the 1973 Grey Cup game included one for Evenson’s 18-yard touchdown run.
“Most of these guys only ever won one Grey Cup, so this is it,” Organ says. Organ proclaims he doesn’t fully understand his exteammates’ hoopla over Perdrix’s commitment to attend, but agrees he’d love to know more about what became of Smith.
Organ says the finalist for a Schenley Award as top lineman in 1974 was traced to cities from Halifax to Peterborough. “If you happen to live next door to him, let us know.”