Grey Cup and other football memories

November 24, 2019: the 107th Grey Cup game. By the time this is read, it may be over. No late bets allowed.

Not the first time the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Hamilton Tiger-Cats have met in the CFL championship game. They went against each other in the memorable Fog Bowl of 1962, when the fog rolled in from Lake Ontario over the Toronto stadium and the game was halted, to be resumed the next day. The Bombers won that year: 28 to 27 over the Ti-Cats.

One hundred and seven games have been played for the silver cup given by Governor General Earl Grey. Game #1 was between the University of Toronto Varsity Blues and the Parkdale Canoe Club. Blues took it, 26-6.

Winningest teams over the decades: Toronto Argonauts, 17 wins; Edmonton Eskimos, 11.

Longtime fans remember watching the game outdoors in frigid weather, or listening to the radio in pre-TV times, leaping up and down when Jackie Parker scooped up a fumble on his team's 11-yard line and ran the ball 93 yards for a touchdown against the Montreal Alouettes. Final score: Eskimos 26, Alouettes 25. You wanta talk cliffhangers?

Numerous great names in the game, but the Big Daddy of all may have been Annis Stukus, a player on two Grey Cup winners, later coach and general manager of the newly minted Edmonton Eskimos and BC Lions. We knew Stuke late in his career, when he wrote on sports for the Vancouver Courier, but he had enjoyed a long run in radio and print before that. Most off-beat assignment: Sent to Taiwan by the Vancouver Sun to cover a conflict between China and Formosa, he interviewed Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek and sent back a story headlined "No New Normie Kwongs in Formosa."

Denny Boyd, whom we miss every day, talked about Grey Cup games in his cookbook, "Man On the Range." He wrote, "Having been a jock writer for some 20 years, I have had my allotment of Grey Cup weeks. Been to some parties we could have been sent to jail for. Played all the popular Grey Cup Week games, like Naked in the Elevator, Mattress Out the Window and Chug-a-Lug-a-Jug." For those recovering from the celebrations, Denny offered a remedy: pot roast cooked in coffee.

For some of us, football has always been The Game, even in a country where hockey is almost a religion. (Don Cherry: "Whaddya mean, almost?") It's the game played in rain and snow, often on miserable fields that have more dirt and gravel than grass, and at some schools, where players were lucky to find cleats that would fit.

At one of those schools, standing on the sidelines, a kid disc jockey kept ignoring the game to look at a beautiful girl who wore the quarterback's St. John's College pin. The dj had been a flop as a high school guard, but he did, to his continuing amazement, win the girl.

And there were the three brothers--one who planned a career as a coach, but instead, "went for a soldier," and led troops in Germany and Cyprus; another who played for the Lions and Roughriders, but ended as a CBC writer with a specialty in Russian literature and politics; and the youngest, and smallest, who, despite his size and a wailing mother in the stands, played centre.

All these memories flash across the gridiron of the mind.

Everyone's a winner.

--Slap Maxwell.