Getting Our Kicks

Football keeps them warm: Fans celebrate prior to the 2003 Grey Cup final between the Edmonton Eskimos and the Montreal Alouettes in Regina. CP Photo/Frank Gunn.

So This Horse Walks Into a Bar
Governor General Earl Grey’s championship trophy was first handed out in 1909. Western teams began challenging for what had been a central Canadian title in the ‘20s. But the Grey Cup did not become the great national blow-out until 1948, when the Calgary Stampeders took on the Ottawa Rough Riders in Toronto. That’s when an enterprising photographer captured the image of a Calgary fan sauntering into the Royal York Hotel on the back of a snorting horse. The resulting shot was plastered on newspaper front pages across the country. The Canadian football championship was suddenly synonymous with fun! From here on, the Grey Cup was anything but grey.

Shanked Kickoff
TV came to Canada in 1952. The first Grey Cup telecast was aired that November by the CBC’s Toronto affiliate, CBLT. Well, three quarters of the game. The match between the Toronto Argonauts and Edmonton Eskimos could be seen by 700,000 local TV fans. In the third quarter, someone tripped a sideline cable at Varsity Stadium, creating an outage in a nearby microwave receiver. A repairman had to shimmy the 300-foot tower to repair the break. The picture returned 29 minutes later.

Pasta ball: Jackie "Spaghetti Legs" Parker runs for a winning touchdown in the 1954 Grey Cup final.

What a Pinhead!
According to veteran broadcaster Johnny Esaw, one play in the 1954 final made the Grey Cup a can’t-miss proposition. “Montreal was leading Edmonton 25-20 with time running out,” Esaw remembers. “And they had the ball at the Montreal goal line. Montreal coach Pinhead Walker called for a risky pitchout. There was a fumble and Jackie ‘Spaghetti Legs’ Parker, the most exciting player in CFL history, grabbed the ball and ran 90 yards the other way for the winning touchdown. People were talking about it all off-season. ‘Did you see that play?’ If you weren’t there, you didn’t. Replays hadn’t arrived yet. Lots of people told me they bought TVs to watch the next Cup. Every year the broadcast got bigger.” Indeed, the Grey Cup was first broadcast in French in 1955. CBC’s microwave transmission extended to Winnipeg in 1956. By 1957, the CFL final was telecast live across the country.

A Really Grey Cup
Unlike the Super Bowl, which is customarily played indoors at room temperature, the Grey Cup is usually fought outdoors in brutal winter weather, which somehow turns the championship game into an entirely satisfying Canadian spectacle. “The Grey Cup is about the defeat of winter as much as other teams,” sportswriter Dick Beddoes once observed. “Once a year we get together and spit in winter’s eye.” That one Grey Cup, the 1962 Fog Bowl, was postponed when a sour mist off Lake Ontario rolled into Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium, swallowing the 35,000-seat facility whole. It only proves that the battle between football and Canadian winter is a fair fight. The game was called with nine minutes left, with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers up 29-28 over the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. The remainder of the contest was played on a fog-free Monday afternoon. Nobody scored, so Winnipeg remained victorious.

Sly guy: Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau walks down the grandstand steps to present the 1970 Grey Cup trophy. CP Photo/Peter Bregg.

The Trudeau Years
No Canadian leader was a bigger booster of the Grey Cup than Pierre Trudeau, who attended the game a record seven times between 1968 and 1981. Indeed, Trudeau was the best half-time show in Grey Cup history prior to Shania Twain. The P.M. once showed up for a contest in Montreal dressed like he was headed out for a night on the town with Sly Stone, wearing a ranch’s worth of mink topped off by a gleaming white knit hat.

Forget Janet Jackson
In 1974, Ray Stevens’ song The Streak went top-10, exciting a wave of naked public strolls. The 1975 Grey Cup game was held in cold, cold Calgary. Despite -25C temperatures, a young Calgarian named Nadia Stooshnoff roamed the field wearing little more than a smile during O Canada. Eyes averted, Calgary police finally escorted Nadia away. Before she left, Prime Minister Trudeau turned to CFL commissioner Jake Gaudaur and commented, “You’ve really jazzed the pre-game show up this year.”

Deflated Football
After Trudeau’s 1981 visit, no Canadian Prime Minister would attend a Grey Cup for 22 years. Over the course of 15 seasons the air gradually went out of the game in central Canada. The Montreal Alouettes folded in 1987. The Ottawa Rough Riders collapsed in 1996. In an effort to remain alive, the CFL expanded into the United States in the mid-’90s. And in 1995, the Baltimore Stallions won the Canadian Football League Championship, defeating the Calgary Stampeders 37-20 before 2,500,000 TV viewers, a record low for modern Grey Cup games.

The Perfect Game
CFL fortunes began improving the next year. First, the league wisely dispensed with American teams and welcomed the Montreal Alouettes back in the fold. The league also lucked out with the 1996 Grey Cup, a perfect Canadian football game played in a slanting blizzard at Hamilton’s Ivor Wynne Stadium. Despite 40-km/h winds and a field that was as white and slippery as a bar of soap, the Toronto Argonauts and the Edmonton Eskimos whipped back and forth across the field. This marvellously played affair was eventually won by Toronto, 43-37. The true victor in the 1996 Grey Cup, however, was Canadian football: the game attracted 3,429,000 TV viewers.

Better TV Packaging
CFL broadcasters smartened up in the late ’90s, doing a better job of promoting games. TSN went to Friday-night games in 1998, while CBC began offering a full array of Saturday-night contests in 2002. Smart moves, as both those time slots, generally regarded as “going out” nights by American broadcasters, were ripe for attracting Canadian family viewers. The results were spectacular. TSN ratings shot up 117 percent over five years, from 155,000 to 336,000 viewers a game, while CBC ratings soared 43 per cent in the same period, occasionally gathering audiences of more than a million.

Half-time diva: Shania Twain waves to the crowd during the half-time show at the 2002 Grey Cup in Edmonton. CP Photo/Adrian Wyld.

The Woman in the Yellow Ski Jacket
In 2002, Ottawa reacquired a franchise; the CFL was whole again. Proving that the Grey Cup could become a hot TV commodity while remaining true to its cold-winter roots, Shania Twain performed an energetic 20-minute concert in a yellow ski jacket during halftime at the icebox that was Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium. Almost 4.5 million Canadians watched the 2002 show, the best rating the championship contest has had in the post-cable TV era. Subsequent contests have all featured a demographically strategic musical act. Bryan Adams performed during halftime the following year. And the Tragically Hip took the stage at the 2004 show in Ottawa, with singer Gord Downie making a boldly defiant Grey Cup fashion statement by performing outdoors in only a T-shirt. This weekend in Vancouver, former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson — who was “discovered” by a Playboy scout when her image appeared on the Jumbotron at a B.C. Lions game in 1989 — will serve as the Grand Marshall of the Saturday morning Grey Cup parade. The Black Eyed Peas will perform during Sunday’s half-time show. The move to broaden the appeal of the Grey Cup has been entirely successful. After Shania, the Grey Cup was suddenly so popular that every politician in Canada wanted to horn in on the act. In 2003, Paul Martin and 10 Canadian premiers attended the Grey Cup in Regina. They were, of course, booed by fans in attendance, many of whom remembered what happened the last time a sour fog crept in over a Grey Cup game.