Winnipeg, Saskatchewan, Calgary, and Edmonton had all become part of the Grey Cup tradition decades earlier, and by the time the Lions came into being, all had been participants in the big game, and all but Saskatchewan had celebrated championships.
The West Coast, though, hadn’t been invited to the party.
When the Lions landed at the Vancouver airport, returning from their triumph in 1964, they were greeted by thousands of fans who had braved the pouring rain – the tarmac was a sea of umbrellas. They watched linebacker By Bailey, who had been part of that first Lions team in 1954, emerge from the plane holding the Grey Cup high.
And, as Kapp remembers it, the celebration that began that day went on and on and on.
“I don’t think any of us recovered for several weeks,” he says.
1969
O, CANADA!
Mark Kosmos and Art Green celebrate the last Ottawa Grey Cup win, 1976.
This was a perfectly, particularly Canadian moment, capping off a decade when the country came of age, when its citizens felt a new sense of confidence about their place in the rapidly changing world of the 1960s. The nation was still basking in the glow of Expo 67, the world fair it hosted as part of its centennial celebrations, an announcement of Canada’s arrival on the global stage. Montreal was a hip, stylish, cosmopolitan city. The prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was young, dashing, and glamorous – and, as it turned out, even knew how to kick a football.
On the field, Russ Jackson, arguably the greatest Canadian-born player of all time, was about to enjoy a brilliant finale to a career. Meanwhile, lurking in the background, as yet out of sight and certainly out of mind as the country partied on, were harbingers of a national crisis that would erupt a year later, with kidnapping and murder and tanks rolling through Canadian streets.
On November 30, 1969, at the Autostade, the Rough Riders were playing the Roughriders in the 57th Grey Cup, and all of that was part of the mix.
This was just the second Grey Cup game to be played in Montreal (back in 1931, the Montreal AAA Winged Wheelers had beaten the Regina Roughriders 22–0 at Percival Molson Stadium), and the only one ever to be played at the Autostade – or the Automotive Stadium, as it was formally known, because it had been paid for by the major Canadian-based automakers – a much-unloved, cold, concrete monstrosity that had been built in Montreal’s Victoriatown neighbourhood to host concerts and a rodeo display during Expo 67.
Russ Jackson, widely considered the greatest Canadian-born quarterback, seen here in the 1969 Grey Cup game.
The Alouettes moved to the Autostade in 1968 from their traditional home on the campus of McGill University, and would remain there until the Olympic Stadium opened in 1976. The Autostade was regarded as a state-of-the-art building, at least in terms of its construction – rather than being a single entity, it had 19 separate, interlocking sections, which in theory could be picked up and reassembled elsewhere. For a brief moment, the Montreal Expos considered beginning their existence there in 1969, before making the wise decision to set up shop instead at tiny, intimate Jarry Park.
(At the end of the 1966 season, the Ottawa Rough Riders also played a single “home” game at the Autostade, the second game of their two-game, total-point eastern final against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. They were forced to make the move because their actual home stadium, Lansdowne Park, was already in the process of being partially demolished and rebuilt as a Canadian Centennial project.
“It was terrible,” Russ Jackson remembers. “The field [at the Autostade] was just awful. It was muddy in some places and frozen in others.”)
The 57th Grey Cup was also, as far as anyone can tell, the only one to be featured in a soft porn film, an entirely forgettable Quebec-made movie called Deux femmes en or (Two Women in Gold). The plot synopsis (perhaps a bit awkwardly translated): “Two women living in the suburban of Montreal find difficult time waiting for their frequently absent husbands. They decide for fun to call as many delivery men as possible to have sex with them.” All that as the football game played in real time in the background on the women’s TV set.
Ottawa had previously won two Grey Cups as the Senators (1925 and 1926), but the 1940 team, pictured here, was the first to win as the Rough Riders.
But the live action at the stadium itself took place in a far more serious political and cultural context: the Riders and ’Riders played under the suspected threat of a terrorist attack from a separatist organization that would become familiar to all Canadians ten months later, during what became known as the October Crisis: the Front de libération du Québec. Three hundred police officers were deployed around the stadium, just in case something happened, as were hidden sharpshooters. Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau promised CFL commissioner Jake Gaudaur that the game would be played without incident, and he wasn’t taking any chances.
Jackson says that the players were unaware of the additional security though he learned later that a plainclothes RCMP officer had been ordered to follow him whenever he came to Montreal.
Long time Rough Rider Bob Simpson won two cups with Ottawa during his career (1950–62).
Ottawa’s first football club was formed in 1876, and organized football has been played in the nation’s capital ever since. The club was called the Ottawa Senators when they won championships in 1925 and 1926, and the Rough Riders when they won in 1940, beating Toronto Balmy Beach in the only two-game, total-points Grey Cup final in history.
The first Ottawa triumph of the modern era came in 1951, when they beat the Saskatchewan Roughriders 21–14. A long drought followed, with the Ottawa teams finishing behind their eastern rivals in Toronto, Montreal, and Hamilton. But the city’s football fortunes began to change for the better with the arrival of coach Frank Clair and, the ascendance of the great Bobby Simpson in 1956 and the signing of Jackson and Ron Stewart in 1958. Clair, nicknamed The Professor, was one of the CFL’s true characters, an absent-minded football genius who often forgot the names of his own players and who had already won Grey Cups with the Toronto Argonauts in 1950 and 1952.
In 1960, Clair coached Ottawa to a surprising Grey Cup win, employing a two-quarterback system, alternating Jackson with a young American from Pennsylvania named Ron Lancaster. They split time during games, and neither knew who would be starting until Clair gave the word during the pre-game warm-ups.
1951 Grey Cup ’Riders vs. Riders game.
A ROUGH RIDE
IN THE UNLIKELY SETTING of the Autostade in Montreal, it was certain – matters of spelling notwithstanding – that a group of “rough riders” would win the 1969 Grey Cup game.
Ottawa’s Rough Riders had adopted the nickname in 1898, but then dropped it in favour of Senators for the 1925 and 1926 seasons before switching back. They might have been better advised to stick with the Senators; after winning back-to-back titles as the Senators, they proceeded to go five years (1928–32) with only one regular-season victory! The Regina Rugby Club, meanwhile, had begun calling itself the Roughriders in 1924. It is a historical oddity that, during the years when Ottawa couldn’t even win a game, Regina made five consecutive trips east to play for the Grey Cup.
In 1951, the western ’Riders returned to the Grey Cup after a seventeen-year absence, and Canadian football had its first Roughriders–Rough Riders matchup, with Ottawa claiming victory by a 21–14 margin. Both clubs went on to suffer through lengthy dry spells – by the time they met again in 1966, they had combined for exactly one Grey Cup appearance (Ottawa, in 1960). The eastern Riders, behind star quarterback Russ Jackson, rolled to an 11–3 regular-season record and made short work of Hamilton in the eastern final, winning by a combined score of 72–17. But in the championship game, Jackson’s former teammate Ron Lancaster led Saskatchewan to the first title in team history, by a score of 29–14.
The 1969 game was a story of a great start and a rough ride to the finish for the Roughriders of Saskatchewan. They led 9–0 after limiting Ottawa to 26 yards of offence and one first down
in their first six possessions. But it is often the big play that turns a game around, and Ottawa found its man in Canadian Ron Stewart. He touched the ball just seven times in the game but gained 153 yards and scored touchdowns on the only two passes he caught all day. Of his 112 yards receiving, 111 came after the catch, as he turned a pair of short swing passes into scores from 80 and then 32 yards out.
The two sets of “rough riders” met a fourth time, in 1976, and Tony Gabriel’s game-winning catch brought the Grey Cup to the nation’s capital for the ninth time in team history. The eastern Riders would make only one more trip to the Grey Cup, in 1981, and folded in 1996. The CFL returned to Ottawa in 2002, but the team, now called the Renegades, bowed out after four losing seasons. The Green ’Riders, however, have made frequent appearances at the Grey Cup in recent years, beating Winnipeg in 2007 and dropping a pair of close decisions to Montreal in 2009 and 2010. Ottawa is preparing to return to the CFL in the next few years, and will have its sights set on a tenth national championship.
That rotation lasted only until 1963, when Lancaster was traded to Saskatchewan, where his Hall of Fame career played out. In 1966, he led the Green ’Riders to their first Grey Cup victory, beating Jackson and the Rough Riders in the championship game. But that loss turned out to be only a temporary setback for what would later be acknowledged as the greatest Ottawa team of them all. In 1968, the Rough Riders defeated Calgary 24–21 in Toronto to win the Grey Cup, setting the stage for the 1969 season, and Jackson’s triumphant swan song.
In the post-Jackson years, there would be a few other great football days for Ottawa: the 1973 Grey Cup, a 22–18 win over Edmonton keyed by a great defence dubbed the Capital Punishment Gang. And in 1976, three players who had arrived the year before – quarterback Tom Clements from Notre Dame University, quarterback Condredge Holloway from the University of Tennessee, and receiver Tony Gabriel, traded to the Riders by the Hamilton Tiger-Cats – were the stars. Clements’s winning throw to Gabriel in the 1976 Grey Cup game, in which Ottawa again defeated Saskatchewan, is immortalized in CFL lore as simply “The Catch.”
That was the end of the line. There would be only one more Grey Cup appearance by an Ottawa team, and a highly unlikely one at that: in 1981, after finishing the season with a 5–11 record, the Rough Riders upset the heavily favoured Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the eastern final – a game remembered best for Pat Stoqua’s 102-yard catch-and-run touchdown.
Ottawa entered the Grey Cup game against the powerful Edmonton Eskimos as huge underdogs. But led by Gabriel and quarterback Julius Caesar Watts, they shocked the Esks – and just about everyone else, perhaps including themselves – rolling to a 20–1 halftime lead. After the break, though, Warren Moon led a furious Esks comeback, capped by Dave Cutler’s winning field goal with three seconds left on the clock.
“We shouldn’t have showed up for the second half,” Gabriel joked later.
What followed that last flicker of glory were fifteen seasons of bad ownership, bad management, bad coaching, and bad, losing football. At the end of the 1996 season, the Ottawa Rough Riders ceased operations, leaving the loyal football fans of the city high and dry.
There was briefly new hope with the unveiling of the expansion Ottawa Renegades franchise in 2002. But the team folded before the 2006 season without ever having qualified for the playoffs.
As early as 2014, football is scheduled to rise again in Ottawa, in a rebuilt stadium on the site of Lansdowne Park.
Russ Jackson and Ron Stewart, 1969 Grey Cup.
Before the 1969 season, Russ Jackson told Frank Clair that it would be his final year playing football. A Hamilton boy, a graduate of Westdale High School and McMaster University, he had originally come to the Riders expecting to play defensive back. But a series of injuries gave him a shot at playing the position at which he had starred in college – quarterback – and Jackson never looked back. He was the first Canadian-born QB since Joe Krol to be recognized as the league’s best, and the last Canadian to be named the CFL’s most outstanding player. Jackson was an elegant athlete who could run nearly as well as he could throw. And he was cerebral, able to run Clair’s complicated offence and to read the situation and change plays at the line of scrimmage – a skill that would come in handy during his last championship game.
At age thirty-one, his retirement announcement seemed premature, even during an era when fewer athletes played late into their thirties. Jackson was at the top of his game, and Clair figured he had at least four or five more seasons in him. But Jackson wanted to take his life in a different direction, to pursue a career in education that would eventually lead to a job as a high school principal, and not even a season that was arguably the finest of his professional career would prove enough to change his mind. “I told Clair this was going to be it,” Jackson remembers. “Twelve years is longer than I ever thought I would play. There was no reason other than my personal reasons to get out. We [Jackson and his wife, Lois] had three young kids. And I wanted to get on with my education.” (Jackson had been commuting between Ottawa and Toronto two or three times a week during the football season while completing his teaching degree.)
The Ottawa Rough Riders and the Saskatchewan Roughriders were the CFL’s dominant teams in 1969. Each lost only three games during the regular season – and Saskatchewan defeated Ottawa the only time the two met, 38–21. “Saskatchewan knocked the crap out of us in Regina,” Jackson remembers. “We got the hell beat out of us. But that gave us some ideas of what they were going to try to do in the Grey Cup.”
Entering the playoffs, the Ottawa Rough Riders were the clear favourites, matched up against Toronto in the two-game, total-points eastern final. But they made things interesting, travelling to Exhibition Stadium for the first leg and losing to the Argos 22–14.
In the days between the first and second games, Leo Cahill, Toronto’s outspoken coach, stood up at a meeting of the Argos’ Playback Club, and declared, “It will take an act of God to beat us.”
That statement still stands, right up there with Jim Trimble’s “We’ll waffle ’em,” as the greatest example of hubris in CFL history.
Of course, what followed was precisely that “act of God” – Ottawa won the second game at home, 32–3, to comfortably qualify for the Grey Cup.
Game day at the Autostade dawned cold and blustery. The field was frozen and slick, forcing the players to don broomball shoes in the hopes of gaining a bit of traction. For the first time, the Grey Cup was being played on Sunday rather than Saturday (other than the famous Fog Bowl of 1962, when the game was suspended and completed the following day), which would become the new norm.
Prime Minister Trudeau walked onto the field for the ceremonial kickoff, wearing a white knit peaked cap in a style then highly fashionable, with a red carnation stuck in the crown. He added a long, matching white scarf. (He wasn’t the only prime minister in attendance: Saskatchewan’s favourite son, John Diefenbaker, was also there, though his hat was made of fur.)
When it came time to kick, Trudeau removed his matching white mittens. And he wore a pair of football cleats.
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau kicking off the 1969 Grey Cup game.
Saskatchewan’s coach, Eagle Keys, understood exactly the challenge his team was facing, and having beaten Ottawa in the 1966 Grey Cup game and in the teams’ lone meeting in 1969, he must have felt confident that he had the formula for success. On offence, his Roughriders would ride the arm of Lancaster and the powerful running game of George Reed, who had been the dominant figure in winning the 1966 championship. On defence, they would unleash a fierce pass rush featuring two of the greatest linemen in CFL history, Bill Baker and Ed McQuarters, to try and disrupt Jackson’s rhythm, and especially his propensity for throwing the long bomb – a play the Riders liked to call “the Arrow” – to wide receivers Whit Tucker and Margene Adkins. With Ottawa’s star running back and receiver Vic Washington sidelined by injury, it stood to reason that if the Saskatchewan rush could get t
o Jackson, the Ottawa attack would grind to a halt.
Ron Stewart playing in the 1966 Riders Grey Cup loss.
All of that was sound, in theory, but if the excellent Ottawa defence could shut Reed down, Saskatchewan’s attacking options would be severely limited. And the westerners’ game plan failed to account fully for Jackson’s superb improvisational abilities, not to mention the still-potent talents of a diminutive running back from Queen’s University named Ron Stewart, who was also approaching the end of his career. (“With Washington out, Stewy became more a part of our offensive thinking,” Jackson says.)
Frank Clair led the Rough Riders to three Grey Cups in his thirteen years with the team. Pictured here at the Autostade in Montreal.
The Rough Riders knew what was coming, and they were ready, but it was Saskatchewan that grabbed the early advantage. In the first quarter, Ottawa punter Bill Van Burkleo slipped on icy turf, turning the ball over and setting up a Lancaster touchdown pass to Al Ford. The lead grew to 9–0 before the end of the first quarter when Ottawa coach Frank Clair opted to concede to a safety rather than punt the ball out of his own end zone.
Though no one knew it that day, Clair was coaching his last CFL game (he would continue as Ottawa’s general manager through 1978, winning two more Grey Cups). He wore his trademark black horn-rimmed glasses and chain-smoked continuously on the sidelines, from the opening kickoff all the way to the final gun.
Jim Mankins (16) played three seasons in Ottawa, winning Grey Cups in two of those.
Legendary Rough Rider Ron Stewart.
THE CFL RECORD BOOK
MANY OF THE GREAT players in Canadian football history, and many honoured members of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, did not necessarily shine in Grey Cup competition. Examples include the great Dick Shatto, who retired in 1965 as the game’s leader in receiving and overall yardage but never played in a Grey Cup game. The same goes for the B.C. Lions’ Jim Young, who had a wonderful thirteen-year CFL career but did not see Grey Cup action, either. George Reed, the number-two rusher in league history, did get into four games, but was on just one winning team, as was seventeen-year veteran and teammate Roger Aldag, who won in his only appearance in 1989. Hal Patterson and Ronnie Stewart played in a combined eleven Grey Cups and yet were limited at times, due to the extraordinary attention paid to them by the opposition. They each posted some good games and some others where they had only a minor impact.
100 Grey Cups Page 9