“I still remember watching this game with my whole family at my grandparents' house,” my husband tells me. “I sat beside my grandfather and he explained what was happening. And after the Riders lost, my one uncle who was a Saskatchewan fan took off his pin and set the ribbon on fire.”
We are watching a replay of the 1972 Grey Cup, as my husband recalls the odd things that adults do – and six-year-olds remember – when the local team wins the big football game.
Held at Hamilton's Ivor Wynne stadium and won by the hometown Tiger-Cats, the '72 Grey Cup is a classic that lives large in the city's psyche.
We are watching it courtesy of Mark’s – the company that deserves a plug for recently digitizing and uploading nearly 70 years of Grey Cup football games.
Many people apparently binge-watched Netflix to make it through pandemic lockdowns. My football-crazy husband binge-watched Grey Cup games.
The earliest games – grainy black-and-white matches played without the benefit of most field markings or television graphics – are a challenge for lazy spectators like me, accustomed to the assistance of a brightly marked first down line.
I quickly give up watching with him, but he perseveres – marvelling at the changes in the game, the broadcasting, the officiating and the glimpses into an evolving Canadian society.
“Hey, come look at this,” he randomly shouts, calling me over to watch a great catch, a streaker running across the field, or Pierre Trudeau booting the ceremonial kick-off.
There are many amusing oddities. One game is delayed when a fan runs onto the field and swipes the ball. Another sees players sliding around in a mud bowl, with officials tossing entire strips of loose turf off the field.
Pre-game shows capture the styles and sensibilities of the country. For decades, Miss Grey Cup is a regular feature – introduced and ogled before heading off on the arm of the reigning commissioner of the Canadian Football League.
Technology brings colour to the games, improves the definition, adds replays. Modern sports broadcasting emerges, as commentators, commercials and various CFL logos march across our television screen.
As a referee of local football games, my husband is fascinated with the changing rules and the mechanics of the officials. He captures big game screenshots of the officials who he once knew only as heroes and legends but now counts among his Facebook friends.
And of course, we see the greatest players in CFL history leave their mark on the game.
Our tangled football history
Hamilton’s football team is mixed into my husband’s earliest memories. I can’t say the same. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as Canadian football when I arrived at Hamilton’s McMaster University in the fall of 1986.
A few months later, I was at a Grey Cup party with my future husband, watching the Cats handily demolish the Edmonton Eskimos to capture the 74th Cup.
A ribbon of Ticat games, football road trips and Grey Cups run through the decades of our life together. But the team wouldn’t win the championship again until 1999, when an eight-and-a-half-month pregnant version of me took up half the couch at the 87th Grey Cup party.
And they have not won the big game since. Not once in the lifetime of my 22-year-old son.
That son, who could chant the Ticats' storied Oskee Wee Wee cheer even before he could recite the alphabet, has grown up immersed in Hamilton’s football traditions. He has cheered for the Cats in cities across the country and been in the stands at two Grey Cup championships.
This Sunday, the 108th Grey Cup will finally give him – and all of us – a chance to root for Hamilton’s team in Hamilton’s stadium for the first time in nearly 50 years.
Surrounded by a family of football friends made solid through two decades of season tickets, we will be buoyed by the shared emotion of the crowd – and our memories of that ’72 win at home.