You gotta be a FOOTBALL HERO ...
The third and final instalment of The Spectator’s November 2012 Grey Cup Series, which celebrated the 100th Grey Cup game, played in Toronto, discussed Canada’s — and Canadian football’s — chronic reluctance to aggrandize, to create myths, to embellish, and to r
Cup events and heroes which should have transcended the game and the sport and become part of a larger national folk lore. A couple of others have occurred since then: Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ Brandon Banks’ late and probably game-winning 90-yard punt return for a touchdown that was called back by a penalty in 2014; and Henry Burris, at 41, the oldest winning quarterback in Grey Cup history coming back from a pre-game injury which at first appeared to have kept him from the game and leading Ottawa’s 2016 o the third-year Redblacks the fourth-fastest expansion team in North American pro sport history to win a league championship. And in this 2012 series conclusion, reprinted below, we probably should have mentioned the 1972 Grey Cup, played in Hamilton and decided in the very last second of Angelo Mosca’s career.
It was true when the Right Honourable Vincent Massey said it more than a half-century ago, and it’s just as true, or more so, 50-plus Grey Cup years later.
“We don’t need to make our history interesting. It is interesting.”
Because Canada’s first homegrown governor-general was an indefatigable supporter of domestic arts and culture, Massey would also be well aware of the corollary that is just as true as his patriotic premise.
“It’s not just whether you have the interesting history it’s how, and how often, you tell it.”
That is the throbbing Achilles heel of Canadian folklore. It is why we have fewer national icons and enduring legends and myths than a country wilfully and bravely carved out of the ice and Great Shield deserves.
It is partly the reason that overt nationalism got such a late start here and will never reach the bloated chest thumping that characterizes so many other countries’ selfbelief.
We are understated, emphasis not just on the “under” but also on the “stated.”
We do not tell our stories well, or often, enough.
We think repetition of our tales is boring and self-serving.
An innate countrywide sense of modesty, decorum, and objectivity prevents us from embellishing hard fact with the flowing descriptives necessary to elevate it to legend and mythology.
That is all true of the Grey Cup, with one exception. Through a solid history of colourful sportswriters and broadcasters, right across the ountry, we have always painted wonderful pictures of the festival, the game, the heroes and the aftermath.
Once.
We tell those Cup stories as, or just after, they happen, then rarely again and hardly ever with the bountiful appendages which should grow out of any good retell. There is no real oral tradition, no common, collective archive.
And in most retellings we generally try to minimize rather than expand and glorify.
A glaring example was the 1950 Mud Bowl when Hec Crighton, an on-field official, was reported in postgame accounts to have rescued 268-pound Blue Bomber Buddy Tinsley from drowning by somehow flipping him over onto his back and his face out of the mucky water. In ensuing years, Tinsley and others regularly insisted he had been in no danger. But should that really have mattered?
Does preciseness have any claim at all in folklore?
A hypothetical question for would-be nationalists: What if even one of the following had occurred in a Super Bowl, as they did in a Grey Cup? The Armed Services teams of 1942, 1943 and 1944 Cups; Calgary’s 1948 Royal York Invasion; the Overtime Games; the Mud Bowl; the 1962 Fog Bowl; the 1970 Sod Bowl; the 1965 and ’95 Wind Bowls; the 1977 Staples Game; the 1996 Snow Bowl; the 2010 Thirteenth Man.
How many aggrandizing, America-proud, movies would have been made from that one day? How many almost-daily references to it would there be in the mainstream media, even years later? The answer is obvious: Lots.
We don’t have to make Disney on Ice out of any of this and we don’t have to be cartoonish about it. It can be done in a “Canadian way,” a gentler way, as TSN has done so marvelously with its Engraved on a Nation series.
But TSN, the financial guardians of the CFL and the Cup, must not stop making them, and must not store away until the 200th Grey Cup the wonderful episodes they have already commissioned. They must get regular airing-outs on all of the network’s platforms.
The CFL has been creating a decent archive of Cup legends on its website and that’s been a very helpful addition, but the CFL is a business.
It is not an independent news source, it is not word of mouth, the most effective way of spreading folklore, and it is not an ad agency which has the power to entrench that lore by incorporating it into commercial hits which get regular repetition.
We’ll, ahem, repeat. Repetition creates familiarity and familiarity creates repetition and that creates and maintains folklore. And a country hoping to remain united needs folklore to nurture a cultural continuum, particularly from an institution like the Grey Cup, which is so full of the potential for it.
There are the immediately obvious candidates for long-term cultural icon status, the field-goals in the dying seconds or on the final play to win a Grey Cup. The likes of Ian Sunter (1972), Dave Cutler (1981), Jerry Kauric (1987), Dave Ridgway (1989) Lui Passaglia (1994), Mark McLaughlin (1998), and Damon Duval (2009) are immortalized to varying degrees in the cities for whom they kicked the winners, and slightly demonized in the cities of their victims.
But, other than perhaps Passaglia (because his beat an American team), and Duval (in a backhanded way because it was his second chance), few have taken on anything close to national legendary status.
And just as integral to the legends canon are the horrible miscues and mis-turns: Angelo Mosca’s hit on Willie Fleming in1963 was only resurrected because of the septuagenarian dust-up between Mosca and Joe Kapp 48 years later; Leon McQuay’s 1971 fumble has some historical legs because it extended the Argos’ impossible streak of futt
lity. But Chuck Hunsinger’s controversial fumble of 1954 — was it an attempted pass? — which kickstarted the Jackie Parker lore, one of our few long-term-sustained stories, isn’t brought up nearly enough, nor is Don Sweet’s befuddled comment after his last-second botched field goal cost the Alouettes the 1975 Cup: “The ball wasn’t there.”
And Hamilton’s Bibbles Bawel being tripped by a sideline fan — who went on to become a judge and major junior hockey franchise owner — on his way to a touchdown in the 1957 Grey Cup? The unique name alone should guarantee it a front-of-mind place in Canadian cultural memory.
Parker, Doug Flutie, Hughie Gall, Joe Krol, Fritzie Hanson, Don Wilkinson, Dan Kepley, Warren Moon, and scores of others should be instantly and eternally recognizable names, the sources and subjects of Canadian parables. They are football’s equivalents to Cyclone Taylor, Howie Morenz, Rocket Richard, Jacques Plante, Denis Potvin, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Steve Yzerman.
Hockey, itself a terrible self-story teller until only the last quartercentury (it’s essentially Canadian too, remember), is now making up for lost time in the reconnection to and the retelling of its past.
Embracing the links to legend enhances hockey’s economy and cultural status and the Grey Cup believers and their messengers need to do the same — if only to fill in the memory gap of the CFL’s Lost Generation of fans, now 30 to 55 years old.
As with the rover in the early Stanley Cups — a lost position now being recelebrated through an explosion of hockey literature and folklore revival — early Grey Cups were played with a different number (14) of players than today, and without an end zone.
But who knows that? And of those who do, who will remember it if we don’t keep repeating it?
And for football, its media and the general public, there is simply no excuse for the national amnesia toward Grey Cup giants who should have utterly transcended football in this country. There are dozens, but we’ll cite just three:
On Dec. 6, 1930 a 28-year-old Ted Reeve sat on the Balmy Beach bench with a dislocated shoulder until late in the game when he came in and blocked a kick to essentially decide the 1930 Grey Cup victory over Regina.
After the game he went back to the Toronto Telegram newsroom where he was in his third year as a colourful sports columnist and had to write a game report. He opened his column, as he did so many others, with a poem:
When I was young and in my prime I used to block kicks all the time But now that I am old and grey I only block them once a day. Reeve also won the 1929 and 1930 Mann Cups in lacrosse, coached football and lacrosse for a couple of decades, wrote for Toronto papers until his death in the summer of 1983 and was a well-known bon vivant. After a drinking bout at a hockey game in New York he sent back this newspaper column, seven words in its entirety: “They got me boys, they got me!” Now that is a larger-than-life character. And where is he in our cultural pantheon? Nowhere.
In 1938, 19-year-old Red Storey used to hitchhike almost every day the 80 kilometres to Toronto from his Barrie home while wearing his Argonaut sweater.
In the Grey Cup that year, he didn’t play for the first three quarters then, with the Argos down 7-6 to Winnipeg, Storey turned in the greatest 15-minute display in the history of the game. He scored touchdowns on three long runs and on a fourth run — covering 102 yards — he was stopped just short, setting up Bernie Thornton’s touchdown as Toronto scored 24 unanswered points (touchdowns were worth only five points in those days), to win going away.
Storey went on to a long and successful playing career but although he played top-level lacrosse for Hamilton and Lachine, was good enough in baseball to be offered a contract by the Philadelphia Athletics, and played hockey at a level just below the NHL, he was best known as a referee in football and, more famously, in hockey. He was the official who was most popular with NHL players but when league president Clarence Campbell said he had frozen on two calls in a 1959 playoff game, Storey quit on the spot and pursued yet another career: as one of the best after-dinner speakers in the history of sports banquets.
You can’t make this stuff up and we don’t have to, but we never give it even close to the repeated attention it merits.
Lionel Conacher was Canada’s athlete of the first half of the 20th
g a Memorial Cup, two Stanley Cups, provincial boxing and wrestling championships, lacrosse’s national title and the triple-A International League’s championship. The Big Train was also an MPP, and MP, and chair of the Ontario Athletic Commission.
And he is the only man with his name on both the Stanley Cup and Grey Cup. In 1921, he scored 15 points as his Argonauts beat the visiting Edmonton Eskimos 23-0 in the first East-West game in Grey Cup history.
Conacher always said that “rugby football” was his favourite game. This from the best all-round athlete the country has ever known, yet how many Canadians have ever been reminded of it even once, let alone frequently?
Exactly.
Grey Cup history is brimming with such fodder for legend and myth, most of it not even needing the smallest stretching of truth.
But history does not create nor sustain legend and myth. It is how the history is told, retold and set in context that does that. And if there is one legacy that must come out of the ion 100th that Grey the Cup’s Cup it heroes, is the recognitt goats, and should-be myths and legends need to be regularly removed from cold storage, freed from the memocobwebs and maybe even emry’s bellished — by all of us — so that we can be certain that there will be a 200th Grey Cup.
An innate countrywide sense of modesty, decorum, and objectivity prevents us from embellishing hard fact with the flowing descriptives necessary to elevate it to legend and mythology