Spector on CFL: Nothing quite like the Grey Cup
Posted November 24, 2011 1:13 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
I get it. You’re young, and the Canadian Football League is for the old.
So there are an increasing number of you out there who will go through life without ever putting together a few friends, hopping on a plane, and spending a weekend conducting the ancient practice of “Grey Cupping.”
We understand that. The Canadian Football League just isn’t hip; the National Football League has captured the generation that follows my own, and that’s just the way it is. My own son loves the Pittsburgh Steelers, but couldn’t be bothered to watch the Eskimos, the team his father grew up with.
Know this, however: We have met many who have never – and may never – go abroad to enjoy a Grey Cup weekend. We have never met anyone however, who went there and didn’t come home talking about one of the best parties they’d ever attended.
It is debauchery on a purely Canadian level. Think Bob and Doug McKenzie’s version of “The Hangover,” without the Tiger, without the baby, and definitely without the sunburn. It is here where both Miles Gorrell (the old offensive lineman) and Myles Goodwyn (old April Wine front man) will always have a place; where Sportsnet anchors Jamie Campbell and Brad Fay couldn’t line up lodging one year in Regina, so they rented a furnished apartment for the entire month.
“Six hundred and fifty bucks!” Campbell announced that year. “I’ve got ‘er for the rest of the month!”
The best room at any Grey Cup – the Spirit of Edmonton suite – has no cover charge to this day, and once inside time does not move. The clientele, with nameplates on their jerseys like “Ryan Ginger,” and “Whiskey Dick,” is timeless. The rented hot tubs filled with ice and beer. The fine distinction between dancing and a serious injury waiting to occur.
I could put you inside a packed Spirit ballroom, and you might not be able to tell me whether it’s 1992 or 2011. But when you emerge from a Grey Cup weekend, for those hearty souls who possess the constitution to rev it up again on game day, the reward at a Grey Cup has over the years been some of my favorite memories through 25 years of writing about sports.
Grey Cup is the home of the castaway quarterback: Anthony Calvillo, the Hispanic kid from L.A. whose road to the CFL Hall of Fame began with the Las Vegas Posse. Darian Durant, who was packing his things for home when the phone rang, and then Saskatchewan GM Eric Tillman said, “Don’t leave. I’m on my way over.” Where Buck Pierce can find his way to a Grey Cup, in the home of and against the team that gave up on him.
Only at the Grey Cup could the story of the 13th man occur, costing the Saskatchewan Roughriders a championship, and revealing the character of Kavis Reed, the special teams coach who shouldered the blame so that his player wouldn’t have to.
“I gotta live with that for the rest of my life,” Reed said after that ’09 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.”
The next year Calvillo announced – totally out of the blue at game’s end – that he probably had cancer, and was heading in for a series of tests.
“In the next week or so I’ll be heading for surgery on my thyroid, to remove a lesion that, uh, they’re not sure what it is,” said Calvillo in his postgame press conference. “I didn’t want to say a dang thing, but the emotions got the better of me.”
I once asked a man in a Calgary Stampeders jersey on a dance floor in Winnipeg, how he could be seen hanging out with the woman he was dancing with, adorned in an Eskimos jersey.
“The sex is great!” he replied, without missing a step.
Simple, and to the point. Very much like a weekend at the Grey Cup.
