If you’re putting your chips down…

Don’t bet against reigning Grey Cup champ Ricky Ray, who, even at 33, has plenty of football left to play

Frito-Lay is a hands-on kind of company. The kind that believes you don’t truly know potato chips unless you’ve seen them every step of the way from farm to shelf. And that you can’t manage a fleet of delivery drivers unless you’ve driven a shift in their truck. So, when you’re a 22-year-old from a small town in California trying to transition from carefree college student to toiling servant of the working class through Frito-Lay’s management-training program, you ride the trucks.

That’s what management candidate Ricky Ray was doing in 2001, a former college football star getting to work at 5 a.m. to climb into a truck full of potato chips and make deliveries. He had three stores on his route. He’d arrive, check the shelves, restock the inventory, organize it appropriately and be on his way. After the third store, he’d drive back to the depot, refill the truck for the next day, and try to get out of there as quickly as possible so he could spend time with his girlfriend, Allyson, or maybe get in a round of golf. He was paid an annual sum of $42,500 for his efforts.

But life is nothing if not a long string of random interconnected events constantly altering what’s ahead, changing courses and rewriting the future. So, as Ray golfed after work one day, complaining to his buddies about the drudgery of a life delivering chips, everything changed. He finished the round, pulled his cellphone out of his golf bag and saw he had 15 missed calls. The first one he returned was from Allyson, who said the San Francisco 49ers had called. Someone had gotten hurt at training camp; that meant someone else had to try out at quarterback; that meant Ray, the star pivot from Sacramento State University who still holds the school record for completion percentage, was getting another chance.

He didn’t make the 49ers, instead spinning off to the Fresno Frenzy, an arena-league team Ray suited up for seven times in 2002, earning $200 a game. Of course, occasional NFL training-camp invites and arena football wasn’t exactly a long-term solution. But it was that unlikely second chance, that unexpected twist of fate, that put Ray back on track to be what he always should have been—a football player. A CFL connection in the arena league got Ray a training-camp invite to Edmonton, where he went on to win two Grey Cups, and he made his way to Toronto last season, where he won another and cemented his status as one of the best quarterbacks in the CFL.

Playing in Toronto means spending an awful lot of time in Mississauga, on the pleasantly sylvan satellite campus of the University of Toronto, where the Argonauts anchor their practice facility on a single field surrounded by a makeshift collection of grey trailers. Ray is sunk into a large beige couch in one of the air-conditioned trailers, wearing a black shirt, blue Argonauts shorts and running shoes. It’s the early days of training camp, and in this, Ray’s 11th CFL season, it’s become a little tougher to get excited about going through the motions—working out all day and throwing passes to rookies who don’t understand the offence yet—as the team prepares for another campaign. “Yeah, some days you’re kind of dragging—you’re sore,” says Ray, who will turn 34 this October. “Sometimes you think, oh man, I wish I could be 22 again. I never got sore before.”

Now, quarterbacks often have much longer careers than their colleagues, because the position is so cerebral and not as physically demanding. But Ray will be the first to tell you his body is deteriorating, that his first step when feeling pressure in the pocket is a bit slower than it was in his 20s. And if he ever forgets about his placement on the slaughterhouse conveyor belt that is pro sport, he need only look at his coaching staff. There’s Mike O’Shea, the special teams coordinator who tried to take Ray’s head off for years as a linebacker for the Argos. There’s Jason Maas, the quarterbacks coach who was the starting pivot in Edmonton until Ray showed up and took his job. And then there’s Marcus Brady, Toronto’s new offensive coordinator, a former quarterback whom Ray played against in college and the CFL. Brady is just a month older than the quarterback he’s going to be calling plays for. “It’s weird,” Ray says. “But I’ll be coached by anybody. If you’re my coach, I’m gonna listen to you. I look up to those guys.”

The Argos are hoping that Ray and this exceedingly young coaching staff, led by 40-year-old drill sergeant Scott Milanovich, can recreate the harmony that carried the team to its first Grey Cup in eight seasons. Ray, Toronto’s first premier quarterback since Damon Allen retired in 2007, was a massive part of that, throwing for more than 4,000 yards despite missing four games with an injury. He was brilliant in the playoffs as well, throwing five touchdowns with just one interception in three games, and completing 71 percent of his passes for 869 yards.

In fact, the Argos are so focused on recapturing the magic of 2012 that they have barely altered the playbook, choosing to run an almost identical offence to the one they ran last year. Part of that is a case of refusing to fix what isn’t broken. Another is that the Argos are convinced the playbook is so rich and detailed that even the returning players are still mastering it. Ray doesn’t think the team truly grasped Milanovich’s offence until eight or 10 weeks into last season, right around the time Ray suffered a nasty knee injury, testing the coronary arteries within the hearts of Argos fans and management. “Right before I got hurt we were starting to turn the corner; guys were understanding their roles better, I was getting more comfortable,” Ray says. “It was starting to click, and I think we’re still building off that.”

So there is a distinct possibility that the Argonauts’ air attack, which attempted and completed the most passes in the league last season, will be even more of a focus this year. That coincides with a season in which the team’s already reliable quarterback might still be getting better. The list of CFL pivots who have excelled in their mid-30s is long, and Ray feels he’s as disciplined and sound as he’s ever been, a direct result of Milanovich’s extremely high expectations. It could be a perfect storm for the Argonauts, who just extended Ray’s contract through 2015. “I don’t sit there and think I want to be MVP or an all-star,” Ray says. “Last year, I played well, but I think I can be even more consistent this year. And we can be even better as a team.”

Still, in life and in an eight-team football league, it all comes back to random twists of fate. The tipped pass that finds a defender’s hands; the goal-line fumble; the innocuous-looking hit that knocks you out for weeks. Ray has seen all of those in his 10 years in this league, and he knows that as hard as he works and as accurate as his passes are, he is still hopelessly at the will of the world.

There are always reminders. Like in May, when Ray packed his life into a 26-foot Tioga RV in Redding, Calif., and set out with Allyson, now his wife, and their two-year-old daughter, Chloe, on a 4,200-km trip to Toronto. The Rays have been making a similar pilgrimage since his days in Edmonton when they did it in an SUV with a trailer pulling along behind. They used to do the trip quickly—last year they made the trek in less than five days. But now with the RV, which Ray bought shortly after Chloe was born, accommodations are built in, which makes it easier to enjoy the scenery. This year, they stopped at Arches National Park in eastern Utah and decided to spend an extra day there, taking in the majestic rock arches and columns that run throughout. The break meant the family reached Denver on the day they should have been passing through Kansas—the same day a massive blast of weather crossed over midwestern U.S., battering Kansas with severe thunderstorms, 160-km/h winds and at least two confirmed tornadoes that killed two people. The Rays were nearly caught right in the middle of it. “We stayed put and watched the news all night,” Ray says. “We couldn’t believe how bad it was.”

It was just another bend of fate, another turn of the cosmos that went the right way. It’s how a guy who used to deliver chips became a millionaire quarterback. How all the factors came together in just the right way for the Argonauts to win it all last season. And, if the universe is on his side, it’ll be how one of the league’s best current quarterbacks becomes one of its best ever.

This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.

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