Jon Cornish’s legs have carried him to a stellar CFL career. But it’s his mind that sets him apart.
If you walk into the Market Mall branch of TD Canada Trust in Calgary on a weekday afternoon, you might find a very large, bald man ready to advise you on your investments. He’ll tell you how much to contribute to your RRSP; he’ll give you some options for that money sitting in your tax-free savings account. Then, as is his wont, he’ll sign your Stampeders jersey and even pose for a picture if you’d like.
Yes, the CFL’s reigning rushing champion and runner-up for the league’s Most Outstanding Player award, Jon Cornish, does what so many in Canada’s competitive yet underwhelmingly compensating professional football league do—he works a second job. He will have you know he doesn’t need the extra money to make ends meet like some of his peers do. It’s simply a case of using the professional athlete’s bounty of free time to gain valuable work experience—and positioning himself for a similarly successful life after football. This will be a motif of Cornish’s story: He has a plan.
Of course the worlds of Jon Cornish, Calgary Stampeders running back, and Jon Cornish, investment consultant, often collide, especially considering his bank’s proximity to McMahon Stadium. Often, fans waiting in line to make a deposit will take pictures of Cornish behind the counter or ask him why he didn’t convert on that second and short the other night. “It’s just part of the drill,” Cornish says. “Eventually you just get used to it.” Well, you probably would if you were coming off the best season of your career, one that saw you set personal bests in yards and touchdowns while breaking a 56-year-old CFL record for single-season rushing yards by a Canadian. There’s a lot of things the 28-year-old has had to get used to with his suddenly elevated profile, but if there is one football player in this country who knows how best to handle the surge in spotlight, it’s Cornish. Thoughtful, complex and cerebral, he doesn’t fit the mould you might expect for someone of his vocation.
Take the simple cue card scrawled with notes that sat magnetted to Cornish’s fridge for the entire off-season. It was titled “Dominate.” Every day, he’d wake up, walk to the kitchen and read it over. It wasn’t anything complicated, just a list of mental cues meant to remind Cornish of what he needs to do to be effective. But he believes it holds the key to much of the success he’s had so far and how he’s going to be even better in the future. Cornish had the idea during Calgary’s bye week last August, and has made a different card for every game he’s played since, with anywhere from eight to 14 different focuses written on the front, and the opposition’s common defensive schemes drawn on the back. He would read the card throughout the week and then one final time right before the game.
It’s simple sports psychology: You can think about your goals all day if you like, but chances are you won’t fully achieve them until you write them down. Putting the objectives to paper helps you visualize them, internalize them, instill them in your being. The psychological approach is often treated with skepticism among athletes, especially in football. But Cornish—a psych major and women’s studies minor at Kansas—can show you the proof of its value. In the five games Calgary played leading up to that bye week, Cornish was averaging just 40 yards per game and 3.5 yards per carry. His final game right before the break was a career-worst; he finished the day with a negative stat line, losing a yard on six carries. His next game, two weeks later with the card in his hands right before kickoff, was the best he’d ever had in the CFL—he gained 170 yards on 20 carries. He’d go on to average 126 yards per game and 7.2 yards per carry in the five games immediately after the bye week. “It’s not some big secret; it’s just science,” Cornish says. “Nobody’s really taken a scientific approach to the game of football.”
Cornish takes a scholarly process to everything he does, constantly analyzing situations and assessing what approach will bring the best outcome. He drives his coaches batty with persistent questions about why he’s being asked to do things a certain way or perform different drills. He wants to see the cause and effect in everything. He lives in the film room and estimates he’s watched every game from the 2012 season at least 30 times, evaluating what he did well and poorly. It’s an atypical approach—most football players focus on the physical side of their game much more than the mental. Cornish will occasionally turn to meditation during the season to clear his mind, and can often be found in the yoga studio between games. It is a rather peaceful way of preparing for a violent game.
But there’s nothing peaceful about the way Cornish plays football, and anyone who has found themselves on the other end of one of his bruising runs can attest to that. Cornish is incredibly mindful off the field, but a different animal emerges on it, where he’s no stranger to confrontation. It’s as if football is his outlet for the juvenile emotion that clouds everyone from time to time. Near the top of most cue cards, Cornish writes the same two words: “Settle in.” It’s for when he’s in his stance behind the quarterback. It’s about running somebody over on a carry or driving his shoulder through somebody’s chest on a block. It’s about getting ready to do damage.
Of course, for the professional football player, the separation between life and the game can run awfully thin. Like any passion you turn into a living, it can be consuming. There is so much more to life than the insular world of football, something Cornish has learned on a deeply personal level. He was born in New Westminster, B.C., one of the five children Margaret Cornish, a music teacher–turned Anglican minister, raised by herself. He never knew his father—“I am thankful for him; he gave me some good genetic code”—who died when Cornish was in college. And it was during an otherwise uneventful Christmas-break visit home from university that Cornish found out his mother was seeing someone. “What’s he like?” Cornish asked. “Well, it’s a she,” his mother responded.
Ever since he revealed this rather innocuous tidbit about his personal life and demonstrated a willingness to speak eloquently about the issue of homophobia—both in professional sports locker rooms and in general—Cornish has become something of a champion for the homosexual community. He was recruited this winter for appearances by the You Can Play Project and the Breaking the Silence conference, where he gave a keynote speech with his mother in attendance. That conference took place in late March; one of Cornish’s main points during his talk was his firm belief that someday soon a current professional athlete would come out as gay. Less than a month later, Washington Wizards centre Jason Collins became that athlete. “Someone had to be the example that, yes, homosexuals do play sports and you will interact with them and it won’t matter,” Cornish says. “You’re still teammates.”
Cornish doesn’t look for any praise for his efforts with the causes that he cares about (he recently filmed a PSA for Plan Canada’s women’s rights initiatives in Bangladesh); he doesn’t make it a focal point during interviews. He just tries to do his part. Same as he does on the field. In fact, the play Cornish made to set the Canadian rushing record captures his essence almost perfectly. It was late in the third quarter in Edmonton, the Stampeders’ final game of the season. As quarterback Kevin Glenn went through the snap count from the shotgun, Cornish crouched patiently behind him—settled in. Glenn took the snap and immediately handed the ball off on his right as Cornish, like the earthmover he is, bulldozed through the line of scrimmage. He never took a step sideways, running straight into the heart of the defence, twisting his torso like a poplar in heavy wind, shaking off tacklers while his legs drove beneath him. It took three Eskimos to finally bring him to ground 22 yards later, where he sprung up, spun the football away and talked some trash to the defenders around him.
The run was tactical, measured and timed perfectly. It was clinical, combative and emphatic. Cornish channelled all the preparation he does away from the field into a tangible result on it. It’s all there on the cue cards.
The card Cornish decided to keep on his fridge through the off-season—“Dominate”—was not selected at random. It’s the one he wrote before the Grey Cup last November, where he was held to just 57 yards on 15 carries as the Stamps fell to the Argonauts, 35–22. In the first quarter, Cornish and Glenn botched a play-action exchange near midfield, turning the ball over and giving the Argonauts a possession they would convert into the first seven points of the game. Calgary never overcame the deficit. So while the card serves as a visual cue of what Cornish needs to do on the field, it reminds him of the sting he felt losing the biggest game of the season. And what he would do differently if he ever got back there. You know he’s planning on it.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.