One unfortunate stat: Mary won’t be there
After 35 years, an injury sidelines CFL statistician from being part of a hometown Grey Cup
It’s a frenetic three hours.
Voices barking out who’s throwing the ball, to whom, who catches it, where it’s caught, who’s running the ball, where the ball is right now, where it ends up, who made the tackle, who made the fumble, who recovered it, who took a penalty, what it’s for, what down, yardage and location that all adds up to.
And a whole bunch of other permutations.
It’s fast, confusing, full of evolving data, and for 35 years, Mary Tinson was the one who kept it all straight and accurate.
It was Tinson’s job to record and input all the information from every single play gathered by the stats crew at Tim Hortons Field and its creaky predecessor, Ivor Wynne Stadium. That, in turn, becomes the data the CFL uses for just about everything involving the game.
Tinson was the only member of the six-person team who had worked the 1996 Grey Cup, the last one in Hamilton, and was looking forward to a repeat gig these long 25 years later.
But, she will not be there with the rest of the “Stat Pack” on Grey Cup Sunday. She is on the long-term injury list and the crew will have to go on without her, as they have reluctantly done all this season.
In late October 2020, Tinson was running across a pathway at a Hamilton store, got dizzy and fell. When she woke up, “I heard somebody moaning and wondered ‘Who’s that?’ and it was me,” she says.
She had broken two vertebrae in her neck and couldn’t move her hands or legs. Over a couple of days, the feeling in her left side came back and her feet started moving, but she couldn’t move the fingers on her right hand. She’s still taking extensive therapy at Hamilton General and is enormously thankful for the attention she’s had there since the accident.
“I’m sad I’m not doing it any more,” she says of the stats work. “But, it’s affected my right hand and I’m right-handed. So trying to use the mouse is difficult and I wouldn’t want to affect the crew’s w
“We were really excited about the Grey Cup coming to Hamilton because the last time here, there was so much going on in the city. I remember the great big white tents we had downtown. It was over the moon and I was really looking forward to that again. It’s bittersweet, but I can watch it at home, and maybe have my daughter over for a Grey Cup party. Jim will be doing the game, so I’m happy for him.”
Jim Tinson is Mary’s husband. He is in charge of the 20-second play clock at Tim Hortons Field, and has been a member of the Hamilton Football Officials Association since the early 1970s. It was Jim who suggested Mary’s name back in 1982 when a vacancy arose in the stats crew at Ivor Wynne. Alex Komarniski, another HFOA veteran who ran the crew, recalls that there was resistance from the CFL at first because they wanted someone with “more football experience.”
But Komarniski says that within a year Toronto was asking for Tinson, a groundbreaker as a female in the football-stats world, to work their games, too.
“Mary’s just a terrific person and has been a wonderful influence on our crew,” says current crew chief, Julian DiBattista. “Her attention to detail, her dedication. She always gives 110 per cent.”
The stats work, hundreds of games of it, was Tinson’s weekend job. After she retired as a secretary at Dofasco, she worked at a temp a resources officer.
Her time in the stats crew is, essentially, a history of the evolution of inputting technology.
When she started, Jim would carry her typewriter — younger readers might want to Google that — up the steep stairs of Ivor Wynne Stadium to the stats booth. Players’ names had to be typed out in full, each time, and small calculators were used to determine yardage and penalty totals.
She transcribed the play stats onto ditto paper, as time went on, the old
Gestetner duplicating machine stencils which then went to copiers — everything had to be summed up and printed for the league and media at the end of each quarter — and in 2002 laptops arrived. That led to ever-evolving computer programs and the early ones included little helmets representing the teams. “That was a scream,” she recalls. Now, the complex programming has players’ names and numbers on file, itemizes and sorts each play, and adds it to the running totals. Once they’re punched in, the playby-play and data summaries are immediately accessible by the public on the CFL website.
“It can be very stressful at times,” Tinson says. “But, you get into a rhythm and it just follows through naturally.”
She adds that after 35 years — she missed a small handful of seasons when game-day stats gathering was centralized in Toronto — of paying attention to the who, what, when, where of each play, “that’s the way I see every game now, even when I’m just watching it on TV.”
Tinson grew up a Ticat fan — Hall of Famer Don Sutherin once lived on the same street — and says she still has a special place in her heart for Ivor Wynne. It was a thrill for her to work a Grey Cup in person there, especially with the memorable wintry conditions. But she’ll be watching Sunday’s game from home.
“It’s really disappointing, we had so many fun times with Mary here,” says DiBattista. “The crew is like one big family and it feels like there’s a part missing.”