AND WELL AND NOISY’
Modern-day Saskatchewan sloshes through a fabric flood; green, green, green. Every closet has a Roughriders jersey, shirt, hat or baby bib. You can eat Rider-themed cereal and potato chips, get bugs off your windshield with Rider-blessed cleaner. That's thanks to Mazurak's efforts in his job with the Roughriders.
In 1975, you see a few pennants in the stands, a mesh ball cap or two with the iconic wheat sheaf and big S. Otherwise, 22,000-plus people wear their usual street clothes; bell-bottomed pants, red sweater, grey jacket, screaming for the green and white. Allegiances aside, this is no sea of green.
The 1975 throng has a cigarette in their collective right hand instead of a cellphone. Nobody takes a selfie. Tweeting is for whistles. When they go home, they'll throw a Fleetwood Mac record on the turntable, or flick on the TV and watch the Sonny and Cher Show. So it goes. It's different, but it's also the same. Twenty-four men on a field, 110 yards long, tackling, blocking, dodging. Passes are caught and dropped, running backs bounce off-tackle. The crossing of a goal-line is a matter of unrestrained joy, or unabashed fury, depending on which colour did the crossing.
Dawson caught four Ron Lancaster passes for 118 yards that day, patrolling the same patch of land as Dean Griffing in 1936, Glenn Dobbs in 1951, Weston Dressler in 2015.
Dawson's one touchdown came off a broken play, when Lancaster turned the wrong way on a handoff to Reed and found nobody there. He scrambled, spied Dawson, threw it, and celebrated a touchdown. Even today, Dawson recounts the broken play with crystal precision. The game? No. The play? Yes.
Dawson, a star with the Florida State Seminoles, joined the Roughriders late in the 1974 season after NFL stints in Houston and Minnesota.
His release by the Vikings sent him drifting into the perceived obscurity of the Saskatchewan prairie: “I was somewhere between disappointed and curious,” he says, but he quickly became a standout; one of the CFL's elite receivers.
“I loved that team,” Dawson says. “We were a bunch of rejects from the NFL, or derelicts. We were all kind of cut from the same cloth. They'd say, 'You're a bunch of old guys.' But we took it personal, went out and proved we weren't.”
Dawson said he gets goosebumps, talking about Taylor Field and those long-ago days in Saskatchewan.
“It's three of the best years of my life, and I really mean that,” he says. "Ronnie and I would make up plays at practice and run them, and Coach Payne would look at Ronnie and go ‘what was that play?' Just the thrill of every little bit of it; being able to tell Ronnie I can beat this guy on the post, Ronnie would call a post, and I'd beat him.
“It's like the most fun you ever had as a kid playing sandlot football, and the most fun you've ever had playing big-time football. I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world. I can truly say I'm glad I got cut by the Vikings.”
But Mosaic Stadium isn't all about joy. The old place made many a football career, but it demolished a lot, too. So let's spare a few words for Charles Miller, an Eskimos defensive back who was the Cleveland Browns' 150th overall selection in the 1975 NFL draft.
Miller — who played under Bobby Bowden at West Virginia — ricocheted up to Canada after the draft, made his debut in this game, played the first half, defended so badly he got benched, and watched the rest of the affair from the sidelines. He never appeared in another game of professional football.
You can see Miller in one of the photos. The Eskimos gave him No. 28 before the game, put MILLER on the nameplate, trotted him onto the Taylor Field grass. The photo shows Roughriders receiver Leif Pettersen hauling in a long pass at the Eskimos 36. Miller, in full gallop, is five yards behind.
Mazurak's two touchdowns both came at Miller's expense; on the first, the rookie collided with fellow Eskimos DB John Farlinger, which allowed Mazurak to spring free on his 73-yard gallop.
On the second, in the words of Star Phoenix writer Larry Tucker, Mazurak “put some moves on Miller that were positively indecent” and scored from 31 yards out.
Miller had put together a fine career up to that point; high-school star, great collegiate run, NFL draft pick. But it ended, as many careers have, with one bad afternoon in Regina.
The day's entertainment ended, finally, and everybody went home with smiles. A few weeks later, the Eskimos exacted revenge, defeating the Roughriders in the West Division final for a third straight season. Then they won the Grey Cup.
“We hated the damn Eskimos,” Mazurak says.
That October bout, like the games before it and the ones that came after, extracted a cumulative toll on the players. Some remember the clash; some forget. But their bodies offer a daily recall.
“The game is wearing and tearing,” Mazurak said.
“You can see it in the way I walk and hobble, the way many of us walk and hobble. George shows that, as well. It comes with the game. We're getting our knees replaced, our ankles replaced, our hips replaced.”
Mazurak, since re-joining the Roughriders, has joked often about the need to bulldoze the old place that's brought him such a beguiling mix of pain and joy; has talked seriously about how it's the one thing keeping the team from being truly big-league.
His wish is coming true, but he spares a nostalgic twinge for Mosaic Stadium, the place where he scored that 73-yard touchdown and brought the house down.
“It has so much meaning, and so much passion,” he says. “The different turfs that have been stained in Roughrider blood, and in fan blood. It's just wonderful. We're going to try our darnedest to give that old girl as good a sendoff as you can give a great stadium.”
And that will suit his old receiving mate Dawson, watching from afar, just fine.
“I'm 67 now,” Dawson says, “and realizing I'm one of those old farts we used to laugh at, the ones who would come watch practice when I was at college. It's one more indication that time keeps rolling on, things get replaced. At some point years down the road, people will look back, and say, ‘I'm sure glad they've built this new stadium, because it's so much nicer,' and that's all they'll care about. But I have nothing but awesome memories of every day I got to be there.”
Those memories include a broken play and a touchdown on the afternoon of Oct. 19, 1975 — one game, of 747, on Saskatchewan's most hallowed ground.