Thank Calgary for that. Thank the square dancers, the pancake flippers, the guys with the guitars, the man on the horse – if indeed there was a man on a horse – for teaching this country how to throw a party, and how to celebrate itself.
1957
TOUGH AS STEEL
Angelo Mosca, in fourteen CFL seasons, earned an all-star spot five times. Pictured here at Ivor Wynne Stadium after the Tiger-Cats 1972 victory.
Jim Trimble was a great big bear of a man: huge hands, huge head, huge body, and a huge, over-the-top personality. Even in a sport populated by giants, he was hard to miss, and long before superstar coaches with gargantuan egos and outsized personas became commonplace, long before trash-talking became part of the modern sports landscape, Big Jim made it his personal art form.
Perhaps his act wouldn’t have played so well in other places in the relatively conservative, genteel times that were the late 1950s. Perhaps in other places they would have preferred a coach who didn’t spout off quite so much about the shortcomings of the opposition, who wasn’t quite so willing to settle arguments with his fists, who never hesitated to let people know he wasn’t just the best football coach in Canada but the best in all of North America.
But in Hamilton, the blustery former steelworker from McKeesport, Pennsylvania, was a perfect fit, and in 1957, the coach, his team, and his town would celebrate a famous victory, signalling the beginning of a decade of dominance – at least in the east. In one of Canada’s great football cities, it was a perfect match of style, success, and personality.
For the rest of Canada, though, the 1957 Grey Cup game would be remembered not so much for the triumph of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, but for one of the most bizarre moments in the history of three-down football – and there have been more than a few – when the name Ray “Bibbles” Bawel entered into this country’s sporting lore.
Identity is always part of the equation in sport. Rooting for a home team is, by extension, rooting for home, for friends and family and neighbourhood, for all of those things that define the place that you come from, projected onto your favourite team. In the modern world, with every game from everywhere available to just about everyone, it is certainly possible to adopt faraway teams and faraway uniforms, to pledge allegiance to players you will never see in person. But that is merely a technological extension of the pure and organic act that is heading for the park, for the diamond, for the rink, to cheer on those you know, who are wearing the colours of home.
The 1957 Hamilton Tiger-Cats and the ball used in the Grey Cup game.
In its modern configuration, Canadian football has been played in nine different cities (not counting the brief American experiment). And in each one of those nine places, at one time or another in its history, its CFL team has been central to how it defined itself.
But when it comes to CFL football as a pillar of local identity, there are two towns that stand above all the rest.
One is Regina – really, the whole province of Saskatchewan, and its far-flung diaspora – where wearing the green has become an even more potent symbol of fidelity in the twenty-first century than it was when Ron Lancaster and George Reed were the gods of Taylor Field.
The other is Hamilton, albeit for very different reasons. Regina is an urban “island” surrounded by a sea of wheat fields; Hamilton is stuck squarely in the middle of the most populous region of Canada, the Golden Horseshoe of Southern Ontario. Before all of the communities between Oshawa and Grimsby converged into one great megaplex with Toronto as the dominant centre, Hamilton stood out from its neighbours because of its heavy industry, because of steel, because it was the smaller, unfashionable burg down the road from Canada’s biggest and richest city.
Hamiltonians forged an identity that centred on pride in their working-class heritage and pride in the city’s grit and toughness – plus just maybe a little chip on the shoulder. From the very earliest days of Canadian football, there was a perfect convergence between that civic self-image and the way the locals played the game. Hamilton players were the roughest in a rough sport, and their fans prided themselves on being just as tough. The Hamilton team might have not played the prettiest football, the flashiest football, but no team would be more ferocious. All the local heroes – from Brian Timmis, the “Old Man of the Mountain,” who refused to wear a helmet long after other players had adopted them; to John Barrow, the great rock of the defensive line; to Angelo Mosca, almost a cartoon villain in the CFL, who used to name his own All-Meanie Team and who morphed easily into an off-season job as a professional wrestler; to Grover Covington, and Joe Montford, and the rest – were cut from the same cloth.
The 1908 Famous Tigers won the Dominion Championship a year before the Grey Cup became the prize. The 1912 Alerts were the first Hamilton team to officially win the Grey Cup.
Garney Henley won four Grey Cups with the Tiger-Cats over his fifteen-year career.
Fifteen times teams from Hamilton have won the Grey Cup – and, if you include the pre–Grey Cup championship in 1908, the city enjoyed at least one victory in every decade of the twentieth century. The Hamilton Alerts took the Cup once, the Tigers five times, the wartime Flying Wildcats once, and the Tiger-Cats – born of a merger of the city’s two franchises in 1950 – eight times. (Hamilton teams have also made fourteen losing appearances in the Grey Cup game.) Many of those sides featured great quarterbacks, great running backs, athletes who succeeded because of their speed and skill and finesse. Has there been, for instance, a more elegant and graceful figure in the history of Canadian football than Garney Henley? Henley came to Hamilton from South Dakota via the Green Bay Packers’ camp and starred as both a defensive back and a receiver. He was part of the 1967 championship team that featured what many argue was the greatest defensive lineup in league history, and was a star still in 1972, when the Ticats won the Grey Cup at home on Ian Sunter’s dramatic final-play field goal.
But utter the phrase “Hamilton football” and anyone who knows the game thinks immediately of something else entirely: grinding, borderline-dirty defence; big, nasty guys patrolling the trenches; and fans who mirror their team in their passion and lack of pretence, and who for decades made Ivor Wynne Stadium (known prior to 1971 as Civic Stadium) the least friendly environment in the CFL for any visiting team.
The 1957 edition of the Tiger-Cats team was a perfect reflection of all that, beginning with Trimble. He had been recruited by Hamilton general manager (and future CFL commissioner) Jake Gaudaur from Philadelphia, where, during his brief tenure as head coach of the National Football League’s Eagles, Trimble had earned a reputation for being hard on his own players almost to the point of cruelty. Trimble’s confidence and bombast seemed undiminished by his failings with the Eagles, or by the fact that, during his first CFL campaign in 1956, his Ticats were humbled in the eastern final by the Montreal Alouettes. He remained fully secure in his own genius, determined to build a team designed not just to beat then-dominant Montreal in the east, but to conquer the flashy Edmonton Eskimos, who had topped the Als in each of the previous three Grey Cup games.
Entering the 1957 season, Hamilton made two blue-chip additions to its roster to go with Ralph Goldston and Cookie Gilchrist, who had arrived the year before. The first was Barrow, an All-American defensive tackle out of the University of Florida, who, like many players of the day, turned down the NFL in favour of a bigger paycheque in the CFL, and would become the anchor of arguably the greatest defensive front in Canadian football history. And the second, quarterback Bernie Faloney, who had starred on a national championship team at the University of Maryland in 1953 and helped the Eskimos win a Grey Cup in 1954, came to the Tiger-Cats following two years of military service.
The ’Cats only scored 250 points in fourteen games during the 1957 season, but they also surrendered precious few, and finished first in the east, ahead of a surprising Ottawa team and Montreal. The Alouettes knocked off the Rough Riders in the semifinal. In the first game of the two-game, total-p
oints final, they were competitive with the Ticats, losing 17–10, before being humbled 39–1 at Civic Stadium, a result that sent the Ticats to their first Grey Cup appearance since their championship season in 1953.
Meanwhile, out west, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers shocked the defending champion Eskimos, beating them in the best-of-three final (the third and deciding game went to two overtime periods). Their rookie head coach also had Philadelphia ties – Bud Grant had played with the Eagles under Trimble. Personality-wise, though, he was Trimble’s polar opposite, quiet and self-effacing. Their great Grey Cup rivalry would go four more rounds after their first meeting, in 1958, 1959, 1961, and 1962, and Grant would win them all. But on November 30, 1957, in what was the first championship game to be televised from coast to coast, the team Grant fielded at Varsity Stadium was already seriously depleted by injury, and that situation would worsen as the game went on. Running back Gerry James broke a finger (he kept playing, but fumbled four times); quarterback Kenny Ploen hurt a knee; and the Bombers lost their punter, Charlie Shepard, in the first quarter, giving the Ticats a huge field-position advantage, because their punter, Cam Fraser, was the best in the game.
Hamilton scored their first touchdown when Gilchrist hammered Dennis Mendyk, and Ray Bawel ran the fumble back 54 yards for a touchdown 6:15 into the first quarter. Another fumble led to another touchdown three minutes later. There was no scoring in the second or third quarters, but the opportunistic Ticats effectively put the game away in the fourth, taking a 32–0 lead, even though the Bombers’ offence would outgain Hamilton’s by a considerable margin on the day.
Bernie Faloney joined the Tiger-Cats in 1957 and became a star in the league, winning two Grey Cups with the team.
As Gord Walker wrote in The Globe and Mail: “Jim Trimble’s hardy warriors didn’t rattle or shake with an adverse roll of the dice. They were shoved around considerably, but an interception here, a fumble recovery there, then a booming punt from the toe of Cam Fraser, and the Bombers were back on their haunches wondering where all of their offensive gains had gone.”
Then came the great slapstick moment – though at the time, not everyone was laughing.
Bawel, a multi-sport star athlete at the University of Evansville in Indiana, had played for Trimble in Philadelphia. When he was released by the Eagles after the 1956 season, his old coach persuaded him to come north and give the Canadian game a try. He was a skinny guy, but quick, a skilled defensive back, and in the ’57 Grey Cup he was enjoying what had to be the game of his life. In addition to his fumble-return touchdown in the first quarter, Bawel had picked up another fumble by Gerry James inside the Hamilton 10-yard line with the Ticats up 12–0 in the third quarter – a moment most regarded as the real end of the Bombers’ comeback hopes.
Then, with five minutes left in the game, and Hamilton in full control, the Bombers lined up in punt formation from their own 50-yard line. Gerry Vincent was doing the kicking because of the injury to Shepard. Instead of punting, the desperate Bombers attempted a fake, with Vincent throwing a pass, but Bawel wasn’t fooled. He stepped in front of Winnipeg receiver Ernie Pitts, intercepted the ball, and immediately set off towards the Blue Bombers’ end zone.
Whether Bawel would have made it will remain a matter of conjecture. But as he was sprinting past the Bombers’ bench, before any Winnipeg player could get near him, Bawel tripped, fell forward, and then was tackled at the Winnipeg 42-yard line.
He immediately jumped to his feet, ran back down the sideline, and angrily confronted a man wearing a black cap and overcoat standing among the Winnipeg players on the sideline. The mystery man held up his hands in front of him, as if expecting Bawel to throw a punch. Then, as Walker described it in The Globe and Mail: “The spectator, threatened at first by some players, faded into the crowded background, actually walked down and in front of the Hamilton bench where incensed players were looking downfield to see if they could spot him, stepped over the players’ bench, then disappeared into an exit immediately behind the bench.”
There was understandable confusion on the field. Referee Paul Dojack, knowing that there was nothing in the rule book to deal with that kind of fan interference, was forced to improvise. The Ticats argued that he ought to simply award them a touchdown. Instead, he ruled that the ball be placed half the distance to the goal line, since he believed that there was a chance Bawel would have been tackled. Trimble and his players weren’t happy with the call, but they were comfortably ahead in any case, and when Cookie Gilchrist ran the ball over from 16 yards out two plays later, the weirdest play in Canadian football history became a moot point.
Cookie Gilchrist (with ball) was one of the key pieces of the 1957 Grey Cup team.
The mystery lingered, though. In the winners’ dressing room afterwards, Bawel displayed a smear of shoe polish on his ankle – proof positive that he had been tripped. But who had done the deed? The next day, the Toronto Telegram offered a cash reward to anyone who could identify the perpetrator. No one came forward – though Bawel did later receive an anonymous gift: a $150 watch bearing the inscription “1957 Grey Cup Game – The Tripper.”
THE “LONGEST” GAME
IN 2010, THE CANADIAN Football League conducted an in-depth video-based review of each Grey Cup game to ensure that the record book was accurate and more comprehensive than ever. Right away, one game stood out particularly as what may be termed the longest game: the 1962 Grey Cup, which was held on December 1 and December 2. Heavy fog rolled in from Lake Ontario, making it impossible to see well, if at all – especially for fans watching on TV. The game was suspended with 9:29 to play in the fourth quarter and the score 28–27 in favour of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. Hostilities were resumed the next day, which turned out to be clear, but not another point was scored. Winnipeg won the Grey Cup, and the “Fog Bowl” gained legendary status in Grey Cup annals.
The 2005 game went to overtime, but the extra period took the form of a “shootout,” in which Edmonton and Montreal took turns on offence, with the Eskimos scoring ten points to the Alouettes’ seven to prevail, 38–35. But it was these same two teams that staged another form of “longest game” in 1956, and we have the Varsity Stadium clock operator to thank for that.
On November 24, 1956, the Eskimos and Alouettes found time to reel off a stunning 235 plays, including a total of 191 rushing or passing attempts! The game saw a play run every fifteen seconds. So, how did that offensive explosion happen? The only explanation is that the game timekeeper did not start the clock on the referee’s whistle, but on the ball being snapped.
In another bizarre twist, there would have been even more plays in the 1956 game, but they ran out of footballs! When Edmonton’s Jackie “Spaghetti Legs” Parker scored from seven yards out with a few seconds to play into a crowded end zone, one enthusiastic fan stole the last remaining ball and ran off into the night. Referee Harry Bowden had no choice but to declare the game over, as the field was completely overrun with happy fans.
It would be two decades later before David Humphrey was comfortable telling his story in public – though by then, his moment of infamy had become a bit of a running joke. Who would have suspected that the Tripper would turn out to be a highly respected justice of the Superior Court of Ontario?
In 1957, Humphrey was already a prominent Toronto defence attorney, and an Argonauts fan, with no clear rooting interest on Grey Cup day. He slipped into Varsity Stadium thanks to being recognized by a few buddies from the Toronto police force, who were also happy to let him stand along the sideline. And, yes, alcohol was involved: Humphrey was one of many fans at the game that day armed against the cold with a discreet flask of whiskey.
As he would explain many years later, he had become upset after seeing a man in the crowd who had been a jury foreman in a case that Humphrey had argued. His client, accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old girl, had been sent to the gallows, which the lawyer believed deeply was a miscarriage of justice. The jury foreman saw Humphrey and extended
his hand, but Humphrey refused to shake it. And then, upset, he took a couple of deep swigs from the flask – and then, perhaps, a couple more.
But beyond that, how to explain a moment of temporary insanity? Humphrey never really could, though he came to enjoy his own notoriety, and his name would forever be paired with Bibbles Bawel.
Bawel never played another game of professional football. He went back to Indiana and back to school, earned a graduate degree, did a bit of coaching, and helped to build a successful business. He would be inducted into the Indiana Sports Hall of Fame.
On his plaque, there’s no mention of the moment that made him instantly famous in Canada, or of the play that made him forever part of Grey Cup lore.
1964
WEST COAST RISING
The B.C. Lions celebrating their winning of the 99th Grey Cup game, 2011.
It is not often that a Grey Cup is a true grudge match.
Over the course of a year, from November to November, so much changes. Players come and go, fortunes rise and fall. Even when the same two teams happen to come together in consecutive championship games, as has happened more than occasionally, usually so much water has passed under the bridge that it is as though they are meeting for the first time.
But not always. Sometimes it’s chapter two. That was the story in 1964, when the defending champion Hamilton Tiger-Cats met the British Columbia Lions for the second year in a row. The ’Cats were the dominant eastern team of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when they appeared in nine Grey Cup games in eleven years. The Lions, born in 1954, had never won the Grey Cup, had made their first appearance only the year before. And hanging in the air from the 1963 game was the memory of one notorious play, which in Vancouver and environs they still haven’t forgotten almost a half-century later.
100 Grey Cups Page 7