‘PERFECT ENDING’
That’s what Hank Ilesic is calling his long-awaited Hall induction
WINNIPEG — Hank Ilesic is 58. He’s been retired since 2001. That’s a long time to wait for a phone call.
When he finally received it, from Canadian Football Hall of Fame executive director Mark DeNobile, there was silence on the line.
“With Henry, there was a delay in his reaction,” said DeNobile, who had the pleasure of informing Ilesic, Scott Flory, Barron Miles, Brent Johnson, Frank Cosentino, relatives of the late Tom Hugo and Paul Brule that they’d be enshrined in the Hall.
“I think he probably thought his day would never come or that his accomplishments had maybe been overlooked by the selection committee for once and for all,” said DeNobile.
You’d have figured that any player who won a record seven Grey Cups, including all five in the 1978-82 Edmonton Eskimos dynasty; and another two in his 11 seasons with the Toronto Argos; and played 19 seasons including one in the NFL would be automatic. With the story he wrote in Canadian football, you would have figured his bust would in the Hall long before now.
“I was a little shocked and a little surprised,” said Ilesic of his initial reaction to getting the call as CFL Week opened with the introduction of the Class of 2018 here Wednesday.
“I don’t know if you’d say I was emotional but, after all these years, it definitely hit me that this was the thing to cap off a career that was very good to me. I knew the second that I was told that, it was the perfect ending for my story.”
As stories go, Ilesic’s had an unbelievable beginning. But the end, in 2001, returning to Edmonton to replace Sean Fleming for three games, wasn’t much of an ending.
If you were there the day Henry Anthony Ilesic showed up at training camp in 1977, you figured that they’d be commissioning the sculptor to begin work on his bust by Labour Day.
The incredible thing was that Hank Ilisec was 17 years old at the time. He was in Grade 11. He stood 6-foot-1. Weighed 200 pounds. And he was wearing size 14 shoes.
Head coach Hugh Campbell summed him up in two words: “Unlimited potential.”
Legendary Eskimos scout Frank Morris pronounced him ‘can’t miss’ on the spot.
“He has God-given talent. A real live leg. He has everything,” said Morris.
Overnight, instantly, Ilesic was the best punter in the Canadian Football League and had the statistics to prove it.
By the end of the decade, Ilesic had become the only 19-year-old in history ever to win back-to-back CFL and WFC all-star selections.
The story of Big Foot, as he was called, actually began to unfold at a much earlier age.
“Three or four years before that first Eskimos training camp I was hanging around a playground,” remembers Ilesic. “A football ended up over by me, so I picked it up and kicked it. It went about 50 yards.”
Ilesic won the national Punt, Pass and Kick competition when he was 14.
His first punt in a preseason game against the B.C. Lions was an 87-yard job. It was impossible to ignore him.
Still, the Esks were overly cautious about putting Ilesic on the regular-season roster.
“I don’t think it’s happened before,” said Campbell. “Hank had to be the youngest player and the first Grade 11 student I ever heard of in professional football.
“But the truth was that he was our best punter in training camp. We waited until the seventh regular-season game because we wanted to be as sure as we could be that he could get along in the pro environment, that he had the maturity to go with the position.”
Ilesic looks back on it now like it was a bit of a fairy tale, too.
“When I look back now, I was just a kid having fun. I had no pressure. I had nothing to lose. I wasn’t even supposed to be there. I could just go out there, have some fun and let the ball fly,” he said here on Wednesday.
“As you get older, it becomes your living. Then there’s pressure.”
Big Foot won the Eskimos’ starting punting job on Aug. 30 of that first season when the Eskimos cut Gerald Kunyk, the CFL’s leading punter of two seasons previous.
His first recorded regular season CFL punt went 55 yards.
Ilesic ranks third in career punting with 91,753 yards and second with 8,004-yards in a single season. His seven CFL Grey Cups are tied for a CFL record.
He ranks eighth in career games played with 259 and that doesn’t include the 14 games he played with the NFL’s San Diego Chargers in 1989.
So what took so long for the former St. Joseph’s Composite High School grad that now lives in Orillia, Ont., to get in?
“I think it was mostly because I was a punter as opposed to a position player,” he said. “There were a lot of deserving players, more than me, who played a full position.”
Ilesic is only the second punter to make it in to the Hall. Criminal when you think about it.
I don’t know if you’d say I was emotional but, after all these years, it definitely hit me. Hank Ilesic