The Sarnia Imperials beat the Ottawa Rough Riders 26–20, claiming their second Grey Cup in three years (it would be their last – and the last ever won by an ORFU team). Again, in 1940, two eastern teams, Ottawa and Toronto Balmy Beach, played for the Cup – in that single instance, in a two-game, total-points final.
But by the conclusion of the Second World War, aside from two games in the 1990s, when expansion produced an American challenger for the championship game of Canadian football, it would be east versus west from that point hence, national battle lines that would define the Grey Cup and everything it came to represent.
All that was left was for the folks from the west to invent another lasting tradition: the wild Grey Cup party. That was coming, in 1948.
1942
KEEPING THE HOME FIRES BURNING
1942 Grey Cup champs, the RCAF Hurricanes.
It is always a difficult decision: to play or not to play. In times of crisis, when real-world concerns make sport seem irrelevant, someone still has to decide whether the games will go on.
Shortly after the First World War began, Canadian football was suspended for the duration. The Grey Cup was contested in 1915, but then would not be lifted by a champion again until 1920. Decades later, in a very different world, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 – the closest thing to war that North America has experienced in contemporary times – the Canadian Football League decided after some debate to shut down temporarily in midseason, as did the National Football League and Major League Baseball.
In World War II, a different call was made. In the first years of that conflict, Canadian football proceeded with business as usual. The Winnipeg Blue Bombers won the Grey Cup in 1939 and two years later in 1941. In the intervening year, the Ottawa Rough Riders won in an unprecedented two-game championship against Balmy Beach of the Ontario Rugby Football Union, this exceptional contest brought about because, once again, the sport’s eastern and western administrators were squabbling with each other.
But by 1942, with war raging in Europe and in the Pacific, it became clear that it would be all but impossible to keep the various leagues running, because so many players were in a different kind of uniform, either already overseas or on their way.
It was decided that the Grey Cup game should still be played, for the sake of morale on the home front, and for the sake of the troops in faraway places: a little bit of normalcy could only be a comfort. And so for the 1942 season, and the three that followed, teams of servicemen, temporarily thrown together while training to go to war, won the football championship of Canada.
For some of those players, the Grey Cup would be the last game of their lives.
Lew Hayman huddling with the RCAF Hurricanes.
RCAF Hurricanes team photo.
The architect of the first of those wartime champion teams, in 1942, was Lew Hayman, an enormously important figure in the Canadian game. Hayman’s influence extended through a remarkable half century, from 1933, when as a twenty-five-year-old he coached the Toronto Argonauts to the Grey Cup, all the way to 1983, when he still held an executive position with the Toronto team that won its first championship since 1952. Hayman was born in New York City and attended Syracuse University, where he starred on the basketball team. After graduation in 1932, he moved north for a coaching job at the University of Toronto, and also became an assistant with the Argonauts. Hayman was promoted midway through the Argos’ first season when the head coach fell ill. He was given the job full time in 1933 and won a championship that year, and then won the Grey Cup with the Argos again in 1937 and 1938.
After World War II, the Argonaut coaching job was given to Ted Morris, much to Hayman’s displeasure, and so he fled to Montreal, where, in partnership with Eric Cradock and Léo Dandurand, he formed the Alouettes football club, taking on the dual role of coach and general manager. Before that, Canadian football had been floundering in the city, but Hayman and company built what would become the dominant team in the east through much of the next decade. The Als won their first Grey Cup with Hayman coaching in 1949. He stepped down as head coach to concentrate on the general manager’s duties in 1951, then quit football altogether in 1954 for a new life as a stockbroker. That didn’t last long. Hayman was back with the Argos as managing director in 1956, and stayed with the franchise, in one executive position or another, until his death in 1984.
The RCAF Hurricanes practising.
Hayman was a pioneer, an innovator, who is remembered for several firsts. His Als played the first night games and first Sunday games in Canadian football history. He signed one of Canadian football’s first black players, Herb Trawick, in 1946. And during the 1946 off-season, he became the general manager of the Toronto Huskies, who played in the first game of what is considered the first season of the National Basketball Association. Hayman also coached the Huskies – for a single game – earning a place in the NBA record books, though his Huskies folded at the end of their only season of existence.
Frequently overlooked is Hayman’s role in wartime football. In 1941, with most of the leagues opting to suspend operations, Hayman enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Legend has it that one day Flying Officer Hayman walked into the office of Squadron Leader Ted Kendrick at the No. 1 Training School at the Downsview base in Toronto and announced, “We’ve got a Grey Cup team at the station.”
“Sure we have,” Kendrick said. “And we’ve also got a war on.”
OUTCHARGED AND OUTSMARTED
THE MOST TELLING DESCRIPTION of the 1942 Grey Cup game’s final result came from Winnipeg’s star lineman and Hall of Famer, Lou Mogul. Mogul had been a member of the Winnipeg club since 1932 (just two years after its inception) and had seen a lot of action in football’s “trenches” that day and during the previous decade. In reply to a pestering reporter, he said, “You tell us that we should have won the game when the truth of the matter is that we got the hell kicked out of us. They outcharged us and outsmarted us.” The game’s final stats don’t support that assessment very well, which suggests that a football game isn’t decided merely by the numbers. The Hurricanes outgained Winnipeg by just 197 yards to 186, and on the scoreboard led by just 8–5 at the final gun.
Nonetheless, Mogul’s “inside” perspective pretty much sums up Canadian football, a game of strength, speed, and, of course, guile. Those attributes went a long way, not only in the service of a football offence or defence, but also in their country’s defence. In this game, the entire roster of the winning RCAF Hurricanes were Royal Canadian Air Force personnel, as were fourteen of the Bombers squad. The decision of players to enlist in the war effort necessitated the shutdown of the Big Four and the Western Interprovincial Football Union after 1941, and yet the game carried on among soldiers stationed at home as a much-needed wartime diversion. A scanned copy of the 1942 game program shows that the winning coach, “Flying Officer” Lew Hayman, and many others were committed to the armed services first, and then to football.
The Hurricanes’ 1942 roster also included Jake Gaudaur, who played in two Grey Cup games and went on to serve as CFL commissioner from 1968 to 1983. In 2010, three years after Gaudaur’s death, the CFL and Veterans Affairs Canada joined forces to recognize players with a new award, the Jake Gaudaur Veterans’ Award, given to a player “who best demonstrates the attributes of Canada’s veterans.”
It turned out Hayman was right: the squadron included a large number of players who had already made their mark in Canadian football, including Bill Stukus, Don Durno, and a future commissioner of the Canadian Football League, Jake Gaudaur. Hayman was given permission to put together a team, on the condition that its activities not interfere with the men’s military training. The Hamilton Tigers, one of several clubs shut down temporarily, offered to loan their equipment. And everyone agreed that morale inside and outside the armed forces could only be boosted by having football continue, even if it was not quite business as usual.
Hayman entered his team, dubbed the RCAF Hurricanes
after the famous fighter plane, in the Ontario Rugby Football Union. They went 8–1–1 in a ten-game season, beat Balmy Beach 24–0 for the league title, and then beat another air force team, from the Ottawa Uplands base, in the de facto eastern final.
Their Grey Cup opponents from Winnipeg arrived at a significant disadvantage, having played only a six-game season in a three-team, all-Winnipeg league – the last league still operating in western Canada – before they beat a Regina team in the western final, their only real preparation for the Grey Cup. But Winnipeg’s outspoken coach, Reg Threlfall, whose Bombers had won two of the previous three Grey Cups, was undeterred by those circumstances. He arrived in Toronto for the game, confidently predicting that his team would prevail and suggesting that the Hurricanes were lacking both the necessary talent and the strategic acumen – the latter a direct shot at Hayman.
It was cold and damp on December 5, 1942, and the field conditions were appallingly bad. The day before the game, officials inspected the icy surface at Varsity Stadium – it was so slippery that both teams were forced to relocate their practices – and decided that the best solution was to spread salt on the field to melt it. That only made things worse. On game day, the Hurricanes and Bombers were forced to wear running shoes in the hopes of gaining a little traction.
“On a field that was icy, watery, slippery, sandy – in fact the worst kind of field for the sky-birds style of play – the Hurrys line outcharged and outblocked the vaunted Bombers brigade,” Annis Stukus wrote in the Toronto Star.
Jake Gaudaur in RCAF uniform.
It was a low-scoring contest. The Hurricanes took a 2–0 lead in the first half on two singles, the first of them coming off a 65-yard quick kick by Don Crowe. Winnipeg pulled ahead 5–2 in the second half on Wayne Sheley’s short touchdown pass to Lloyd Boivin (the convert was blocked), but then Crowe’s 37-yard run set up what would be the winning touchdown for Toronto in a game that finished 8–5.
Despite the lack of scoring, and the Bombers’ lack of preparation because of their makeshift season, reviews for the Grey Cup were generally good. As Hal Walker wrote:
“The crowd of 12,000 which assembled for the seventeenth annual clash of East and West marveled at the fine continuity of play on a gridiron which was dotted with pools of water and has as its foundation a thin, yet dangerous layer of ice. They thrilled at the open offense of both teams, which contributed to a fine football spectacle, and they left with the impression that Hayman, in accounting for his fourth Canadian title in four trips to the national final, had a team which would stand comparison with any of the great teams he has had in the past.”
Winnipeg’s coach agreed.
“They had it on us,” Threlfall said. “They were a better ball club.”
From London, the great Scott Young, working as a correspondent for the Canadian Press, offered a very different perspective on that Grey Cup game – perhaps the one that mattered most:
Gloom hung like pea soup over Western Canada’s soldiers, sailors and airmen in Britain today while Easterners celebrated the 8–5 victory of Toronto Hurricanes in the Dominion football final Saturday.
This afternoon, all who were able, clustered around radios in their billets, dispersal huts and auxiliary service canteens to hear a half-hour condensed broadcast account of the game.
Some of the more nostalgic perched themselves on the backs of chairs, which they called “bleachers,” eating a variety of food, all of which they nicknamed “peanuts” for the occasion, while others sucked on small bottles which needed no nickname – all trying to create the illusion of a sports atmosphere they have left behind for the duration, but certainly not forgotten.
Dozens listened to the broadcast at London’s Beaver Club and in flats all over London civilian Canadians working here – Government officials, radio and newspaper men – were grouped around home radios. Many sentimental bets were placed on the teams the bettors had never seen.
Cheers and groans which roared over the radio when Eddie Thompson made his 62-yard run for the Hurricanes were echoed all over the United Kingdom wherever men listened. As the tide of the game ebbed and flowed, unmerciful kidding was thrown back and forth.
A little bit of Canadianese occurred near the door of the Central Y.M.C.A. in London’s Bloomsbury district. Two soldiers from Western units jumped from a moving bus and were running toward the door when three airmen appeared in the doorway, singing: “We don’t give a cuss for all the rest of Canada, we’re from Toronto.”
“What was the score pal?” one of the soldiers asked. “Eight to five for Toronto, pal,” was the joyful answer.
There is a photograph that depicts the RCAF Hurricanes celebrating their famous victory: Hayman in dress uniform, and the players wearing jerseys with the RCAF roundel – a red maple leaf inside a blue circle – on the front. Many of them are hoisting a celebratory beer. They played for free that season, though they ate a bit better than their fellow soldiers. They came from different clubs, different places, different countries – there were several Americans among them. They were a team for one year only.
In that crowd are Ed Poscavage (best man at Jake Gaudaur’s wedding), Ed Sarvis, Lloyd “Truck” Langley, Ed Burton, Jack Buckmaster, George Oliphant, and Eddie Thompson.
They’re the ones who didn’t come home.
1948
THE “FIRST” GREY CUP
Reggie Holmes talks with a reporter after Calgary’s 1971 Grey Cup win.
A man wearing a cowboy hat rides a horse into an elegant hotel lobby in the middle of a stuffy, uptight big city, and suddenly everything changes.
Perhaps it wasn’t quite so simple. Perhaps it could have happened – and even should have happened – but is merely a persistent myth. Maybe there never was a horse in the Royal York Hotel – no independent reports from the time corroborate the oft-told tale. But every story of how the championship of Canadian football was transformed into the country’s favourite annual party begins in a particular place, at a particular time: in Toronto, in 1948, when the Calgary Stampeders first played for the Grey Cup. And, whether or not a cowboy actually rode through the doors of the grand old hotel, it’s true that the western fans turned staid Hogtown on its ear and transformed a football game into something much bigger.
But first, the game itself.
In the immediate postwar years, Canadian football grew close to its modern form as the final vestiges of amateurism fell away – fully professional, and fully accepting of imported talent. As late as the early 1960s, there wasn’t a huge gap between what Canadian and U.S. teams were paying, and so players moved freely back and forth across the border, to wherever they could cut the best deal.
One of these nomadic players was Les Lear, whose biography is particularly unusual. Born in Grafton, North Dakota, Lear moved to Winnipeg at age ten, and it was in Canada that he received his football education. He graduated from the Deer Lodge Juniors to the team that became known as the Blue Bombers, and was part of Grey Cup victories in 1939 and 1941, playing offensive guard and linebacker.
In 1944, Lear moved south for a bigger paycheque, where he played four seasons in the National Football League with the Cleveland Rams (winning an NFL championship in 1945), the Los Angeles Rams, and the Detroit Lions, making him the first Canadian-trained player ever to compete in the NFL. Then, in 1948, he was lured back to Canada by the promise of an $8,000 annual salary as a playing coach with the Calgary Stampeders. He arrived in a city with a long, though spotty, football heritage, during which the various home teams had never claimed a championship of any sort.
First there were the Calgary Tigers, a rugby football team founded in 1909 that disbanded a few years later during the First World War. The Canucks came next, playing from 1915 until 1919, and then the 50th Battalion team, in 1923 and 1924. There was no senior football in Calgary at all from the Battalion’s demise until the rebirth of the Tigers in 1928 – a side famous for being the first in Canadian football to throw a forward pass. But t
hat strategic innovation wasn’t enough to keep them going. In 1931, the Altomahs came into being, and then in 1935 the Calgary Bronks, who finished as western runners-up, behind the great Winnipeg teams of the 1930s, four seasons in a row.
After the Second World War, the Bronks were renamed the Stampeders. In 1948 they adopted the colours red and white, and that same year thirty-year-old Lear arrived in town. He was by all accounts a character, and a tough guy on and off the field (in 1952, he was charged with assaulting a player, though the player later changed his story and the charges were dropped). He also brought the four-man defensive line to Canadian football for the first time.
The Grey Cup-winning 1948 Calgary Stampeders.
Later in life, after the Stamps let him go in 1952, Lear built a second career training racehorses and became a familiar figure around the Canadian circuit. In 1948, though, his only concern was football, and he assembled a team that would for a short time be one of the best in Canadian history. They were a talented, colourful, and idiosyncratic bunch, including Fritzy Hanson, Lear’s old teammate in Winnipeg and the star of the first western Grey Cup victory in 1935; Woody Strode, who after his football career ended would become much more famous as a Hollywood character actor, featured in such films as Spartacus and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; and Normie Kwong, a local teenager, still wet behind the ears who would go on to become one of the CFL’s greatest stars with the Edmonton Eskimos, and years later become the lieutenant-governor of Alberta.
In the west that season, no one could touch the Stamps. They finished the year undefeated at 12–0, scoring 218 points and surrendering just 61. Saskatchewan provided a surprisingly stiff test in the two-game, total-points western final, tying the first game in Calgary 4–4. However, the Stampeders took the second 17–6, and booked their trip to Toronto’s Varsity Stadium for a Grey Cup date with the Ottawa Rough Riders. The Ottawa team represented the final obstacle between the Stamps and an undefeated season, something no Canadian football team had accomplished before, and no team has accomplished since.
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