Austin puts Rider past on back burner
Ticats coach focused on Grey Cup, not Regina return
To Canadian Football League followers of a certain age, the sight of the main entrance to creaky old Mosaic Stadium (the ballpark formerly known as Taylor Field) flanked by 40-foot colour images of players not named Ron Lancaster and George Reed is ... well, jarring.
But a Saskatchewan Roughriders franchise whose Hall of Fame icons won only one Grey Cup — 47 years ago — during their long careers decided last season that it was time to move on, to update the folklore a tad. Nice timing. A year later, one of the guys it moved on to, Kent Austin — though undeniably deserving of the honour, having both quarterbacked (1989) and coached (2007) the Roughriders to CFL championships — is back in town for Sunday’s Grey Cup game ... coaching the enemy. Against the beloveds.
Is there no local ordinance that could be passed? Couldn’t the club take Austin down and put old George back up, even if he’s a little faded, just for the week? Or paste a photo of current backup Drew Willy’s head on Austin’s body, since he wears the same number (5)? Maybe paint over Austin’s name on the No. 5 parking lot, the one that’s located closer to the stadium than the No. 23 Lancaster lot?
“Yeah, I don’t make those decisions,” the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ coach chuckled Wednesday at the CFL’s first formal function of Grey Cup week. “The (Saskatchewan) organization will do what they want to do, but we’re very honoured to be recognized.”
Asked what it felt like to have to walk past Austin’s gigantic poster every day on the way to work, Riders coach Corey Chamblin didn’t miss a beat:
“Well, I actually come in the other way, so ...,” he said.
The last thing he wanted to do, he said, was see the “ancient landmarks” of the club’s rich history removed.
“That’s part of the foundation. The Riders wouldn’t have the Cups they have without Kent and Richie (Hall, the defensive co-ordinator) and all those guys,” Chamblin said, “and we’re just trying to build on all the things those guys did in the past.”
Austin’s place in team, league, even pro football history is unique: no other championship-winning quarterback has ever guided the same franchise to another title as head coach.
And considering his fingerprints are all over two of the only three Grey Cups the Roughriders have won since they were invented as the Regina Rugby Club 103 years ago, it’s a wonder the stadium hasn’t been named after him.
Austin, though, is downplaying all of it. Whatever emotions might be stirred up by a return to play a Grey Cup in the town where he spent seven seasons as a quarterback and one sensational rookie year as a coach are being wrapped in vanilla phrases and put aside until the job is done Sunday.
“Any time you’re in it, it’s an awesome experience, it’s hard to get here,” said the 50-yearold, second-most famous quarterback ever to come out of Natick, Mass. (Some guy named Flutie is No. 1).
“And every one of the Grey Cups are special. That being said, if we were going to play somebody ... I would want it to be Saskatchewan. If we’re not going to win it, which we hope very much we do, it would be good to see Saskatchewan in there.”
The Ticats’ Andy Fantuz wouldn’t go that far — “I’ll be just as mad losing to them as I would be losing to anybody else,” said the big slotback, who played for Austin on the ’07 team — but he said the vibe from Austin this year feels a lot like it did then.
“When he came in ’07, it was a big thing about culture and camaraderie and playing for one another,” Fantuz said. “You could tell it was something special as soon as he came in this year, and everyone was buying into it.”
Henry Burris, the voluble quarterback who was shunted off by Calgary two years ago, says the players have all noted the coach’s likeness on the front of the stadium and teased him about it, “but you don’t want to piss him off, because he might get upset and have us running bleachers out here.
“The thing is with Kent, he’s such a focused guy, he’s so dialed-in this week.”
“I have a game to coach, Andy has a job to do, Hank has a job to do,” said Austin. “We’re focused on the things that will tangibly affect our ability to win the football game, not on any distractions that are incidental to the process of winning.”
The chance to take another team, again in his first season as head coach, to a championship is certainly somewhere in Austin’s consciousness, but Wednesday he was spreading the glory around to Burris and running back C.J. Gable, to Ticats owner Bob Young and CEO Scott Mitchell, to his assistant coaches ... anyone but K. Austin.