100 Grey Cups

by Stephen Brunt

  1938 Red Storey TOR Scored three fourth-quarter touchdowns to lead Toronto to a 30–7 comeback win.

  1947 Joe Krol TOR Accounted for all 10 Toronto points, including a 35-yard TD pass to Royal Copeland and the game-winning punt single on the final play.

  1948 Norm Hill CGY Scored a touchdown on the famous “sleeper play” from Keith Spaith, helping Calgary complete an unbeaten season and win their first Grey Cup.

  1953 Vito Ragazzo HAM Hooked up with Ed Songin on a 55-yard pass and run to provide the game-winning points for Hamilton’s first Grey Cup win as the Tiger-Cats.

  1954 Jackie Parker EDM Returned Chuck Hunsinger’s “fumble” 90 yards for a touchdown to set up Edmonton’s 26–25 win.

  1955 Sam Etcheverry MTL Passed for 508 yards and two touchdowns in Als’ 34–19 loss to Edmonton.

  1957 Ray Bawel HAM Scored in the first five minutes on a 50-yard fumble return and was later tripped by a fan while returning his second interception of the day for an apparent touchdown.

  1958 Norm Rauhaus WPG Blocked Cam Fraser’s punt into the end zone and recovered on the final play of the first half.

  1961 Kenny Ploen WPG His 18-yard run settled the first Grey Cup overtime win in favour of Winnipeg.

  1964 Bill Munsey BC Scored a touchdown on both offence and defence, including a 65-yard fumble return, giving the B.C. Lions their first Grey Cup win.

  1966 Ron Lancaster SSK Threw for three touchdowns to lead Saskatchewan to their long-awaited first Grey Cup win.

  1969 Russ Jackson OTT Led Ottawa to a 29–11 win in his final game, throwing a Grey Cup–record four touchdown passes.

  1969 Ron Stewart OTT Touched the ball just seven times but gained 153 yards with two touchdowns.

  1971 Reggie Holmes CGY Recovered Leon McQuay’s fumble late in the game at the Calgary 12-yard line to help preserve the Stampeders’ first win since 1948.

  1972 Ian Sunter HAM Last-play field goal from 34 yards won the Grey Cup at home for Hamilton. The winning drive was aided by four great catches by Tony Gabriel and Garney Henley.

  1976 Tony Gabriel OTT Scored the only last-minute Cup-winning touchdown in history on a 24-yard pass from Tom Clements.

  1977 Vernon Perry MTL Returned an interception 77 yards in Montreal’s 41–6 win over Edmonton.

  1981 Dave Cutler EDM Completed the greatest Grey Cup comeback (after trailing 20–0) with a 27-yard winning field goal.

  1982 Warren Moon EDM In his final CFL season, he passed for 319 yards and ran for 91 more to complete Edmonton’s run of five straight Grey Cup wins.

  1986 Grover Covington HAM Recorded five of Hamilton’s record 13 sacks in a 39–15 upset win over Edmonton.

  1989 Dave Ridgway SSK Ended what has been termed “the greatest Grey Cup ever” with a 35-yard field goal with two seconds left to play, breaking a 40-all tie.

  1991 Raghib Ismail TOR His 253 kick-return yards included a touchdown on a kickoff in the fourth quarter.

  1994 Lui Passaglia BC Made last-play field goal at home, redeeming himself after a miss a minute earlier.

  1996 Eddie Brown EDM His amazing touchdown catch in the snow came after kicking the ball up into his arms.

  1998 Mark McLoughlin CGY Made last-play 35-yard field goal to win – one of three in the final quarter.

  2000 Chuck Levy BC Denied Montreal’s final effort to tie the game by defending a two-point convert.

  2007 James Johnson SSK Made a Grey Cup–record three interceptions, including a second-half touchdown.

  2009 Damon Duval MTL Given a second chance after Saskatchewan’s “too many men” penalty, Duval hit a 33-yard field goal on the final play to give Montreal their first Grey Cup since 2002.

  What changed the Argonauts’ fortunes, finally, and brought their Grey Cup drought to an end, were a new coach and a temporary abandonment of the endless quest for big name stars.

  After finishing a franchise-worst 2–14 in 1981, the Argos handed the reins to Bob O’Billovich, a Montana native who had been a defensive back and backup quarterback with the Ottawa Rough Riders before becoming an assistant coach with the team. O’Billovich understood the idiosyncrasies of the league and knew the nuances of Canadian football in a way that many of his Argo predecessors did not. He hired as his offensive coordinator one of the most innovative thinkers in the sport, Darrell “Mouse” Davis, who had popularized a scheme known as the run-and-shoot, which used motion and multiple wide receiver sets and turned out to be a perfect fit with the three-down, big-field game.

  Bob O’Billovich broke the Argos’ thirty-one year Grey Cup drought in 1983.

  Davis only stayed in Toronto for one season, but it was a memorable one. Employing the starting quarterback tandem of Condredge Holloway and Joe Barnes (who had won championships in Ottawa and Montreal, respectively), he helped the Argos go from worst to first in the CFL East in 1982. “A lot of the things we brought in on offence were pretty new and creative,” O’Billovich says. “We applied a lot of the run-and-shoot concepts to our game. With the unlimited motion, we were able to do some things that no one had seen before.” The Argos’ run wasn’t halted until the Grey Cup game, where they were hammered 32–16 by the powerhouse Edmonton Eskimos, who won their fifth consecutive championship. (That game is best remembered for the cold, torrential rain that fell at Exhibition Stadium, which convinced local politicians that the city needed a domed stadium. The SkyDome – later renamed Rogers Centre – which included the world’s first fully retractable roof, opened to great fanfare in 1989, and hosted the Grey Cup game that year.) “It was a close game going into the half, and then the second half the rain came down hard,” O’Billovich remembers. “It affected us more than it did Edmonton because we relied on the pass so much. That was the first time that Toronto had been in a Grey Cup in thirty years. They had a parade – and we didn’t even win. I think there were about 20,000 people downtown the day after the game. I said to the players, ‘Imagine the kind of turnout they’re going to have if we actually win it.’ ”

  Joe Theismann led the Argos to the Grey Cup final in 1971, but couldn’t end their long Cup drought, losing to the Stampeders, 14–11.

  They would soon find out. The Argonauts were the best team in the east in 1983 and, after a tough win over the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the eastern final, advanced to the Grey Cup game, which was played in the brand new B.C. Place Stadium – the first Grey Cup in history to be played indoors. Nearly 60,000 fans packed the place, and almost all of them were there to root for the hometown B.C. Lions, who had finally broken Edmonton’s stranglehold on the west. Much of the credit for that went to their bright, young rookie head coach Don Matthews, who had been an assistant on the Eskimos’ staff during the Edmonton dynasty.

  Condredge Holloway led the Argos to their first Grey Cup win in 31 years.

  Those Lions, led by the great wide receiver “Swervin’ Mervyn” Fernandez, who caught a long touchdown pass from Roy Dewalt to open the scoring, were the better team in the first half. The Argos tied the game 7–7 on a touchdown pass from Holloway to Jan Carinci, but their offence struggled as B.C. employed an overloaded defensive front designed specifically to nullify the run-and-shoot. Holloway, who had come down with the flu in the days before the game, was largely ineffective. Just before halftime, when Lui Passaglia’s field goal put B.C. up 17–7, Joe Barnes – who was the only player on the Argo roster old enough to have been born when they last won the Grey Cup – started warming up on the Toronto sideline.

  Canadian-born punter Hank Ilesic won seven Grey Cups over his 19-year career.

  The game turned in the second half. With Barnes under centre, the Toronto offence adjusted and began to move the ball. But three drives stalled short of the goal line, and three times the Argos’ field goal kicker, Hank Ilesic, missed – so that instead of a potential nine points, they picked up only two, to narrow the score to 17–9. Ilesic, who had signed with the Edmonton Eskimos out of high school as a punter (he was nicknamed “Thunderfoot” because of his booming kic
ks) had placekicking added to his duties for the first time after moving to the Argos for the 1983 season.

  O’Billovich remembers the conversation he had with Ilesic on the sidelines after he missed the third field goal attempt.

  “I said, ‘Hank, we’re going to need those points. This is a close game.’ ”

  “Don’t worry, coach,” Ilesic said. “I’ll make it when it counts.”

  To his credit, he did. After switching the shoe on his plant foot to provide a better grip on the artificial turf, Ilesic was good on a 43-yard field goal in the fourth quarter, which narrowed the score to 17–12. Meanwhile, the Toronto defence completely stymied Dewalt and the B.C. offence in the second half.

  With the clock ticking down, the Argos regained the ball at their own 49-yard line and began one of the most memorable drives in the team’s long and glorious history. Most CFL fans remember how it ended; what they may have forgotten is how it almost came apart: Barnes connected with Paul Pearson on a pass over the middle, and when he was hit, Pearson fumbled the ball, which popped straight up in the air. Had the Lions recovered, the Grey Cup would almost surely have been theirs. Instead, Pearson’s teammate Emanuel Tolbert plucked the ball out of mid-air and saved the day.

  That set up a play that would become iconic for Toronto football fans. With 2:55 left on the clock, the Argos scrimmaged on the Lions’ two-yard line. Barnes took the snap and rolled left, instantly under pressure. He then flipped a short pass to running back Cedric Minter, who cruised across the goal line – and finally, it seemed, deliverance was at hand.

  Still, there were tense moments yet to come for the long-suffering Toronto fans. The Argos failed on a two-point convert attempt that would have given them a three-point lead. Instead, down by just one, with lots of time on the clock to move into position for a winning field goal, the Lions got as far as their own 46-yard line before a holding penalty set them back. A long bomb from Dewalt to Jacques Chapdelaine that would surely have won the game glanced off the receiver’s fingertips. The Argos would get the ball back, and then be forced to punt, setting up one final, failed Lions Hail Mary. Only then did the celebration begin, as O’Billovich was carried off the field on his players’ shoulders.

  “Absolute elation,” he says, when asked how it felt.

  Afterwards, all of the Toronto players told the same story. The difference this time, they said, was the Argos were truly a team.

  “That wasn’t the Toronto way for so long,” Holloway said. “They used to go out and buy one guy, an Anthony Davis or a Terry Metcalf. They’d tell him to go and win it. They told me that two years ago. But Coach O’Billovich changed that way of thinking. He turned the Argos into a team.”

  “What you’re seeing is the beginning of a dynasty,” said hometown boy Carinci, who remembered crying when Leon McQuay fumbled in 1971. “I grew up in Toronto, and I know very well about the 31 years. I’ve suffered a lot, too. I think of all the high-priced players and coaches who have come in here over the years, but couldn’t do it…. It turns out all we needed was a team, which is what Obie built.”

  “We brought a winning attitude,” O’Billovich says. “We changed the culture of Toronto pro sports franchises at that time. It was just a tremendous experience. It had taken so long for that to happen and to be a part of history – that something nobody can ever take away from you. It’s a memory firmly etched in every mind of every player that represented the Toronto Argonauts in that Grey Cup game, and [of] every coach. It was pretty special.”

  O’Billovich was right about the victory parade. It took over much of downtown Toronto as the Argos celebrated their first Grey Cup since 1952. But Carinci wasn’t quite right about the dynasty – the remainder of the 1980s would be pretty much a washout for the Argonauts. Barnes was traded to Calgary in 1985, and after the Argos lost the 1987 Grey Cup game to the Eskimos, 38–36, O’Billovich was fired in 1989, though his stellar CFL career continues today, with Hamilton his latest (and perhaps final) stop.

  Highly touted prospect “Rocket” Ismail was brought to Canada by free-spending Argos owner Bruce McNall. The investment paid off in his first year with the Argos (1991), when they won the Grey Cup.

  The Argos’ fortunes wouldn’t change for the better until 1991, and then in dramatic fashion, when the team was purchased by California-based wheeler-dealer Bruce McNall, who also owned the Los Angeles Kings of the National Hockey League. His partners in the enterprise were the actor John Candy, a lifelong passionate Argos fan, and Wayne Gretzky, then the greatest hockey player on earth. McNall had acquired Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers in 1988 in the most famous trade in hockey history.

  McNall arrived intent on making a splash, and there’s no question he succeeded. The Argos in the past had generated plenty of publicity for bringing in big talent, but never anything like this: in advance of the National Football League draft, Toronto signed the player projected to go first overall, Notre Dame’s sensational receiver and kick returner Raghib “Rocket” Ismail. It was an enormous risk, at an enormous cost, but in the short term, at least, it paid off. A huge crowd packed the SkyDome for the season’s opener with the Blues Brothers providing halftime entertainment. Beyond the sizzle, the Argos delivered on the field, finishing first and winning the eastern final 42–3 over the Blue Bombers in front of 50,000 fans. They advanced to the first-ever Grey Cup game played in Winnipeg, where their opponents would be the Calgary Stampeders.

  The game’s signature moment on that frigid day was Ismail’s 87-yard kickoff return for a touchdown in the fourth quarter – both the moment and Ismail untouched by a frozen can of beer that was hurled from the stands and just missed him as he cruised into the end zone. Final score: Toronto 36, Calgary 21.

  By the time the Argonauts next appeared in the Grey Cup, McNall was in jail, Candy was dead, Gretzky had long since surrendered his ownership stake, and Ismail was playing in the NFL. But Toronto had acquired another superstar – arguably the greatest player in the history of the Canadian game – Doug Flutie, who arrived from Calgary before the 1996 season. That sensational Toronto squad, coached by Don Matthews, won two consecutive Grey Cups.

  The first, played in Hamilton’s Ivor Wynne Stadium, transformed into a winter wonderland by an unexpected blizzard, was a riveting game of give and take between the Argos and the Edmonton Eskimos. The teams traded kick-return touchdowns – Jimmy “the Jet” Cunningham brought a punt back 80 yards, but Henry “Gizmo” Williams topped that, taking back a kickoff 91 yards for the Eskimos – and both quarterbacks, Flutie and the Esks’ Danny McManus, put on a show. The two teams combined for 41 points in the second quarter alone, with the Argos finally prevailing 43–37 (though Edmonton Eskimos fans will forever point to a Flutie quarterback sneak on a third-down gamble, and a fumble that wasn’t called a fumble …).

  SOMETIMES, IT TAKES TWO

  Condredge Holloway combined with Joe Barnes to give the Argos a 12–4 record in the 1982 season.

  BY 1982, AS THE Argos faced the Esks in the last of Edmonton’s five straight Grey Cup victories, they had a pair of QBs that could well have been the regular starter anywhere. And the following season, Condredge Holloway and Joe Barnes each attempted more than 250 passes, the first time in CFL history that had ever occurred. Neither missed much time to injury, and Holloway started a little more than Barnes, but each was effective in leading the club to a 12–4 mark and first place in the east for the second consecutive season.

  The true test of their interchangeability came in the 71st Grey Cup, against the British Columbia Lions. For the first time ever, the game was being played indoors – at the brand-new B.C. Place Stadium, before 59,345 fans, most of whom were backing the Leos. Holloway played most of the first half and engineered only one score before he was pulled late in the half. At halftime, the Argos faced a tough 17–7 deficit, but Barnes, who would be named the game’s offensive MVP, was the spark Toronto needed as he came off the bench to produce 203 second-half yards and five drives that led eit
her to field goal attempts (Hank Ilesic had a tough day, going 1-for-4) or the game-winning touchdown. Barnes moved the Argos consistently throughout his turn, passing for 175 yards and picking up another 36 on three scrambles out of the pocket.

  The other side of the story was the outstanding second-half defence put up by Toronto. The Argos shut down the Lions completely, forcing six two-and-outs and a pair of turnovers. Defensive MVP Carl Brazley was a key player for the Argo “D,” as he made six tackles, forced a fumble, and made two B.C. turnovers on his own with a fumble recovery and an interception.

  The 1983 Argonauts are only one of two only teams since 1950 (a span of sixty-two Grey Cup games) to have shut out an opponent in the second half of a Grey Cup, and their comeback from a 10-point deficit at the half was just the fourth of that magnitude in Grey Cup history.

  WARRIOR

  THERE ARE CFL quarterbacks who have started more Grey Cup games than Hall of Famer Matt Dunigan, and some who have won more games as well. But none can match him for the sheer number of teams that he led into the CFL’s championship game. The talented import from Louisiana Tech started three straight Grey Cup games, from 1986 to 1988, as well as the 1991 and 1992 contests – a total of five in a span of just seven seasons, and, most remarkably, for four different clubs. Everywhere Dunigan went, except for expansion Birmingham (whom he led into the playoffs, at least) and a brief stint in his final year in Hamilton, he guided his teams into the Grey Cup. A remarkable achievement, but one that came with a price by every season’s end.

  Dunigan’s efforts to get his teams to the championship did not come without personal sacrifice, often in the form of the hellacious hits he absorbed in 194 career CFL games. In fact, he missed fifty-two games for a variety of injuries across fourteen seasons. His statistics show just how worn down he would become by the post-season: his passer rating in Grey Cup games was 55.3, compared to a regular-season mark of 84.5. In several of his Grey Cup appearances, notably with the Argonauts in 1991 against Calgary, injuries limited his ability to move and throw at all. A look at the 1991 game stats, however, sum up his influence: Toronto – Dunigan: 12 of 29 for 142 yards; Calgary – Barrett: 34 of 56 for 372 yards. Final score: Toronto 36, Calgary 21. Dunigan made his 12 completions count for two touchdown passes and did not throw an interception, while Barrett was picked off three times and Calgary’s turnovers led to half of the Argos’ 36 points that day. That is Grey Cup guts and leadership writ large.