How we made this game, OUR GAME
When the Grey Cup was held for the 100th time — in Toronto, during late November 2012 — The Spectator
rked the historic birthday with a three-part series by columnist Steve Milton, which ran during Grey Cup week. The first instalment, an overview titled “Grey Cup reflects Canadian self-identity and survivalism,” theorized that the Grey Cup symbolizes Canada more than any other non-war event. “There has been no other sporting hardware, not even the Stanley Cup, that so thoroughly represents everything that Canada is, has been and wants to be,” Milton wrote. It dealt with several major national themes including: our lovehate relationship with inclement weather; western alienation; our collective inability to praise and mythologize ourselves; our conflicted attitudes toward the U.S; and how, although there was a new sports nationalism which went public and viral with the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, the Grey Cup has been openly “cheering for Canada” since 1948 when Calgary Stampeders supporters arrived en masse and on horse into grey, staid Toronto for the game and festival which changed everything.
Part two of the series, which digs more deeply into Canada-U.S. relationships as exemplified by the Grey Cup, is reprinted here. Some things have changed since then, of course. The instalment acknowledges racism but, as a country we have since become far more aware of its depth and breadth in Canada and in Canadian institutions.
Canada’s bipolar attitude toward the behemoth to the south — what Hamilton author Stephen Brunt succinctly refers to as a “push-pull” relationship with the United States — was reflected first in, and is still symbolized most graphically by, Canadian football.
So, it is no surprise the history of the Grey Cup also reflects Canadians’ historically organic, overshadowed, adore-abhor and sometimes uneasy attitude toward the USA.
Until the past half-decade, Canada usually defined itself less by what it was than by what it was not. We are not the Brits or the French, who colonized this country, and we are not the Americans, whose proximity could easily have overwhelmed us in all aspects of cultural and economic life.
Canadian football has always echoed that definition. The game diverged quickly and widely from its roots in British rugby and differs in so many significant ways — number of downs and players, kicking rules, field size and economies of scale — from the American game, which has the same origins. It is the only major sport shared by the two countries that is considerably different on each side of the border.
Sometimes, what you are not is the main component of what you are. And, although since 1996, 14 years before the Olympics-generate
“new nationalism, “the CFL has promoted Canadian football for what it is (“Radically Canadian” etc.), so much of Canadian football history has been highlighted by what it was not.
And one of the things it was not, at least in its public actions, was overtly and institutionally racist.
So, Black quarterbacks and “skilled position” players got a chance here long before they did in the U.S. pro leagues, where the unspoken, but very real, prejudice was that they didn’t have the required cultural background or, frankly, mental tool set.
The Grey Cup crystallizes trends in Canadian football, providing their historical benchmarks. When Chuck Ealey became the first Black quarterback to win a professional football championship, leading the Hamilton TigerCats to the 1972 Grey Cup title at Ivor Wynne Stadium — 16 years before Doug Williams became the first African-American to start at quarterback in the Super Bowl — it was merely the final step in a logical progression.
Long before, in 1951, Bernie Custis of those same Tiger-Cats became the first Black quarterback to win steady employment as a professional quarterback. Anywhere.
Herb Trawick was the first Black Canadian pro player, hired by Lew Hayman to play for the Montreal Alouettes in their founding season of 1946 after Hayman saw how Jackie Robinson was accepted earlier that year with the Montreal Royals.
Trawick, a lineman, recovered a fumble for a touchdown in the 1949 Grey Cup game and played against the Eskimos running back Johnny Bright, a brilliant American who had been the victim of a racial incident playing college ball in 1951 and the No. 1 draft choice of the Philadelphia Eagles, whom he rejected in favour of Edmonton, because he “would have been their first Negro player and I didn’t know what kind of treatment I would receive with all those southern players coming into that league.”
It was not altruism that put the Grey Cup so far ahead of American championship games in sociologicc game
l advances. The Canadian needed players and the U.S. had some good ones they would not use because of prejudicial attitudes.
It would also be impossible — and a bald lie — to even hint that there is, and has been, no prejudice in Canada.
Trawick, for instance, could find no employment other than hotel doorman in his post-Als career, Custis was the target of vicious verbal abuse by players on Trawick’s very own team and 1957 Grey Cup star Cookie Gilchrist always claimed the CFL was racist.
But, in Canada’s postwar public institutions and rites, of which the Grey Cup is among the oldest, acceptance tends to be based on, in Ealey’s terms, “who you are, not the colour of your skin. It became evident as soon as I came to Canada, walking down the streets, just the culture.”
Forty years later, Ealey hits the philosophical nail on the head as squarely as he hit Tony Gabriel with those three passes to set up the Grey Cup’s winning field goal.
“Canada doesn’t have to be boisterous about it, they just live it every day, “he told The Spectator. “My skin colour never became an issue when I came here. Nobody ever even talked about it. I was never looking for the other shoe to drop.”
By the time Williams made Super Bowl history in 1988, Black stars such as Ealey, Roy Dewalt, Warren Moon, Danny Barrett, J.C. Watts and Condredge Holloway had already pivoted teams in Canada’s national championship.
And, in 1982, six years before Williams made his singular Super Bowl start, both quarterbacks in the Grey Cup, Moon and Holloway, were African-American. And, if it was noted, it was noted only in passing, so to speak. No big deal, Grey Cup business as usual.
Race may be the most prominent, but it is just one of the issues in which the Grey Cup has embodied Canada’s relationship to its large, friendly neighbour.
Stretching a theme, Canada, an exporter of natural resources, ships hockey players to the States but imports football players, who are generally nearly-finished products.
And we are a nation of immigrants who came here for the opportunities denied elsewhere.
In football, and in the Grey Cup, those opportunities involved not only race, but body types. The Canadian game requires a different skill set in many positions — defensive halfbacks, rush ends, quarterback among them — than the U.S. game does, so Doug Flutie, Joe Montford, Damon Allen, Ron Lancaster and dozens of others became Grey Cup champions and Hall of Famers here when they were pretty well rejected in the U.S. because of their physical dimensions. That doesn’t make the Canadian game necessarily smaller, or poorer, only different.
Football was among the first industries in Canada to deal directly with heavy, and expanding, American influence. And that stemmed exclusively from the Grey Cup.
The nine Western teams that came east for the Grey Cup had all lost, and usually humiliatingly so, until the Winnipeg ’Pegs brought the legendary Fritzie Hanson and eight other Americans into the Hamilton AAA grounds and beat the Tigers for the 1935 Grey Cup tle.
In ensuing years, ad hoc rules and petty eastern jealousies barred many American players from competing for the Grey Cup with their western-based teams but, by 1946, the Canadian Rugby Union, the precursor of the CFL, addressed the problem by capping American participation in the Grey Cup to five players per team. You could easily argue that concept was the thin edge of the wedge for legislated protectionism in other Canadian cultural spheres: music, publishing and electronic media. By 1952, the Grey Cup ceiling was eight Americans and, by 1958, as Canada’s economy and culture had become far more influenced by the U.S. than the U.K, it was a dozen. Now, 17 of the 24 starters can be Americans, but the quota system still exists.
The 1945 Grey Cup was the last to be played without Americans on either team. The irony is that the game featured Winnipeg, which had started the whole import controversy because of a Grey Cup 10 years earlier, and Toronto, which would become known in the 1960s and most of the ’50s and ’70s, too, as the home of the highest-priced, most-hyped and least effective Americans … at least as far as Grey Cups success was concerned.
Federal cabinet minister Marc Lalonde’s Canadian Football Act of 1974, which never became actual aw, scared the American-based World Football League out of this country before it could set up shop, came just four months after the team representing Canada’s capital won the Grey Cup and was a rare flexing of nationalistic muscle by the government.
The shifting nature of Canada’s currency and national ethos, relative to the U.S., is also obvious in Grey Cup history. When our dollar was pegged much higher in the 1950s, the CFL regularly outbid the NFL for top U.S. college talent, including many enduring Grey Cup greats such as Jackie Parker, Bernie Faloney and Hal Patterson.
But, by the early 1990s, the Canadian league couldn’t compete financially because of the plunging dollar and a collapsing CFL economy related partly to the classically Canadian inferiority complex that anything that doesn’t make it in the isn’t worth supporting in CanaU.S. da.
To buy time and capital — and, even if they will never admit it, some legitimacy — the league expanded into the U.S. It was a disaster, overall, but may have averted the folding of the CFL. The “American experiment” lasted only three years in total, but resulted in the worst blight in Grey Cup history w the 1995 title, using all American players.
But, by the following season, all of the American franchises folded, and the Stallions had been forced to move to Montreal. The league and the Grey Cup, were forced to rett rench and, with no other options, stumbled upon what has clearly been its long-term saviour (besides TSN money): its unique Canadiana. The barrage of nationalistic slogans — “Radically Canadian,” “Our Balls Are Bigger,” “It’s Our Game,” et al — has not stopped since then.
And, while mining that lode in the late 1990s, the CFL made a startling discovery. While a generation-plus of Canadians loved to dis the CFL in public, especially compared to the NFL, in the privacy of their own homes, they cherished the Grey Cup, the very symbol of the league they said they had no taste for. Television audiences for the Cup were inexplicably massive.
That’s when the CFL knew they had seriously undervalued the Grey Cup and its relevance to Canada’s identity, and began promoting the heck out of it, essentially leading us to what (was) a spectacular week in previously resistant Toronto for the 100th Grey Cup.
It is blatant parallelism, but also a historical accident, that the 100th Grey Cup should be played in southern Ontario, the site of so many 1812 battles, during the 200th anniversary of the last armed conflict between the U.S. and Canada. But the most enduring symbolism is never intentional.
And as Gov. General David Johnston cracked at a CFL Congress in Toronto, not long after the 99th Grey Cup: “Had we lost that war, we’d all be watching four-down football.”
The Toronto Argonauts’ Andre Durie scores a fourth-quarter touchdown against the Calgary Stampeders in the100th Grey Cup game at a jam-packed Roger’s Centre.
STEVE RUSSELL TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO
My skin colour never became an issue when I came here. Nobody ever even talked about it.
CHUCK EALEY FIRST BLACK QUARTERBACK TO WIN A PROFESSIONAL FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIP