The Grey Cup, amid a NATIONAL CRISIS
There were more than 33,000 screaming people in Toronto’s CNE Stadium, yet down on the sidelines of the rain-ravaged field George Springate stood silent and alone.
Well, not quite alone. A protective, armed, security detail hovered nearby.
“We used to laugh that nobody wanted to be beside him at the games, in case the sniper missed,” recalls former Montreal Alouettes quarterback Tony Passander, Springate’s teammate in the 1970 Grey Cup game. “But it was only half-jokingly.”
On Nov. 28, 1970, George Springate was 32 years old, but he was in his first year as a CFL player and contributed a field goal and a convert as Montreal defeated the Calvg g first Grey Cup title in 23 years.
But Springate was also a rookie in another career. Earlier that year, the one-time Montreal city police officer had become a member of the Quebec National Assembly for he winning Liberal Party. And, at the peak of one of the most divisive eras in Canadian history, that made him a target for terrorism.
The 1970 Grey Cup game was the last one played on a Saturday, and the last that included an eastern eam that had not finished either first or second. But, it was also the second of back-to-back Novembers which illustrated how the Grey Cup can serve as both a symbol for national unity and a vehicle for at least some sense of normality during staggeringly uncertain times. Canada’s infamous “October Crisis” was still raging, although mainly in Quebec and laser-focused on Montreal, the Alouettes’ home city. For eight years, Front de liberation du Quebec (FLQ), a violent Quebec independence movement, had been attacking — frewith bombs — what it conquently sidered symbols of English colonialism and anti-Francophone institutions. Government offices, police, and the Liberal-controlled provincial legislature were high on that list.
The 1970 Grey Cup game was held just six weeks after Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte was found dead, after having been kidnapped in early October. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau had invoked the War Measures Act, curtailing many civil liberties, the FLQ had been outlawed, troops were deployed throughout Montreal and kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross was still missing, amid fears he’d be executed although he was released in early December.
The Alouettes had practised and played home games at Montreal’s now-demolished Autostade, but Passander recalls that Springate wasn’t with them, except for games, and thinks he worked out on his own somewhere else, perhaps McGill.
“It was a scary time” recalls Passander, who played a lot that season before Sonny Wade got hot and took over for the playoffs and Grey Cup. “We did talk about it. I don’t think it affected the way we worked out near the Grey Cup game ... other than George.
“I had military training from playing at The Citadel and the whole thing scared the hell out of me. But it never got to the point where I never went to practice or that I didn’t want to be there. Football was our time for normality. We had a job to do and tried to get through this the best way we could,” he remembers.
“In the city, I just remember a lot of attention and tension, and it was real. There was anxiety on our team, particularly because we had George playing with us. We felt we could have been in the middle of the thing, easily. The fact that nobody would stand beside George on the sidelines at the Autostade tells you something. We were happy to get out of Montreal. The fact that the was in Toronto eased tengame sions, I think, for the team.”
For the fans, too, according to some recollections published over the years. Those who were there, or watched on TV, called it a harmless distraction from the harsh realities of the outside world.
The same breathe-out process had occurred a year earlier when
the Grey Cup Game was in Montreal, where nine months earlier 27 people had been injured in the bombing of the Stock Exchange. A bomb had also gone off at the home of Mayor Jean Drapeau.
Trudeau and CFL commissioner Jake Gaudaur, the former TigerCats president and GM, were insistent that the game be played despite the calls from some quarters to move it to another city.
To mark the Cup’s 100th birthday in 2012, TSN released “Playing a Dangerous Game,” a superb documentary on the 1969 game as part of its acclaimed “Engraved on a Nation” series. Director John Walker referred to the game as a metaphor for Canada at the time, with Trudeau feeling Quebec was a necessary cornerstone to the country and Gaudaur wanting to broaden French-Canadian support for football. It was the first time the game had been in Montreal in 38 y
The documentary featured pivotal interviews with a member of Montreal’s bomb squad who was responsible for inspecting and protecting both the Grey Cup parade and game (Autostade) venues, so knew the threat of violent incidents was very real; and with Hamilton native Russ Jackson, who was the Ottawa Rough Riders quarterback and would be playing the final game of his spectacular career. In one of the greatest sports exit statements of all time, he threw four touchdown passes in Ottawa’s 29-11 win over the Saskatchewan Roughriders, a Grey Cup record that still stands.
“(The danger) wasn’t a discussion point among the players or anything; I don’t remember it being horrendous,” Jackson recently told The Spectator. “I found out only later that I had sort of been looked after when I was in Quebec. The Mounties, or somebody else, were always watching over me and thought I would be a potential target. I didn’t see the (security detail) snipers. The rumour afterward was that they were on the roofs of some of the buildings and I was told they were at the semifinal game in Ottaww wa, too.”
Jackson said he and the players, including Saskatchewan quarterback Ron Lancaster, his former teammate, never felt that the game would be moved from Montreal. As a full-time educator in Ottawa, he was acutely aware of the crisis just across the river, but didn’t regard the game as necessarily asserting a larger political and social unity.
“I wasn’t thinking along those lines, but as I look back I think the Grey Cup was an important Canadian event, and I can see now more of that thinking than I could then.
“They felt the Grey Cup would be something that could help.”