Riders' first Grey Cup 50 years ago
This past spring, Saskatchewan Roughriders icon George Reed was asked: “Are you guys going to celebrate the 50th anniversary?”
His surprised response: “What are you talking about?”
“Then it dawned on me that, yeah, that’s how long it has been,” the legendary fullback said in reference to the Roughriders’ firstever Grey Cup season. “It doesn’t seem like that long to me, but it is.”
An even longer period of time elapsed from the Roughriders’ inception as the Regina Rugby Club to the franchise’s icebreaking title.
While transitioning from rugby to football, and from the Regina Rugby Club to the Regina Roughriders to the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the team went 56 years before finally winning a championship.
The protracted drought ended on Nov. 26, 1966, at Empire Stadium in Vancouver, where the Roughriders defeated the favoured Ottawa Rough Riders 29-14 to capture Canadian Football League laurels.
“It will always be special to people because we had a chance to really put Saskatchewan on the map,” Reed reflected. “The first one will always be remembered.”
Reed played an integral role in the landmark victory, rushing 23 times for 133 yards — including a clinching, 31-yard touchdown run in the fourth quarter.
Saskatchewan’s previous three touchdowns were through the air, as Ron Lancaster found Jim Worden, Alan Ford and Hugh Campbell for majors. The TD toss to Campbell, on the first play of the fourth quarter, snapped a 14-14 tie.
Reed, Lancaster and Campbell all arrived in Saskatchewan in 1963. They played under irascible head coach Bob Shaw for two seasons before he was wooed away by the Toronto Argonauts, who offered considerably more money than Saskatchewan could pay.
“Had Bob Shaw not gone to Toronto in ’65, neither Ronnie or I would have been here,” Reed noted. “I was going west and he was going back to the east. We said, ‘We won’t play for him anymore. Football’s not worth it.’
“That’s the way things turned out. Had (Shaw) stayed, you wouldn’t know me today. I wouldn’t have been here. In fact, I had already got a teaching job in the state of Washington and I was going to help coach a high school football team and that was it.”
Instead, Eagle Keys — an assistant under Shaw in 1964 — became Saskatchewan’s field boss and eventually became the franchise’s first Cup-winning head coach. The team had previously played in seven Grey Cup games, losing them all by a combined margin of 172-35.
But everything changed on the final Saturday of November 1966, when Keys told CBC: “We made history today.”
The 1966 Roughriders are to be celebrated July 16, when Saskatchewan plays host to the B.C. Lions. Kickoff is at 5 p.m. Plans are also in place to honour the Roughriders’ championship teams of 1989 (Aug. 13), 2007 (Sept. 24) and 2013 (Oct. 22) during home games as part of the Mosaic Stadium farewell season.