100 Grey Cups

by Stephen Brunt

  In his final Grey Cup appearance in 1992, Matt Dunigan faced incredible pressure from the Calgary defence (Wally Buono’s first championship team) and stayed standing for three quarters. He finally gave way to Danny McManus after two sacks and dozens of hits. By the end of his career, Dunigan had played on two championship teams and was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 2006 after passing for 43,857 yards – he remains fifth in all-time yardage – and launching 306 passes for touchdowns. For Dunigan, the game was as much a matter of will as of skill, and he epitomized what it must have taken for a player of modest physical stature (5’11”, 180 pounds) to impact the CFL game.

  A year later, following a second consecutive 15–3 regular season, the Argos returned to the Grey Cup, this time at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium, where, until the western final, all signs pointed to a rematch against the hometown Eskimos. But the Saskatchewan Roughriders, who finished third in the west with an 8–10 record, upset Calgary in the semifinal and then beat the Eskimos at home, 31–30, to become one of the true Cinderella teams in Grey Cup history. It appeared that most of the province of Saskatchewan had emptied, as fans of the Green ’Riders poured into Edmonton for the big game. But against Flutie and company, the magic wore off. Adrion Smith’s 95-yard kickoff return for a touchdown to open the second half was the decisive blow in what finished as a comfortable 47–23 Toronto victory. For the second year in a row, Flutie was named the Grey Cup’s most valuable player.

  Flutie departed in 1998, and tough times followed. In 2003, Toronto actually fell briefly into bankruptcy before new owners took charge in time for the 2004 season. What followed was a real feel-good story: coached by Michael “Pinball” Clemons, as popular an athlete as Toronto has ever known, the Argos rose from the ashes to finish second, and then upset the Montreal Alouettes in the eastern final at Olympic Stadium to advance to the Grey Cup. The game was held that year in Ottawa, and the opponents would be the B.C. Lions.

  Michael “Pinball” Clemons joined the Argos organization in 1989 and has been there ever since, winning three Grey Cups as a player in the 1990s and one as head coach in 2004.

  That Grey Cup will be remembered for Clemons’s emotional call-and-response speech to his players, captured by television cameras, just before they stepped onto the field.

  “A guy who understands perspective about life and what’s important,” he said. “Part of it is, this is when you truly care about somebody and you’re willing to work together with them and you’re really, truly willing to do it, not just for your own good but for their good first. When you’re willing to think about somebody else first, they truly become family.

  “Who are we?”

  “FAMILY!”

  “Who are we?”

  “FAMILY!”

  “Who are we?”

  “FAMILY!”

  “Now, when we go out there today, we’ve been talking about playing at another level. We’ve been talking about being dominant. And you know the reason why we’ve been dominant the last few weeks.

  “What’s the word?”

  “PAIN!”

  “What’s the word?”

  “PAIN!”

  “Because you’ve got to hit somebody in this game. That’s why we’ve been dominant. When we go out there today, there’s going to be a bigger audience than has ever seen a football game in this country in history. It’s the biggest crowd ever. Now we’ve got a chance to do what we’ve been talking about. We’re talking about playing this game at a level that nobody, nobody, nobody, in any league anywhere has ever played this game … Guys, let’s go out there today as a family and get it done from the first whistle to the last …

  “Win on three: one, two …”

  “WIN!”

  Win they did, 27–19, the fifteenth championship in the history of the Argonaut football club, the most by any team. And no Argo bounce was required.

  1995

  BALTIMORE, CANADA

  Mike Pringle helped bring the Grey Cup south of the border for the first – and only – time.

  The 83rd Grey Cup Game was a first, and a first … and a last.

  The early 1990s had been a time of turmoil for the Canadian Football League. Shifting cultural currents and unsteady ownership had put the very future of the ancient game in jeopardy. Yes, there had been challenging times before, but never had the CFL been so close to extinction.

  And so, in desperate times, one takes desperate measures. At a moment when the Canadian-ness of the Canadian game seemed to be of diminishing importance for Canadians, and when the Internet revolution seemed to have rendered lines between countries and cultures arbitrary and unnecessary, CFL governors began to think the previously unthinkable. Faced with an apparently unsolvable dilemma, they decided that the only path to survival was through growth – not within Canada, but into the United States, putting teams in markets that were unserved by the National Football League. That bold, risky strategy required the CFL make several significant compromises. For instance, in some places, it was nearly impossible to squeeze a full Canadian field into stadiums built for the American game. And it hardly made sense for American-based teams to be forced to employ Canadian players, so for them and them only, out went the non-import quota that had been a fundamental of the CFL for decades.

  BALTIMORE’S GREATEST LEGACY

  ONE OF THE POSITIVE aspects of the CFL’s short-lived incursion into U.S. markets was the introduction of a player who would become one of its brightest stars.

  Mike Pringle was selected 139th in the 1990 National Football League draft by the Atlanta Falcons, but made it into just three games, carrying the ball twice for a total gain of nine yards. Released in training camp in 1991, Pringle spent the following spring with the Sacramento Surge of the World League before playing three games with the Edmonton Eskimos.

  Between 1992 and ’93, the World League shut down, while the CFL expanded. Surge owner Fred Anderson was granted the CFL’s first U.S. franchise, the Sacramento Gold Miners, and Pringle appeared in all eighteen games, gaining more yardage as a receiver than a running back. An off-season trade sent him to Baltimore, and at age twenty-seven he enjoyed the greatest of breakout seasons, setting a CFL record with 1,972 rushing yards. The team, coached by Grey Cup fixture Don Matthews and quarterbacked by CFL veteran Tracy Ham, finished second in the East Division and made it all the way to the championship game, where they lost to the B.C. Lions on Lui Passaglia’s field goal with 0:00 showing on the clock.

  Pringle was named the CFL’s Most Outstanding Player in 1995, after again leading the league with 1,791 rushing yards. With a 15–3 record, the Stallions led the CFL South Division and defeated Winnipeg and San Antonio en route to the 83rd Grey Cup game, played for the first time ever at Regina’s Taylor Field. Baltimore’s defence (which forced six turnovers) and special teams were the story of the game, but Pringle gained 137 yards, helping put the Stallions in position for five Carlos Huerta field goals. Baltimore defeated the Calgary Stampeders, 37–20, and for the first and only time, the Grey Cup was captured by a non-Canadian team … but not for long.

  Even as the Grey Cup was being presented, it was known that the NFL’s Cleveland Browns had designs on playing in Baltimore in 1996. As the other four U.S.–based franchises folded, Stallions owner Jim Speros considered other American sites before electing to move to Montreal and revive the Alouettes name. The Denver Broncos signed Pringle to an NFL contract, but when he was cut late in training camp, he rejoined his former team north of the border.

  In 1998, Pringle broke his own record for rushing yardage, with 2,065, while establishing league highs for carries (347) and 100-yard games in a season (14) and winning his second Most Outstanding Player award.

  Though the Als won the Grey Cup in 2002, Pringle saw action in only six regular-season games. A year later, he signed with Edmonton, rushing for 1,376 yards and contributing to the Eskimos’ Grey Cup win. The seven-time CFL all-star retired after the 2004 season, having broke
n George Reed’s career records for rushing yards and yards from scrimmage, and tying Reed’s mark for touchdowns (since broken by Milt Stegall). He was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 2008.

  Even with the grand plan still a work in progress, and with some of the U.S. ownership not entirely stable, off the CFL went into unknown territory – first Sacramento, California, followed in short order by San Antonio, Texas; Baltimore, Maryland; Shreveport, Louisiana; Birmingham, Alabama; and Las Vegas, Nevada. The traditional east–west split would be thrown out the window; now the Grey Cup would be a battle of North versus South, and in all likelihood, of Canada versus the United States. The first international Grey Cup game took place in 1994, as what was then known as the Baltimore Football Club (the NFL had prevented them from using the Colts name) lost to the British Columbia Lions on a last-play Lui Passaglia field goal at B.C. Place, a matchup that began to stir some of the same overtly patriotic feelings that would be on full display in Vancouver sixteen years later when it hosted the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

  By 1995, though few outside the CFL’s inner circle knew it, the great American experiment was actually on its last legs. Teetering ownership in several U.S. cities, tepid fan support, and the imminent move of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns to Baltimore conspired to knock down the house of cards. But there would be one last spectacular gasp, as a powerful Baltimore team coached by Don Matthews – and now called the Stallions – rolled through the playoffs, setting up a Grey Cup match against the Calgary Stampeders, quarterbacked by the great Doug Flutie.

  That was rich subtext indeed. And then there was the setting.

  Mike Pringle returned to Canada after the U.S. expansion to win two more Grey Cups as an Eskimo and an Alouette.

  Regina had always held a special place in the hearts of those who love Canadian football. The smallest city to have a team, the focus of a vast, though sparsely populated, province, it has always seemed the pure and perfect embodiment of the connections between identity, place, and rooting interest. There was a romance to the idea of Saskatchewan football that reached all the way down to the seven-and nine-man teams playing in high schools where the student population was too small to permit fielding a full 12-man squad. For those who knew their history, there were the tales of those quixotic teams that came east in the 1920s and 1930s and had their heads handed to them by the eastern powers when they challenged for the Grey Cup. All of that passion wasn’t fully rewarded until 1966, the first time the Green ’Riders won the Cup, and the championships since were few and far between. Some years, the ’Riders seemed a hopeless cause. But the beating heart never stilled.

  It had long been conventional wisdom that a city as small as Regina could never play host to the Grey Cup. This was a big-time, big-city event. For much of its history, the game had been played only in Toronto, and then – with the construction of Empire Stadium – it made regular stops in Vancouver. The opening of Olympic Stadium in Montreal created another, spectacular venue. And other cities occasionally had their turn – Ottawa and Hamilton, Calgary and Edmonton, and in 1991, for the first time, Regina’s prairie rival, Winnipeg.

  Bringing the Grey Cup to Regina, though, was something else again, and in an era when it seemed that being bigger, splashier, and more expensive was all that mattered, a small-town championship game didn’t exactly seem to line up with the CFL’s larger objectives. What would those people in San Antonio and Baltimore and Las Vegas think when they saw “Regina” on the marquee?

  Still, the decision had been made, and strangely enough, it was Larry Ryckman, the owner of the Stampeders and one of the more gung-ho proponents of U.S. expansion, who came up with the perfect analogy. The Grey Cup in Regina, he said, would be just like the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. At a time when the Olympic spectacle was becoming ever more grandiose, those Games had been staged in a sleepy rural town where people skied and sledded to work and to buy their groceries, where speedskaters were superstars, where the connection between the sports and the culture and the environment and the history was organic and obvious every moment of every winter day. It was a journey back to the sports’ roots, to the origins, and Ryckman rightly figured that Regina would be the same – or at least it would be, if you substituted people wearing watermelons as hats for picturesque Norwegians.

  In a strange and unsettling moment in Grey Cup history, Regina turned out to be the perfect tonic. The Roughriders didn’t come close to qualifying – they finished 6–12 that season, in sixth place in the new CFL North Division and out of the playoffs. But still, the people of Saskatchewan responded as though it were Ron Lancaster and George Reed taking the field for the home team. The week leading up to the game was like none in the history of Grey Cup, a celebration of the province and its football heritage – stories of whole houses painted green, of fan loyalty that stretched through generations, of impossibly long journeys made just for the chance to watch a ballgame. Every Grey Cup event, no matter how modest, the kind of stuff at which jaded, big-city fans might have turned up their noses, was packed to the rafters and beyond. For the Canadians from outside the province who were in attendance – and for the handful of puzzled and amazed Americans, including a smattering of reporters, who followed the Stallions north to this strange and exotic land – it was tough to resist the appeal of something so honest and genuine, in a culture increasingly driven by artifice and superficiality and baseless hype. What happened in Regina in 1995 was 100 per cent real, 100 per cent genuine – and more than a little bit magical.

  Don Matthews is the second winningest CFL coach of all time, and the only coach to win a Grey Cup in the U.S.

  As for the game itself, well, there the storybook narrative ended. A prairie zephyr swept through Taylor Field and was so strong at one point, before kickoff, that the crowd had to be evacuated from a section of temporary stands that had been constructed in one end zone to increase capacity to Grey Cup standards. The gusts were enough to earn the Wind Bowl a place alongside the Fog Bowl and Mud Bowl, storied Grey Cups played under crazy climatic conditions.

  The bottom line was there would be no stopping Baltimore, not even by Flutie and a Calgary team that, for all of its dominance during the era, won only a single Grey Cup, in 1992. The Stallions were just too good. Operating without any kind of roster restrictions based on nationality, Matthews stacked his team with superb players at all positions – including on special teams, which to a large degree was where the game was decided. Chris Wright scored on an 82-yard punt return to give Baltimore an early 7–0 lead. Calgary fought back with two field goals, and then a Flutie touchdown pass early in the second quarter put them ahead 13–7.

  But then the Stallions took over, with three field goals and a touchdown off a blocked punt – more of that special-team dominance. They were up 23–13 at the half, and after the two sides traded touchdowns in the third quarter, Baltimore closed the show, with Carlos Huerta (who seemed untroubled by the howling gale) kicking two more field goals in the fourth, and running back Mike Pringle taking control, running behind the superb Stallions’ offensive line, eating up yards and eating up the clock.

  ALL KINDS OF WEATHER

  IN RECENT YEARS, GREY Cup weather has frequently been a non-issue, as the game has been held indoors thirteen times since the opening of B.C. Place Stadium in Vancouver in 1983. Rogers Centre in Toronto (known formerly as the SkyDome) and a covered Olympic Stadium in Montreal have hosted five of those warm and dry contests since 1989. However, the other eighty-six Grey Cup games have been played in a wide variety of weather conditions, ranging from a sunny but frosty −17ºC day in Winnipeg in 1991 to the 90 k.p.h. wind conditions in the 1995 Wind Bowl in Regina. Snow-covered, frozen fields seemed to be the norm in the 1920s and 1930s, followed by years of muddy fields with the game at the mercy of early Canadian winters. The most recent of the “coldest” games came at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium in 2009, under –5ºC conditions, and these types of games have usually led to a few
more fumbles or dropped passes than usual.

  Two other games stand out particularly among those most affected by the conditions on the day: the 1962 Fog Bowl and the 1950 Mud Bowl, both held in Toronto. In 1950, the field was described as at best “muddy,” but a look at the existing film reels of the game offers a better description – a quagmire. The footballs were so heavy and waterlogged that Toronto tried just three passes all day, completing one for seven yards. Winnipeg managed to complete just three passes themselves and had a total of three first downs in the entire game. The oddest image of the day came when a dazed Winnipeg star Buddy Tinsley fell face down into the mud. Legend has it that the officials saved him from drowning, but the Winnipeg star claimed otherwise. The other lasting memory is of backup Winnipeg quarterback Pete Petrow and his dazzlingly clean jersey after he came off the bench late in the game to join a sea of mud-blackened uniforms.

  The strangest Grey Cup, and one seen only in part, even by the 32,655 fans in attendance, was the 1962 Fog Bowl between Winnipeg and Hamilton at Exhibition Stadium. Unseasonably warm 47ºF weather brought in fog off Lake Ontario that persisted throughout the day. Eventually, the fog became so thick that the final 9:29 of the game had to be postponed until the next day, with Winnipeg leading 28–27.

  An interview with Kenny Ploen of the Blue Bombers revealed the real issue that arose with the continuing the next day – the players had less than twenty-four hours to get into game shape after stiffening up. In today’s game, players generally have a week in between games, so the turnaround was a tough one for the sixty players dressed that day. There were no points scored after the action resumed under clear conditions; only four first downs were made, and neither team was able to move the ball much past the midfield stripe. Hamilton completed a 38-yard pass in the final minute, but a Joe Zuger punt on the final play was covered by Ploen at the two-yard line and ended the longest game seen, more or less, in Grey Cup history.