100 Grey Cups

by Stephen Brunt

  Just ask Joe Kapp and Angelo Mosca.

  One thing must be said about British Columbia football fans: they are patient.

  Canadian football was a late arrival in Vancouver, a city in which rugby retained its popularity much longer than it did in Eastern Canada (rugby remains very much a part of the B.C. sports landscape to this day). The first football clubs were formed in the 1930s, but Canada’s west coast wasn’t part of the Grey Cup competition until well into Canadian football’s modern era.

  In 1951, a group of Vancouver businessmen, inspired by Vancouver Sun columnist Andy Lytle, approached the Western Interprovincial Football Union about adding a team to the existing four franchises. They were encouraged, and a year later returned with a $25,000 goodwill bond in hand, only to be rejected, with Winnipeg and Saskatchewan voting against expansion. But the Vancouverites were undeterred. In 1953 they tried once more, and this time they were told to come back once they had a 15,000-seat stadium, and 6,500 season’s ticket holders. These requirements were fulfilled when Vancouver hosted the 1954 British Empire Games, which led to the construction of Empire Stadium. The stadium became the home of the newly formed British Columbia Lions and a regular host of the Grey Cup game, beginning in 1955 – the first year the game was staged outside the east. (Still, even after Vancouver had met all of the original conditions, the Lions had to agree to cover the travel expenses of visiting teams before they were finally granted entry to the league.)

  The task of building the Lions was handed to Annis Stukus, whose remarkable career in Canadian sport included stints as a football player and coach, sportswriter and broadcaster, consultant to the Toronto Huskies in the inaugural season of the National Basketball Association, and general manager of the Winnipeg Jets of the World Hockey Association, where he signed Bobby Hull to a landmark contract. The job wouldn’t be easy. There was no expansion draft to seed the franchise, and with only nine Americans allowed, Stukus would somehow have to find enough Canadian players to fill out a competitive roster.

  Annis Stukus was a CFL player in the thirties and would go on to spearhead CFL expansion to the West, first with the Edmonton Eskimos, then the B.C. Lions.

  Stukus was starting from scratch – and it showed. In the first game of that first season, on August 28, 1954, the Lions shocked just about everyone by leading the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 6–1 at halftime. But they lost that one, and then every other game that season too, except for one at-home win September 18, when they topped the Calgary Stampeders 9–4.

  The Lions improved from 1–15 to 5–11 in 1955, and then to 6–10 in 1956, though they still finished out of the playoffs, and Stukus was fired. Then things got worse: 4–11–1 in 1957; 3–13 in 1958.

  Finally, in 1959, a glimmer of hope: the Lions finished 9–7 and made the playoffs for the first time, thanks in large part to the heroics of a running back from the University of Iowa who was part of a Rose Bowl–winning team the previous January: Willie Fleming. British Columbia was clobbered in the western semifinal by Edmonton by a combined score of 61–15, but, for the first time, the long-suffering Vancouver fans felt their pain might be rewarded.

  Still, it would take a little while. In 1960, they were back in fourth place, and back out of the playoffs. On the field, the 1961 season was an out-and-out disaster: the Lions finished 1–13–2. But that year, they added two key building blocks: Tom Brown, an All-American linebacker and offensive lineman from the University of Minnesota, and quarterback Joe Kapp, who came over from Calgary in midseason in a trade for four B.C. players.

  Joe Kapp, quarterback of the B.C. Lions first Grey Cup victory in 1964, also played in the Rose Bowl and the Super Bowl, the only player to appear in all three events.

  Kapp wasn’t exactly a sure thing, because he was coming off a knee injury that had severely diminished his exceptional running abilities. But his pedigree was impeccable. An All-American at the University of California, where in 1959 he led the Bears to the Rose Bowl (losing to Willie Fleming’s Hawkeyes), Kapp had finished fifth in voting for the Heisman Trophy and had been drafted by the Washington Redskins of the National Football League. The Redskins didn’t sign him, and he was lured north by Jim Finks, then the Stamps’ general manager. After beating out future Buffalo Bill (and United States senator) Jack Kemp for the starting job, Kapp took the Stampeders to the playoffs in 1960. But after the knee surgery, Finks had his doubts that Kapp would ever fully recover, and one game into the 1961 season he made the deal to send him to the Lions.

  “I came to Vancouver in the trade and the city came alive,” Kapp remembers. “The people got behind us. And we weren’t the Vancouver Lions – we were the British Columbia Lions. Players made their lives here.”

  Well, perhaps it wasn’t quite so instantaneous, but soon enough things started to gel. In 1962, coach Dave Skrien arrived, and Kapp threw for 3,279 yards and 28 touchdowns as the Lions finished fourth with a 7–9 record. Finally, the franchise had reached a tipping point, and Kapp, with his big personality, became a celebrity – arguably Vancouver’s first true modern sports hero. His fame even earned him a number of commercial endorsement deals, including one with Squirrel brand peanut butter, for which Kapp visited communities all over the province, driving a peanut butter–coloured convertible.

  “That’s why they called me Nutty Joe,” he says.

  Willie Fleming scored the game-breaking touchdown of the 1964 Grey Cup, getting revenge for the Mosca hit of the year before.

  The 1963 season was a magical one in Vancouver, thanks in large part to Fleming. Already established as a 1,000-yard rusher, he enjoyed a season for the ages, rushing for 1,234 yards on 127 carries – an astounding 9.7 yard average. The Lions finished at 12–4, on top of the Western Division, then beat the Saskatchewan Roughriders two games to one in the best-of-three western final – winning the final game emphatically, 36–1, at Empire Stadium. As a bonus, they would play in their first-ever Grey Cup game right there, at home, while the eastern champion Hamilton Tiger-Cats would have to make the long journey west into unfriendly territory.

  One moment from that game has remained burned in the memories of B.C. Lions fans ever since. With Hamilton leading 7–0 late in the first half, Fleming took a pitch from Kapp, ran wide, and was tackled by Gene Ceppetelli almost at the sideline following a short gain. A beat – maybe two – later, Mosca came flying in, after running across much of the width of the field to get there. He launched himself at the prone running back and actually sailed right on over him. Technically, he didn’t pile on, and he certainly didn’t spear Fleming with his helmet. No penalty was called on the play. But on the way by, Mosca’s knee smacked Fleming in the head. Fleming suffered a concussion and was lost for the rest of the afternoon.

  Hamilton never looked back, and won the game 21–10.

  Was the Mosca hit really dirty? Was it really the difference? By and large, the answer to those questions depended on where in Canada you lived. In Vancouver and environs, you’d get an emphatic yes to both. In Hamilton, they’d agree with Ticats coach Ralph Sazio, who said after the game, “We’re from Steeltown and we understand that football isn’t football until you hear the leather pop.”

  But, for the record, Kapp says that losing Fleming wasn’t the whole story of the Lions’ loss. “Good football teams can overcome that kind of thing if your balance is there. They took our ace away, and we had to drop down to a king. There are no excuses, though. Hamilton was probably the best defensive team in the league at that point.” (But Kapp was not always so sanguine on the subject. Just a couple of hours after he uttered those words, in the days leading up to the 2011 Grey Cup game, Kapp and Mosca, by then both in their seventies, got into a brawl at a CFL Alumni Association luncheon that became a worldwide media sensation.)

  At the time he was injured, twenty-four minutes into the game, Fleming had gained only twelve yards on five carries. The Ticats controlled him, and the Lions offence in general.

  Action from the 1964 Grey Cup game, B.C.’s
first trophy-winning season.

  “The Lions seemed to be college boys playing a game, but the Ticats are pros who practice a high and violent art,” Dick Beddoes wrote – but that was the eastern perspective. The headline over Jim Taylor’s story in the Vancouver Province the next morning reflected the view from the west coast: “Dirtiest Player Sidelines Star: Mosca Puts Fleming In Hospital.”

  In fact, Fleming never did go to the hospital. After being checked out by team doctors, he spent the rest of the game watching from the sidelines in street clothes. But as to Mosca’s “dirtiness,” even he probably wouldn’t argue. In addition to his football exploits, he enjoyed a successful parallel career as a professional wrestler, was always willing to wear the black hat, embellished his reputation as a tough, mean player, and certainly didn’t shy away from the infamy, from the notoriety – or from being the most hated man in British Columbia. All of that was good for the Mosca business.

  It’s telling that, after the ’63 game, Skrien seems to have been nearly as interested in talking about a Mosca hit on Kapp as Mosca’s hit on Fleming.

  “I never saw a more deliberate attempt to injure a player than once when Mosca hit Kapp, knocked him down, fell over him, and then hit him an elbow in the face,” Skrien said. “What upset me was that Mosca laughed like the whole thing was hilarious.”

  Which perhaps explains why Kapp – along with several of his teammates – refused to shake Mosca’s hand after the game. And it may also explain their dust-up, nearly fifty years later.

  (Following the Grey Cup defeat, angry, drunken Vancouverites took to the streets, congregating at the corner of Georgia and Granville. It didn’t quite qualify as a riot, like the one after the 2011 Stanley Cup finals, but still, 319 people were arrested by the Vancouver police.)

  Lui Passaglia won three Grey Cups with the Lions before moving to the front office. Seen here playing in the 1994 Grey Cup game.

  An early Varsity football game.

  THE FIRST GREAT GREY CUP TEAMS: COLLEGIATE CHAMPIONS

  IN 2011, THE GREY Cup and Vanier Cup games were held jointly in Vancouver as part of a football festival weekend. The link between the two games is undeniable, as Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) football graduates are at the heart of most CFL clubs. The annual Canadian Evaluation Camp and draft have become essential events on the CFL schedule. The gap between the collegiate and pro levels is wide today, but this has not always been the case. In fact, collegiate teams won seven of the first twelve Grey Cup games.

  The University of Toronto Blues won the Grey Cup from 1909 to 1911, becoming Canada’s senior football champions three times running. The last collegiate team to win the Cup, Queen’s University, strung together three championships from 1922 through 1924 and were the predominant football power of their day. Over those three games, Queen’s outscored opponents 78–4, disposing of “professional” teams from Edmonton, Regina, and Toronto’s Balmy Beach with ease. The 54 points and nine touchdowns they scored against Regina in 1923 remain Grey Cup records, unmatched by any club – professional or otherwise – since then.

  This scoring record needs just a bit of qualification, however, as under the rules of the day, the team scored upon was forced to kick off. Simply put, Queen’s marched down the field and scored, then gratefully received the kickoff and did it all over again. The unfortunate Roughriders barely touched the ball that day, by most accounts.

  During its run of championships, Queen’s won twenty-six consecutive games over all forms of opposition. The key players in that era were two charter members of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, Harry “Red” Batstone and Frank “Pep” Leadlay. They combined for 19 points in 1923 and were unquestionably the dominant players of their time. Their backfield kicking and running skills were unparalleled and given that players played both offence and defence in that era, they were on the field continuously. To provide a modern perspective of the challenge facing Queen’s opponents, the magnitude would be akin to playing a hockey game against a team with both Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux on the ice for the full sixty minutes. The Queen’s roster included many others stars, such as John “Red” McKelvey, Liz Walker, and Bud Thomas.

  Returning to the link between Canadian college and professional football, Batstone and Leadlay actually conducted their careers in reverse. First they played for the IRFU (semi-pro) teams in Toronto and Hamilton, and then went on to star for the collegiate powerhouse at Queen’s. Batstone left the game in 1928 to become a very successful doctor, but remained to help many CRU committees administer the game. Leadlay returned to the Hamilton Tigers after Queen’s, retiring in 1930. Between them they won nine Grey Cup games. Both are now enshrined in the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame.

  Whatever the truth, whatever the interpretation, the Mosca hit on Fleming set the stage beautifully for the 52nd Grey Cup game one year later, on November 28, 1964, when the two teams met again at Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium. Hamilton and British Columbia both topped their divisions, the Lions finishing with an 11–2–3 record and beating the Calgary Stampeders in the western final.

  It would be a very different game, played on a very different kind of day, than it had been the year before. The teams met in what could best be described as Vancouver weather – cold rain, which resulted in a slippery field – and afterwards some of the Lions players suggested that their familiarity with those conditions had been an advantage, especially considering that the Ticats seemed to struggle with their footing, and with holding on to the football, all day long.

  But this was also a different, more confident Lions team. “Well, we got Willie for a full game,” Kapp says, when he was asked what had changed between 1963 and 1964. “And we were one year better, and believed in ourselves.”

  A 35-yard Kapp-to-Fleming pass set up B.C.’s first score, with fullback Bob Swift piling over for the touchdown. (Swift would leave the game injured shortly thereafter, and his emergency replacement, Bill Munsey – normally a defensive back – would come on to play a key role in the Lions’ victory, scoring two second-half touchdowns, one on an 18-yard run, one on a fumble recovery.) British Columbia stretched their lead to two touchdowns on a broken play, when holder Pete Ohler was unable to control the snap on Peter Kempf’s short field goal attempt. The Lions’ Jim Carphin alertly figured out that something had gone wrong, and did as he had been instructed to do – run into the end zone. Ohler picked up the ball and hit him with a pass for the score, the decisive play of the game.

  Fleming broke free for a 46-yard touchdown run to make it 20–1 B.C. at the half – it was widely noted that the hole in the Hamilton line that he ran through corresponded exactly to Mosca’s position – and though the Ticats threatened in the third quarter, and mounted a late, furious charge in the fourth, the Lions’ first-ever Grey Cup victory was secure: final score 34–24.

  Danny McManus is one of the top passers in CFL history.

  This would be no dynasty. In 1965, with both Kapp and Fleming hobbled by injuries, the Lions were back in fourth place in the west, and by the end of the 1966 season, Kapp was off to the Minnesota Vikings of the National Football League, where he would start in a Super Bowl game (he is the only quarterback to date to have played in a Rose Bowl, a Grey Cup, and a Super Bowl). The great patience of those loyal B.C. fans would be tested through the rest of the decade and all of the next. It wouldn’t be until 1983 that the Lions again qualified for the Grey Cup, losing a heartbreaker at home in the brand new B.C. Place, 18–17, to the Toronto Argonauts.

  Two years later, a Lions side led by a brilliant young coach named Don Matthews would not be denied. They were dominant all year long, and hammered the Tiger-Cats 37–24 in the Grey Cup game at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium.

  The B.C. Lions celebrating their 1994 win.

  In 1988, the Lions were back in the big game and suffered another gutting one-point loss, 22–21, to the Winnipeg Blue Bombers at Lansdowne Park in Ottawa.

  Back home in 1994, in an unprecedented cross-
border Grey Cup matchup against what was then known simply as the Baltimore Football Club, hometown boy Lui Passaglia’s last-play field goal not only won a championship, it sealed a 26–23 victory for Canada over the United States in a game that seemed to have much more at stake than simple silverware.

  The Lions won their fourth Grey Cup in 2000, beating Montreal 28–26 in the final after finishing the regular season only 8–10, and then accomplishing the near-impossible feat of winning two playoff games on the road.

  Wally Buono arrived from Calgary in 2003 as coach and general manager, signalling a new era of stability and excellence in Vancouver. The Lions lost to the Argos in the 2004 Grey Cup game, but were back two years later, when they again beat the Als, 25–14.

  And then, in 2011, in what turned out to be Buono’s last game as head coach, his Lions became the first team to recover from an 0–5 start to the season and win the Grey Cup. They defeated the Winnipeg Blue Bombers 34–23 at the refurbished B.C. Place – making it the first time a team had won the Grey Cup at home since the ’94 Lions’ victory.

  It can be argued that the 1964 Grey Cup victory was different than any that had come before, because of the nature of the place, because of its sports history, because of its geography. Thousands of miles from central Canada, where so many of the country’s economic and cultural and sporting conversations had originated, magnificently bracketed by the mountains and the ocean, Vancouver existed apart from the rest of Canada, especially in the era before easy commercial air travel.

  The Vancouver Millionaires had won the Stanley Cup way back in 1915, but Vancouver didn’t became part of the modern National Hockey League till 1970. Before the 1963 and 1964 Grey Cup games, the biggest local sporting event in the second half of the century had been the famous Miracle Mile in 1954 – just a few weeks before the Lions’ first game – when Roger Bannister famously duelled with John Landy in the Empire Games.