THE DON WAS ONE OF A KIND
The CFL is mourning a huge personality and the greatest coach the league ever saw
Don Matthews was called every name in the book and then some in his lifetime in the Canadian Football League.
He was his own football thesaurus: brilliant, egotistical, intimidating, driven, singular, successful, nomadic, chauvinistic, mistrusting, caustic, abrasive, acerbic, extraordinary. The man was a walking, talking, winning contradiction.
The greatest coach in CFL history — who was maybe the largest personality, maybe the most controversial figure — died Wednesday at the age of 77. The man known as The Don was probably the most intriguing, most despised, most successful, most annoying and most fascinating coach the league has ever known.
“He’s the greatest coach ever,’’ said Jim Popp, general manager of the Toronto Argonauts, who worked with Matthews in Baltimore and Montreal and was first hired by him in Saskatchewan in 1992. “He was the best and he brought the best out of everybody.
“He didn’t just coach his players — most great coaches coach their coaches, too. Don did all of that. He controlled the environment. I learned so much from him.”
Matthews controlled just about everything around his football teams.
“This,” he told me years ago about coaching football, “isn’t a democracy. This is a dictatorship and I’m the head dick.”
Indeed, he was. Mostly loved by his players, often loathed by media who covered his teams and difficult to work with at times with others in the front office, Matthews was part of 10 Grey Cup-winning teams — five as an assistant, five as a head coach — and five times he was the league’s coach of the year.
Years ago, I wrote of him: “He has 10 rings, six Grey Cup, four wedding.” That was the life he led. He was a wanderer; impatience played a role in all his success.
He made eight different coaching stops in the CFL, three times coaching the Argos, also having terrific runs in Montreal, Baltimore, Saskatchewan, Edmonton and B.C.
“He touched so many people,” Popp said. “When you were with him or worked with him, you saw another side of Don. He cared about people. He helped people. He did things for people he didn’t want anyone to know about.
“Deep down, he was never that person (the media portrayed him to be). He did what he needed to do to win. If he took something too far, he knew what he was doing. Sometimes he’d say, ‘I’m going to do this today,’ but everything was calculated. Everything was for the team.
“When he walked into a room, he had a real swagger to him, a confidence. He was the leader and everyone knew it.”
One regret Matthews had was he never got a chance to coach in the National Football League. He came close to being hired by the New Orleans Saints in 1997, but the legendary Mike Ditka was chosen ahead of him.
Before that, he thought he was being hired by another legend, Tom Landry, with the Dallas Cowboys in 1989. Landry brought Matthews to Dallas, picked him up at the airport, asked him to diagram his CFL pressure defence and to explain how it would work with one fewer player on the field. Landry was so sold by the presentation, he offered Matthews a coaching job right on the spot. The two shook hands on the deal.
Four days later, Matthews turned on his television set to see the stunning news: The Cowboys had fired Landry as coach. “I never heard from him again,” Matthews told me in 2006.
Not coaching in the NFL meant Matthews had time to travel the world in the seasons away from football. He made stops in Fiji, Greece, Africa, Israel, Egypt and Peru. Matthews couldn’t help his my-wayor-the-high-way style — that’s how he operated.
He also loved the highway for another reason: It was a place he could ride his beloved motorcycle. Matthews was an educated man of culture who often acted the opposite of that.
In his first days coaching the Roughriders, he received a call at 1 a.m. from a clerk at the Regina Inn hotel. Matthews answered the phone with: “Someone better be dead.”
It turned out one of his players had been caught climbing the balconies of the hotel, trying to get from his room to his girlfriend’s room. The player’s name was John Bankhead.
The next morning, Matthews asked his personnel man if they had a John Bankhead on their team. The answer came back yes. “Not anymore,” Matthews said. One time, when preparing his team to play the Edmonton Eskimos, where Matthews cut his teeth as an assistant coach in the dynasty years, the coach told his players: “This is an ass-kicking contest — and the Eskimos are supplying the ass.”
That was his career: a lot of ass-kickings.
He coached the Doug Flutie Grey Cup seasons in Toronto, ending up 34-6 over those two record-breaking years that will never be duplicated. He coached the all-American Baltimore Stallions, probably the most talented team in CFL history, to a Grey Cup title.
He won 231 games as a head coach, which was the most in CFL history when he walked away under difficult health circumstances in 2008.
“I talked to him all the time,” Popp said Wednesday.
Matthews had been battling cancer since 2012. The last time they spoke was less than a week ago.
“He couldn’t communicate, but he could hear. He could raise his arm,” Popp said. “We needed some kind of closure. I’m sure going to miss that man.”