Warren Moon had a plan. He’d always had this plan. There was only ever one plan. It never wavered.
He was going to be a quarterback in the NFL.
At seven years old, Warren became the “man of the house” when his father died of a heart attack at thirty-eight years old. There were six sisters and his mother in the Moon house in West Los Angeles. Warren’s mother did not want to lay such a heavy burden on her son’s shoulders, but Warren just naturally took to the task.
His mother worried for her son every time he left the house. The ’70s saw the rise of street gangs in Los Angeles. You were either with them or against them; it was impossible to be indifferent. Innocence could not save you. It was hard to be a “good kid” — hard-working, ambitious, and athletic — and stay safe. That’s why she enrolled him at Hamilton High School. The two closest schools, Los Angeles High School and Dorsey High School, were, in Moon’s words, “just really infested with Crips and Bloods.” Warren wanted to go where he could get a good education and play football in a respected program. He wanted to play where the right people would take notice, those that could further the plan, the only plan — to get to the NFL as a quarterback.
“You sometimes had to negotiate yourself through certain neighbourhoods, knowing where you could go, and where you couldn’t go,” Moon told me in his office in Irvine, California, a world apart from more humble and perilous beginnings. Moon is the president of Sports 1 Marketing, a highly successful marketing firm whose goal, according to the company’s tagline, is very simple: “Make a Lot of Money, Help a Lot of People, Have a Lot of Fun.”
“Maybe if you were going to a certain park, or going to a movie theatre,” he continued, “and you had to go through one of these neighbourhoods, you knew exactly when to go, where to go, how to get there. Because you knew you might run into some type of encounter with a gang member. So you were very aware of everything that was going on at that time.”
Moon’s words eerily echoed those of Chuck Ealey when he spoke about the dangers of wandering too far afield from the friendlier confines of his own neighbourhood, except Chuck was talking about dangers associated with white neighbourhoods. Moon’s was the fear of straying into the path of gangbangers, the source of so much black-on-black violence in West L.A.
With his enrolment at Hamilton High, step one in the process had begun. There was, however, a trade-off to be made to escape the gang influence: Hamilton was predominantly white. And until the moment he entered the hallowed halls of Hamilton, Warren Moon had never come up against, or certainly never observed so closely, systemic racism.
“I think it’s when I went to high school that I first realized there were going to be difficult times trying to play the position of quarterback. Coming in to the high school that I went to, it was predominately white and Jewish. I was one of the three quarterbacks on the sophomore team. Clearly, [I was] better than the other two.… For some reason, [the coach] did not want to play me as a quarterback, and the only time I did play was when we were either really far ahead, or really far behind.”
But the next year, under the school’s varsity football coach, he was named the starter. Ordinarily, being the starting quarterback on a high-school team brings with it the perks of being the top dog among the student body far beyond the reach of the gridiron — the admiration, envy, and sycophancy that inflates egos to the bursting point. Warren Moon had a very different experience as a high-school starting quarterback. He faced death threats.
“We were going to play Crenshaw High School one particular night, and it was a big game in our conference. The winning team was probably going to win our division. I was approached by a couple of gang members. If I won the football game, [they said,] I was going to be killed after the game was over. Just kind of giving me something to think about.”
He told his mother, his girlfriend, Felicia (who would later become his wife), his coach, and his best friend. His coach told the police, who had the stadium surrounded. Hamilton won the game. His mother gave him a ride home while his best friend drove Warren’s car in case the gang members had the car targeted. (Now that is a friend.) Later that night he went to a celebratory party with Felicia. Some toughs from Crenshaw showed up. Warren figured it might be in his and Felicia’s best interests to leave. As they did, shots rang out. Moon and his girlfriend hit the sidewalk. Realizing that they were not the intended targets, they picked themselves up off the pavement and beat it as fast as they could. Just another typical day in the life of a high-school quarterback.
“But yeah, you played with that type of intimidation sometimes, and things were going to happen to you, whether you took it seriously or not. I did take it seriously. But I wasn’t going to let it affect the way I play my football game.”
Why would he? Just all part of the plan. Step two in this process involved obtaining a scholarship to a university that a) wanted him to play quarterback and b) wanted him to throw the ball, not run it.
“I got a lot of scholarships from schools wanting me to run the football, or change positions. I had actually committed to go to Arizona State University and thought I was going to get a chance to play quarterback. But [the coach] ended up signing on two of the top quarterbacks of the nation, and they came to me and said they were going to change my position to safety. So I told them no, thank you.”
So, Arizona State and a full scholarship were out. They simply didn’t fit the plan. And when he didn’t get the offer he was looking for from any of the major schools, he decided it was time to devise a backup plan. So he chose West L.A. College, figuring he could spend a season there and prove that he belonged in a passing offence in a major university football program. It also didn’t hurt that his high-school football coach was going to West L.A. as the offensive coordinator.
After his season in junior college football, the Division I offers began to pour in. As it met most of the criteria he’d established on his checklist — West Coast school, a chance to start, pass-based offence, and a new coach — he finally settled on the University of Washington, led by first-year coach Don James, who let Warren know that the quarterback’s job was there for the taking. Once again, everything was going according to the plan.
Within three weeks of joining the team, Warren Moon was named the starter over a fifth-year senior, Chris Rowland, a Seattle native who was very popular with the hometown crowd, despite having led Washington to an underwhelming 5–6 record the year before. Rowland also happened to be white. The move to Moon was not a popular one with the fan base nor with the resident quarterback, who felt he was being sacrificed for a new coach’s long-range goals.
“Not to take anything away from Warren, but I don’t think he was ready,” Rowland said in an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer back in 2003.
Rowland was not the only one to think that Moon was out of his depth. The Washington football fans were practically apoplectic about the benching of their local boy in favour of some black upstart out of West L.A. And after the Huskies got off to a slow start, the fans figured that they had every right to voice their displeasure.
“We had one of the toughest schedules in the nation that year,” Moon explained. “We played three of the top ten teams in the nation in our first four games. And we weren’t winning. And when you aren’t winning, the quarterback is going to take the heat, and the head coach is going to take the heat.”
Moon understood that the quarterback was going to be the main recipient of any criticism directed toward the team when they weren’t winning. He was also going to be the guy that got the most credit for winning. It was the nature of the job. But there is a huge difference between criticism and persecution. And, as an eighteen-year-old black kid in a city where he didn’t know many people outside of his teammates — and there were probably more than a few of those who resented him for taking Rowland’s position — it was difficult to absorb the vituperation he received from the hometown crowd.
“That made it tough. It made it tough for my girlfriend in the stands and it was tough for my buddies who sat up there with her, listening to some of the things they had to listen to throughout the game.”
There were times he wanted to transfer but his mother told him in no uncertain terms that you did not run from your problems. This was the school he chose over all others. There was a reason for that. Did he suddenly think there was going to be some other major Division I school where such problems didn’t exist? Where he would not find himself in the same situation? He decided to stay and prove to the naysayers that they were wrong, that he could lead the Huskies to recognition on a national stage.
“I learned that from my mom. Because that’s the way she lived her life, that’s the way she taught us. That we could do anything. It wasn’t always going to be easy, but you had the ability to do anything if you put your mind to it and worked at it.”
In his third and senior year, the Huskies accrued a record of 7–4, including a 6–1 record within their own conference, the Pac-8, and won the right to go to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on January 2, 1978, against the Big Ten’s Michigan Wolverines. Michigan, ranked third in the nation, was the overwhelming favourite against Washington. Moon remembered standing at midfield for the coin toss with his fellow captains and reflecting on the path that had led to this moment, the teams that had passed him over as well as the positive steps he had taken on his own behalf.
“I think it was a vindication [against] my high-school coach that didn’t want me to play, a vindication [against] the colleges that didn’t want to recruit me as quarterback. It was a proving ground for all the fans that doubted me at the University of Washington. It was just a matter of completing it now, that day. You didn’t want to get that far and all of a sudden lose the football game, or go out there and lay an egg as a player.”
He did not have to worry about laying an egg that day. Washington knocked off the highly favoured Wolverines 27–20 and Warren was named the Most Valuable Player in the Rose Bowl. He was also named the Pac-8 Player of the Year. And to top his season off and to signal that he had finally made a positive impact on the citizens of Seattle after two seasons of targeted bigotry, he was named the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sports Star of the Year over some very tough competition, not the least of which included a non-human competitor, Triple Crown winner Seattle Slew. By anyone’s standards, the Slew was tough to beat.
All seemed in place for the final step in the Warren Moon long-range plan: the NFL draft. It seemed like a slam-dunk that some team would come calling, interested in his services. And they did … they just weren’t interested in his services as a quarterback. Rose Bowl MVP? Pac-8 Player of the Year? Sorry, not interested. No team requested a workout. He wasn’t even invited to the NFL combines, a chance for college football players to showcase their athletic abilities in front of NFL general managers, coaches, and scouts.
“That was a clear-cut indicator that people weren’t taking me very seriously as being a ‘field general,’ so to speak,” said Moon.
Like Chuck Ealey before him, Warren Moon was persona non grata as a quarterback because he had, according to Moon, “the wrong paint job.” Teams were quite willing to look at him as a defensive back, the default setting for black college quarterbacks. You’d make a helluva DB. Or maybe wide receiver. Neither of these positions appealed to Warren Moon. His goal had not been to reach the NFL any way possible. The goal was to be a starting quarterback in the NFL. Not just play any position or hold a clipboard as one of many backup QBs taken late in the draft and doomed to rot on the vine of NFL dreams.
There was, however, another option, one where he could ply his trade as a starting quarterback in a professional football league and be well-compensated, if not overwhelmingly so, for his efforts.
Hugh Campbell was a sure-handed wide receiver out of Washington State University — and former teammate of George Reed — when he came to Canada to play for the Saskatchewan Roughriders. He played from 1963 to 1969, although he retired for one season in 1968. He had three 1,000-yard seasons as a receiver with the Green Riders (so-called for the colour of their uniforms) and one Grey Cup victory in 1966. After retiring from the CFL, he coached football at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, for seven years before getting his first opportunity to coach in the pros by returning to the CFL as head coach with the Edmonton Eskimos. In his first year as head coach, Campbell took the Eskimos to the Grey Cup game against Montreal in the Olympic Stadium, or “Big O,” in Montreal. The game earned the reputation as the “Ice Bowl” because of the icy field conditions. The Alouettes came up with a unique solution that allowed them to literally run away with the game, 41–6, over a field of floundering Eskimos: they fired staples into the rubber cleats on their shoes, which allowed them to outgrip and outrun the opposition.
That off-season, Hugh Campbell went looking south of the border for the best quarterback that the Eskimo budget could buy. The Eskimos already had two solid quarterbacks in Tom Wilkinson and Bruce Lemmerman, but “solid” wasn’t what Campbell wanted. He was looking for the exceptional, someone who could learn from the veterans even as he gradually usurped their roles in the Edmonton offence. And he found the quarterback he was looking for back in the state of Washington. That quarterback was Warren Moon.
Moon didn’t know a lot about the CFL at the time. He knew some of the black quarterbacks who had gone up there, having followed them as players in college — Condredge Holloway and Jimmy Jones and Chuck Ealey. But he didn’t follow the league. He knew it was there, that it existed as a viable option for players who went undrafted or who simply chose to go north to play football. He understood why black quarterbacks would go. If they were anything like him they would go for one reason only: to play quarterback. Moon had never thought he would have to worry about that option. He was certain that his future in the NFL was written in the cards. All part of the grand scheme of things, until it wasn’t.
“Hugh Campbell came down and introduced himself to me, and we sat down and talked football and watched film one day. He talked to me about his team, and what he was trying to build there in Edmonton, what they had done the year before, and told me what he thought about me and my abilities. And he was just very high on me as a player and as a person and he felt that I had a tremendous potential to come up there and play well. Given the fact that he had such praise for me and had confidence in me at the quarterback position — as well as the money they were offering me to come up there to play — and then you look at the other side of it, the cons of the NFL, that they weren’t too serious about me playing quarterback and I just wasn’t getting any good vibes from them, I decided to go to Canada.”
Like two characters from a Dr. Seuss book, Tom Wilkinson was Quarterback One and Bruce Lemmerman was Quarterback Two. As long as both men were healthy, they both played every game, sharing the quarterback duties. This was not a case of going with the “hot hand.” Wilkinson’s hand could be ablaze, it didn’t matter. Lemmerman would come in regardless. That’s the way it had been for years. Campbell liked to keep his team on their toes.
“I’ll do the deciding who’s in there,” Campbell told his players. “You just do the playing when the guy’s in there. Make sure each of them looks so good that it’s a difficult decision for me who’s going to play.”
On the other hand, maybe he did it to drive the sportswriters and media types crazy, as they endlessly performed the roles of judge and jury, coach, and general manager over the airwaves and in the newspapers.
“The media very much wants to say, ‘Well, who’s going to be the starting quarterback?’ And the second [QB] goes in and does well and they say, ‘He has a big decision to make next week,’” explained Campbell in a 2017 interview on the CFL website.
Tom Wilkinson knew his best days as a quarterback were behind him. He was thirty-five years old when Campbell signed Moon. It did not take a genius to see who his heir apparent would be.
“I watched him play in the Rose Bowl the year before,” remembered Wilkinson, perched on a chair inside the Eskimos alumni box overlooking the field at Commonwealth Stadium, where I met with a number of former players for an interview. “And after watching the game, in my mind there was no chance Warren Moon was going to be up here, because he could do everything a quarterback could do. He could throw. He could throw a touch, he could throw long, he could drop back, he could throw on a run, and he could run. I mean, I watched that Rose Bowl and the very last thing I thought was that he would be coming here. He would be in the top five rounds for sure, drafted in the NFL.”
Tom Wilkinson was not a tall quarterback, which is a bit of an understatement. He was only five foot nine on a good day, he wasn’t particularly mobile, and he had an adequate but not strong arm. He remembers practising with his University of Wyoming Cowboys team one day and as he took the snap from centre and dropped back to pass, he bumped into some guy who had just wandered onto the field. Excuse me? It turned out that this guy wasn’t just some dazed Cowboys fan with too much draft beer in his system, but a professional scout from the Canadian Football League. He had come onto the field with a purpose. He wanted to measure Wilkinson’s actual height against his own. And he asked him whether he’d be interested in playing in the CFL.
“The what?”
“The Canadian Football League.”
“Never heard of it.”
This was Wyoming, not Timbuktu. The scout represented the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Never heard of them.
“My dream was either be in baseball or be in the NFL. So I really wasn’t that interested in talking to him because my hope was still to get drafted … but I’m glad that I didn’t answer up to him because I would’ve gone to Saskatchewan. And that’s way back when there was only one quarterback, and Ron Lancaster happened to be the quarterback in Saskatchewan.”
For sixteen years, from 1963 to 1978, Ron Lancaster was “the man” in Regina. But in 1965 Wilkie didn’t know that. He’d never even heard of the place. He got a career break by not seizing an opportunity.
“I wouldn’t have made the team. And if I hadn’t made the team, I would’ve gone home and used my teaching degree, because I wasn’t going to chase it.”
And by “chase it,” he means the dream. Tom Wilkinson knew he was not the most gifted quarterback physically. What he did have in abundance was guile and leadership, and he relied on those two qualities to work opposing defences to the point of exhaustion. When the NFL didn’t come banging on his door, Leo Cahill, legendary CFL coach, general manager, and character, brought him up from the University of Wyoming to play for the Toronto Rifles of the Continental Football League in 1966. Then Cahill took the head-coaching job with the Toronto Argonauts for the 1967 season.
Cahill brought Wilkinson up with the Argos. From there, Wilkinson was off to B.C. and in 1972 he was picked up by Edmonton. With Edmonton, Wilkinson had gone to the Grey Cup every year between ’73 and Warren Moon’s arrival in 1978, except for the 1976 season, winning two and losing two, including the Ice Bowl, which still left a bitter taste even years later. Still, the Eskimos carried a huge chip on their shoulders going into 1978, Warren Moon’s first year in the Canadian “show.” The thought of losing 41–6 to Montreal made them, to a man, cringe. If staples were legal, why not flubber?
“We got together and said, ‘Bey, let’s just work harder than we’ve ever worked, and show the media that we’re good enough to win that game,’” Wilkinson remembered, his competitive fires relit by the memory of that season.
And no one worked harder to prepare for that season than the two incumbent quarterbacks. The Eskimos only carried two quarterbacks. They would have to be in the best shape of their lives. Even the notoriously pot-bellied Tom Wilkinson chipped twenty pounds off his gut. Out of necessity. Someone would have to go, because a third quarterback was on his way. And they knew the one to leave wouldn’t be named Warren Moon.
The first thing you notice when you meet Ed Jones, former defensive back with the Edmonton Eskimos, is his front teeth, like a perfect miniature piano keyboard. If the light hits them at the right time of day, you would be well-advised to wear shades. They are most certainly not homegrown. And if you spend any time with Mr. Jones, as I did, you’ll see a lot of those teeth, because he likes to smile. He enjoys a laugh. Get him to tell you a story and you’ll soon be flashing your own teeth. He’s a funny man with a self-deprecating wit, the kind developed after years of locker room banter. It is not hard to imagine that he usually came out on top. For instance, I asked him if Warren Moon was the greatest quarterback he ever saw.
“Quarterback?” He seemed to mull it over as if perhaps Warren Moon played some other position I might have forgotten. Jones was one of the former Eskimos invited to my interview session in Commonwealth Stadium high above the field. “He was one of the best. He wouldn’t say I was the best defensive back he ever saw. He’d give me the ‘one of the bests’ so right back at him.”
Ed Jones grew up in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey. His parents separated early but when his mother suffered a stroke at thirty-three years of age, the family moved in with his father in Navesink, New Jersey. Ed did not play organized football until he was in the ninth grade.
“It was one of the biggest schools in New Jersey. And I wanted to be a receiver. Looked like a pretty glamorous position. But they told me I was too short. I was only about five and a half feet tall in ninth grade and so they made me a running back. And I could throw twenty moves inside of two steps. Probably the same guy would have the chance to tackle me three times and miss me three times.”
Then he started to grow. By the time he was a senior he was a solid six feet tall and a starting fullback. A number of Ivy League schools were after him.
“I ended up going to Rutgers because it was the closest,” he said. “With my mom being an invalid and my dad, having suffered a couple of heart attacks, staying home.”
At Rutgers he played three seasons at cornerback, earning All-East honours and finishing his time at Rutgers with a total of fourteen interceptions. He was drafted in the ninth round of the 1975 NFL draft by the Dallas Cowboys.
“I didn’t really fit in there. I think I was a little too liberal for the coaching staff, which I believe were all from Alabama and down around there. I learned from Drew Pearson [a Dallas receiver] who was from South River, New Jersey … and he sort of took me under his wing a little bit and tried to tell me the dos and the don’ts there. And there were a lot of don’ts for African-Americans. Such as who you hang out with. I had a problem with that.”
But he didn’t have the problem for long. At the end of the pre-season, Tom Landry, the head coach of the Dallas Cowboys from 1960 to 1988, called Jones down to his office. That was bad enough. But when he told Jones to bring his “playbook,” that meant Jones’s days as a Cowboy were over. A team’s playbook was a player’s most valuable possession, to be guarded with his life, until he was either released outright or traded. Ed Jones was not traded. He returned to his home in New Jersey to figure out his next step. Then the Buffalo Bills came calling.
“I ended up going there as a free safety … I was going to be the guy. I was the smallest strong safety in the league because I was really a corner. But I could cover man-to-man, which they really appreciated. But they were really impressed at my aggressiveness and tackling skills. I rarely missed tackles.”
What really impressed the coaches at Buffalo was that Jones was the only guy in camp who could tackle their superstar running back, O.J. Simpson, the first running back in football history to rush for over 2,000 yards in a single season.
Jones’s secret? “[O.J.] ran how I used to run when I was a running back.”
Despite playing through a severe arm injury late in the season that significantly restricted his tackling abilities, Jones nevertheless made the NFL All-Rookie team. Naturally, he expected to be compensated for his breakout season the next year at contract time, but instead he discovered that Simpson’s demands for a new million-dollar contract were having a negative impact on other players’ salary offers, including his.
“[Simpson] got his million. I didn’t get my thirty or forty dollar raise. They let me and about six other starters go to pay O.J. I was labelled as having a bad attitude because I wouldn’t sign the contract that was offered to me, which I felt was a slap in the face.”
A reputation, especially a bad one, has a way of getting around in NFL circles. No team wants some other team’s problem. Stick a label on a player, especially a black player, and it’s there for life. Lazy. Uppity. Troublemaker. Unless a team is absolutely desperate for talent, they are not going to invest the time or money to discover for themselves whether there is any truth behind an affixed label. That’s what Jones found himself up against when he went looking for employment elsewhere. Even after several successful workouts with teams seemingly interested in his services: Pittsburgh, the New York Jets, and Washington.
“They all said I was good enough to play, but ‘what happened in Buffalo? People in Buffalo have said this about you.’ Even the headlines when I was released — too smart for my britches. At that time, there weren’t many guys from Ivy League schools in the league. And so, you know, definitely down in Dallas, that didn’t go down too well. Because not many of those guys, it seemed, graduated. Came from a lot of small schools, a lot of Southern schools as well. And they understood, I guess better than I did, how you’re supposed to act down there. I just brought my New Jersey attitude with me.”
In 1976, a “New Jersey attitude” was best left to white rockers like Bruce Springsteen, unless you were “the Big Man” himself, Clarence Clemons, and carried a sax. And then Jones got a call from Edmonton.
“I don’t know where Edmonton is. But we’re taught that it’s cold up here. This is where the cold weather comes from. And so I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll come up there.’ I hopped on a plane, spent about five, five and a half hours in the air. I got here and there was like nothing. It’s brown. And this is like the end of September, I’m in a T-shirt and I’m freezing my butt off here. And I’m thinking, ‘Where am I?’”
He was also in for a surprise when he checked out the facilities at Clarke Stadium (“Clarke with an e,” to Ed’s amusement). He was used to new facilities like Texas Stadium in Dallas and Rich Stadium in Buffalo, state-of-the-art modern extravaganzas with saunas and gyms and racquetball courts. Someone could live their whole life in places like that and never want to leave. Not so at Clarke Stadium. The minute he entered he was looking for the exit.
“I walked through that locker room thinking, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’”
He was on a five-day tryout. If a player didn’t impress the coaching staff within five days, they were usually winging their way south out of there. Soon five days turned into nine and it was getting even colder. Should he invest in warmer clothes or pack his bags? He decided it was time to have a sit-down with the head coach, Ray Jauch.
“I told him, ‘I kind of think I’m good enough to play, but you have two Americans at the corners.’ I didn’t understand this Canadian-American ratio. So many Canadians, so many Americans, moving guys around. You could be a healthy scratch if somebody else goes down and they need to fill that [position] with an American. It was really quite confusing to me. But he said, ‘Nah, nah, hang around, we have something in store for you. You’re gonna play this next game.’”
His first game took place at Clarke Stadium on Canadian Thanksgiving, 1976. He played at the defensive halfback position, which was similar to the strong safety position he had played in Buffalo. The Eskimos won. Jones played three more regular-season games and continued throughout the playoffs. Edmonton beat Winnipeg in the Western semifinals but lost to Saskatchewan in the finals for the right to go to the Grey Cup.
“And I impressed,” said Jones. “So that’s why I’m still here.”
Don Matthews was the defensive coach in Edmonton that season, his first year in the CFL. Matthews had taken over a winless high-school program in Beaverton, Oregon, three years prior to coming to Edmonton and coached the team to consecutive state championships, going unbeaten in his final year. Don Matthews would eventually win five Grey Cups as a head coach in the CFL, but as training camp approached in 1978, little did he know that he was about to embark on a run of five straight Grey Cups as an assistant coach with the Eskimos.
“I remember being in the Eskimo office,” said Jones. “Our coach, Don Matthews, says to me, ‘Hey, we got this new quarterback coming up here. He’s really good.’”
“Oh yeah?”
“Out of University of Washington.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Warren Moon,” said Matthews.
“Wow,” said Jones. He repeated the name. “Warren Moon.” Maybe he thought Matthews was jerking his chain. Is that name for real? Warren Moon?
“Who’s that?” he finally asked.
But what he remembered all these years later was what Matthews didn’t say about Moon. He never said, “Yeah, we got this black quarterback coming up here.” And so for a moment in time Warren Moon existed in Ed Jones’s mind in a kind of pure state of quarterback being, free of labels and identifiers other than that he was “really good.” That first impression stayed in his mind.
“We don’t see colour up here!” Ed exclaimed before pausing for a quick rethink. He adjusted his statement somewhat to acknowledge that there might be a few out there who very much see colour and nothing but colour. “Not everyone,” he said, bringing things down a notch, “but for the most part a lot of guys don’t see colour up here. When Warren went down to the States, you know, it was black quarterback this, black quarterback that.… Up here, it was just ‘Warren Moon.’”
Matthews did have another message to deliver to Ed Jones that day in 1978 regarding Warren Moon, and this was perhaps the underlying reason behind their discussion in the first place.
“He said, ‘We got this good kid coming up here.’ And then he goes, ‘And we’d like you to stay away from him a little bit. ’Cause he’s a good kid.’” Ed Jones reacted with appropriate shock at the suggestion that he might have been a bad influence on the rookie. “And I’m saying, ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ At that time, I used to party a lot. In fact, I threw most of the parties for the players. I guess he thought I might be too much of a good influence on Warren.”
And as I had grown to expect from Ed Jones, he laughed.
“Yeah, the thing I worked on the most is teaching him how to throw a tight spiral. And I taught him how to throw sixty, seventy yards down the field. And I taught him to run fast.”
This was Tom Wilkinson’s sarcastic response when I asked whether he took the rookie phenom under his wing.
“I mean, there wasn’t anything I could teach him, as far as being a quarterback, other than just the way you handle yourself and the things you did, and how you call plays. That was something that you didn’t sit down with him and talk about. Because that’s what coaches do, and I certainly wasn’t a coach.”
When Bruce Lemmerman went down with an injury that year, the starting job was Wilkinson’s, with Moon acting like a reliever in baseball, brought in late to close the game out.
“Campbell didn’t hide the fact that I was our most talented quarterback,” Moon wrote in his autobiography, Never Give Up on Your Dream, “but he made sure I was put in the best possible position to succeed.”
It would be difficult to find two more disparate quarterbacks than Wilkinson and Moon. While Wilkinson worked the short game to perfection, Moon pushed the ball downfield. Where Wilkinson went for eight, Warren went for eighteen. But Moon was quite happy to sit back and watch Wilkinson work his mini-magic up and down the field. Canadian football was a different game than the American one. You had to learn, as a quarterback, how to make those differences work for you — the wider field, the number of downs, the number of players in motion before the snap of the ball. One play that Moon witnessed had him utterly baffled standing on the sidelines. Something that could only happen in a Canadian football game.
“I remember the first pre-season game,” he said, “where the punter of the opposing team punted the football into the end zone, and we punted it back out, and they caught it and punted it back in, and I was going, ‘What the heck is going on out there?’ But this was a big part of the game, getting that one point.”
(Ah yes, the beloved “rouge.” The single point awarded for a missed field goal or a punt that does not exit the end zone. One of the rules in Canadian football that can turn an intricate, well-played, well-coached game into playground mayhem in an instant.)
Hector Pothier, a former Canadian offensive tackle and now a school principal in Edmonton, was a rookie the same year as Moon. When it was his turn in the hot seat high above the Commonwealth Stadium field, I asked him to describe his first impressions of Moon as an athlete, not just a quarterback. He offered a frank assessment the likes of which might appear in a professional scouting report.
“Warren was always an outstanding athlete. I mean he’s as tall as I am. He’s six foot three. He’s strong. I mean, Warren, as a quarterback, had like a 350-pound bench press. Which is pretty impressive. Plus he can run like a deer, throw off his back foot, had an arm like a bullet. He was an amazing athlete. But he was a fairly humble, quiet guy, too. Fairly reserved, quiet, shy.”
In 1978, the Eskimos played their last game in Clarke Stadium and moved into Commonwealth Stadium, which had been built for the Commonwealth Games (and eventually the Eskimos) with seating for 40,000. The stadium was expanded in 1983 to a capacity of 60,000. In his first year with Edmonton, as backup to Wilkinson, Moon threw for 1,112 yards on eighty-nine completions. In the Grey Cup game, played at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto, the Eskimos exacted revenge on Montreal 20–13, with Wilkinson carrying the load. Moon only got into the game for one play, a quarterback sneak on a third-down-and-one-yard-to-go situation. On that one occasion, he got the first down. But his lack of playing time during the latter stages of the season and playoffs bothered him.
“I felt I wasn’t contributing to the team and wondered if I’d ever get my chance,” he told the Ottawa Journal. “But you have to be patient.”
In 1979, the workload was more equally divided between Wilkinson and Moon, with Moon throwing 149 completions for 2,382 yards compared to Wilkinson’s 120 completions for 2,132 yards. Moon also started four games. The team went 12–2 behind both quarterbacks. In the Western Conference final against the Calgary Stampeders, Wilkinson started but proved ineffective against the Calgary defence, and Coach Campbell made the switch to Moon early in the contest. Moon led the Eskimos to a couple of quick touchdowns and Edmonton hung on for the victory. Once again, Edmonton was heading to Montreal and the unfriendly confines of the Olympic Stadium against the Alouettes for the Grey Cup.
Despite pulling out the victory against the Stampeders the week before, Moon had no illusions over who would get the call to start the game.
“I know Wilkie will start in the Grey Cup and he should,” he told an Ottawa Journal reporter. “He’s the man and he’s gotten us this far. There’s no reason to change.”
Wilkinson did get the start in the Grey Cup game but, unlike the previous season’s final, he did not finish the game. Moon came on for the second half and threw his first Grey Cup touchdown pass, a thirty-three-yard pass to receiver Tom Scott. Neither quarterback particularly distinguished himself but the Eskimos came out on top, 17–9, in a defensive struggle. It was the fifth time the two teams had faced each other in the Grey Cup that decade, with the Eskimos coming out on top in the rubber match.
Moon had demonstrated that he was ready to be “the man” in Edmonton. He had completed his apprenticeship under Wilkinson and had been well served by it.
“Well you know, Wilkie had his skill set,” Moon said. “He was such a crafty guy. He just knew the game really well. Knew his ability, his strengths and weaknesses, inside out. He knew the things we did best in the offence and those were the type of plays that he called. And that was one of the things about our offence, that you called your own plays. So he called the ones that he felt most comfortable with and he succeeded.… No one could stop him, even if they knew what he was going to do. He just out-executed other teams.”
“He was quiet, very quiet. He wanted his actions to do the talking,” remembered Wilkinson about his protege. “Not his lips. And he wouldn’t say much in meetings. He was trying to take everything in. And every year he got a little better.”
Moon had also earned the trust of his coach, Hugh Campbell, not just for his obvious physical talents but for the more cerebral aspects he brought to the game. As Moon wrote in his autobiography, “Campbell also told anyone who would listen that I also won games with my head, not just my arm or my athletic ability.… It seemed as if every black quarterback at one time or another has faced his share of criticism about reading defences poorly or not being prepared — the inference being that black quarterbacks are not mentally up to the task.”
As expected, when the 1980 season opened, Moon had ascended to his rightful place as starting quarterback. Everything was indeed going according to the Moon plan. The Eskimos dominated the regular season, going 13–3, with Moon throwing 181 completions for 3,127 yards and twenty-five touchdowns. In the backup role, Wilkinson threw for another 1,060 yards. Ed Jones led the league in interceptions with nine. Nine Eskimos were named to the All-Canadian team. Moon’s total yardage passing was second only to Dieter Brock’s with Winnipeg. Brock, a white American quarterback from Birmingham, Alabama, by way of Auburn and Jackson State University, would win the Most Outstanding Player award that year. But it was Moon and the Eskimos that were going to the Grey Cup in Toronto against the overmatched Hamilton Tiger-Cats, barely one game over .500 and the best of a mediocre East.
If Edmonton won, it would be their third Grey Cup victory in a row, a streak that would match the highly touted Eskimos team from the ’50s led by Johnny Bright, Rollie Miles, and Jackie Parker. That was the Edmonton team that all subsequent Eskimos teams were compared against. If any team could match that great ’50s squad, it was Hugh Campbell’s team.
“It was a great team,” said Hector Pothier. “We just had all the right factors. We had great players. We had a great coach, Hugh Campbell, with a great philosophy that allowed us to be men. Basically, we had one rule. Act like a man. And if you don’t know what that means come talk to me.”
“You know, you were hearing about the guys from the ’50s, the three-in-a-row Grey Cups,” said Jones, the mischievous smile as wide as ever. “I met all those guys and I got to know them really well. I’d hang out with them. Rollie I used to call Pop ‘Roman Numeral’ Two. He was like my dad. He sort of looked after me a bit. I could pop in on him at two in the morning if I was on the west side of the city and maybe had a drink or two and didn’t want to drive home. I could pop in there and sleep it off. I was almost treated like one of his kids.”
The Grey Cup game itself was an anticlimactic rout. Moon threw for 398 yards passing and three touchdowns in a thorough demolition of poor Hamilton. He also picked up the MVP award for the game. It didn’t take long before talk swung from matching the ’50s Eskimos to surpassing them.
“And first it was like, ‘Well, who’s won three in a row?’” Tom Wilkinson remembered. “And it was the group from Edmonton — ’54, ’55, and ’56, Jackie Parker and them.… Then it was, ‘Well, who’s ever won four?’ ‘Well, nobody.’”
That was all the incentive they needed.
“I enjoyed these guys. These guys were a lot of fun,” said Ed Jones and I believed him. If anyone knew about “fun” and could provide a definition, it was Ed Jones. “The white guys [and] the black guys were all treated very equally here. There was nobody walking around with a side arm calling you, ‘Boy, come here!’ like I had in Texas. That’s probably why I stayed here. Because of the friendships I developed and the relationships I made.”
Friendships, relationships, and no side arms. Who wouldn’t want to stay? Plus now the team had their sights set on the magic number four. The regular season of 1981 played out like one long coronation. The Eskimos went 14–1–1, their lone blemishes a loss to Winnipeg behind Dieter Brock and a tie with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. The offence was unstoppable and the defence impenetrable. There was talk throughout the league that this year’s team was the best Canadian football team of all time. Tough to argue with that. Their only competition came from the West-based teams, led by Winnipeg who went 11–5, with three of the remaining four teams owning winning records. The East was a complete shambles. Outside of Hamilton, who had an 11–4–1 record, Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa won only a total of ten games and half of those belonged to Ottawa behind an exciting black rookie quarterback, J.C. Watts.
Moon had a tremendous season by any standards with 237 completions for 3,959 yards and twenty-seven touchdowns, numbers only surpassed by Dieter Brock in Winnipeg. But in Winnipeg, Brock was the show. In Edmonton, Hugh Campbell still found playing time for Tom Wilkinson, who chipped in with 1,293 passing yards and eight touchdowns of his own. The team as a whole set a league record with 576 points scored, an average of thirty-six points per game. Wide receivers Brian Kelly, Waddell Smith, and Tom Scott accounted for almost 4,000 yards receiving the ball.
But there’s no question who was at the reins of this offensive juggernaut as it rolled over the opposition on its way to the Grey Cup. One man, Warren Moon. For Tom Wilkinson, one play that season came readily to mind that encapsulated Moon’s incredible talent.
“There was one game the last year I was here when we played at Commonwealth Stadium. We were going to the north and [Moon] rolled out to his left into a really strong wind and just flipped the ball to Brian Kelly for about thirty-five yards and a touchdown. I didn’t have a bad arm but I didn’t have a gun. But I’m not kidding, the way the wind was blowing and to be rolling to your left …” He paused in mid-memory to just shake his head in amazement. “I’d have had to throw it and gone and picked it up and thrown it again to get it where Kelly was. And he just rolled out and flipped it.”
Asked by Graham Kelly for his book The Grey Cup what went into being a good receiver, Brian Kelly answered, “It helps to have a good quarterback. That is one very important characteristic; a quarterback who can put the ball on the money all the time without putting the receiver at risk. Warren Moon can do that.”
Moon “was a leader by performance,” said Hector Pothier, as succinct as ever.
That leadership would be put to the test in the Grey Cup game of 1981.
The fact that a lowly five-win team, Ottawa, beat a lowlier three-win team, Montreal, in the Eastern semifinals was nothing to get Canadian football fans excited, not even those in Ottawa. It is difficult to take pride in an undeserving team making the playoffs when the bar has been set limbo-dancer low. But when that same team then goes on to eliminate the top team, Hamilton, in the conference final, well, then the reluctant fan gets to thinking that maybe the regular season was an anomaly, that only now were the Rough Riders rising from the smoking embers of a lost season to transform into a thundering flock of phoenixes.
Right.
Even if a fan was dreamy-eyed enough to think it possible that the Eastern Roughies could beat the Eskimos, the odds-makers were saying something different: that Ottawa did not even belong on the same field as Edmonton. Thus, the Rough Riders became twenty-two-and-a-half-point underdogs to the Eskimos. But Ottawa had a secret weapon in J.C. Watts. Not exactly a “secret weapon” because he had played all season, but he was a rookie quarterback; no one could guess how he would hold up under pressure before and during the game. But Hamilton coach Frank Kush — the same man that once tried to recruit Warren Moon to Arizona State — knew how Watts was capable of turning a flaw in his game into a positive quality.
“I think the greatest asset Watts had going for him was his inconsistency,” said Kush after the Tiger-Cats fell to Ottawa. “The reason for that is he got back there, scrambled, and came up with the big plays.”
Unpredictability might have been a more generous term than “inconsistency,” although throughout his rookie season in the CFL Watts proved more than capable of producing as many spectacular fails as successes. But once the game got under way, it was Moon who provided the model of unpredictability — because it was impossible to predict that he could play so badly.
“The first two plays of the game, I remember, I believe he threw outside, one to Kelly, and one to Scott,” remembered Hector Pothier, who was providing protection for Moon. “And both [passes] hit the turf in front of the receiver and that was a foreshadowing of the sort of rough half for Warren.”
On his next possession he threw another one into the ground and then the next one into the arms of an Ottawa defender. Of his first six passes, he completed only one, not counting the two he completed to Ottawa defenders, both interceptions resulting in points on the board for Watts and company.
“I mean Warren struggled … there’s no doubt about it,” said Pothier. “[On the second interception] I was blocking my guy at tackle — we weren’t close to Warren at all — and he threw a pass downfield that hit me in the back of the head, went up in the air about forty yards, and they intercepted and ran it down to about our ten-yard line.”
Watts, on the other hand, was doing what he had to do while Edmonton imploded. He turned Eskimo mistakes into points and raced out to a 20–0 lead. In his post-game interviews, Moon was at a loss to explain why he began the game so poorly.
“I don’t know what it was. I threw the first two passes into the ground when I had guys open. The third one I tried to force the ball in just to get a completion and a guy intercepted it.”
Hugh Campbell had seen enough. Early in the second quarter, he sent in Tom Wilkinson to take Moon’s place.
“I want you to go out there and get me some first downs,” Campbell told Wilkinson, “so we can show Warren some things at halftime, some simple things that work.”
And that’s exactly what Wilkinson did. Slowly but surely he worked the team down the field. Ottawa was willing to give Edmonton the short plays in order to prevent the deep threats. But that was precisely Campbell’s strategy in putting in Wilkinson. He wanted to remind Moon that he didn’t have to make big plays to get back into the game. Work the field and work the clock and there was still an entire half to play. As it turned out, Edmonton had to settle for a single point off a missed field goal, and they went into halftime trailing 20–1.
“I said almost nothing at halftime,” Campbell told reporters after the game. “The feeling was that we knew we could score twenty points — undoubtedly — in the half. We knew we could score three touchdowns in three minutes. The important thing was getting the first one.”
When the second half started, Moon was back at quarterback. He promptly led the Eskimos down the field for a touchdown. 20–8. J.C. Watts rolled out deep in his zone, was hit by an Edmonton tackler, and fumbled the football, with Edmonton recovering it on the three-yard line. A Moon quarterback sneak, and just like that, the score was 20–15. Ottawa kicked a field goal. 23–15. Later, a one-yard quarterback sneak by Moon and a two-point conversion. Tie game, 23–23. And with three seconds left on the clock, Dave Cutler kicked a field goal for Edmonton to win the game.
It was hardly Moon’s best game and, quite frankly, could be rated as one of his worst. He threw another interception in the second half to go with his two in the first. He was matched in that category by Watts, who also threw three interceptions and made a costly fumble deep in his own territory. But it was J.C. Watts who was named the game’s offensive MVP for keeping the game interesting and close. Inconsistent — or unpredictable — to the end.
Interestingly enough, the player most credited with leading Edmonton to victory in its fourth Grey Cup in a row was Tom Wilkinson, who played less than a quarter of the game.
“Inspired by 15-year veteran Tom Wilkinson, the heart and soul of the Eskimos,” read the Nanaimo Daily Free Press on November 23, 1981, “Edmonton answered with a 25-point second half to nose out the victory.”
Not to take anything away from Wilkinson, who went 10-for-13 for eighty yards during his stint at quarterback, but what did he accomplish in that playing time? A single point on the board. To credit Wilkinson with turning the game around, as many newspapers did across the country, was to ignore what Moon did in the second half. Wilkinson did what he had always done, moved the ball and ate up time, providing Moon with a breather and allowing him to get his bearings. There had never been any question in Campbell’s mind who would start the second half.
Perhaps it was just the press heaping excessive praise on the little overachiever from Wyoming as he rode into the sunset. But no more would Warren Moon have to read or hear about who should be or not be starting any game. The job was all his heading into the 1982 season. And once again, a black quarterback from the East was set to rise up and challenge the reigning champ for supremacy in the CFL.
In Tennessee, they called him “the Artful Dodger.” But if you’re thinking of the filthy little master pickpocket from Charles Dickens’s classic Oliver Twist, forget it. Wrong guy. This Artful Dodger was a five-foot-ten black quarterback from Alabama, whose skin colour prevented him from playing quarterback for a major school in his home state. Instead, he went to the University of Tennessee where the head coach told him, “If you can play quarterback, you can play at Tennessee.” That was all he needed to hear. Alabama’s loss would be Tennessee’s gain. He played varsity quarterback for three seasons for the Tennessee Volunteers, electrifying fans every time he touched the ball (which, it so happens, was every offensive play from scrimmage). No one knew what to expect from one play to the next. Not even his coaches.
His name was Condredge Holloway. And he would be the first Black American to ever play quarterback in the Southeastern Conference.
Condredge Holloway could steal an opponent blind. They might think they had him comfortably trapped behind the line of scrimmage but they’d blink and he’d be gone, leaving his opponent grasping at air. There is a story — difficult to absolutely verify in the game film — where it is said that, in a game against Georgia State, every player on the defensive side of the ball got a hand on Holloway and he still scored the touchdown. It is a remarkable thing to watch, that run. He bounced, he pivoted, he turned completely around, regaining balance and direction, not resisting the tackler but allowing himself to be twisted in the direction the tackler took him and using that force to gain momentum, as hands slid helplessly away. And then the next wave, arms stretched, fingers extended, grazing ankles … then nothing. Teammates clashed against each other like bowling pins, a would-be sandwich missed, toppling over one another like some staged extras in a forgotten gridiron classic of the silver screen. There he is … no, there … no, there! All that was missing was a Harpo Marx–like honk to rub it in.
As his former Tennessee teammate Lester McLain comments in Kenny Chesney’s cinematic ode to Holloway, The Color Orange, on Holloway’s unbelievable touchdown run, “Only in a cartoon can you get away that way.” And maybe that’s what makes it so compelling to watch time after time, the cartoonish improbability of it all.
Condredge Holloway was born in Huntsville, Alabama, the grandson of a former slave on his father’s side who gained emancipation as a child in 1865. He went to an integrated Catholic school until grade six and then, like all black children in Huntsville, he attended segregated public school. During the ’60s, Governor George Wallace was something of a divine ruler in Alabama — if you were white, that is. At his gubernatorial inauguration in 1963, with the rising tide of civil rights threatening to overwhelm the white power structure, he made his famous American apartheid declaration. “I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.”
In his inaugural year, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional, Wallace stood blocking the doorway to the enrolment office at the University of Alabama, flanked by state troopers, to prevent black students from enrolling. His personal blockade ended when President John F. Kennedy sent in National Guard troops to force integration. Two months later, Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and felt obligated to draw attention to Wallace’s rhetoric.
“I have a dream that one day in Alabama with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”
But Alabama football was suffering under Wallace’s apartheid system. Alabama was one of the last teams in the United States to have an entirely white makeup. The once-powerful football team, under Coach Bear Bryant, was falling behind schools that were taking advantage of Alabama’s racist policies by recruiting the best black athletes out from under their noses. Bryant saw the writing on the wall and was trying to work to change the system from within. It was not until the famous game between Alabama and USC on September 12, 1970, the first time an integrated football team from outside the state would play on Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama, that things would change. USC, with an all-black backfield, hammered the Crimson Tide in front of a stunned crowd. Bryant had made his point. Integration on the gridiron was an absolute must if Alabama ever hoped to top the nation again.
Which brings us back to the young Condredge Holloway. In high school, he discovered that friends he had known from Catholic school were now picking sides. He decided that rather than get caught up in peer pressure he would pour his energy into sports, and he was able to do that at an incredible level. He was a three-sport star athlete, receiving university recruitment letters in basketball (from John Wooden at UCLA) and football. The Montreal Expos drafted him fourth overall as shortstop and offered the seventeen-year-old Holloway a handsome contract. Signing the contract would have meant forgoing college, and Condredge’s mother would have none of that. Her son was going to get a university degree. And the best bet for that to happen was by means of a football scholarship.
He did get an offer from Bear Bryant to play football at the University of Alabama. There was, however, a caveat. He would not be allowed to play quarterback. Alabama was not ready to have a Black American as the face of its most famous football team.
“I was told by Bear Bryant that it wasn’t his problem, it was the governor’s problem,” said Holloway over the phone from his office at the University of Tennessee where he is now an assistant athletic director. “He was the one who said, ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.’ Coach Bryant and I had a great relationship. But he told me he can’t override the governor of Alabama. That was out of his hands.”
So, instead, Holloway accepted an offer from the University of Tennessee.
“Believe it or not, my coach here at Tennessee, Bill Battle, was a former player for Bear Bryant. He was just in a state that didn’t have problems like that or believe in that. He asked the governor of Tennessee, ‘Can we have a black quarterback?’ And he said, ‘If he’s good enough, yeah.’ They had no problem with anything.”
It is hard to imagine in Canada that the head of the football program at a major university would have to go to the premier of a province to make a player personnel decision. But in the South of the United States where racial prejudices could reach a fever pitch, under the threat of funding cuts or open fan revolt, especially where older, more staid alumni were concerned, the University of Tennessee football program needed to know if they could have a black quarterback. Did Holloway ever feel an added burden as the first black quarterback in the Southeastern Conference?
“I never worried about that,” he said. “I played as hard as I could, I played the best I could. That’s just the way I was brought up. My dad and mom always said, ‘Always play the best you can play and fix whatever you messed up.’ That’s just the way we were. I never felt that I was on a platform where I had to play for anybody. Not at all. Ever.”
His parents’ advice “to fix whatever you messed up” must have been echoing in his ears in his very first game as a starter against Georgia Tech. The Volunteers were on the march for a touchdown when Holloway threw “a quick out” to the sidelines. The pass was tipped at the line of scrimmage and fluttered toward the receiver, giving the defensive back enough time to step in front and intercept the pass at about the Georgia Tech twenty-eight-yard line. In The Color Orange, there is wonderful footage of the defensive back sprinting down the sidelines for a certain touchdown. Not showboating or high-stepping, just flat-out sprinting. There is no one else in the shot. He’s having his moment in the warm brilliance of the sun. And then, out of nowhere, Condredge Holloway enters the shot, crossing the forty-yard line on an angle toward the interceptor. The thirty, the twenty, ten … Holloway dives and brings down the most surprised human on the planet. Fix whatever you messed up. The Volunteers held Georgia Tech to a mere field goal when, moments before, a touchdown had seemed a sure thing. In the film, he calls it the best play he ever made.
“If I don’t catch him, I’m probably a defensive back the next week,” he says in the film.
Beginning in that rookie season as varsity starting quarterback in 1973, for three seasons Condredge Holloway thrilled the Volunteers fans who flocked to Neyland Stadium and the millions of Tennesseans watching the televised games at home. For his Houdini-like escapes on the field, he was dubbed “the Artful Dodger” by the Volunteers’ play-by-play voice, John Ward. He wished he could have been known by a different tag, something that might have proved less stressful on his body.
“I would much rather stand back and throw it like Peyton [Manning] and not have a hip replacement, two knees, and a shoulder,” he admits in the film.
As exciting as it is to watch and marvel at his daredevil escapes online, one cannot miss noting that he took a hell of a lot of punishment. By his senior year he was playing injured much of the time and it was affecting his game, although not enough to prevent Tennessee from going to a third bowl game in a row with Condredge at the helm. He was drafted by the New England Patriots in the twelfth round of the 1975 NFL draft. They made it clear that they were not interested in him as a quarterback. And he wasn’t interested in being a defensive back.
Then the Ottawa Rough Riders contacted him. They never told him he’d make a hell of a defensive back; they wanted him to play quarterback. They had another rookie quarterback in camp that year, one with an even higher profile than Holloway’s. Tom Clements had been the starting quarterback at Notre Dame from 1972 to ’74, leading the Fighting Irish to the national championship in 1973. The following season, his senior year, saw Clements finish fourth in the Heisman Trophy voting. The two quarterbacks would share quarterback duties that first year with Clements getting the lion’s share of the playing time, throwing for 2,013 yards as compared to Holloway’s 984. That would be the pattern for three straight seasons with roughly the same ratios of playing time and yards passing. When Ottawa went to the Grey Cup game in 1976, both quarterbacks’ second year, Clements would play the entire game, despite having a miserable first half. He would, however, redeem himself by throwing the winning touchdown pass to Tony Gabriel with twenty seconds left in the game to beat Saskatchewan 23–20. Clements would win the Grey Cup MVP despite completing just eleven passes in thirty-five attempts for 174 yards.
By their fourth season, 1978, there was no longer a discrepancy in their playing time, and their statistics from that season prove it: Clements threw for 1,990 yards and Holloway for 1,970. One statistic in particular stood out in Holloway’s favour: he only threw two interceptions that season while Clements threw twelve. In fact, throughout their whole careers Clements tended to throw a lot of interceptions while Holloway did not. This can probably be explained by Holloway’s greater mobility. He didn’t have to throw into dangerous situations, because he could tuck the ball away and run. Clements was considered the traditional drop-back passer while Holloway was considered a much greater threat running the ball.
In 1979, that quarterback partnership ended when Tom Clements was traded to Saskatchewan, who flipped him to Hamilton midway through the season after a poor start. Any thought that the job was all Holloway’s ended, however, when Ottawa picked up Jimmy Jones from Montreal. Once again Condredge found himself sharing minutes with another quarterback, although this time he was the starter and Jones was in the backup role.
(Jimmy Jones owned a unique distinction. He had been the first black quarterback to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, back in 1969. At the time he was the starting quarterback for USC. That season the Trojans went undefeated, 10–0–1, their only blemish a 14–14 tie with Notre Dame. USC beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl, ending the season ranked third in the nation. In the 1972 NFL draft, he went undrafted. He came to Montreal where he was named the Eastern All-Star quarterback in 1974. That same year he led the Alouettes to victory in the Grey Cup over the Edmonton Eskimos.)
Holloway played two more seasons for the Rough Riders before he was traded to the Toronto Argonauts, the league’s sad sacks and whipping boys for close to thirty years. Their last Grey Cup had been in 1952, when Ulysses Curtis was their backfield star. In 1980, the Toronto Argonauts had named Willie Wood, former Green Bay Packer defensive back and double Super Bowl winner, as head coach, the first black head coach in CFL history. Thirty-four years after he had signed Herb Trawick to the Montreal Alouettes, Lew Hayman, now president of the Argos, was back breaking boundaries.
“Even if Willie was white I would have hired him,” Hayman told the press. “I hired the first black player and now I’ve hired the first black coach. Whether it’s a player or a coach all I’m concerned with is if he can help us, that’s the guy I want.”
Willie Wood saw something of his own story in Holloway’s struggles to find a job coming out of college. Back in 1957, he had been the starting quarterback at USC, the first black quarterback in not only USC’s history but in the entire Pac-10 (which is now the Pac-12). In the now all-too-familiar scenario, he went undrafted by the NFL. But Wood sent out letters to all the pro teams and got a hit. Vince Lombardi, head coach of the Green Bay Packers, was interested in giving him a tryout. In this case, however, Wood allowed himself to be turned into a defensive back. That move happened to work in his favour. In twelve seasons, he never missed a game, made All-Pro eight times, and won two Super Bowls.
The 1981 season started poorly for the Argonauts. They lost their first three games by a total of only five points. And then came a disastrous and humiliating blowout in Hamilton. Two weeks later the Argonauts appointed Ralph Sazio president of the club, replacing Hayman. Unless Willie Wood could do the impossible and turn his team’s fortunes in the opposite direction, his tenure as a head coach would not last under Sazio, who was known for having an itchy trigger finger. The Argos ran their losing streak to ten games. When Wood confessed to reporters that he had “already tried everything” in his bag of coaching tricks to turn the team around, he as good as signed his walking papers.
But according to Holloway, Wood took far too much of the blame.
“Willie Wood was a great coach and an even better player,” Holloway told me, in his former coach’s defence. “A lot of stuff gets blamed on the coach when you’ve got players who can’t play. We were two and fourteen because we had two-and-fourteen players. Willie never played a down.”
That off-season, Sazio went out and hired Ottawa’s assistant coach from 1976 to 1981, Bob O’Billovich. He brought with him offensive coordinator Darrel “Mouse” Davis, who had developed a unique offensive system he’d perfected as head coach of Portland State. The system was known as the “run-and-shoot” offence, and both men believed it perfectly suited Condredge Holloway’s gift for improvisation.
The run-and-shoot offence emphasized the passing game, putting multiple receivers in motion parallel to the line of scrimmage, a means for the quarterback and receivers to determine the defensive coverage being used. That, of course, was just the beginning. The system granted the receivers the freedom to adjust their pass routes according to the coverage. The quarterback would also adjust his thought patterns to match the receiver’s and throw to open spaces soon to be occupied by the receiver. It was a complex system requiring improvisation within rigid patterns. Asked for a rough explanation of the run-and-shoot system from the quarterback’s point of view, Holloway gave a sigh that said, Oh no, not again. I’m being forced to explain Einstein’s theory of relativity to a barnyard chicken.
“The run-and-shoot is an offensive scheme just like the ‘I’ formation or split formation,” he began. “It enhances a lot of motion. And the reason it works so well in Canada is because you have unlimited motion. In the U.S., you can’t run three guys across the field. In Canada you can line up four guys on one side, run three of the four in motion across the formation. If the defence doesn’t move, they’re in zone coverage. In Canada, you can run two one way and one back the other way. Maybe you can find out if they’re in man-to-man and who’s covering who, and if they’re not they’re in zone and you can find out exactly which zone they’re in before the ball is even snapped. That’s the luxury of motion.”
Got that? It was also a system that required a quarterback with brains, guile, mobility, and toughness. But it could take its toll on quarterbacks. They tended to get hit a lot because they were such active members in the flow of motion, often waiting until the last moment before unloading the ball.
Hugh Campbell was familiar with the system and had heard all about Mouse Davis and the offence he was running down at Portland State. No matter how much Campbell may have admired the run-and-shoot, he was not willing to run the same risks with his most valuable commodity, Warren Moon. That may have been the reason that, before the season began, Toronto acquired quarterback Joe Barnes from Saskatchewan. It wouldn’t hurt to have two quality quarterbacks drilled in the intricacies of an innovative offensive scheme in case one of them goes down. This is not a system where teams could airlift in an emergency replacement and hope to teach him on the fly.
Once again, the season started slow for the Argonauts as the players acclimatized themselves to the new playbook. They also needed to build up confidence in their ability to close out games. The year before they had come to believe that at the end of the day, they would always lose. It was O’Billovich’s job to change that mindset. To make them believe that they would win. And just as much as he had to sell that change to the players, it was important to change the minds of the fans, those who resorted to the derisive drone of “Arrrggggos” as the team staggered toward each inevitable loss.
“One thing when I came to Toronto from Ottawa,” Holloway said, “everyone just wanted to talk about the history and all that stuff and how [the Argos] were so bad. I didn’t engage in that. Of course, I was part of it [that first year] but Obie was adamant about ‘We gotta change the culture.’ One thing about changing the culture is you have to forget about the past and not dwell on it. But I can see how people who had been there a long time were used to it and kind of expected it. You’re never going to change everybody’s mind, but if you play well, sometimes they come around.”
And gradually, the team began to make believers out of the players and the fans. Late in the season, the Argos lost back-to-backs against Winnipeg to drop to 7–6–1 before bouncing back to win their final two games against Saskatchewan and Ottawa, closing out the regular season with a 9–6–1 record. What a difference a year makes, from 2–14 in 1981 to first place in the East in 1982. Condredge Holloway had his greatest season in the CFL, throwing the ball over 500 times, connecting on 299 of those passes for a 59 percent success rate and 4,661 yards, almost twice as much yardage as he had thrown the year before. Thirty-one of those completions went for touchdowns. Holloway’s trio of favourite receivers — Terry Greer, Paul Pearson, and running back Cedric Minter — accounted for 208 of those completions and 3,266 yards. As well, Holloway ran for another 448 yards, an average of 7.2 yards every time he took off on his own either by design or for purposes of survival. That brought his total yardage over 5,000 for the season.
A good year. Good enough to win the Schenley Award as the CFL’s Most Outstanding Player. Condredge Holloway has never been one to revel in his accomplishments. Make no mistake, he is very proud of what he has accomplished, but he’s not one to dwell on the past, except when fans and interviewers come calling. When the subject of his Schenley arises, Holloway, humbly and matter-of-factly, tells it as he sees it.
“Should have been Warren Moon. But sometimes you get lucky. He had a heck of a year. Go back and look if you have a chance. I’m not blowing smoke. Warren had a hell of a year that year.”
He’s right. Warren Moon did have a “hell of a year.” But when I reminded him that his own season wasn’t exactly chopped liver, Holloway was willing to concede … slightly.
“Well, it wasn’t a runaway, let’s put it that way.”
The Edmonton Eskimos had been so good for so long, maybe to sports-writers across the nation it was difficult to pick one man out of the many CFL All-Stars on those teams and declare Moon the most valuable. The Esks had won with Tom Wilkinson. Tom had even won a Schenley as the Most Outstanding Player back in 1974. Back then the Eskimos were really just coming into their own as the closest thing to a dynasty the league would see over the next decade. And besides, it was Tom Wilkinson, not the most gifted of athletes, a blue-collar white guy from Wyoming. Most CFL fans could identify with him. He had that gut. No abs, no six-pack. A gut. Just like your average Joe. It was never an aesthetic experience watching Wilkinson work the field, but he was not being paid to make the gridiron his canvas. He was being paid to win.
Warren Moon had inherited the pre-eminent quarterback position in the land. The presumption was that he would use the mighty Eskimo machine to roll over the opposition. There were expectations for him not just to win but to win magnificently, to eschew the more conservative approach of a Tom Wilkinson–led offence in favour of an exciting, deep-threat aerial game. And if he did not match their expectations, as was the case in the 1981 Grey Cup game, then he heard his share of boos. But that was all right with Warren Moon, because as far as he was concerned, the fans had every right to express their displeasure over a poor performance.
“It was so much easier for me to play [in Canada],” Moon conceded. “Not going out with the burden of wondering what the crowd reaction was going to be. Not walking out of the tunnel before the game started, and kind of tightening your shoulders wondering what you’re going to hear from some fan right outside the tunnel. Because that’s what you were exposed to sometimes in the United States. Going out there in Canada, you just knew if you were on the road you got booed along with the rest of the team. If I didn’t play well on the road, I got booed for it. If I didn’t play well at home, I got booed for it — fortunately that didn’t happen often. You were cheered and booed for the right reasons.”
In fact, Moon might have heard a few hometown boos early in the 1982 season as the Eskimos started off 3–5. And then one day it was as if the team awoke from some collective somnambulism, took a look around, and decided enough of this nonsense — and rattled off eight straight wins to finish the season. If the fans were looking for an exciting air show that year, they were not disappointed. Moon threw 562 passes, completing 333 of them for 5,000 yards. While Holloway had his top trio of receivers, Moon had what seemed an unlimited supply of targets: Brian Kelly, Waddell Smith, Tom Scott, Brian Fryer, the water boy, the mascot, and anyone that could run a route and hang onto the football. It was a Schenley Award year by anyone’s standards. But Moon did not have to carry a team with two wins the previous season on his back to first place in the East. Moon merely took a 14–1–1 first-place-in-the-West team to an 11–5 first-place team. And that worked in Holloway’s favour with the Schenley voters.
In the Eastern final that year, the Argonauts had an easy time polishing off the 5–11 Ottawa Rough Riders. The final score was an unflattering 44–7 in favour of Toronto. Edmonton, on the other hand, barely squeaked by the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the Western final, and the media pundits began calling it the beginning of the end for the Edmonton dynasty. No one was quite ready to crown the Argos before the game, remembering that only a year before they had been a 2–14 team, but they had managed to beat the Eskimos once during the season, so anything was possible. With the game being played at Exhibition Stadium in Toronto, the Argos could only benefit from a hometown crowd cheering them on.
The Eskimos opened the scoring early in the first quarter, with Moon moving the offence into field-goal range for Dave Cutler. 3–0. Toronto responded shortly after that when Holloway tossed a screen pass to Emanuel Tolbert, who raced eighty-nine yards to the end zone. 7–3. Moon then moved the Eskimos eighty-two yards in eight plays, finishing off the drive with a pass to Brian Kelly for the touchdown. Just like that, 10–7. The game was quickly becoming a case of “anything you can do I can do better” as Holloway proceeded to march the Argonauts down the field, mostly by means of his own scrambling, before launching a touchdown pass into the end zone to Terry Greer. Holloway got crushed as he let the pass go, his helmet ripped from his head. He bounced right up. 14–10. The 54,741 fans in the stands were going crazy, despite the freezing temperatures and cold southwesterly winds. How did Warren Moon respond? He once again marched the Eskimos down the field before calmly rolling out and throwing a forty-one-yard touchdown toss to Kelly. 17–14. Cutler added another field goal before the half to make it 20–14 in Edmonton’s favour before the rain and snow and colder temperatures blew in and ended the Argonauts’ hopes for an upset on the artificial turf of Exhibition Stadium. Final score, 32–16. Edmonton had their fifth Grey Cup victory in a row.
When I suggested that perhaps the Argos were beaten as much by the weather as they were by the Eskimos, Holloway scoffed.
“I think we could have scored against the weather but Edmonton was hitting us in the mouth and that’s one of the reasons we had a really hard time.”
Warren Moon rushed for ninety-one yards that day and threw for another 319, winning the game’s Most Valuable Player award. If his victory over Michigan in the Rose Bowl had been a vindication for the years of verbal abuse and criticism he had received from the Washington supporters and media, so too was the ’82 Grey Cup game.
“What makes this one so good is that I did it on my own,” he told reporters after the game. “Up until this year they kept saying that Tom Wilkinson had been holding my hand all this time.”
It probably irked him that Wilkinson had been given so much credit in the media for supposedly showing Moon how to get the job done during the Grey Cup game the previous year when it was Moon who’d led the second-half comeback. And it bothered him that his regular-season performance was once again overlooked by the Schenley voters. Moon had nothing personal against Condredge Holloway. After all, quarterbacks don’t play against quarterbacks. That’s just part of the media hype-machine, which heightens conflicts and invents personal battles, always ready to pounce on a morsel of controversy. (A hockey goalie is commonly said to “outduel” the opposing goalie even though neither one takes shots on the other.)
“I played against the defence of Edmonton,” said Condredge. “The only guy I was going head-to-head against was Dan Kepley [Edmonton’s middle linebacker]. That’s the guy I had to worry about. Warren was on the sideline when I was playing. I was on the sideline when he was playing. Now, for the press, we were going head-to-head.”
True enough. Still, one can only imagine the hype that would have surrounded this particular contest if it had been played south of the forty-ninth parallel. It would be six years before a black quarterback even made an appearance in the Super Bowl. In 1988, Doug Williams led the Washington Redskins to victory over the Denver Broncos, copping the MVP award in the process. Twenty-five years would pass before a black quarterback won another one, Russell Wilson in 2013. In the seventy-two years since the NFL integrated, only six black quarterbacks have played in the championship game. And never have two black QBs ever faced each other in an NFL Championship or Super Bowl. Did the significance of two black quarterbacks vying for the national championship of Canada two years in a row enter into Warren Moon’s thoughts before, during, or after the game?
“It did and it didn’t,” he told me, “only because of where I was. If this was something happening in the United States, it would have been a huge deal. Because it was Canada and we played against each other all the time, race was just not a big deal. And that was what was so refreshing about playing up there. It really didn’t matter where you were from or what the colour of your skin was. You were just a quarterback, and you were playing a position.”
Change was in the air in Edmonton after that fifth Grey Cup victory. For one thing, Hugh Campbell was leaving to take a head-coaching position with the Los Angeles Express of the fledgling United States Football League (USFL), which was meant to be a rival league to the NFL, although it would play a spring and summer schedule that would not put it in direct competition with the NFL for the football audience. There were also rumours in the air that Warren Moon was set to jump to either the USFL or the NFL, neither of which was true at the time.
“I signed a ten-year contract at one time with an ‘out clause,’ but I felt that I was going to play my whole career in Canada. That’s how much I was enjoying it. I was just enjoying playing football. I was being paid pretty well. My family was enjoying it.”
The biggest negative, if one considers it a negative, was going back and forth between Southern California and Edmonton, living in two places. His kids were reaching an age where he and his wife would have to make decisions concerning their future. Were they going to commit fully to living in Canada year-round or keep moving back and forth every six months? And, lest we forget, there was the Plan. Always in the back of his mind there existed the thought of returning triumphantly to the States and proving to all those professional NFL teams that they were wrong to overlook him because of the colour of his skin.
The Eskimos of 1983 were, if not exactly in turmoil, certainly trending downward, no longer the great invincible Edmonton machine. Hugh Campbell’s replacement as head coach was himself replaced halfway through the season by former Eskimo star Jackie Parker. But even “Ol’ Spaghetti Legs” could not lift Edmonton out of its mediocrity as the Eskimos finished the season 8–8, good for third place in the West. That mediocrity, however, did not extend as far as Warren Moon’s play. Moon had, from a purely statistical standpoint, a career year. He threw an unprecedented 664 passes, connecting on 380 of those for 5,648 yards and thirty-one touchdowns. It took a mediocre season by Edmonton for the Schenley voters to finally recognize Moon’s true value and achievements. He might have been speaking in the “royal we” when he said, after winning the Grey Cup and game MVP the year before, “I have given up thinking that we will get the recognition we deserve.”
Meanwhile in the East, Toronto had sailed along to a 12–4 record, including two wins over Edmonton, partial repayment for the Grey Cup loss. Though Condredge Holloway had established himself as the number-one starter, Joe Barnes, back from injury, was much more than a backup quarterback. This was another Warren Moon/Tom Wilkinson two-man quarterback show, with Holloway throwing for 3,184 yards and Barnes for 2,274. But the real star performance on that 1983 team belonged to Terry Greer, who caught 113 passes for an astounding 2,003 yards.
Toronto brushed aside the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, another five-win team from the East, in the Eastern final. By the time they had done that, however, they already knew that they would not be facing a rematch with the Eskimos, as Edmonton had been blown out by Winnipeg in the semifinals of the West. Winnipeg, in turn, were beaten by the first-place B.C. Lions. For the third season in a row, the Grey Cup game would be contested by two teams fronted by black quarterbacks, Holloway and Roy Dewalt of the B.C. Lions.
The 1983 Grey Cup would be the first Canadian football championship contested indoors under an inflatable roof at BC Place. For the first time since the Grey Cup’s inception in 1909, the Grey Cup competitors would not be at the mercy of the fickle Canadian weather in November. No mud wrestling. No need to fire staples into shoes to promote traction. No fog, rain, sleet, snow, freezing cold, or wind to affect the handling of the ball or the ability to run with it. There did, however, remain one distraction that could have affected the outcome of the game. The NOISE. And with a hometown crowd well-versed in the art of maximizing noise levels indoors, especially when the opposition had the ball, they could make it very difficult for visiting teams to hear the quarterback.
From the beginning, it was clear that Holloway did not bring his A game to the big event. He had only thrown five interceptions all year in 372 passing attempts and yet, on the second play from scrimmage, he threw a pass directly into the arms of a B.C. defensive back. The Argos’ offence never really got on track, Holloway in perpetual scramble mode, missing opportunities. Down 17–7 at the half, O’Billovich did not wait to see whether Holloway could turn his game, as well as the team’s fortunes, around. Instead, he inserted Joe Barnes into the game. The Argos came from behind and won the game with a couple of minutes left when Barnes hit Cedric Minter with a three-yard touchdown pass. The final score was 18–17.
“Condredge was having trouble running the football team. He was not sharp,” explained Obie in his post-game comments. He mentioned a hamstring, the flu. He had no desire to throw his starting quarterback under the bus. What was the whole purpose of having two quarterbacks capable of being starters if not for moments like this? Condredge Holloway is not the kind of man to fall back on excuses.
“Didn’t play well,” he said, looking back on his performance that day. “That’s the way it was. To win a Grey Cup, to win any championship, you’ve got to be a little bit lucky and you’ve got to play well, that day, at that moment. If you win, you win as a team and if you lose …” He left the rest unsaid. “Sometimes you just don’t get things done you should.”
Holloway was the consummate professional and team player. Could he have delivered in the second half if Obie had left him in? After all, Barnes hardly blew the doors off the game, putting up only eleven points in his half, with seven of those coming in the last two minutes of the game. But to wonder “what if” is to miss the point. Holloway and Barnes had each other’s backs all season long. There was nothing personal in Obie’s move, no lack of respect for his starter. Just an awareness that it was time for a change.
“All egos are gone when you get into the Grey Cup and when you are so far into your career,” acknowledged Holloway.
Once Hugh Campbell left Edmonton for the USFL, a stepping stone in his own plan to reach an NFL coaching position, the writing was on the wall for Warren Moon, writ large in ten-foot graffiti letters for the world to see. What else was there left to accomplish?
“I got to a point in Canada where I had done everything I could possibly do as a player. I won multiple championships, I won MVP awards of the game, I won the MVP award of the country. Our team was getting older, guys were starting to retire. I knew our run had pretty much ended. I didn’t want to go through a rebuilding process.”
And in the back of his mind was the question, “How good a quarterback am I really?” Over six seasons he had proven that he was the best quarterback in the Canadian Football League. There was nothing left to prove.
“I think the only way you can measure yourself on how good you are is to play against the very best. The very, very best to me were still in the National Football League. So that was the curiosity I had inside of me. And the challenge inside of me. I wanted to see exactly how good I was.”
The Plan had always been there. He had waited for the right moment. And now multiple NFL teams were banging at his door. He didn’t have to ask, “What position?” He knew. The time had come for Warren Moon. And to possibly sweeten their pitch for Moon’s services, the Houston Oilers hired Hugh Campbell, the man who knew Warren Moon’s capabilities better than anyone, as their new head coach. And so Warren Moon signed with Houston for $5.5 million over five years, the largest contract in NFL history at the time. The black player the NFL wouldn’t draft because he refused to play any other position than quarterback now stood atop the game.
I just had one last question for the most successful quarterback the Canadian game has ever seen.
“What would you have done if the Canadian Football League hadn’t existed?”
“That is a really good question,” he began, and I gave myself a mental pat on the back despite knowing he has probably made hundreds of interviewers feel brilliant by beginning his answer with those words. “What would I have done if the Canadian Football League was not there? Again I was a very stubborn, very confident guy that I could play quarterback and that was the only position I wanted to play. It wasn’t that I didn’t love football. I loved the game of football because of the position of quarterback. So if it wasn’t there I don’t know. I might’ve quit and gone to law school or something like that.… But I’m glad I wasn’t given that option because I’m glad the Canadian Football League option was there … it saved my career and made me the player I became. The opportunity of going to Canada did it.”
Maybe dreams are for those who can only imagine. But plans, such as those hatched in the Moon house in West L.A., are for those who can see dreams through to their natural conclusion.