Sometimes it felt like he’d been on the run his whole life. Running from poverty. Racism. Bigger kids. Drugs. Alcohol. The multiple sclerosis that stalked his family. And, on the gridiron, from the thunderous charge of large, armoured opponents whose task was to prevent him from doing what he was paid to do: run for his life.
There is no one in the history of the CFL who has run for more touchdowns on special teams — kickoffs, punts, or missed field goals — than Henry “Gizmo” Williams. Thirty-one touchdowns, twenty-six of those on punt returns. No one is even close. And that’s where Henry liked to be: way out in front.
When Henry was five, his mother died of multiple sclerosis (MS). He didn’t really know his father but he, too, would die a year later in a house fire. Henry went to live with his oldest brother, Edgar, who was only twenty-one when he took in Henry and five of his brothers and sisters. Including Edgar’s wife and two kids, there were ten people living in a two-bedroom shotgun house in west Memphis, Tennessee, a tough, rough, poor part of town. Edgar and his wife took over the roles of mother and father for all the kids. Edgar got up at five o’clock every morning to go to work at Memphis Light, Gas and Water, and he made all the kids get up with him even though they didn’t have to go to school until 8:00 a.m. He wanted to instill a sense of discipline in them. They were only going to get out of life what they put into it. Edgar was Henry’s hero in life.
But Edgar didn’t want the young Henry playing football. He was too small. He didn’t want to see his little brother get hurt.
“We used to play this game called ‘hot ball,’” Henry told me during our interview session at Commonwealth Stadium. “Hot ball was, you take the ball and you throw it up in the air, and every kid would try to catch it and run with it, everybody chasing and trying to tackle you. And when you play that game, you start off with probably about fifteen guys, and by the end of the day it’s about a hundred kids playing this game.”
And who was the kid at the centre, eluding his would-be tacklers the most? Henry Williams. This fact did not escape the attention of the principal, who then went to see the school football coach.
“You have to come see this little kid play,” he told the coach.
And so the coach went to see the little hot ball hotshot play.
“You ever play football?” he asked Henry.
“Nah. I don’t think my brother would let me play,” Henry said. “The only way you can get me to play football is if you go talk to my brother.”
The football coach at Henry’s public school went to see Edgar Williams.
“Mr. Williams,” he said respectfully. “Can you please let your brother Henry play football?”
This was Memphis, Tennessee, not Canada where health insurance is a given.
“I don’t have no money for the insurance,” replied his brother. In other words, if something happened to Henry during a game, Edgar wouldn’t be able to pay for treatments.
“I’ll never forget this,” said Henry Williams. “The coach said, ‘Don’t worry about it, we’ll take care of everything he needs.’”
Between the coach and the principal, they outfitted young Henry from head to toe: helmet, pads, cleats, the whole shebang. He never got to play the full four quarters in a game. The team was too good and Henry, in particular, was untouchable, sometimes scoring ten or eleven touchdowns a game. There were two plays: Henry right, Henry left. The coach took pity on the opposition and had to regularly bench Henry to keep the score down.
The legend of Gizmo was off and running.
* * *
Henry Williams never did hit a massive growth spurt. He topped out at five foot six, which turned off a lot of recruiters before they had even seen him play. He was drafted out of East Carolina University by the Washington Redskins in 1985 but chose to play for the Memphis Showboats of the United States Football League (USFL). That lasted one season before the league folded. But in that one year he did manage to pick up the nickname “Gizmo” from a teammate, future NFL Hall of Famer Reggie White. (Was he named for the mogwai in Gremlins, which had come out just a year earlier? Or because he was a small gadget that served any number of practical functions? Your guess is as good as mine.) Then he got a call from the Edmonton Eskimos of the CFL. He had never heard of Edmonton. He had never been to Canada, never seen a CFL game on television. Had no idea what awaited him. He came partway through the season. His first game was against B.C., where he was inserted into the lineup as a punt returner. The first punt he caught, he ran back for an eighty-nine-yard touchdown. A sign of things to come. He just had to remind himself there was no such thing as a fair catch in Canadian football. A man could get killed making that mistake.
There were other differences beyond the rules of the game that any first-year American player from the southern states, whether black or white, would have to learn.
“I was living in the Chateau Lacombe downtown … but I never forget that one morning when I got up and I looked outside. It was minus thirty-five degrees, snow was everywhere, and I was catching the LRT to get to the stadium. I didn’t know that they were going outside to practise, because I never been in a blizzard or something before. And I’ll never forget: [head coach and Eskimos legend] Jackie Parker came out and said, ‘Everybody on the football field in ten minutes.’ And I thought, No way, no way. I said, ‘Ain’t no way I can stay up here; this is too cold.’ I’ll never forget that day in practice. I didn’t get nothing done. I could barely move. I think when they blew the whistle I was the first guy to the locker room. The first place I went with my clothes on was the steam room. It was cold.”
Gizmo, or “the Giz,” is perhaps most remembered for his return of a missed field goal in the 1987 Grey Cup game, played at BC Place against the Toronto Argonauts. The Eskimos would defeat the Argos on a last-second field goal, 38–36, in an exciting back and forth game between the Eastern and Western champions. But early in the game, Lance Chomyc of Toronto lined up to kick a forty-six-yard field goal. Henry Williams was the lone back waiting in the end zone. If the field goal was wide, he could either run it out or concede a single point. The ball sailed wide right. Henry caught the ball on the fly and took off running to his right before turning upfield. Watch it online and you can see an extra gear kick in. He hurdles a would-be tackler and then cuts toward the opposite corner of the end zone.
“I must have run about 200 yards. But it was fun, it was exciting.”
Official record keepers have counted only 115 of those yards covered, the longest return in Grey Cup history. A decade later he would run a kickoff back for a ninety-one-yard touchdown run against the Toronto Argonauts during the Grey Cup dubbed “the Snow Bowl.” The Eskimos would lose that day. All told, Henry played in five Grey Cups over his fifteen-year career with the Eskimos, winning two and losing three. He has career records no one will ever touch. It is unheard of for a kick returner to last as long as Gizmo did without suffering career-ending injuries or a huge drop-off in speed. If you’re a kick-return specialist, the one thing you can’t afford to lose is your speed. Many teammates had come and gone over his long career in Edmonton but one thing never wavered — his belief in them.
“I had a lot of guys on the football field who cared about me. Not just because I cared about football. I never said this, but I always felt like they’d never let anything happen to me. That’s how much I trust my teammates. I always felt like when I’m running down the football field, they would never let nothing happen to me bad. They were always going to look after me.”
He did give the NFL a try back in 1990 with the Philadelphia Eagles, but he hated it. He wasn’t the coach’s guy. Somebody else on the Eagles staff had brought him in. And in head coach Buddy Ryan’s book, Henry could do no right. Buddy Ryan was the opposite of a Pinball Clemons; he wanted to control everything. Two games before the playoffs, Williams walked into Ryan’s office and said, “You know what, release me.”
“He couldn’t believe I wanted to be released. He said, ‘Why you want to be released? You’re not happy here?’ I go, ‘I’m happy, I just feel like I need to.’ And I know if I hadn’t told him to release me, I probably would’ve done something stupid that I would’ve regretted. I just asked him to release me because I knew I had a home I could come back to.”
And for Henry Williams that home was Edmonton.
“There’s a lot of things that guys don’t understand. When you play football in the CFL, you’re playing because you love the game. You’re not playing for the money, I can tell you right now. You’re playing because you love the game. Because if I was playing because I loved the money, I would have been definitely trying to get a job back in the NFL.”
Edgar Williams never got to see his little brother achieve fame and success as a professional on the gridiron. He never got to see Henry enter the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 2002. Edgar Williams had to send Henry away to live with an uncle and aunt in Mississippi just as he was about to enter high school, because Edgar was sick with the MS that would ravage the members of Henry’s immediate family. His mother died from MS, and so did his brother, Edgar. Of the ten siblings in the Williams family, seven of them died from MS. When Henry Williams turned thirty-seven years of age, he had already accomplished something none of those seven siblings could achieve: living past thirty-six. His last two brothers died from heart attacks brought on by drug and alcohol abuse. Of the twelve members of his immediate family, Henry is the only survivor. He is only fifty-six years old.
Today, Henry Williams works as a personal trainer, a high-school football coach, and a motivational speaker. He’s in high demand in all these areas. He is also actively involved in a number of charities, including Kids with Cancer Society, Cystic Fibrosis Canada, and especially the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada. He is still a workout demon. Built like the proverbial brick you-know-what. Muscles bulging on muscles most people will never know exist. He may not still be running from MS, but he is fighting the possibility of attack by making an unassailable castle of his body.
Henry Williams is well aware that things aren’t perfect for black people in Canada. Racism exists because racists exist. They can be anywhere. But freedom comes in many forms.
“I think a lot of guys when they come here they find themselves more relaxed. It’s an equal opportunity for them to be whoever they want to be, to do whatever they want to do.”
There is another kind of freedom for Henry and one that he says other Black Americans, especially those from the South, appreciate. Being in a place, in Henry’s words, “where they ain’t got to look over their shoulder all the time.” If there’s one experience Henry Williams knows something about it’s the feeling of looking over his shoulder at whatever or whomever might be nipping at his heels.
“Growing up as a kid, I was always on the run. Move from here, go to here, going there. Edmonton is the only place I’ve really settled down and been able to find myself and know what I want to do with life now … and that’s why I think the only way I’m going to leave Edmonton now is in a wooden box, head first. And I don’t think I’m even going then.”
On November 29, 2015, the Edmonton Eskimos defeated the Ottawa Redblacks on Investors Group Field in Winnipeg, Manitoba, for the 103rd Grey Cup. A piece of Canadian football history was made that night that might have gone unnoticed amid the celebrations for yet another Grey Cup for one of the most storied franchises in Canadian football: Ed Hervey became the first black general manager to win a Grey Cup.
Today, Ed Hervey is the general manager of the B.C. Lions. He came to the CFL as a receiver back in 1999 with the Edmonton Eskimos. He won two Grey Cups as a wide receiver with Edmonton. He went from the gridiron straight into scouting. He was never much interested in coaching. He was far more interested in the business side of operations, which included finding the talent worth signing. One of his mentors with the Eskimos organization was the president, Hugh Campbell, the man behind the signing of Eskimos legend Warren Moon. Campbell encouraged Hervey to pursue his ambitions. In 2009, Ed Hervey became the head scout for the Eskimos and, in 2012, the general manager, a position he held until 2016. One year later he took on the role of general manager with the Lions. That amounts to twenty years that Ed Hervey has given not only to Canadian football but to Canada itself.
Ed Hervey knows what it’s like to live a double life. He spent his high-school years living undercover. Alert, wary, hiding the truth, retracing his steps, throwing off pursuers whether they existed or not. It was too dangerous to live without paranoia. Inhabiting a wardrobe of drab colours, varying shades of brown, grey, black. Nothing that might remotely grab attention or signal an association with the colours of a particular gang. That kind of mistake could get you shot.
That was life in Compton, California, a city of approximately 100,000 contained within Los Angeles County and a city more often associated with black gang violence than probably any city in the world. The main combatants were the Bloods and the Crips, of which existed any number of associated subsets throughout Los Angeles. Like Warren Moon had done twenty years earlier, Ed Hervey wanted to attend a high school outside his area, Compton High School, because of its athletic reputation. There was only one problem, one with possible deadly consequences: he would be living in an area dominated by Bloods while attending school in a neighbourhood under the influence of the Crips. Blood colours were red, the Crips’ were blue. Best to eliminate either colour from one’s wardrobe.
On Fridays at Compton High, the players got to wear their football jerseys on campus. Powder-blue home uniforms. There was no way he was ever going to bring that colour jersey home with him. He’d take it off and leave it at the school, then follow his convoluted path home as if traced by enemy agents.
“If they found out where I lived, whether I was involved or not, it wasn’t about who you were but where you were from.”
We spoke in the safety of the media room of the Eskimos’ team facilities in Commonwealth Stadium. He admitted that the whole intrigue involved in his youthful double life was “silly.” Not just in retrospect; he thought it was even then. An absurd pretend life, something out of a movie. But it was his reality.
“It was a world you had to live in and it was a world you had to survive in.”
When he was fourteen, he’d look out the window of his house. It became something of a family routine. His mother would ask, “What’s going on out there?”
“Oh, you know, a whole lot of people doing nothing,” he’d respond.
“Good,” she’d say. “I’m glad you see that.”
But even though Ed Hervey dreamed of getting as far away from Compton as he could for all the obvious reasons like drugs, gangs, crime, guns, poverty, and oppression, he cannot simply dismiss that past. He knows that there are others like him who want more out of life, who have dreams and aspirations and may not have football as a passport out.
He remembers friends asking him when they were kids, “You want to go play pro football and leave the neighbourhood?” He’d answer with an emphatic “Yeah! Why would I want to stay here?”
“But all your friends are here.”
“Hey, you guys will always be my friends. But there’s something else that I’ve got to get away from.”
“And what’s that?”
How to express to his friends back then what he was able to tell a stranger years later?
“It’s this fear of opening up and being who I really feel I am inside.”
After high school, Hervey went to Pasadena City College, whose notable alumni include Jackie Robinson. At Pasadena, he played two seasons at quarterback, as a reserve in his freshman year before becoming the starter as a sophomore. After two years at Pasadena, he transferred to the University of Southern California. At USC, head coach John Robinson converted Hervey to a wide receiver. He was hampered by injuries in both his junior and senior years at USC, but he did make All-American in track in his senior year.
Hervey was drafted in the fifth round of the 1995 NFL draft by the Dallas Cowboys but he fractured his left fibula in a pre-season game. He was declared inactive for the rest of the season and was finally waived by the Cowboys. He spent three more years bouncing around NFL teams — Oakland, Denver, and then Oakland again. Nothing stuck. By this time, Ed Hervey just wanted to play football. He “burned” to play. His agent told him he could play in Canada. He was young enough that if he so desired he could prove himself up in Canada and NFL teams would be watching, and if there was an opportunity he could always return to the States.
“You know, all that stuff that agents sell you.” Ed Hervey smiled.
He admitted it was a slow learning process but by the time his career started taking off and the NFL teams reached out to make contact, he had more or less made up his mind that he wanted to stay in Canada. He didn’t see the point in trying to re-establish a career in the NFL when he already had an established career in the CFL. It wasn’t an easy decision. The NFL had the draw of greater salaries. It comes down to “compensation” for many players. What if I get hurt tomorrow? Will I be protected?
“I felt like I was having too much fun to turn my back on a team that gave me the chance to play and gave me the opportunity to grow.”
There was something else that Canada offered, and again it came down to the word “freedom.” This was a different freedom from Henry Williams’s version, that oppressive fear of looking over his shoulder. Hervey’s freedom was all about the choice of wardrobe for a kid from Compton.
“It wasn’t until I got to Canada that I put on a colour outside of black. It’s just because I felt safer up here. Even then I felt uncomfortable because it wasn’t something that I was accustomed to doing.”
Ed Hervey remained very close with his grandmother, who lived in Sacramento.
“She never really wanted me to play football, but she was also thrilled that I was having so much success at it; she wanted to support her grandson.”
At the end of every season she would ask Hervey the same question. Did you win the championship? And Hervey would sheepishly respond, “Not yet, Grandma, not yet. But we’re close.”
Then came 2002. The Eskimos made it to the Grey Cup game held that year in the Eskimos’ own backyard, Commonwealth Stadium. Their opponents were the Montreal Alouettes. Both teams entered the game with identical season records of 13–5. Ed Hervey could not see the Eskimos losing the game. Certainly not before a hometown crowd primed to cheer their Eskimos to victory. The Alouettes, however, refused to co-operate with the desires of the thousands of Edmontonians shrieking their support for the Eskimos. The Alouettes won 25–16, giving Montreal its first Grey Cup in twenty-five years, a long time between Cups in the CFL.
Ed Hervey called his grandmother in the aftermath.
“Did you guys win?” she asked.
“No, we didn’t win.”
“Oh, you’ll get it next year.”
A subdued Hervey responded, “I hope so.” He knew that his grandmother was not in the best of health and wondered whether he would ever have the opportunity again in her lifetime to give her the news she so badly yearned to hear.
The next year, 2003, the Grey Cup was held at Taylor Field in Regina, Saskatchewan. Once again the game featured Edmonton versus Montreal. This time the Eskimos came out on top. Ed Hervey’s sister actually gave their grandmother the good news.
“Did they win?” his grandmother asked.
“Yes, they did,” his sister replied.
Twenty-four hours later she passed away. His sister called to give Hervey the bad news just as he was preparing for the Grey Cup parade.
“Talk about something that levels you and grounds you. This is far greater than going back to Compton after a season’s end and driving through the streets and seeing where you came from and realizing that you’ve got to keep working hard.”
His sister told him that his grandmother had hung on long enough to hear the news that he had won.
“I gained some solace in knowing that she knew I had won.”
At her funeral, Ed Hervey tucked his Grey Cup game jersey into his grandmother’s hands. He wanted her to have something of his that meant so much to both of them. A reminder of a championship shared. A jersey he no longer felt obliged to hide for fear of something so elementary as its colour.
“People to this day ask me, ‘Hey, where is your Grey Cup jersey?’ And I say, ‘My grandmother has it. She has it with her.’”
Henry Burris was born to play football. In fact, in Spiro, Oklahoma, the citizens refer to the hospital as the place “where football stars are born.”
“When you’re born in Spiro, pretty much the first question your parents are asked is ‘What position is he going to play?’”
Spiro is one of those small Oklahoma towns that only draws attention to its existence every twenty years or so when a tornado touches down and obliterates everything in its path. Otherwise, it’s business as usual. And that business is football.
Henry’s father, Henry Burris Sr., was a baseball player. Henry figures he got his arm from his dad. When football coaches saw the way he threw the ball growing up, they made him the quarterback. But he got more than his arm from his father. From both parents he gained an awareness of the rewards of hard work.
“Both my parents worked hard, from sun-up to sundown, to make ends meet. I can honestly say I’m not one of those kids who came from a poor family. I came from a hard-working family. We kind of mixed the two worlds together where my family worked 9 to 5 but even before work and after work we were out there on the farm, baling hay, tending livestock, and things like that. I gained an understanding of what it meant to make ends meet, one. But also to earn your keep, two.”
Our conversation took place in the press box high above the playing field at McMahon Stadium in Calgary. Neither of us knew it at the time, but it would be Henry’s last year in Calgary where he had played for seven seasons. He was friendly and open and well-spoken, an interviewer’s delight.
After high school he ended up going to Temple University in Philadelphia. Why didn’t he want to play for one of the universities closer to Spiro that were courting him?
“Everybody thought I was going to either go to Texas Tech and go out there with the Red Raiders and hang out with the other farm boys and girls from rural Texas and Oklahoma. I wanted to achieve something different, experience something different. I grew up in a society where you’re always judged. For some reason when I was in high school, going into my first year of playing high-school ball, our head coach at our football program at the time, he told me, ‘You’re not fast enough to play quarterback for me.’ I looked at him, like ‘Huh? Why should I run when the ball could get there quicker?’”
When he finished his four years of college ball at Temple, he held twenty passing records and ranked second all-time for passing yards in the Big East Conference. His team, the Temple Owls, did not share the same success. In his four years there, the Owls won only five games while losing an incredible thirty-nine times. The quarterback of a team that bad is not likely to attract much attention come NFL draft day. And that is exactly what happened to Henry Burris. He went undrafted. It was a bitter disappointment.
“I may not have been the biggest, tallest guy, the strongest guy, the fastest guy, or the prettiest guy, but I felt like I did enough to at least get an opportunity.”
He remembered going for a tryout with the New York Giants, hoping to catch on as quarterback. An assistant coach was putting him through various drills and sprints.
“And the first statement that came to me was, ‘Man, you’d make a great free safety.’ I kind of looked at him and said, ‘Free safety? I’m too busy torching those guys week in and week out to be one of them now.’”
But Calgary of the CFL was interested, and so Burris put his hopes for an NFL career on hold and came up to Canada. The first time he stepped on the larger Canadian football field he thought, Wow, this field is huge.His first pass from scrimmage during a pre-season game against Winnipeg was a wide-out route to the far sidelines.
“It felt like I almost threw my arm out. I threw it so hard, just to prove a point.”
And that, it seems, has been the driving force behind his entire career. Proving a point. That Henry Burris could not be fit in a neat box of preconceived notions of what constitutes a quarterback. After he had attained a certain level of success in Canada, the NFL came calling. He spent a season with Green Bay as the third-string quarterback and playing on the practice squad. Then it was off to camp with the Chicago Bears, where he went into his first meeting with the coaching staff and the first words he heard were, “Man, you remind us of Michael Vick.” Henry was stunned into silence. Michael Vick? Have they seen me run?
“I mean Michael Vick is a heck of a quarterback, but we’re two different shapes and sizes. I’m a totally different package than what Mike brings to the table. But trust me, if coaches have you tagged already as being a certain type of player, it’s hard to shake it, especially when other people are making the play calls.”
After that season came to a miserable end, Henry could not wait to get back to Canada. In 2008, after the Calgary Stampeders had defeated the Montreal Alouettes 22–14 and Burris had been named MVP of the Grey Cup, the Chicago Tribune called him. He knew the purpose behind the call. They were looking for him to exploit his victory by trashing the Bears, a nice little revenge tale. Not good enough for the Bears but now a champion! That sort of thing. But Henry wasn’t buying into it. He declined the interview, telling them, “I just want to enjoy the moment and not look at all the negatives but the positives. What the CFL game has given me, what the city of Calgary has done for my family … I’m definitely thankful for that and I’m not looking back at all.”
In the 2016 Grey Cup, Henry Burris led the Ottawa Redblacks to a Grey Cup victory against the overwhelming favourites, the Calgary Stampeders, at the ripe old age of forty-one, and then announced his retirement. Known as “Smilin’ Hank” for that 1,000-watt smile he flashed anyone who entered the chromosphere of his presence, he also had a less flattering nickname for a perceived inability to deliver in the big game: “Bad Hank.” But if you have been around long enough and played in enough big games and had more than your share of negative outcomes, the media requires a label they can slap on your image. Thus, victory is turned into vindication. A loss is a vindication of sorts as well; it proves the media were right to label you a loser in the first place. Henry Burris had heard it all in his long and storied career.
“When I saw Damon Allen, the first time I watched a CFL game, it was the Memphis Mad Dogs playing against the Shreveport Pirates,” Burris told me. This was during the lost years for many CFL fans, ’93 to ’95, when the CFL experimented with expansion into the United States. Perhaps the greatest highlight of this era was when a Las Vegas lounge singer, Dennis Parks, tasked with singing both national anthems before a Las Vegas Posse game, lost his musical path during the presentation of “O Canada” and began singing the lyrics to the tune of “O Tannenbaum.” Priceless. “And to see Damon Allen out there just putting on a show I’m like, ‘How come this guy isn’t playing in the NFL?’ Football is football, the last time I checked. You either make the right decision as a quarterback or you make the wrong decision. And the bottom line to me is some quarterbacks make their teams better and some quarterbacks are only as good as their team can make them.”
Henry Burris played twenty years of professional football and never once was he unemployed. He threw for over 60,000 yards in the CFL. He won three Grey Cups, two with Calgary and one with Ottawa, and was twice named MVP of the Grey Cup game. He won the Schenley Award twice, first in 2010 and again in 2015, when he was forty years old. He topped that when he quarterbacked the Ottawa Redblacks to a Grey Cup victory over Calgary and was named the game’s MVP at forty-one.
Burris is not only a student of the game but a student of its history. He is especially proud of the black pioneers who cleared the way for players like him to follow in their footsteps.
“I knew a lot about Johnny Bright ’cause I grew up in Oklahoma. They don’t teach you a lot about that down in Oklahoma. They try to keep it more underground. You know, when it comes to Black History Month, you learn pretty much the basics of black history. But just having a father like I had he taught me the whole story about Johnny Bright and how Oklahoma basically had a bounty on his head in that game.… What I had to deal with was nothing compared to that. I mean, just what they had to go through to give me the opportunities that I have today. I’m truly thankful for it.”
Henry and his family recently gained permanent residency in their journey to attain Canadian citizenship. They want to stay as so many others who came before them remained. And so, like most Black American players who came to Canada to ply their trade and remained, Henry feels a deep sense of owing to the past, as well as to those yet to come, the kids of today without access to opportunities. Henry Burris, Damon Allen, Henry Williams, Chuck Winters, Michael Clemons, John Williams Jr. — the list goes on and on — all speak, teach, give clinics, and contribute to the communities where they live in ways that demonstrate a deep attachment and commitment to their adopted country.
“That’s why, whenever it comes time to celebrate any occurrence of black history, I’m always a person putting my front foot forward and lending a helping hand,” said Burris. “Because I definitely want to help those out who went through the hardships and perils they went through to get me to where I am today. If it weren’t for them, who knows where I’d be.”
Henry Burris understands that for many black athletes who came here to play football, whether they stayed or whether they returned to their first home, Canada was more than just a country. It was and remains a state of mind. There is no need anymore for a true “underground railroad,” shepherding shackled souls north to freedom. But there is something to be said for those who chose to cross the borders in their lives and in their minds that tried to keep them from reaching their true potential. In the case of Johnny Bright, Bernie Custis, Bruce Smith, Henry “Gizmo” Williams, Chuck Winters, Warren Moon, Condredge Holloway, Henry Burris, Ed Hervey, John Williams Sr., John Williams Jr., and so many others, past and present, that underground railroad of the human spirit happened to run right through the frozen football fields of Canada. And those who have followed that path know what it is to stand on the shoulders of champions.