Lefko on LaPolice: Huard made his mark

He will be remembered as one of the oddest head coaches in Canadian Football League history.

The mere mention of John Huard’s name will cause anger among Toronto Argonauts’ fans who were witness to a season in 2000 unlike any other. It launched the head coaching career of Michael (Pinball) Clemons and the beginning of a journey for a young positional coach who is now a head coach.

Paul LaPolice would not be in the Grey Cup coaching the Winnipeg Blue Bombers were it not for Huard. LaPolice is the only member of Huard’s ragtag staff in 2000 that’s still active in any meaningful way in football.

The Blue Bombers coach is a survivor.

Long after Huard resigned, leaving with a 1-6-1 record and taking with him the red waterproof rain suit that he wore on the sideline so his players could easily distinguish him, LaPolice remained. Clemons kept LaPolice on his staff when he was appointed as head coach while still active as a player following Huard’s unceremonious departure.

Clemons retained LaPolice in 2001 when he assembled his own staff, and LaPolice left the Argos after that 2001 season when Clemons stepped down to become the team’s president.

LaPolice began the typical nomadic path of a positional coach thereafter in the CFL hoping to climb the ladder to success. It has brought him to this year’s Grey Cup in only his second full season as a head coach. Last year he had a 4-14 record, worst in the CFL, but he vaulted to first in the East this year and is one win away from the greatest achievement of his coaching career.

He has often credited Huard, with whom he still keeps in contact with. He calls him Coach Huard with the ultimate of respect and reverence because of what he means to him personally.

Huard did a lot of weird things as a coach in Toronto — having his players take Popsicle breaks in training camp instead of water breaks — and a few years before that in Shreveport as head coach of the now-defunct Pirates.

Huard lasted a week into training camp before he was fired by team owner Lonie Glieberman, who ran the team for his father and collectively helped run professional football in Ottawa right into the ground.

But we digress. Huard is an eminently successful businessman these days in the field of installing ersatz football turf. He was in the early stages of that in 2000, and amid the daily turmoil of the Argos he candidly admitted he didn’t need to coach because he could return to his boat in Maine and live quite comfortably.

When it became apparent the fans and players had enough of him and the media would cut him no slack, he told the man who hired him, J.I. Albrecht, one of the two was going to lose their job. So he took the bullet for Albrecht, who would later admit hiring Huard was a colossal mistake even though he loved him like a son.

Huard can laugh about that all now. He said some of the players on the Argos were “prima donnas” and that didn’t help. But LaPolice, for one, was undying in his loyalty.

“LaPo was very unique,” Huard told sportsnet.ca on Monday in a phone interview from Maine. “He’s worked at it, just as you can see by looking at his resume and where he’s been. Once he got into the CFL, he stayed. He’s done a great job in handling his people and bringing his team together.”

Huard sent LaPolice a note on Monday crediting him for surviving that 2000 season and staying true to his passion and dedication to football and coaching and for a similar commitment to his family.

“He has a chance to do something that not many people have a chance to do at a very young age,” Huard said.

What’s interesting is Huard’s connection to both Buono and LaPolice. One season in the 1970s, Huard played in the CFL as a linebacker for Montreal. He was a teammate of Buono, who played 10 seasons for Montreal as a punter/linebacker. Albrecht was the teams personnel director and signed both Buono and Huard, who recalled lining up on the field as starting linebackers at the same time as Buono in some formations. So now it is the Huard protégé against one of Huard’s former teammates.

“Wally (Buono) was always dedicated to the game. He was always consistent in what he was doing,” Huard said. “Wally seldom ever made mistakes.”

Huard plans to watch Sunday’s game via satellite, and acknowledged that somewhere in the celestial skies the late Albrecht will also be watching, one good eye and all, and smiling with that unmistakable grin knowing he had something to do with Buono and LaPolice becoming head coaches and facing one another on Sunday in the Cup.

Albrecht has long since passed, but his influence on the CFL landscape is far reaching.

“J.I. (Albright) was eccentric,” Huard said. “He was a different individual.”

Albrecht viewed football like the military and wanted his players to be rough and tough. He considered Huard the toughest player he ever witnessed.

Huard’s career in the CFL amounted to little more than a funny footnote in Shreveport and Toronto. But he brought along a young coach who has graduated into a full-fledged head coach. LaPolice will clearly be one of the finalists for the Coach of the Year award in 2011.

“To be a head coach you’ve got to go to a lot of different places and you’ve got to look at different systems,” Huard said. “Different systems can be successful. It’s up to you to find a system that’s best for you or your design and develop your own system if you have that opportunity. I think Paul is having that opportunity now.”

Huard failed in Shreveport and Toronto for Huard for various reasons, and in some ways he was ahead of his time using computer analysis with the Argos. But give him credit for spotting a future head coach in LaPolice. Huard did something right for all the things he did wrong.