Illustration by Jillian Tamaki
Canadians don’t need reminding that there is a big football game on TV this Sunday. Just as everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, so most of us are football fans come the Grey Cup, the most popular Canadian TV event of the year.
By now it’s in our DNA. The U.S. Super Bowl, which comes with Roman numerals and multi-million dollar advertising tie-ins, is way better hyped. But after watching the Canadian Football League championship for 53 years, we seem to prefer the Grey Cup, thank you. Last November, CBC pulled in 3.8 million for the CFL championship, while the extravagantly promoted CBS Super Bowl simulcast that aired on Global in January captured only 3.56 million viewers.
Not that either the CFL or its championship game have always been a smooth toboggan ride. The league was on life support in central Canada in the mid-’90s. And broadcasters have had to surmount all kinds of difficulties to bring us the Grey Cup. In 1962, when the fledgling CTV network was awarded the Big Show, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker intervened, declaring the Grey Cup to be “the greatest unifying force in Canada.” The government demanded that the new network offer a feed to CBC in areas that CTV didn’t serve. Alas, Dief’s determined stewardship went for naught. The ’62 game was conducted in a fog as thick as a sweater. There have been other Grey Cup calamities: matches played in snowstorms that might foil Arctic explorers; a tripped cable that sent the picture to a test pattern for half an hour; and one title game where the Canadian championship was won by a club from Baltimore, Maryland.
Still, we Canadians seem to like our institutions beleaguered, which is why this Sunday, several million of us will gather in our family rooms to watch the CBC broadcast of a football game involving the Edmonton Eskimos and the Montreal Alouettes. Here’s a time travelogue explaining how the Grey Cup has morphed into the biggest Canadian TV event of the year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.
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