In Jael Ealey Richardson’s memoir The Stone Thrower, about her relationship with her famous quarterback father, she conjures up an image of Chuck Ealey as a ten-year-old boy hanging out by the railroad tracks on a daily basis with a handful of stones, waiting for the train dragging coal cars labelled Norfolk and Western “in faded yellow” to appear.
“The train moves faster and the ground rumbles as the train roars towards him. He selects a stone and pulls his arm back as a gust of wind rushes through him, the train passing quickly.… He watches for the light between the cars.… He narrows his eyes to focus. Wait. Light. Throw. The stone flies toward the coal train, the cars rocking with the rapid motion of the rails. BANG! The rock lands on the N and the boy shakes his fist in triumph.”
The story manages to create a mythical origin for a quarterback’s golden arm, the pinpoint accuracy that led to an unbeaten record as a starting quarterback in high school and university, while at the same time painting a picture of a time, a place, and a set of economic circumstances where a poor black kid entertained himself by hurling stones at passing freight trains. In Portsmouth, Ohio, where Chuck Ealey grew up, there wasn’t an obvious metaphorical barrier like tracks that divided the haves from the have-nots. That barrier was a line defined nearly 350 years earlier when the first slave ship hit port in the New World carrying its human cargo below deck.
“You’ve got to remember during that time growing up, we weren’t in the South,” Chuck Ealey told me in his Investors Group Mississauga office; it’s not the most visually interesting location for our interview, but Chuck appears to be in his element behind a desk. “We were just right across the river from Kentucky in Ohio on the Ohio River. [But] it was almost a Southern flavour, so there was a lot of segregation things that were going on. I lived in what were the ‘projects.’ You don’t have ‘projects’ here in Canada, not like we have in the States. That area of town was called the North End. That’s where we lived. All the black people lived there.”
Chuck Ealey isn’t kidding about “Southern flavour.” Portsmouth’s motto is “Where Southern hospitality begins.” That’s one way of looking at it. Or you could add a second line to complete the thought: “… and Southern attitudes prevail.” Although Black Americans make up only 5 percent of the population of Portsmouth, 95 percent of them live in the city’s north end where Chuck grew up.
Portsmouth was founded at the confluence of the Scioto and Ohio Rivers in southern Ohio, which made it perfectly situated as a manufacturing base and shipping centre. The population peaked in 1930 at 40,000 but since then has steadily decreased with the loss of industry, a story too common across America, and has now bottomed out at 20,000 inhabitants. Portsmouth is no longer the thriving industrial town of the last century where work was plentiful and easy to find. These days it is better known for its drug problems, predominantly in prescription drugs and specifically OxyContin or, as it is more euphemistically called, “hillbilly heroin.” And anywhere you have drug problems you are bound to find an increase in crime.
Chuck’s parents divorced when he was four years old. His father, an alcoholic and an itinerant worker, was around, living a shadowy existence in rumours but not a part of Chuck’s life. Chuck was raised by his mother, Earline, who cleaned white homes and worked in the local hospital as a nurse’s assistant. He converted to Catholicism at seven years old, went to a Catholic middle school, and then started at Notre Dame High School in 1964.
“Growing up in that period of time, mid-late ’50s, early ’60s, you kind of grew into something that was a prejudicial environment. You understood it. You knew where you shouldn’t go, but going outside of the area wasn’t like you crossed the line and now you had to be looking over your shoulder. You understood where the black community was, where the white community was, what type of prejudicial issues you were going to run into, but you weren’t always running into them. It wasn’t a case where you were fearful to go to the high school, that you were fearful to walk in the area. You could go into an area, and someone could call your name or act foolish, and you moved on. So it was just a way of the times. There was a great deal of turmoil in society as a whole, and I was just a product of that turmoil. At any time you could run into something that was not necessarily favourable for you racially.”
It was not until his junior year at Notre Dame that he got his chance to start at quarterback. He never looked back. Without a father in the picture, Chuck came to view his football coach, Ed Miller, as something of a father figure.
“I had mentors of older guys in the area playing sports like football and basketball that I wanted to be like. So there were community mentors. But Ed Miller became more like a father figure — teaching things about drive and discipline and direction.”
Some of the methods that Coach Miller used to instill “drive and discipline and direction” in his players back in the ’60s would most definitely be frowned upon today. These were high-school kids, after all, not Special Forces. Coach Miller would withhold liquids during training, substituting salt tablets instead, to make his team more mentally tough. One of the trainers used to soak a towel in cold water so that players he was tending to could suck water from the fabric under the coach’s radar. Whether or not restrictions of this sort actually made the players mentally tougher than their opponents is questionable. But it allowed them to believe that they were tougher than the other guys, which was more the point of the whole exercise.
Coach Miller not only made Chuck the starting quarterback, he made him the nonpareil star of the team. Each week, a top star of the game would be announced by the coaching staff and for one week that chosen player would get to drive the team’s prize car around town, showing off. But it seemed that no matter what a player did on the field in any game, the star of the week, week after week, was always Chuck Ealey. This clear favouritism drove everyone on the team crazy, but once again it accomplished the coach’s purpose. It made every player work that much harder in each and every game to try to unseat Chuck. The car became secondary, a mere status symbol. What it really meant was I beat out Chuck Ealey.
Notre Dame’s chief rivals were West Portsmouth, who regularly filled a 20,000-seat stadium for their home games. For a Canadian, attendance numbers like that and facilities capable of holding crowds that size at the high-school level seem unimaginable, but in the States, Friday Night Lights is not the exception, it’s the rule. A stadium like “the Big House” in Ann Arbor, home to the University of Michigan Wolverines, has a seating capacity in excess of 109,000, a mind-boggling number for the average Canadian. The Western University Mustangs, one of the most successful college football teams in Canada, play their home games at the TD Stadium, which was built in 2000 to accommodate their devoted fan base. It has a capacity of 8,000, a spit in the ocean that is the American football industry. If Western was ever to play a home game against Michigan, there would be 101,000 displaced persons roaming the streets of London clamouring for a non-existent ticket.
As a small school, Notre Dame played not only West Portsmouth but also other small schools in rural southern Ohio. Notre Dame did have the distinction — or notoriety — of having the only integrated football team in the region, and that just meant they had Chuck and his friend Al Bass. Those two players could be usually called upon to receive their share of attention from opposing teams as well as their fans. Parents of the Notre Dame players were called upon to escort their sons to the team bus after games against West Portsmouth to protect them from thrown objects and curses. White players were under as much fire as their black teammates for the crime of being associated with a team that contained black athletes.
But perhaps the worst indignity occurred when West Portsmouth supporters — oh, let’s call them vandals — painted a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary situated in front of Notre Dame High School with black paint in honour of Chuck Ealey and Al Bass. If the plan was to get under the skin of the Notre Dame football team, the perpetrators of this sacrilege failed miserably. Notre Dame went undefeated two straight years with Chuck Ealey at quarterback. That was the beginning of the legend, the unbeatable quarterback.
Bruce Smith grew up in the shadow of Huntsville Prison, more properly called Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville or Huntsville Unit. It’s commonly known as the Walls Unit, so named for its iconic red brick walls. At one time back in the nineteenth century, the prison was reserved for white Texans. This was segregation with a macabre edge. Only whites were accorded jail time; black people were summarily whipped or hanged, the only two options available. Since 1982 and the reinstatement of the death penalty in Texas, 553 death-row prisoners have been executed there by lethal injection. Before this more “humane” method was introduced, the preferred treatment was a massive jolt in “Old Sparky,” the state-owned electric chair introduced in 1924 and retired in 1964, which was used to electrocute 364 inmates. If you happen to be feeling peculiarly nostalgic, you can still visit Old Sparky anytime at the Texas Prison Museum out on Interstate 45 north of Huntsville.
Every day on his way to school, Bruce Smith had to pass those iconic red walls looming over him. This was his peculiar bogeyman, a child’s daily experience of dread like the huge growling dog on a neighbour’s chain that pulls the beast up just short of the sidewalk, the haunted house covered in vines and inhabited by evil witches, or the bully’s house that must be passed alone. The walls erected to keep prisoners inside formed their own prison in the mind of Bruce Smith. If you don’t get out of this town this is where you’ll end up. A fatalism born of racism and poverty. And there was a third option open: death. A chill crept into his voice when he spoke of his memories of that institution.
“Huntsville prison was a real bastion of brutality, man. You walk by this big wall, all you could see was a guy up in the gun tower with his dark glasses on like in Cool Hand Luke, and you knew, man, that you didn’t want to go there. Not a place I wanted to go. And unfortunately, there were a lot of black people in there. For things like one marijuana stick — life in prison. It was just ridiculous. Over fifty percent of the population there was black.”
The highlight of the year in Huntsville was the Texas Prison Rodeo, held on weekends throughout October. People came from out of state for the thrill of watching inmates — black and white — busting broncos, riding bulls, and roping calves. One event you didn’t find on a regular rodeo circuit, for the obvious reason that it was far too dangerous, was twenty-five inmates in bright red shirts competing with each other to be the first to pry a bag of tobacco loose from a raging bull’s horns without getting maimed, stomped, or gored in the act. So great was the demand for tickets that a 20,000-seat stadium was built to accommodate the crowds. What better attraction than a bunch of performers with nothing to lose?
Bruce grew up fatherless. The first time Smith remembered seeing his father, he was eleven years old, when his father had invited Bruce and his brothers and sister to visit him in California.
“I remember him driving up in this big shiny Cadillac,” Bruce said, seated at one end of a leather couch in front of a window in the Toronto art gallery where we met. The late-afternoon traffic rushed by outside. “Man, was I excited — until I saw this cute little black Barbie-doll-looking woman sitting where my mama should have been sitting. I made up my mind right then not to like her; this would be war.”
That anger built up during his adolescent years, creating deep emotional scars that Smith claimed turned him into a bully and got him into a lot of trouble at school. He wasn’t just big for his age, he was big for his size. In today’s world he would have been the type of kid targeted by anti-bullying campaigns. Sports became an outlet for much of his anger.
“In high school, we only knew about black football,” he said. “We didn’t know nothing about white football. Everything was black, my high school was black. I was playing basketball, baseball, and football; it was all black. They wouldn’t allow us to play with the white kids. You weren’t allowed to ride on the same bus as the white kids, we weren’t allowed to eat in the same restaurants. We used to eat at the back. You go into the back door, and sit down and eat. There was a special place for coloured only. As a matter of fact, even in the water fountains, it said coloured boys or coloured girls. Everything was marked. We didn’t think anything of it. We felt that’s just the way it was. We actually felt — at least I did — that white people were superior.”
In 1961, the first Freedom Riders began their campaign to protest the non-enforcement in the South of the Supreme Court decision against segregated public transit. The first bus loaded with both black and white civil rights activists was to travel from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans. The bus never got that far. It was met by Ku Klux Klan members in Alabama, who slashed the tires and firebombed the bus with the passengers still aboard. A mob tried to keep the people from getting out. They actually believed that these riders deserved to burn to death for their activism. The riders did manage to escape the flames, only to be beaten half to death by the mob. But their message had taken hold and spread far and wide. Soon there were Freedom Riders coming from as far away as Canada to take part in these rides through the South. One of these buses pulled into Huntsville, Texas, in 1966 and the riders began to spread their message.
“I lived in a little place called ‘the Alley,’” said Bruce. “One way in, one way out. It was a narrow little place, shacks on both sides of the alley, hardly enough room for a car to drive down, so at the end of the alley [the Freedom Riders] set up shop. I remember the theme song was called, ‘Hey you!’ just like in the army, and I was like, that’s me, they’re talking to me. There’s these people from up north, a couple of white folk, saying ‘Hey, you don’t have to eat in the back of a restaurant anymore! You can ride at the front of the bus!’ We said, ‘That’s crazy; they’d shoot you for that!’ So I remember we went to our first meeting. They told us about Rosa Parks, they told us about what was happening in other places in America now. How black people were fighting for their civil rights.… So we started to walk and carry our signs, ‘We shall overcome’ — that was our song.”
Rather than institute full-scale integration in 1966, the state of Texas decided it would phase in integration gradually and in select areas.
“They sent — to an all-black school, my school — they sent us a couple white teachers, some white students, and three white coaches. Three white coaches to an all-black school. We freaked out! I said, no way, no way, absolutely no way, will I ever play for a white coach. And they sent us a nervous little white guy, a little fat guy named Morris Magee. I said, ‘Well your time here won’t be long.’”
Bruce organized a boycott by a number of the black players on his high-school team. Although he had experienced something of a political awakening through the Freedom Riders, his scope was very narrow. He treated it as something of a lark, an opportunity to cut classes or cause trouble. He would have been the first to tell you he lacked conviction.
“We used to sit up in the stands during practice, and those who went along with the white program we called an Uncle Tom. So we’re sitting up there, ‘You Uncle Tom! You no-good Uncle Tom!’ And we were just making fun of the guys. But after two days of that we got bored and wanted to play.”
The question was how to continue to protest against the white coaches and still play football. Bruce gathered his charges together and laid out the plan. They would go back to the team, practise as usual, but when it came game time they would just make no effort to block, no effort to tackle. They would make their statement where it hurt the most, on the field and in front of the coaches and the fans. No one would miss the point. And that’s what they did during the next game against a highly rated team. At least half the team didn’t block, tackle, or make any discernible effort. At halftime they were down 32–0, and those responsible were having a good laugh about it in the locker room.
“We had this young coach named Skeeter. He was only about nineteen or twenty, probably just graduated from university. This guy was red as a beet. He was so mad! You could see smoke coming out of his ears. And he picks up this helmet and slams it against the wall! Against a locker. BAM! He got our attention, let me tell you. So Skeeter decided he was going to talk to us. ‘You know, if I were you, I’d probably be doing the same thing.’ He said, ‘You know what, if you do this, you’re going to make everything white people say true about you. If you’re going to make a difference, you go out there, and you play the best you can. You show white people you are every bit as good or better than the white teams.’ Let me tell you, the speech worked because we only lost that game by two points. And after that game, we galvanized, and we really felt that these coaches were really for us — and they were.”
Under that “nervous little white guy,” Morris Magee, Bruce blossomed as a football player in his senior year. He had never worked out in his life, but under Coach Magee he began to train hard and for the first time began to take this game of football seriously. It wasn’t long before the Samuel Walker Houston High School football team became the best team in the district and Bruce was named captain and Most Valuable Player. He used that outstanding senior year to attain scholarship offers from a number of black universities, including Texas Southern and Prairie View.
He had yet to make up his mind when one day he heard his name over the school intercom telling him to go to the cafeteria. His first thought was, What did I do now? When he walked into the cafeteria he noticed a tall, thin, bald-headed white man wandering about on the periphery of the tables. Once again, Bruce’s defensive instincts kicked into paranoid overdrive as his mind shuffled through a mental file of possible misdemeanours. This guy must be a cop.
That “cop” turned out to be Eddie Crowder, head coach of the University of Colorado Buffaloes football team. He had been scouting players from larger schools in the Houston area when he’d seen this massive linebacker from Huntsville, #61, running all over the field destroying everyone who dared touch the football. Inquiries were made. And that’s how Eddie Crowder happened to be wandering about the Samuel Walker Houston High School cafeteria in search of Bruce Smith.
“How’d you like to go to University of Colorado?”
“Where’s that?”
“You ever been to the mountains?”
“Nope.”
“How’d you like to fly on an airplane?”
“Not too sure about that one.”
“How’d you like to be on national TV? You could be playing for a big-time school and be on television next year.”
“Sounds good, man. Let me think about it.”
There was, however, a caveat.
“All you have to do is take the SAT test and the ACT test. Pass the tests, and you’re in.”
“Oh, no problem, no problem,” Bruce assured him.
Though Bruce was quick with the cocky response, on the inside he was anything but. ACT test? That’s the same test the white kids have to take, he thought. How in the world am I going to pass a test that the white kids take? The old beliefs and fears resurfaced that maybe white people really were superior and that all the things the Freedom Riders had preached about equality were a lie. So he pretended that he wasn’t interested. Who wants to go live in the mountains anyway? I’d rather stay in Texas. But Coach Magee wasn’t going to make it easy for him.
“What about Colorado, Bruce? You could be doing this town a real justice, son. No one from this town has ever gone to a major university. Black or white. You’d be the first!”
Bruce finally capitulated and took the test to get his coach off his back. In his heart, he knew he had failed. How could he not? He couldn’t possibly compete with the white kids off the playing field. He put Colorado out of his mind. Instead he turned his mind toward Alcorn State, an all-black university in Mississippi with one of the best football programs in the country. They offered Bruce a full scholarship with a guarantee that he would be starting as a freshman. The road to the NFL looked like it might run right through Henderson Stadium in Lorman, Mississippi.
Morris Magee would not quit. He believed that Bruce was settling for Alcorn State as opposed to eagerly embracing it. Their daily greetings became a routine Q and A.
“What about Colorado?”
“Not interested.”
Bruce held tight to his belief that he had failed on his ACT. Coach Magee went ahead and contacted the head coach at Sam Houston University, a major university right in Huntsville. How ironic that the football coach of a high school named after a former slave should reach out to the head coach of a university named after the former owner of that former slave. Only in America. Coach Magee had his hands full in promoting Bruce. Sam Houston had never had a black player on its football team.
“You need to talk to Bruce Smith. He’s one of my kids.”
“You talking about that black guy? That Negro player? We don’t want any Negroes in our college.”
“Well, let me tell you something. You don’t have a football player on your team as good as him. I don’t care if they’re a senior or whatever, you’d be a fool if you don’t give this boy a scholarship.”
“Okay, we’ll give him a look. I’m not promising anything.”
Bruce was nervous showing up for camp at the Sam Houston University practice field, seventeen years old and the only black kid among the tryouts and veterans. He had drawn his own black cheering crowd, who were watching him through the fence because they were not allowed inside. One thing about Bruce: he never lacked for confidence on the playing field. Never met an opponent he couldn’t beat. It was time to show this all-white team what Bruce Smith could do.
“We had our first practice and I just ate them up. I put a beating on those guys. People outside the fence were screaming and going crazy. The defensive coach really liked me. He said, ‘Man, we would really like to have you here. You could start with us right now. Middle linebacker is your position.’ The head coach though, the whole time I was there, the man never said one word to me.”
Meanwhile, Bruce had gotten his test results from the University of Colorado but had left the envelope unopened for an entire month, so sure was he that he had failed. Finally, he opened it. “Lo and behold, I passed!” He went to his last practice at Sam Houston University, rejuvenated and bursting with pride, but he had still been given no indication by the head coach that there was a place for him on the team. As he left the dressing room that night, he discovered the head coach lurking in the shadows behind the facility where no one could see him. The coach called to him from the darkness, his face hidden.
“Hey Smith, come here. I want to talk to you.”
“Okay. What about?”
“How would you like a scholarship to Sam Houston University?”
“You know what? That sounds really good. But you’re a little late.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever heard of the University of Colorado? You ever hear of that place? Because that’s where I’m going!”
There are more than 140 quarterbacks enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame and Chick-fil-A Fan Experience. The Hall of Fame was located in South Bend, Indiana, until 2012. Attendance figures started going down. That’s when the National Football Foundation, which runs the Hall of Fame, decided to move to a different market, a more football-friendly universe (and preferably one that served as headquarters for a chicken franchise).
Not one of those 140–odd quarterbacks in the Hall of Fame ever went 35–0 as a starter in American college football. But that’s what Chuck Ealey’s record was at the University of Toledo. In three seasons, with Chuck installed as number one (freshmen players were not allowed to play for the varsity squad), the Rockets never lost a game, including three straight Tangerine Bowl victories (now known as the Citrus Bowl) in Orlando, Florida.
Chuck Ealey is not in the College Football Hall of Fame.
Now, to be fair, the Hall of Fame has rules governing who gets in and who does not. It doesn’t matter in any way what a player might do in his subsequent professional football career, so there are certainly NFL superstars without a place of honour in the college hall. Here is the sticking point with Chuck Ealey. In order to qualify for a place in the Hall, a player must receive first-team All-American recognition by a selector on the NCAA’s list of recognized sources. Chuck Ealey was recognized as such by the Football News in 1971. The problem is that the Football News was not on the NCAA’s list of preferred sources in 1971. It is now, but it’s too late for Chuck’s bid.
One of the quarterbacks inducted in 2017 is Matt Leinart, former standout QB with the University of Southern California Trojans. No one questions whether Matt Leinart deserves to be in the College Football Hall of Fame. His credentials are impeccable. Over three seasons, he led the USC Trojans to a 37–2 record and a national championship, and on the personal side, he snagged the Heisman Trophy in his junior year. In his first year as a starter, he lost the fourth game of the season to the University of California in triple overtime. After that game and over the next three seasons, Leinart won thirty-four straight games, going into the 2006 Rose Bowl against Texas with a chance for the second national championship in a row.
But in many circles, the national championship between the top two teams in the country took second place to another storyline. If USC were to win the game and national championship, Matt Leinart would tie the existing record for consecutive victories by a college football starting quarterback — thirty-five games straight. That record had been in existence for thirty-four years and belonged to a little-known quarterback from Toledo University named Chuck Ealey. Overnight Chuck had been propelled from the shadows of obscure football trivia into the American limelight. He was suddenly relevant, three decades after his tenure as Toledo quarterback had ended.
For his part, Chuck was rather philosophical about it and grateful for the attention. Records, after all, are meant to be broken. In any interview, when confronted with questions of whether the fact that so few Americans knew of his record or even acknowledged the greatness of his feat was because of racism, he preferred to take the high road. He chose to say that no, he didn’t think it was racism. It was because Toledo was a smaller college without brand recognition and, in the days before a multi-channel universe of football was available, Toledo was hardly the school of choice for a large network’s televised game of the week. But as he noted in an ESPN interview in the build-up to the Rose Bowl, “It would be a record he would have that would go along with me. But he would have one loss.” In other words, Leinart might tie the consecutive-wins mark but he would never be unbeaten, as Chuck had been.
As it turned out, Matt Leinart would have an excellent day at quarterback, completing twenty-nine of forty passes for 365 yards and one touchdown. But Vince Young, the young black quarterback for Texas, would have an even better day, rushing for three touchdowns himself in a 41–38 victory over the Trojans, including a last-minute touchdown and two-point conversion. The two best teams in college football throughout the season of 2005, both unbeaten, left it all on the field in one of the greatest national championships ever played. Lost in the excitement and post-game adulation poured on Vince Young from Texas was Matt Leinart’s failure to match Chuck Ealey’s winning streak — lost everywhere except among the Ealey family, the people of Portsmouth, and the fans of the Toledo University Rockets in Ohio. The legend of the unbeatable quarterback lived on.
Over Chuck’s three seasons at quarterback, the Rockets outscored their opponents 1,152 to 344, which comes out to an average score of roughly 33–10. That is domination. Toledo’s success cannot all be attributed to Chuck Ealey, as the team’s defence led the nation all three seasons. The line was anchored by defensive tackle Mel Long, who’d become a decorated Vietnam War veteran before going to Toledo University. Mel Long played three seasons alongside Chuck Ealey. Mel Long is in the College Football Hall of Fame. Chuck is not.
Bruce Smith began that season of 1969, his sophomore year, as the starting defensive tackle. At some point during the season, he lost the starting job, not because of his on-field performance but because of his off-field one. When he first came to Colorado from Huntsville, he was something of a backward hick, and he sensed it and kept his distance from everyone, including many of the other black players. There were not many, only seven in that sophomore year, but when they had first arrived on campus, there had been a hierarchy. The more outstanding black players recruited from bigger-name high schools were given a more royal treatment. Bruce was not included in this group of elite athletes. He became something of a loner, except for a few local guys from Boulder, non-football players, who were bent on showing him the ropes in the big town.
“I remember this one guy named Buddy who grew up in Boulder. Buddy had a little MG and he said, ‘How’d you like to go to a party?’ So he took me to a party up in the mountains, we got the top down, we’re roaring up the mountains in this little MG. Man, I’m thinking, We’re going to die! So we get to the party and this white girl comes running up to him and gives him a big kiss. ‘You have got to be kidding, man!’ I said. ‘They’d hang you for that where I’m from! I’m serious, man. You got a white girlfriend?!’ ‘Yeah, so what? I grew up like that.’ ‘Man, where I come from, you look at a white girl, and you’re dead.’ And that was the truth. And then I said, ‘Man, this place is a little strange,’ and I kept to myself. To be honest, I was really, really afraid, because I grew up in the South. You just didn’t do that.”
That all changed by his sophomore year. His roommate, who was black, was dating a white girl. And in a predominantly white university, in an overwhelmingly white city like Boulder, there simply wasn’t an abundance of black women. Because of his size and strength, Bruce had acquired a Paul Bunyan–like reputation. Plus, he was a star on the football team, and that never hurt anyone’s chances of finding a date. Bruce finally overcame his inhibitions about talking to white girls, and one in particular. Soon they were “going steady.” And that’s when the head coach, Eddie Crowder, called Bruce into his office to explain how things worked where he came from in Oklahoma and how they should work in Boulder, Colorado, especially if you were going to play for his team.
“You know something, Rob Bruce?” Coach Crowder always referred to Bruce as Rob Bruce. “You’ve got a great future.”
“Thank you, Coach.”
“But you know, Rob Bruce, where I come from we do things a little different.”
“How’s that, Coach?”
“Well, one thing, Rob Bruce, the coloureds and the white folk don’t mix.”
“So, why’d you bring us here?”
“Well, I think you understand what I’m saying.”
Bruce understood what the coach was saying. He just chose to ignore it. Shortly after this meeting, Bruce was benched. No explanation, none required, point made. He was relegated to the role of full-time observer.
That benching included the Liberty Bowl victory over Alabama.
Bruce had always carried a large chip on his shoulder, ever since his father had cut out for California, abandoning the family, when Bruce was only four years old. Through the years, that chip continued to grow with each new perceived indignity. By the summer of 1970, that chip had become a beam large enough to support his house of anger. The benching proved to be a tipping point. He formed a gang with three other local black students. They called themselves “the Wild Bunch” after the characters in the Sam Peckinpah film of the same title. They wore long duster coats, straight out of a spaghetti western, and cut-off gloves, and they carried a shotgun and a .38 and went about the university campus starting fights anywhere, even in the middle of a crowded dance floor, inflicting maximum damage on whoever or whatever was unlucky enough to get in their way. Though Bruce never personally took drugs, he wasn’t above selling them, especially to white people, a hugely profitable business in Boulder, Colorado.
“I really lost my mind. I really did. It was just a lot of anger, a lot of hatred, and I just felt, I’m going to show these white people.”
Then one night the Wild Bunch engaged in a full-scale brawl against a bunch of white guys on campus. Somebody called the cops and everyone involved, black and white, was arrested. They were brought before a judge and, just as one of the white combatants was providing his testimony, the judge abruptly called a halt to the proceedings and ordered everyone into his chambers.
“He took the four of us and six or seven white guys into his chambers. Just as the white kids are set to speak, the judge says to them, ‘I’d like for you to leave the room.’ So they just left us in the room with the judge. He said, ‘What’s up with you guys? You guys are here; I assume you’re on scholarship, otherwise, I don’t know why you’d be here.’ I was the only one who had a scholarship, by the way. He says, ‘I don’t know if you know or not, but Colorado has a lot of Ku Klux Klan.’ And I’m like, ‘What’s he telling us this for?’ He said, ‘If I were you guys, I’d really watch it. I’d really cool it.’ I’m like, ‘This guy’s really trying to frighten us and he’s telling the truth.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you what. I’m going to let you go. I’m not going to charge you, but you’ve been warned.’ And we said, ‘Man, that was weird.’ But we got rid of the guns and the gang disbanded.”
Not long after this incident, Bruce woke up in the middle of the night covered in sweat, his heart beating wildly. He was having a full-blown anxiety attack.
“I thought, If I don’t turn my life around, I’m going back to Huntsville — on death row, picking cotton, or dead.”
That was all the incentive he needed. Right then and there he experienced his epiphany. It was time to rededicate himself to the game of football, even though his chances of playing under an Eddie Crowder–led team seemed as remote as Tibet.
“I got up, and I started just running. I didn’t know what else to do.”
And he kept on running, training like he never had before. He managed to keep his scholarship. He continued to practise with the team but he had slid way down the depth chart. It would take an outbreak of crippling injuries to the defensive corps for him to get a chance to move up and out of Crowder’s doghouse. Then one practice, they brought the scrubs and the doghouse dwellers in to defend against the starting offence. Bruce was in a particularly nasty mood. On the first play, he nearly tore the head off the starting fullback, Bobby Anderson. Cries of “Somebody block 61!” rose from the sidelines. Somebody tried to block 61 and nearly paid for it with his life. Crunch. Another back bit the dust. Bruce was a one-man wrecking crew. A ripple of fear went through the entire coaching staff. Goddammit, he’s going to kill somebody. “Somebody block 61!” But Bruce was on a mission.
“Haven’t you guys figured it out yet?! There ain’t nobody here can block me!”
“Get back there, Smith!” shouted Anderson. A challenge. Bruce lined up. Gave him the sign. Bring it on, baby.
The fullback took the handoff. A hole opened up in the line. Then it slammed shut. Crunch. Anderson was slow to get to his feet.
“They couldn’t find anybody to block me. So they said, okay number 61, you get over here, and you block for Bobby. So they put me on offensive. They would do anything to make sure I didn’t play.”
The hope was that Bruce would just get so frustrated being moved around from position to position, without a hope of getting into a game, that he would quit.
“So I get over to the other side and I’m blocking for Bobby. I got my defensive shoulder pads on and I’m blocking for Bobby. And of course I wipe out anybody who gets in Bobby’s way. Nobody touches Bobby.”
The next day, the coaches had the bright idea of putting Bruce in at fullback, where he was expected to do nothing but absorb punishment. A moving flesh-and-blood tackling dummy. He changed his number from 61 to 32. Put on running-back shoulder pads (as opposed to defensive tackle pads). Taped up his shoes. Got ready for business. There was only one problem with the coaches’ plan: nobody could tackle Bruce. He was a horse in the backfield. Bodies hung from him as he dragged them downfield.
So, they left him in the backfield. Way down the list where he’d never see the gridiron except from the bench.
The Buffaloes’ next game was against the University of Kansas Jayhawks, to be played in Memorial Stadium, in Lawrence, Kansas. Bruce was fifth or sixth on the depth chart of running backs, playing behind a back named Ward Walsh (who would go on to play for the Green Bay Packers). Walsh was in a panic knowing he was going to have to block for their star running back, Bobby Anderson, against a real beast, Emery Hicks, a linebacker known as the Tasmanian Devil around the league for his vicious tackling. Hicks stood six foot six and weighed 230 pounds. All muscle.
“Ward couldn’t sleep that night,” said Bruce, his face lighting up with the memory. “I said, ‘Man, I heard this guy eats nails.’ I was just messing with his head. I said, ‘Man, this is the one game I’m glad I’m not playing. Did you see him the last game? I think he was in on every tackle.’ And Ward’s eyes are like this.” Bruce mimed Ward’s state of shock, opening his eyes as wide as possible like he just stepped off a curb in front of a runaway Greyhound bus.
Late in the game, a rash of injuries to key players included Ward Walsh. Coach Crowder sent in Bruce with one specific job: block the Tasmanian Devil. In the huddle they called his number, 32. There must be some mistake, man, thought Bruce. They want me to run the ball? He took the handoff from the quarterback before 50,000 pairs of eyes all glued to this massive running back crashing through the line. Not even a Tasmanian Devil could bring down this bull. Forty-five yards later, the Jayhawks’ tacklers finally brought Bruce to the ground. His teammates were all over him, pounding his pads. Shouts of “Man, I told you this guy could play!” and “He should be starting!” arose from his teammates. Many of them patted him on the back as he left the field. He got in for one more play, shook off a couple of would-be tacklers behind the line of scrimmage, and gained seven yards and a first down.
That was it. He never played another down that season. In his senior year, Bruce managed to get into four games. One of those was against the Air Force Academy Falcons. By his own admission, Bruce had “a monster game.” So impressed was the Air Force head coach, Ben Martin, that he referred Bruce to the head coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Jim Spavital. Bruce was excited at the prospect of playing professional football anywhere after his college career had gone south along with his NFL draft status. But the coaching community is a tightly knit brotherhood, and when Jim Spavital did his due diligence and reached out to Colorado’s Crowder for his input, he received a less than glowing report. When Bruce arrived at Winnipeg’s camp, the first words out of his new head coach’s mouth were, “We’ve got our eye on you. We don’t want any troublemakers here.”
Spavital, a native Oklahoman, had played his college football at Oklahoma A&M, the same school that, only three years after Spavital had graduated, would find its football program under fire for its open attack on Johnny Bright. His pre-judgment of Bruce based on Crowder’s assessment did nothing to endear him with the prickly tackle. Bruce worked hard to make the team, which he did, only to tell the head coach what he could do with the job.
“I told Spavital I would never play for him if he was the only coach on planet Earth.”
He found his way to Philadelphia looking to find a job with the Eagles under their head coach, Jerry Williams. Bruce didn’t make the roster but he did make an impression on Williams, who, after being fired by the Eagles, was hired by the Hamilton Tiger-Cats to guide the club into the 1972 season. Williams brought Bruce in for a tryout.
“I remember coming to Hamilton in June of 1972, wearing an overcoat, stocking cap, and gloves, thinking it would be freezing. It was ninety-five degrees.”
Bruce understood that you didn’t get a lot of second or especially third chances in professional football. If you were black and had been labelled a “troublemaker,” coaches were not inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt in any situation. He decided to let his work ethic and his play on the field do his talking for him. He also had the benefit of a coach who saw the enormous potential in Bruce’s game and wasn’t troubled by his past. He was reunited on defence that first day with his former fearsome foe, the Tasmanian Devil of Kansas fame, Emery Hicks. Bruce took note of another black rookie in camp, a quarterback from the University of Toledo. Story was he’d never lost a game in high school or college. There were already rumours he had the “magic touch.”
But Bruce had more important issues on his mind than the fate of some skinny quarterback trying to make the team.
“I decided when I came to Canada, to Hamilton, there was no way I was leaving. I came here with one goal in mind: to make the team. And I made the team the first day. I went against as many guys as would come at me and I basically made the team as a free agent the first practice.”
Soon the rest of the league would see what Jerry Williams saw that day. When Bruce Smith put his mind and his body to a task, he could move mountains.
The candlepower in the Glass Bowl is so low that at night the place is more suitable for séances or Halloween parties than the home games of the University of Toledo Rockets. But they have this hobgoblin quarterback named Chuck Ealey who flits in and out of the shadows to elude tacklers, then zings the ball right on the button to one of his receivers, all of whom can see in the dark like owls. His teammates have an almost mystical belief in his ability to get them out of any jam.
— Joe Jares, Sports Illustrated, October 11, 1971
Joe Jares’s article about the Toledo team appeared in Sports Illustrated after Chuck Ealey and the Rockets had stretched their winning streak to twenty-seven games in a hard-fought victory over Ohio University (no, not the Buckeyes, the other one). The article was titled “Holy Toledo! Chuck Ealey Nearly Lost One.” That put Chuck’s personal winning streak at fifty-seven games, including the thirty straight he’d attained playing for Notre Dame High School in Portsmouth.
At what point does someone start to believe that he is truly gifted with some otherworldly protection against defeat? Was there a moment where Chuck Ealey wondered whether he had been dipped in a version of the mythical River Styx by his mother — perhaps at the confluence of the Ohio and Scioto Rivers? The secret of his success, removing the general quality of the team surrounding him from the equation, was a combination of confidence and fearlessness equalling grace under pressure. “Fearlessness” meant being unafraid to lose even as the streak grew in number.
“It’s not whether [the opposition is] going to beat us or not, but how bad they are going to get beat,” he said after the Ohio game. “That’s the way I feel.”
Two weeks after narrowly escaping defeat at the hands of the Ohio Bobcats, Chuck Ealey and the Rockets met the Broncos of Western Michigan for a homecoming game at the Glass Bowl in Toledo. By halftime the home team was behind 24–7 and a general gloominess had descended on the crowd. The unbeaten streak looked to be coming to an end. There would be no modern fairy-tale ending with the Rockets players disappearing into a cornfield after victory number thirty-five.
But the second half saw a complete turnaround as Chuck and the offence pounded the hapless Broncos into submission, scoring twenty-one points in the fourth quarter alone while the defence completely shut down the Western Michigan attack. The final score was 35–24. Number twenty-nine was in the bag. The rest of the regular season was a series of routs that saw Toledo demolish Dayton 35–7, Miami (of Ohio) 45–6, Northern Illinois 23–8, Marshall 43–0, and Kent State 41–6. Not one team came within two touchdowns of the Rockets.
“I said to one of my teammates after the last game against Kent State, the thirty-fourth win, I said, ‘I don’t think we understand what we did here.’ And we didn’t. Each game we were kind of taking one game at a time. And I know that sounds like a cliché — but that’s the way it really was. I don’t think at any point we were afraid to think about losing in the sense that it would break the streak. We were never thinking we had a streak. And to this day, the only reason it’s come up is because they put it in the history books.”
Only one game remained in Toledo’s season. For the third year in a row, the Rockets, winners of the Mid-American Conference, were going to the Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Florida. Their opponents would be the winners of the Southern Conference, the University of Richmond Spiders. The unbeaten Rockets were heavy favourites over the Spiders, who, despite winning their conference, had a mediocre record of 5–6. The surprising Spiders led at the end of the first quarter by a 3–0 score but by full-time, the planets had realigned and order had been restored in the football universe. Toledo won the game handily, 28–3, completing a third straight unbeaten season.
For six straight seasons as a starting quarterback, first in high school and then at university, Chuck Ealey had never known defeat. Not once did he have to look back on a game and think, If only I’d done this and not that, and berate himself for failing his teammates. He had gone 65 and 0 in that time — 65 and 0! He had received national recognition in the pages of Sports Illustrated, and for the very first time a player from the Mid-American Conference was in consideration for the Heisman Trophy. He would finish eighth in the final Heisman voting that year. The Toledo Rockets would finish fourteenth in college football rankings at season’s end, which is more indicative of the perceived quality of the competition in the Mid-American Conference among the nation’s pollsters.
Although football is a team game, the one position that most assuredly makes a perceptible difference, game in and game out, is the quarterback. He’s the one you turn to on the sidelines or in the huddle for a sign. To the defence: just get me the ball back. To the receivers: just get open and I’ll find you. To his blockers: just give me time to do my job. A quarterback who can turn his teammates (and even the opposition) into true believers is a rare thing indeed.
All of which only makes the 1972 NFL draft all the more puzzling. Chuck and his agent had sent a letter out to all twenty-six teams notifying them that he wanted to be drafted as a quarterback and to be given an opportunity to compete for the quarterback position with the team that drafted him. It had been a common practice to draft black quarterbacks with the expectation that they would make good defensive backs or receivers. Chuck made it known that he was not interested in any other position. It was a bold move for a black quarterback coming out of the college game, but it was one that Chuck felt that he could afford to make.
“Most people think you’re going into football to get a scholarship so you can play professional ball. Honestly, all the way through I didn’t even think about playing professional football until probably my junior or senior year when some scouts came around and were looking at me. And I’m going, ‘whatever.’ That’s kind of the way I felt about it … professional football was kind of secondary to what I was looking to do.”
Not one of the twenty-six NFL teams in existence in 1972 deigned to draft Chuck Ealey of the University of Toledo Rockets. Fourteen of those twenty-six teams had losing records. Four hundred and forty-two names were called over the course of seventeen rounds and not one of those belonged to Chuck Ealey. The Atlanta Falcons even had the audacity to waste a selection on one John Wayne out of “Fort Apache” State as a joke because their head coach, Norm Van Brocklin, had demanded that the scouts draft more “tough guys.” Atlanta had just experienced their first winning record in six years of existence with a mediocre 7–6–1 record and yet they still felt they could afford to throw away a draft pick for the sake of an inside joke. (The commissioner of the league, Pete Rozelle, would overturn the pick.) Twenty quarterbacks were selected; only one of them ranked higher in the Heisman Trophy voting than Chuck Ealey at number eight, and that was the Heisman winner, Pat Sullivan, from Auburn.
Some teams did approach Chuck Ealey after the draft as if he might have had a change of heart and would consider signing a free-agent contract to play defensive back or wide receiver, but Chuck said no, not interested.
“My life didn’t depend on sports or football. If I couldn’t go into the league as a quarterback, I was going to do something else.”
That’s when the Hamilton Tiger-Cats reached out. They brought him up to Hamilton where he met with the general manager, Ralph Sazio, who sold him on the idea of playing in Canada.
“I didn’t know much about Canada at all. I mean the only thing you study down there is American history; you get a little geography but I wasn’t familiar with anything in Canada at all.”
He was looking for something spectacular or exotic, something that would announce in no uncertain terms that he had entered the enchanted forest, an utterly foreign world. What he got instead was a whole lot of Highway 401 before entering Hamilton. No Eiffel Tower, no Arc de Triomphe, no Big Ben, and no Tower of London awaited him. Instead, he found a city that reminded him a lot of where he came from: an industrial, working-class town with economic and social demarcations.
“It wasn’t anything you could notice right away, because everything almost looked the same, so I thought, Everything’s going to be okay.”
After Ealey signed his contract, Sazio said, “You know, you aren’t the first black quarterback to play here.”
Not that it mattered to Chuck whether he was or he wasn’t. He could only think that he was coming to a new country and a new league that he knew so little about. He was just happy that he was going to play quarterback.
“Oh?”
Sazio was only too happy to enlighten his new signee. “Ever hear of a guy named Bernie Custis?”
This city of barbarians has an occasional moment of civility.
Last night at Ivor Wynne Stadium, Ottawa Rough Riders engineered a last minute drive to beat the Ticats by a single point … ordinarily an occasion for throwing red hot rivets at the home side.
But in the last few seconds, quarterback candidate Chuck Ealey ran around in frantic futility and earned a hand from the 21,000 souls in the ball park for an exhibition game.
Ealey is the quarterback from the University of Toledo who never lost a game in high school or college football, and who was overlooked in the NFL draft, according to some sources because he is black and NFLers do not have confidence in black quarterbacks.
For that reason alone, he could be the fans’ favourite here in Hamilton where everyone is an underdog, but more than that, he’s an exciting player who runs well and seems to have a strong arm and the required cool to do the job.
— Eddie McCabe, Ottawa Journal, July 7, 1972
“This city of barbarians …” A tongue-in-cheek slight directed at the heavily working-class nature of Hamilton and its devoted, noisy, hearty football fans. Canadian football has always been a game that allowed fans to unleash the inner beast, behaving more along the line of British “football” (soccer) fans — minus the hooliganism — which is now beginning to inform fan behaviour at every sports venue short of the curling rink (whose day, too, could be coming).
But McCabe touches on something else here: the average Hamilton football fan’s acceptance and adoration of the underdog. Oh, like any city’s sports fans with a deep attachment to the home team bordering on psychopathy, Hamiltonians are just as capable of turning on their heroes. But it was Hamilton fans who twenty years earlier, according to Bernie Custis, would have rioted had Hamilton’s head coach not started Bernie in the season opener after the hoopla surrounding his arrival in Steeltown. Chuck Ealey was the latest underdog to be embraced by the wide arms of Hamilton, and fans waited for his ascendancy to the position of starting quarterback.
“Oh yeah, the first season came and I was a rookie,” said Chuck, remembering those first exhibition games. “I was playing, I was having a good exhibition season, good practice. I enjoyed the game because it was a wide-open field. It kind of suited my ability to manoeuvre and move around in the pocket or outside the pocket and throw the ball. So I was having a good time.”
Jerry Williams had arrived in town that year as the new head coach. Williams had been a fighter pilot in the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War before attending Washington State University, where he became a football star. He was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in 1949 and played four seasons there, winning the NFL Championship in 1951. He finished his career as a player/coach with the Philadelphia Eagles and went into coaching full-time, a journey that took him through the university coaching ranks and head-coaching stints at Philadelphia and Calgary, before he landed in Hamilton. The man had serious credentials. He was also new to most of the players. There were a couple of notable exceptions.
“I didn’t like Jerry Williams,” former All-Star defensive back John “Twiggy” Williams Sr. confessed, though a smile played across his face. We were sitting at his kitchen table in his home in Waterdown, a former municipality amalgamated into the city of Hamilton, Ontario, back in 2001. It had been almost ten years since I’d first interviewed him in this house, for the film. He was more relaxed this time, without a camera in his face. John had gotten his nickname during his playing days, a reference to ’60s British model Twiggy, for his skinny legs. “I hated Jerry Williams. He cut me twice. In Calgary. And the last time he cut me, you know what he told me? He said, ‘You can play in the National Football League. If you want me to I can write you a recommendation letter.’ But he cut me twice. Unreal.”
That was a result of arcane Canadian import rules and numbers games that many Canadian as well as American players have fallen victim to over the years. John Williams Sr. had been balancing on a bubble between making the team in Calgary and being released if another American came in, not necessarily a better American player than John, but one that might add insurance at another position deemed more valuable. But Jerry Williams did pay John Sr. a fee just to hang around in Calgary in case he was needed, a pretty standard practice throughout the league.
Bruce Smith, the other player known to Williams, carried his personal grievances like a Bay Street financier carried his billfold — deep-pocketed, close to his heart. Cross him and you were dead, not literally, but in his eyes you may as well have been. Criticism was hard to take. For him, it was deeply personal. That made coaching him all the more difficult. It could make just knowing him difficult.
“When I was playing I was totally introverted,” Smith told me. “I would talk to nobody. I wouldn’t talk to the media, I wouldn’t talk to anybody. I said, if you wanted to talk to me, I do my talking on the field.”
He tried his best to keep his unfocused anger hidden away. He was a professional now and he knew that he couldn’t treat his adult teammates as he would have when he was younger and could get away with it because of his size. He was an imposing figure but these weren’t boys he was playing with anymore. These were men, and if he wanted to get along as a teammate he had better learn the art of self-discipline and respect for others. His size could be a little frightening in itself.
“I remember when Bruce came in,” said former running back Dave Buchanan when I pressed him for information about his old teammates on that 1972 Hamilton team. “Oh my God, this guy when he came in, he looked like Hercules!”
“Bruce had this thing, like a bad attitude,” John Williams remembered. “He didn’t get along with anybody. So I kind of took him under my wing because he was from Texas, too. I had a brand new corvette and I told Bruce, ‘I’m gonna let you have my car tonight.’ I let him have my car and he just thought that was the greatest thing in the world. I was the only one that could really handle him when he first came up here.”
But Jerry Williams knew Bruce from his tryout with the Philadelphia Eagles. He saw the enormous potential in need of a focus. Early in the season, the Tiger-Cats were out for a meal in Montreal the night before the game. And it was there, during an innocuous team ritual of dining out, that Bruce’s inner tension erupted in fury.
“We ordered roast beef, and I ordered an end-cut,” said Smith. “I always ordered an end-cut. It was a bigger piece of meat, and it was well done. And I remember they brought this piece of meat to me, and it was raw.”
Instead of simply calling over the waiter and explaining that the beef was too rare for his tastes and requesting that they cook it more to his liking, he took it as one more sign of disrespect. Something snapped inside him. He rose from his seat and threw his plate down on the table like a bad poker hand, cutlery flying everywhere. Without a word he stormed out of the dining room, went up to his room in the hotel, and slammed the door shut.
“I was just sitting there, fuming, and I hear this knock on the door. It was Coach Jerry Williams. He asked me, ‘Can we talk?’ And I said, ‘We don’t really have much to talk about.’ And Jerry Williams came up to me and said, ‘You know what, Bruce, I don’t know if anybody ever told you this, but you are a very important member of our team.’ He says, ‘I know what you’re going through. I know what you felt, but I have to tell you, you don’t have that problem with me. You are part of my team and you are one of my best players. And I appreciate having you here.’”
I could see that Bruce Smith was deeply moved by the memory of this white coach from Spokane, Washington, who, in a Canadian city a million miles from the poor black neighbourhood in the legalized-killing capital of America, showed compassion, kindness, understanding, and belief in this young man. Not a young black man, just a young man in need of guidance. An abandoned son who grew up believing that white people were superior because how would he know? Who was there to tell him different? He had never competed against them on the football field or in the classroom. All he knew was that you’d better not go near their water fountains if you know what’s good for you. Why? Was the water that flowed through their fountains clearer, tastier, and superior as well? Was he not deserving of the same? And if a white man in authority wanted to see you, there’s a good chance he thinks you’ve done something wrong. You don’t want to wind up in “the Walls,” man. Because that’s exactly where he thought fate might lead him.
“I got to tell you, man, it flipped me out,” Bruce continued. “I loved that man, and he accepted me, and he really made me feel like a son. And to me, that really meant something.… I think he was really instilling in me that I was more than a football player, I was a human being who had value. And let me tell you, that was probably one of the most touching things that ever happened to me.”
The regular season started slowly for the Tiger-Cats.
“At that time Wally Gabler was the starting quarterback,” Chuck Ealey remembered. “I think we won our first game maybe against Saskatchewan. Then we went out west on this western swing where it was this crazy thing where you played one game on Saturday and played another one on Tuesday. It was like three days’ rest or two days’ rest, something crazy.”
The first game on that road trip was in Vancouver against the Lions, and Ealey played in the second half of a losing cause. Three days later he got the start in Edmonton and was relieved by Gabler in another losing cause. The team returned to Hamilton for a game against Montreal, which they also lost. Their record stood at 1–3 after four games. But a decision had been made.
“Well, the head coach [Jerry Williams] decided that if we were going to lose we were going to lose with this rookie quarterback,” explained John Williams. “And when he made the change to Chuck it just seemed like everything clicked.”
Chuck Ealey would be the starting quarterback for the rest of the season, and Ralph Sazio dispatched Wally Gabler to Toronto to replace the injured Joe Theismann. And then the team went on a roll. They travelled to Montreal for a rematch against the Alouettes. This was the occasion of Bruce Smith’s pre-game dinner meltdown. Whether Smith’s outbreak had any influence on the team for the next day’s game is a matter of conjecture, but the Tiger-Cats went out and beat the Alouettes 25–12 on their home field.
“There was something magic about Chuck Ealey,” was how Bruce Smith described the rookie quarterback.
The players had heard of Chuck Ealey’s unbeaten record in high school and at the University of Toledo. But in the pros, no one puts too much faith in reputations and records attained playing at a lower level. They respect what someone has accomplished, but it’s still very much a “show me” league.
“We heard bits and pieces about Chuck’s abilities that led to a perfect record,” Tony Gabriel, former receiver with that ’72 team, told me. “At the same time a lot of things are different when you become a professional.”
His teammates didn’t know it at the time but they were about to go on another magical Chuck Ealey–led ride, ten regular-season games in a row, a string that would lead directly to the Grey Cup game of 1972 and a matchup with the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
Dave Buchanan went to John Muir High School, which had switched in 1954 from a junior college to a full four-year high school. The most famous student to ever wander the school halls was none other than Jackie Robinson, who went on from John Muir to attend UCLA. In the years that Buchanan attended John Muir — he graduated in 1967 — the black students drew inspiration from the knowledge that the first Black American to play Major League Baseball graduated from their school.
“We wanted to live up to those expectations that he laid out,” Buchanan told me over the phone from his home in Pasadena.
Buchanan, a running back, played college football with the Arizona State Sun Devils and was named the Western Athletic Conference’s offensive player of the year in 1969. He went undrafted in the 1971 NFL draft and, instead, he signed as a free agent with the Cincinnati Bengals.
“What happened with the Bengals is I went all the way through to the last cut. And the running back coach came in to see me and said, ‘Dave, we’re going to put you on waivers. But don’t go anywhere. The Hamilton Tiger-Cats have your negotiation rights in the CFL. But don’t leave.’”
Buchanan paused in his narrative to admit that this was just the beginning of his problems in professional football, revolving around the business side of the game, which would be a recurring theme in the narrative arc of his professional career. But back to the running back coach and his pitch.
“We’re going to put you on waivers so that when we get down to the proper roster level — and a team claims you off waivers — we’re going to claim you right back. We’re going to dangle you out there and dangle you back, dangle you out there, dangle you back. And then teams will say, ‘Well, they’re just going to keep doing that. And then we’re gonna put you on the practice squad [or taxi squad …]’” and that’s when Dave Buchanan had heard enough. “I said, ‘I’m a better ballplayer than that’ and I told him, ‘You know what? I’m going to leave. I’m going to Canada and I’m going to make All-Pro and then I’m going to come back.’ But what I didn’t realize is once you leave, it’s very difficult to come back to the National Football League.”
And that’s how he found himself in Hamilton, where he saw limited action over the course of nine games, rushing for 213 yards on sixty-two carries and catching eight passes for another fifty-six yards. But with the 1972 arrival of Jerry Williams — a coach that Buchanan called “a genius” — he forged a career year, rushing for 1,163 yards on 263 carries, and a further 275 yards receiving for nearly 1,500 yards in total offence. And there’s one man in particular that he credited with the turnaround in his performance.
“Chuck [Ealey] was so dynamic it was like he’d always been our starting quarterback. I mean for a rookie or kid to come in there. Man, with Chuck’s ability of being able to get out of difficult situations, he put so much pressure on defences. I will tell you that Chuck was as much responsible for the type of year that I had and all the other guys had as we were as individual players. The guy was so dangerous. When I watch that kid up in Seattle [Russell Wilson], I see him and think, God, that’s Chuck Ealey. If you don’t put a spy on that guy he’s going to hurt you. And if you do put a spy on him now you’re forcing everybody to cover man-to-man. And that’s the way Chuck was.”
Tony Gabriel was as close to a hometown boy as you could find on that 1972 Hamilton team, having been born in Burlington, one of eight brothers and four sisters. His father died when he was eleven years old and Tony felt the loss deeply. In the summer between grades twelve and thirteen, a friend convinced him to come and work out with the local junior football team, the Burlington Braves, coached by a former CFL player named Bernie Custis.
In a very short time, Bernie Custis had become more than a football coach for Tony. He had become a mentor and father figure. Bernie also seemed convinced that he could secure a scholarship for Tony at his old alma mater, Syracuse. So, one weekend that winter, Bernie and Tony, along with another Braves player, went down to Syracuse University for a football tryout with Bernie’s old head coach at Syracuse, Ben Schwartzwalder. A couple of quarterbacks and some defenders were on hand at the Manley Field House to work out the two Burlington prospects for Coach Schwartzwalder.
Tony ran a pattern and made a quick cut, and the linebacker covering him went down on the slick field. Then he made another cut and the defensive back went down. The quarterback threw the pass. Tony reached out and snagged the ball with one hand and pulled it into his chest. Schwartzwalder turned to Bernie.
“I want that boy,” he said.
Tony played four seasons at Syracuse University and earned a degree in chemical engineering. He had a chance to sign with the New York Giants of the NFL but chose Hamilton because, he admitted to me when we met in the boardroom of CIBC Wood-Gundy’s offices in Oakville, “I was homesick,” a perfectly natural state when you’re one of twelve siblings. His rookie season with Hamilton in 1971 was “decent” but when Chuck Ealey arrived in 1972 “it really seemed to click.”
“Initially, it took a couple of games to become familiar with his combination of scrambling and ability to throw on the run. Then with the natural talents that he had — and some of the good players we had on the team — we seemed to be able to connect. Chuck got better with each game. And it was obvious we were heading in the right direction.”
After starting the season 1–3, Hamilton reeled off ten straight wins to finish with an 11–3 record and first place in the East. A number of Hamilton players had career years, including wide receiver Garney Henley (who would win the Schenley Award as Most Outstanding Player), Dave Buchanan, named CFL All-Star at running back, and Tony Gabriel, who had better years ahead but really kick-started his outstanding career in only his second year and was named to the CFL All-Star team as tight end.
“That year was a terrific year for me,” remembered John Williams Sr., who also made the CFL All-Star team at defensive back. “I had something like nine interceptions. Two or three of them I ran back for touchdowns. That was my best year.”
Chuck Ealey would be the runaway winner of the Most Outstanding Rookie award, but Jerry Williams would lose out on the Annis Stukus Award for coach of the year to the coach of their rival Ottawa Rough Riders, Jack Gotta, whose team lost all three games they played against Hamilton.
So it came as something of a surprise when Ottawa took the first game of the semifinal, 19–7. Jerry Williams was disappointed in the way his team had performed away from home but remained confident and relaxed leading into the second game on the artificial turf at Ivor Wynne Stadium. He referred to the two-game, total-points format as the “game of eight quarters,” an outlook designed to reduce the emphasis on needing to win the next game by at least thirteen points. Instead, he encouraged his team to just think about it as being down thirteen points at the half with four quarters yet to play. Uphill but not insurmountable.
Dave Buchanan had a special incentive leading into the second game after what happened during the first game in Ottawa. One of Ottawa’s cornerbacks had gotten right up in Buchanan’s face and told him, “You can’t run the ball.”
“I’ll never forget that,” said Buchanan, still seething at the insult. “And that whole week I could just hear what that guy said and I had a headache I was so fired up for the game. And when we came out for that final game, I think I had a twenty-yard run but what I did — and I really think I could have broken it for a touchdown — I turned and went right for him. And I ran right over him. So whatever comment he made to me I made right back at him.”
Buchanan rushed for over 130 yards in that game as the Tiger-Cats beat the Rough Riders by a score of 23–8, giving Hamilton the edge by an overall score of 30–27. The Tiger-Cats were going to the Grey Cup game against the champs from the West, the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
The Roughriders had experienced a mediocre season, going 8–8, before catching fire in the playoffs and ousting both Edmonton and Winnipeg, two teams with better records than them. But the Roughriders had three future Hall of Fame players: quarterback Ron Lancaster, running back George Reed, and defensive tackle Ed McQuarters, two of whom were black.
George Reed finished his career in 1975, having gained a total of 16,116 yards rushing over his thirteen-year career, a record that would stand for over thirty years until Mike Pringle travelled even farther. He had played his university football at Washington State and came to Regina in 1963. That’s when he got his first look at Taylor Field, home of the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Reed experienced that most common of American reactions to the sight of some Canadian facilities — pure anxiety. What have I got myself into? As Hugh Campbell, Reed’s former teammate at Washington and future coach of the Warren Moon–led Edmonton Eskimos, once said, “When I first saw the stadium in Regina, it looked like a farmer had built it.”
Reed managed to play his entire career in Saskatchewan, a major feat in itself, especially since he made it known over the years that he had hardly been greeted with open arms by the citizenry of Regina. He remembers showing up for appointments to rent an apartment only to discover that the one he was looking to rent was suddenly unavailable. He spent most of his first couple of years living in hotels and depending on the kindness of teammates.
“I was debating whether I’d even come back after the second year,” he told a reporter with the local CBC station in Regina.
Stardom and winning has a unique way of changing attitudes. The Roughriders made the playoffs every year that Reed played, including winning the Grey Cup in 1966 before losing in ’67 and ’69. He began working during the off-season for Molson breweries, touring the province, shaking hands, pushing product.
“Either I started warming to people or people started warming to me,” he said.
Ed McQuarters was born in Oklahoma and played his college ball at Oklahoma University. He was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals of the NFL but was released after a single season, an action that caused the black players on the Cardinals to declare the organization racist. In an article in Sports Illustrated from July 1968, writer Jack Olsen wrote: “The McQuarters case proves neither that the Cardinals have a quota system nor that Negroes are stacked into certain positions while white players get their jobs automatically, as is so often the case on college football teams. But it is suggestive of both possibilities. As one white Cardinal says, ‘The front office has nobody but itself to blame if people run around accusing them of cutting Ed McQuarters for racial reasons.… It’s possible the Negroes are only being touchy. But who the hell can blame them for being touchy the way they’re treated around here.’”
The Cardinals’ loss was the Roughriders’ gain. In his first season, McQuarters helped Saskatchewan to its first Grey Cup win over the Eastern Rough Riders. He was a CFL All-Star in ’67, ’68, and ’69, winning the league’s Most Outstanding Lineman award in 1967. In 1971, the year before the 1972 Grey Cup against Hamilton, Ed McQuarters lost an eye in a freak accident in his home workshop. Despite this horrific mishap, he was able to return to action during the 1972 season and once again become a valuable part of the team’s march to the Grey Cup game.
The sixtieth Grey Cup game — if anyone’s counting — was played before a crowd of 33,393 fans, with a decided majority pulling for the hometown Tiger-Cats.
“That year, Hamilton outdrew everyone in the league. I think we averaged thirty-three thousand a game, and the stadium only seated about thirty thousand,” laughed John Williams, while I sat wondering about overcrowded conditions and stadium disasters and just where they managed to cram in the other three to four thousand fans. “And they had wheelchairs and everything around the track and it was an exciting time. I remember they had a parade, they had Lorne Greene [a Canadian actor best known for his role as Ben Cartwright on the TV series Bonanza in the ’60s] and all these kinds of people down on the field just before the game. But the thing is, I never got nervous. Everybody was telling me, ‘You’re going to be nervous,’ and I asked the other guys before the game, ‘Hey, when are you supposed to get nervous?’”
Asked whether he was nervous going into the game, Chuck Ealey said, “I think that the nerves you have in a game is pretty consistent with every game you go into. I don’t think it was any different with this Grey Cup than any other game other than the fact that we were at home. When people see it from a fan standpoint, they see it as a big game. You see it as a game. There is no more pressure on you in that game, at least not for me, than any other game, because you were trying to win that game. You don’t have time to think and say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s the Grey Cup.’”
“That’s the way Chuck was,” confirmed Dave Buchanan. “For a rookie, his composure was unbelievable. When we say ‘field general,’ this guy was a field general. There wasn’t an ounce of fear in this guy.”
Tony Gabriel agreed with Buchanan’s assessment. “Here’s a rookie quarterback taking command of the team and it’s indicative of his leadership talents and his demeanour, off the field and on the field,” he said. “He was very cool under pressure.”
“Nineteen seventy-two was interesting, obviously,” said Bruce Smith, “because [we were] playing against a legend like Ron Lancaster, and Chuck had been a rookie quarterback and a black quarterback. I don’t know what went through Chuck’s mind but at that time we were galvanized as a team.” He recalled a flare-up he had with teammate Angelo Mosca. “We almost got into blows, but it wasn’t a racial thing. It was more like, I’m the new guy, he’s the old guy, and the coach was always bragging about the new guys, they’re quick, they’re fast.” That obviously did not go down too well with Mosca, the aging don of the defence. “But we got over that. We were just a team. And people [on the team] accepted Chuck, embraced Chuck. People knew that the guy was a winner.”
Hamilton drew first blood, a sixteen-yard touchdown pass from Ealey to Dave Fleming in the end zone. Or, according to the Saskatchewan players, out of the end zone, as Fleming’s foot appeared to land on the sideline. But at that time, before unlimited camera angles and video replays and coach’s challenges, there was no way to overturn the call, and so it stood.
With an Ian Sunter convert the score was 7–0 for Hamilton. Later in the first quarter following a John Williams’s recovery of a blocked punt, Sunter, a nineteen-year-old kicker from Burlington, hit for a field goal to make the score 10–0, and it looked like Hamilton might run away with the game. But before the half was finished, Saskatchewan had tied it up at 10–10.
“George Reed and I were like one and two in the CFL in rushing,” explained Buchanan. “And they expected us to run and we expected them to run and what ended up happening is we passed.”
At one point during the game, John Williams approached the line of scrimmage while Saskatchewan had the ball on offence and shouted at Ron Lancaster, “Hey Ronnie, when are you going to throw the ball over this way, ’cause I need some action. I’m trying to win this here MVP.” The Most Valuable Player in the Grey Cup at that time was given a brand new car.
“He just called me a bunch of nasty names,” said John Williams, smiling at the memory of “little ol’ Ronnie Lancaster,” as he referred to the former great, losing his cool. But the fact was, Lancaster deliberately threw away from Williams, who was one of the best cornerbacks in the league.
“Every play, they were throwing to Lewis Porter. They were just using their game plan. They knew something.”
“Let me tell you about that guy,” said Dave Buchanan about his old friend John Williams. “He was wily. This guy was a genius at the corner. What John did, you can’t teach that. He was quiet. But when that guy was on the field, he was like, ‘C’mon, put your best guy out here.’ He wasn’t a talker. He’d just say matter-of-factly, ‘Hey come on, put your best guy out here.’ And sure enough, they would throw away from him.”
Both teams were able to move the ball, but neither team really threatened to score in the second half. The game had settled into something of a full-contact chess match. Late in the fourth quarter, Saskatchewan had a third down and one yard to go deep in their territory, and they opted to go for the necessary yardage rather than kick, a daring gamble that could have had disastrous consequences. But when you had a running back with the brute strength of George Reed on your side, the odds had a way of shifting in your favour. Reed picked up the necessary yardage and Saskatchewan retained possession of the ball. A few plays later the Roughriders found themselves in the same situation, third and one, this time at their own fifty-one-yard line. Instead of turning to George Reed to once again smash through the line for a first down, their head coach, Dave Skrien, inexplicably chose to punt the ball away. The Saskatchewan players were stunned. It made no sense. Why go for it deep in your end and not closer to midfield? Why not try to keep the drive alive and go for the winning points? But Skrien hoped to pin the Tiger-Cats deep in their end and force Hamilton to give the ball back with excellent field position. That decision, in hindsight, was the biggest mistake of the day.
Saskatchewan punted and the Hamilton receiver was downed at the fifteen-yard line. There were just under two minutes left in the game. Two minutes for Chuck Ealey to capture lightning in a bottle one more time. By this time his teammates had come to believe in the magic of their starting quarterback. Hadn’t he proven it time after time during their ten-game winning streak? No one questioned the unbeaten reputation that began at Notre Dame High School back in Portsmouth and at the University of Toledo, when he had clearly proven that he could do it in the pros. Ninety-five yards away lay the Saskatchewan goal line. This was the opportunity the Tiger-Cats and their twenty-two-year-old black quarterback had been waiting for, the chance to cement the legend.
Up to that point, Tony Gabriel had had a quiet day.
“Chuck hadn’t even looked my way for the whole game. We were on our own fifteen-yard line and Regina had been tough all game.”
Part of the Saskatchewan strategy that day had been to keep Gabriel bottled up inside, not let him get off the line of scrimmage. But late-game substitutions were made and defensive schemes were altered in an effort to contain Hamilton and prevent a long completion downfield.
As Tony Gabriel described that final drive for me, it was as if I were watching the action play out on the boardroom table between us, holographic figures in motion, through the standard wide-angle CBC camera placement. (Although that could also have been the result of my having watched the game so many times in preparation for my interviews.)
“On a zone play up the middle,” he said, “Chuck found me because they were dropping off defensively just to play it safe. I got in the clear and got the first catch of about three in a row.”
That first catch went for twenty-seven yards. The ball was now at the Hamilton forty-two-yard line. But the quarterback and his tight end were not finished yet.
“The second one came on the same flood pattern but I had to hook up because of the coverage. And Chuck found me again right over the middle for a first down.”
That play went for another eleven yards. It was first and ten at the Hamilton fifty-three-yard line. Ealey then threw to a wide-open Buchanan. The ball hit the turf in front of him, maybe the first sign of nerves getting the better of Chuck. On second and ten, he looked for Gabriel again.
“I had to come off the left side for a button-hook for a decent twelve- to fifteen-yard gain,” continued Gabriel. “So, thank God, I caught three in a row and all of a sudden we were threatening in the Saskatchewan side of the field with time running down.”
The play was good for exactly fifteen yards and the ball was now on the Saskatchewan forty-two-yard line with forty-two seconds to play. On the next play, Ealey kept the ball and picked up maybe a yard and a half. Second down and eight and a half to go.
“The next play they blitz from the backside so I couldn’t go out in the pattern. I had to block. The play before I’d gotten hit in a particularly sensitive area so I was in no shape to run,” Gabriel chuckled, knowing I was bound to feel his pain; right on cue, I winced in empathy. “So thank God I was in the backside to block for Chuck because he hit Garney Henley sliding from his right side, and he caught the ball at about the twenty-seven-yard line.”
The next play was a handoff to Buchanan, who was immediately swarmed and lost a yard. There was time for one more play in the game. Onto the field came the teenage kicker to make the most important kick of his young life. A thirty-four-yard field goal for the professional football championship of Canada. Garney Henley, the league’s Most Valuable Player that season, was the holder.
“Just keep your head down,” he told the kid. Sunter followed his advice and kicked the ball through the uprights. Hamilton won the 1972 Grey Cup in front of their hometown fans on the last play of the game.
John Williams did not win the coveted MVP award, much to his disappointment. He blames Ron Lancaster for that. “Little ol’ Ronnie” would not throw the ball his way. No, the MVP went to the man who had successfully guided his team to first place and a Grey Cup victory in his rookie season.
“If you had to have a trophy, it might as well be a car,” laughed Chuck Ealey in his office when I told him what John Williams said about his dashed hopes of winning the game MVP and the car that came with it. “And so, I remember that quite well. At the time thinking, this is a great business to be in, to play football as a sport, being paid, winning a car. And just having a great time.”
As special as that year was in Hamilton, the future looked even brighter. With a rookie quarterback who could only get better, an All-Star running back, a clutch Canadian receiver, and a solid defensive corps, the Tiger-Cats looked poised to win a number of Grey Cups.
It never happened. Hamilton would not win another Grey Cup for fourteen years. The team’s current Grey Cup drought is nineteen years long. Only twice have they carried the Cup off the field in the forty-six years since that December day in 1972 on their home field before their hometown fans.
During an exhibition game against Toronto the following season, John Williams would have his leg broken in an illegal block by a big fullback trying to make the Argos. Even today, John remains outraged by such a show of disrespect.
“I remember the doctor who was taking me to the hospital said, ‘John, that boy who clipped you. They’re gonna cut that son of a bitch, you watch. Knockin’ a player of your calibre out.’ Wouldn’t you know it, the next day [the Argos] cut him. And he sends me a card telling me that he was sorry. And that same guy was in my apartment three days before. He was on his way to Toronto and stopped by my house and had a beer with me. I was just shocked. I had been on top of my game and that guy broke my leg and I wasn’t the same anymore.”
He returned for the final two games of the season but he knew something was wrong.
“Any time a guy ran a pass pattern on me that year I was scared to death. And I used to beg them to run or pass toward me. But I became scared to death ’cause I knew I couldn’t run like I ran before.”
The next year, John was traded to Edmonton during the great purge of 1974, which came about when the CFL expanded the Eastern Conference schedule from fourteen games to sixteen to match its Western counterparts. The league, however, had no intention of paying the Eastern players for the increased number of games. A number of Hamilton players held a mini-revolt and demanded that their contracts be adjusted to make allowance for the greater number of games they would now be required to play. This did not go down well with Tiger-Cats president Ralph Sazio, who began shipping out those players who were at the forefront of the rebellion. Bruce Smith was sent to Edmonton. Tony Gabriel was sent to Ottawa following the ’74 season. And Chuck Ealey — Chuck Ealey! — was traded to Winnipeg halfway through the season.
“It just wasn’t comfortable for me because my mother was a single mom,” explained Ealey. “And in the East, I could get back to Ohio fairly quickly. She was having some health issues … and just mentally I wasn’t comfortable in the mid-west.”
He was at pains to express that he had nothing against Winnipeg — “I love Winnipeg!” he insisted. It was just a matter of geographical location. He was still a very young man, only twenty-four years old, and he was comfortable in Hamilton, one year removed from a Grey Cup victory and the Most Valuable Player award. He was looking to start a family with his wife, Sherri. He must have felt that this move was more than just a trade, that it was a banishment, a form of punishment for daring to argue about money in a league without a lot of it to go around. After an injury-plagued season and a half in Winnipeg, he was traded to the Toronto Argonauts where he played three more seasons before suffering a collapsed lung and deciding, Okay, that’s it, time to hang up the cleats.
Dave Buchanan suffered perhaps the cruellest fate of all, and through his life he continued to blame it all on his own ignorance and naiveté regarding the business of football. He still harboured the dream of returning to the NFL in triumph and proving to all the naysayers, especially the Cincinnati Bengals, that they were wrong about him.
“What I should have done is said, ‘Hey, if [Hamilton] is where my career is, this is where I stay, where people love me and where they respect my game.’ And not worry so much about getting back to the National Football League.”
He had just finished a season where he was second in the league in rushing yardage and first in the number of carries. He had been an integral part of a Grey Cup–winning team. And when he thought about what he had accomplished that season in Hamilton, he concluded, “Wow, I’m underpaid.” And so he took the issue up with Ralph Sazio. And when Ralph didn’t agree that he should have a significant upgrade in salary, Buchanan decided to play hardball. He would simply hold out until Sazio came to his senses and signed him to a much larger contract. And that, he admitted to me, looking back on it, was his next big mistake.
“I should have gone out on the field, played out my option, and then gone to another team. I tried to force the issue. And when I heard about the World Football League coming in, this was my chance to get back closer to the NFL.”
And so Buchanan decided to sit out the year and wait for the World Football League to open for business in 1974. Buchanan believed he could grab a position in the backfield with the novice Honolulu Hawaiians, and so, with this idea in mind, he moved back to Pasadena, got a job in a local Sears, and worked out like a maniac in his off-hours, preparing to get in the best shape of his life for the following year in the WFL. His efforts paid off. He signed with Honolulu and began the 1974 season playing football in Hawaii.
And then Hamilton management discovered that Dave Buchanan was playing football in Honolulu and said, “Uh-uh, sorry, you’re still under contract with us.” The Honolulu Hawaiians took a look at the paperwork and said, “Yep, they’re right, you have to go back to Canada and play out your contract.” But Buchanan didn’t want to go back to Hamilton; he had burned too many bridges there. There was, however, one city and one organization where he really wanted to live and play.
“I told Ralph to his face that I wanted to go to Toronto. I remember those classy uniforms; they were so far ahead of the game from a fashion standpoint. I used to look across the field and go, Gosh, I wish I played for them. They are a class organization. And I told Ralph I wanted to go to Toronto and I must have said something insulting like, ‘I’m going to come back and fix you guys,’ because what he did was trade me out west to Winnipeg.”
So Dave Buchanan came up with a new plan. He would play out the season and then head further west, right out to the West Coast of Canada and the B.C. Lions. That would bring him closer to his home in California. Unfortunately, Winnipeg and B.C. could not work out a deal for his rights and, in utter frustration, he walked away from football altogether and moved back to Pasadena to begin a life in teaching and coaching.
“It wasn’t the game that killed me, it was the business part of the game,” he said.
Chuck Ealey played seven seasons in the CFL before retiring at the age of twenty-eight. He could have still played if he’d had the desire. The Argonauts wanted him to come back. But by this time he was the father of two children and had a third one, daughter and future writer Jael, on the way. It was time to get down to the business of the rest of his life. Twenty-eight may seem awfully young for a successful CFL quarterback to hang them up, especially given the quarterbacks who have won Grey Cups in their forties in the last fifteen years, like Damon Allen and Henry Burris. In 2017, quarterback Ricky Ray won a Grey Cup for the Argonauts at the ripe old age of thirty-eight. But even as I was writing this chapter, Ricky Ray was in a hospital in Toronto recovering from a hit that saw him carted off the field strapped to a board, his head immobilized, his wife and two young daughters watching from the stands. For the thousands of fans taking in the game and for the players of both teams who stood in stunned silence for the twenty minutes it took to carry the injured player from the field, it was a haunting reminder of the dangers inherent in this game.
“You find out something when you go through professional football that is very different than amateur football,” said Chuck Ealey, as our interview neared its conclusion. “People would lose their job in the middle of the season. Trades and things were going on that were very different than amateur life and could impact you. Because it’s no longer a game just for fun. It’s a game for business and it’s those types of things that can be very distracting for athletes as they get older and their livelihoods depend on a game.”
And so Chuck Ealey walked away from the game he loved. He had come to understand that pro football was not an end in itself but a path to his next destination.
He went on to forge a successful career in the investment world and, most importantly, has been there for his wife and his children, now grown adults themselves. And like many successful former players who come from less-privileged backgrounds and even just plain hard times, he now shares his experiences and knowledge, and the basics of making “good decisions,” with others as a motivational speaker.
“That border, an imaginary line, becomes very real when you cross it on both sides from either direction,” he said. “I mean that in a constructive way, in a positive way. Canada gave me a sense of freedom.” He listed some of the more obvious aspects of freedom for a family man, like less crime and a sense of security, and then moved to concepts that affect his children’s lives, such as being free in a city environment, a sense of “social responsibilities,” and, finally, “acceptance.”
“Just coming in and having the chance to play quarterback was something that my own country didn’t allow me to do even with the record that I had. While it is one of those quietly kept secrets to a certain degree, it’s a reality of what was happening, especially at that time. That sort of filtered itself into everyday life and it was very easy for me to make a decision to stay in Canada, with my kids, and family, and everything else because of all the other opportunities where I didn’t have to feel like I was limited because of the colour of my skin.”
“I remember my first year after the Grey Cup, I went and bought myself a brand new corvette,” Bruce Smith recalled. “I filled it up with all kinds of presents and drove it home [to Huntsville] for Christmas. I was Santa Claus. It was great seeing the look on my mom’s face, being able to go back home and have some time to process everything. After sort of having a failure in university and not really looking like I was going to play professional football, to go up there [to Canada], make the team, excel, win the Grey Cup, and really and truly have a great year that year in Hamilton.”
Bruce’s stepfather had started a trucking business. Bruce bought him a new truck. He was able to buy his mother a new house. These were the things that he had always dreamed of being able to do. Football had been the means to that end. And Bruce Smith never made any bones about it: that’s all football had ever meant to him. A means to an end. A way to get out from under the suffocating poverty and racism in his hometown. And a way to get out of himself, at least for the length of time it took to play four quarters.
“I did like playing in the CFL. It was a great league. But for me, I never saw football as who I was. I wasn’t Bruce Smith the football player. I was Bruce Smith playing football.”
There was a popular song recorded in the 1950s called “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” In the case of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats it wasn’t wedding bells, it was contractual demands.
“Ralphy [Sazio] didn’t want to give any raises,” said Bruce Smith. “I think the raise he offered was to paint the stadium or something like that. And so nobody wanted to play for Ralph.”
And not many did for very long, including Bruce, who was shipped out west to the Edmonton Eskimos. He played one season there before coming back east to the Ottawa Rough Riders in 1975, where he hooked up with his old teammate Tony Gabriel. In Ottawa, the two became roommates and, more than that, friends for life.
“I really got to know him as a man,” said Gabriel of that year, adding what many consider the ultimate compliment: “You could depend upon his word.”
The next year, Tony Gabriel would become famous for what has gone down in Canadian football folklore as simply “the Catch,” the touchdown reception against Saskatchewan in the waning moments of the 1976 Grey Cup game that gave Ottawa the title. Unfortunately, Bruce Smith would not be there for that game. He spent that season with the mediocre Toronto Argonauts, where he was reunited with Chuck Ealey. But no amount of Ealey “magic” could save the Argos from sliding into irrelevance in the four years that Bruce played there, despite a defence that built a reputation as “the Dirty Dozen.” Chuck played three of those years before retiring, unable to breathe new life into the franchise, which had been on a downward projection for a few years. For both players it was time to figure out what they were going to do with the rest of their lives. One thing was certain: whatever they were going to do, they were going to do it in Canada.
Bruce eventually became one of the top real estate salesmen in Toronto. But despite the wealth and stardom he had attained in Canada, he still lacked a sense of peace. Anger, insecurity, and even despair lay just beneath the surface.
“I’ve got a great house, nice cars, lots of money, a very successful business, and a big line of credit. I can pretty much do what I want,” he knew. Then it hit him. “I realized I was very worried. My thoughts were focused on ‘How can someone come from barely making it to this wealth and success? When is this bubble going to burst?’”
One night, his anxieties became so severe that he suffered a paralyzing panic attack, which he thought was a heart attack. It was only then, in the midst of his own dark night of the soul, that he remembered the Bible he had been given as a member of the Toronto Argonauts back in 1976.
“I had never opened that Bible. For some reason I grabbed it and put it under my pillow. That night I got some sleep.”
Not long after that, he started going to church. Within six months, he began feeling guilty about the lifestyle he was leading.
“Then one day I reached out to God and He answered me.”
He continued to sell real estate, but he also began a quest to find a ministry. That quest eventually led to a position as chaplain at the King-Bay Chaplaincy, a non-denominational chaplaincy in the heart of downtown Toronto. Though the surrounding office towers housed some of the country’s most powerful, influential, and wealthy business elite, not even those power brokers were immune to stress and feelings of emotional and spiritual emptiness.
“The whole downtown area is in screaming need,” said Bruce in an earlier interview we did for a documentary project I was hoping to make about his lifelong spiritual journey. “There are marriage problems, money problems, alcohol problems, and people who are afraid they will lose their jobs. There is a lot of pain and suffering. People come to the chaplaincy when they are in distress. They come looking for support, help, direction, prayer, and counselling. People come who have other faiths or no faith at all. It doesn’t matter to me who you are, everybody needs hope. When you don’t have it, you go looking for it.”
Bruce Smith undertook an enormous journey, far beyond the geographical distance that stretched from Huntsville, Texas, to Canada. Anyone could make that journey in a couple of days of hard driving. Bruce’s journey cannot be measured in miles or kilometres. He went from schoolyard bully and angry young man, acting out the rage and self-doubt he felt inside, to a man who fully opened up his heart to welcome the people most in need of the big-armed embrace of the man once known as “Grizzly” to his teammates.
“They used to call me a grizzly bear,” he said, “but now I’m the panda bear.”
Bruce Smith passed away on January 3, 2013, from pancreatic cancer. He was sixty-three years old. He is deeply missed by all whose lives he touched.