Looking back, old teammates relive a turbulent time and a championship season

Over the weekend, I participated in an annual holiday ritual that reminds me of the bonds of the season. Each December, I drive to Montreal to have a meal with a diminishing group of friends with whom I share an indelible memory. We were the members of the 1970 Dawson College Blues football team. You have never heard of us, but we were so unusual that, had we been an American college team of the same era, there would have been a book or a film to recount the story. It was the first and last championship for Dawson: the team folded a year later. The backdrop to the season was a turbulent time in Quebec, of language friction, terrorism, and death. We were a rag-tag bunch of raw 18- and 19-year olds, two-thirds of whom had never played organized football. We came from every racial, linguistic, ethnic, and social background and every neighbourhood of Montreal. We were thrown together by a college whose most notable contribution to Quebec academia until then had been Friday afternoon cider parties and marijuana as an unofficial part of the curriculum. The person who took on this “mission impossible” was a former quarterback for McGill University, who missed the national championship the previous year due to injury. From training camp in August to our final game in November, he transformed us from a know-nothing random band into a team. Coach George’s approach was low-key: his “pep talk” before each game was “you know your jobs. Now let us do what we prepared to do, and hope no one on either team gets hurt.” Thanks to him, a bunch of wild kids became better football players, but also better people. We played our hearts out in towns like Shawinigan, Trois-Rivières, Joliette, and Vieux-Montréal, in front of a few friends and family at our home games and masses of people away. In opposing stadiums, I felt the crowds were there to see “les anglais” get their lumps, even though as mostly working-class kids we were hardly “Westmount Rhodesians.” That fall, the October Crisis and the FLQ knocked at our doors when the armoury we had been using as a dressing room was transformed into a military command centre. Skinny teenagers who had drilled while we practised were soon carrying submachine guns and patrolling the streets of Montreal. Our dressing room talk was dominated not by girls and party exploits but rather by politics. We were mostly opposed to the Vietnam War and tended to have left-wing sympathies. Few of us supported the War Measures Act, invoked to respond to the October Crisis, and some might have been picked up by the Mounties had they not been playing football. Even so, there were many bleary, tear-stained eyes the morning the body of assassinated Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte was found on the south shore of Montreal, as we climbed on a bus to play football in an idyllic Laurentian village. Although we won the game, I don’t remember the score: football didn’t seem important that grim day. It was a year spent visiting hospitals, as we lost many starting players, and heard their screams of anguish as one or another friend ripped out a knee in a game. We were so young that when I scored my first touchdown, an older running back asked me, “Wasn’t that better than sex?” and all I could answer was a woeful “I don’t know!” We won the regular season Quebec championship and lost in a playoff. In the black and white photo that remains my only memento of that time, there is a trophy and all those young faces smiling back. Those faces are now wrinkled, their heads without hair and bellies with paunches; some old teammates are no longer with us. We have been social workers, labour leaders, journalists, teachers, entrepreneurs, parents, and now grandparents. We look at the dystopian world outside and worry about the future. Several of us have been active in politics, and the conversation now ranges from sports talk to analysis of the new Legault and Ford governments in Quebec and Ontario to predictions for the 2019 federal election. If our small sample is any indication, Doug Ford and François Legault are in trouble, federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is going nowhere in Quebec, and the Montreal Canadiens will make the playoffs. But for most of one brief evening in December, we laugh about events five decades ago, tell lies about athletic glory, and are young once again. Andrew Caddell is retired from Global Affairs Canada, where he was a senior policy adviser. He previously worked as an adviser to Liberal governments. He is a fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and a principal of QIT Canada. He wishes happy holidays to all column readers. He can be reached at pipson52@hotmail.com. The Hill Times

Looking back, old teammates relive a turbulent time and a championship season

Every December, I trek to Montreal to meet up with members of my 1970 Dawson College Blues football team to share a meal and memories.

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Looking back, old teammates relive a turbulent time and a championship season

Every December, I trek to Montreal to meet up with members of my 1970 Dawson College Blues football team to share a meal and memories.

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