For one week in November fans and football come together in perfect party harmony.
EDMONTON — How can it be Grey Cup week already? Sheesh — the Leafs haven’t even been mathematically eliminated yet.
Then again, everything about Grey Cup week sneaks up on a guy. For instance, my first Grey Cup as an accredited reporter wasn’t nearly a long ago as I’d thought. Looking back through the files it was Vancouver, 1999, where the Hamilton Tiger-Cats met the Calgary Stampeders in a west coast city languishing in a prolonged Canadian Football League slump.
“You know, cities like Hamilton, Winnipeg, Saskatchewan (Regina), they’re football cities,” Hamilton rush-end Joe Montford told us that week, 11 years ago. “You come to a city like this, and they’re looking at you and saying, ‘Who do you play for? What are you doing here?’”
All of that has changed in Vancouver, where the Lions’ hometown has been rehab’ed into one of the CFL’s pillars. But when it comes to Grey Cup week, the question remains valid:
What are you doing here?
For fans, it’s a fair question to ask whether they’re coming to Edmonton this week for Sunday’s football game, or the Thursday-Friday-Saturday of debauchery that precedes the kickoff.
A media friend of mine, his father used to go to the game, get some work done through the week, have his fun and fly home Sunday morning. He’d avoid the Monday rush at the airport, and rather than freeze his cheeks off at the game he’d back home in Winnipeg and on the couch nursing a hangover in comfort for kickoff.
Nothing against the game — more times than not the Grey Cup is fantastic. But for me, nearly all of the most memorable moments of Grey Cup happened before kickoff.
Yes, some happened on the streets of Montreal, or Regina, or Toronto, and involved some guy wearing a team jersey with the nameplate “Ryan Ginger” or “Whiskey Dick.” And of course, the sound track behind others is sung by some “classic” Canadian band like Chilliwack, Trooper, Streetheart or the Guess Who.
But truly, the Grey Cup memories that stick with you through the years are the stories like Marcus Crandell, who was never as good before or since he led Calgary through those 2001 playoffs and to a championship one magical day in Winnipeg. It was the ultimate three-week, out of body experience for Crandell.
Must Read: Arash Madani profiles the craziest, cockiest & talented team that broght the Cup to Montreal in 2002 | Read it nowOr a kicker the Montreal Alouettes dragged into his hometown of Regina one week named Matt Kellett. In his previous gig in B.C. he had exited on this note, from then-GM Adam Rita: “Our kicker has to get his head out of his ass.”
So Kellett moved on to Montreal, another used-up kicker looking for a second pr third chance. “I’m not going to disagree with you about him being a mental basket case (when he arrived),” holder Ben Cahoon said before that Cup, the ultimate cote of confidence.
Alas, Kellett never had a chance to be a factor in a 34-22 Eskimos win, just another Grey Cup loss for poor Anthony Calvillo, the best QB to ever have a lousy, 2-5 Grey Cup record.
It was in some ballroom in some Winnipeg hotel back in 2006 where Calvillo took a table of scribes back to his first CFL training camp back in ’94, where he was hoping to crack the lineup of that historic CFL franchise, the Las Vegas Posse.
“It was my first experience in professional ball,” he said. “So I thought practicing in the casino parking lot was normal. I thought living in the Riviera [Hotel and Casino] was normal. I thought playing in that kind of heat was normal. I thought playing in front of 1,000 people was normal. When I look back on it, of course, it is not.”
They’d walk through the casino in full gear after practice. On pay day they’d run through — on their way to the cashier’s window to cash their pay checks.
Then, of course, we had last November at McMahon Stadium in Calgary, where we all saw something we’d never seen before: A championship game decided on a “too many men on the field” penalty.
“I gotta live with that for the rest of my life,” Saskatchewan special teams coach Kavis Reed said after the game. “A mistake was made, and ultimately … as a leader, I have to shoulder this blame for the rest of my life.
“It’s a life changing situation.”
It was also the first game I ever remember where the losing team was ahead on the scoreboard or tied (at 0-0) for 60:00 of the game. The winning Alouettes never held the lead for even a single second of clock time.
Talk about a last second comeback.
Talk about something you’d have to be at a Grey Cup to see.
