EDMONTON – Normie Kwong. Frank Morris. Don Getty. Oscar Krugar. Dave Fennell. Dave Cutler. Rod Connop. Chris Morris.

It’s not a long list of Canadians on the Edmonton Eskimos Wall of Fame, considering what Canadian content has meant to this team. But now you can add two more.

Larry Wruck and Sean Fleming, it was announced Tuesday, will go up there with the greats on Thanksgiving.

Not many Canadians up there?

“I’ve noticed that over the years as well,” said Wruck.

“It certainly wasn’t something I was banking on. I wasn’t holding my breath on it.

“I’m just tickled pink by it. I just get goose bumps. I means a great deal to me. It’s like somebody pinch me being up there in that company.

“I’m from humble beginnings in Saskatchewan where football is everything. I knew who all those guys up there were as a kid,” he said of the Eskimo Wall of Famers.

“I know what special company I’m in. The wow factor with me is enormous. Edmonton is a very special place to play football and this is a very special day for me. I was numb for about a half hour after Rick LeLacheur told me.”

This was a guy who played middle linebacker, supposedly an import position, despite being legally blind in one eye.

“Blind in one eye and deaf in the other,” he laughs.

“I just wanted to be on the field playing. I don’t know if you could call me a pioneer,” added the product of Saskatoon, who replaced Danny Bass after Bass replaced Danny Kepley in the middle.

“I just trusted the coach not to look at me as a Canadian but as a football player like everybody else. Being Canadian is something I took a lot of pride in my whole career,” said Wruck.

“I wasn’t after stardom. I didn’t want to be given anything. But I appreciated the opportunity to compete for the position. When the Eskimos gave me the opportunity to compete for it in good faith, I was pretty happy about that. Hopefully, anything I accomplished spoke highly of Canadian talent.

“Hopefully it proved Canadians are viable and legitimate to play more than certain positions. Hopefully it did something to break down the walls that said there are certain positions that only a Canadian could only play.”

Kicker Fleming left a legacy of records which left no doubt that in short order after retiring, he’d be going up on the Eskimos Wall and quite likely the Canadian Football Hall of Fame as well.

Wruck, who played a dozen years in a career which came to a conclusion in 1996, had reached the point he didn’t think this was going to happen.

“I really didn’t,” he said. “I joked with Blake Dermott that the only way we were going to get our names up there if we snuck in Commonwealth Stadium some night with a can of spray paint.”

There may be some young fans wondering who the, uh, heck was Larry Wruck?

“Larry’s locker was next to mine for my first five years of my career until he retired,” said Fleming.

“He was a mentor to me and taught me how to be professional and to conduct myself in a manner that is expected as a member of the Edmonton Eskimos. I owe a lot to him and this day is even more special to me, that Larry is being recognized for his stellar career on the same field. Larry was not a splashy player but was the type of player every team looks for and needs; hard working, consistent and an undisputed leader.

“I’ve never really considered the nationality of those I’ve played with or those players on the wall. They are all true Eskimos and have contributed greatly to the organization. However, I do recognize the role Canadians in the CFL play as role models for youth playing football across Canada. Honours such as this can play a part in strengthening the perception and belief among young players in this country, that they can achieve great things in the game of football at the highest level in Canada.

“I believe that being on the wall is more than accomplishments on the field. It also reflects how you conduct yourself and how you represent the community.

“I hope that when the next generation of players look up in the stadium and aspire to be on the wall, they will see that being an Eskimo is about more than putting on a jersey on game day.”

47 LARRY WRUCK, 1985-96

• Played in four Grey Cup games and won two.

• Five-time nominee and two-time finalist for CFL Award as most outstanding defensive player.

• Played 12 seasons and ended up sixth on the Eskimos all-time list for games played at 213.

• Ended up second on the Eskimos all-time tackles list (646) — first all-time in playoff tackles (57) and first for most defensive tackles for a loss (10 in 1992).

11 SEAN FLEMING, 1992-2007

• Three-time Grey Cup champion who played in the big game five times.

• Selected Grey Cup top Canadian in 1993.

• Played 16 seasons in Edmonton, ending up second on the Eskimos all-time list for games played with268.

• Ended up with Grey Cup records for most points in a game (21), most field goals in a game (6) and average points scored per game (10.6).

• Owns most of the Eskimos kicking records including most career points (2,569), most converts career (713) and most field goals career (553).

@sunterryjones

terry.jones@sunmedia.ca

http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/Edmonton/2011/10/05/18783011.html

By:  GERRY MODDEJONGE, QMI Agency

EDMONTON – The halls of Commonwealth Stadium are getting a little more hallowed.

Finishing touches are being made on the Edmonton Eskimos locker-room, which is now being overlooked by 40 of the greatest players ever to wear the Green and Gold.

Every Eskimo who is enshrined in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame now appears on the smoked glass above the lockers, which surrounds the circular room.

The head-and-shoulders image of each player is larger than life, with their name and their years of service with the club appearing underneath.

Once completed, one wall will have: “Edmonton Eskimos in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame,” written on it, along with the hall’s new logo.

“I love it,” said Eskimos head coach Kavis Reed, who played here from 1995-99. “Because the tradition here is rich, we’re imbedded in it as part of the Eskimos of 2011 and that’s something that we’ve been preaching from the beginning.

“So for those guys to be able to see those names and those faces and what they accomplished, I think, is vitally important.”

Especially for any American players who aren’t familiar with the history of the franchise that has 13 Grey Cup championships in the league’s modern era.

The club has made an effort to reunite its current players with alumni members and the Hall of Famers who still live in the area.

“They see a lot of them in the city,” said Reed, who lives in Edmonton year-round with his family. “One of the things that we really want to get back to is a lot of the guys staying here during the off-season and becoming engrained in the Edmonton community.

“I think over recent time that has been lost. I know the weather’s brutal but it’s important that those guys really enjoy the complete experience that this community has to offer and seeing those faces on the wall is vitally important.”

gerry.moddejonge@sunmedia.ca

Twitter@SunModdejonge

http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Football/CFL/Edmonton/2011/09/28/18754916.html

Because of the looming stadium construction of 2013, Sunday in Moncton certainly won’t be the last time the Hamilton Tiger-Cats play a regular season home game on the road.

It also won’t be the first.

Some 53 years ago last Wednesday — on September 14, 1958 — the Tiger-Cats boarded a charter Trans-Canada Airlines plane for Philadelphia, where they would play the Ottawa Rough Riders in the fifth game of the young season

“We were met at the airport by a police motorcade that accompanied us right to where we were staying,” recalls Bob Dawson, a defensive back and backup quarterback with the ’58 Ticats. “They couldn’t have treated us better.”

The plan was to play off the tight football connection between Philadelphia and Hamilton, now all but forgotten, introduce Americans to the beauties of the three-down game and to raise a lot of money for the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital.

The plan didn’t work. At all.

“I remember they said there were 15,000 in the stands, but you’d look up from the field and there’d be groups of twos and threes sitting together,” Dawson says. “People did come from Hamilton, though. I remember Manson’s Sports Club took fans down there for the game.”

Promoter Bob Dudley hoped for a crowd of 40,000, told The Spectator a week before the game that 20,000 tickets had already been sold and announced the day of the game the audience was a mere 15,110.

And they were lonely souls. Municipal Stadium, then home of the Philadelphia Eagles, seated 102,000 for football.

Dudley lost “a couple of thousand dollars” on the event and what few American fans there were (a reported 3,500 fans arrived from Canada, mostly Hamilton) didn’t take to the Canadian game because the rules were too confusing and there were too many (31) punts.

But Cam Fraser’s 15 booming kicks, for a 52.2-yard average, caught the eye of the cynical cadre of American sportswriters in the press box, all of whom said it was the best punting display they had ever seen.

The Tiger-Cats, who had won the Grey Cup the previous season, upped their record to 5-0 with a 24-18 victory.

“Cam kept kicking us out of trouble,” Dawson recalls.

The critical moments in the game were Tommy Grant’s brilliant running catch of a Bernie Faloney pass for a 75-yard TD and Hamilton native Ron Howell’s punt return 79 yards for a major, leaving Rough Riders strewn all over the field. And remember, in that era there was no blocking on punt returns.

Faloney, who had starred at nearby Maryland four years earlier, was supposed to be one of the attractions who’d put people in the stadium, as were Ottawa quarterback Hal Ledyard, a star at Chattanooga, and coach Frank Clair, who had been with Ohio State and the Washington Redskins. Cats coaches Jim Trimble and Ralph Sazio had both coached with Philadelphia’s NFL team and defensive star Ralph Goldston was one of a number of Cats players from the 1950s and ’60s who’d played for the Eagles. Jerry Williams, who took the Ticats to the 1972 Grey Cup, also coached the Eagles, and Bernie Custis, the Ticat legend who was the first African-American to start at quarterback in a professional season, was from Philadelphia

Because Municipal Stadium was customized for U.S. football, the gridiron was only 100 yards long, but had been widened to nearly the standard 65 yards of a Canadian field. The end zones were deeper than the American norm of 10 yards but shallower than the 25 yards then in use in Canada. And the track around the field made the end zones only eight yards deep at the sides.

The wildly popular Ticats would have drawn 22,500 at home, but they were guaranteed $40,000 to play in Philadelphia, about $10,000 more than they could gross at Civic Stadium.

That was the last time a regular-season CFL game was played in the U.S. until the doomed experiment of 1993-95, when seven American-based teams played for various stretches in the deeply struggling league.

There have been at least seven exhibition games between NFL and CFL teams, mostly in the 1950s and early ’60s, including a match between the Tiger-Cats and Buffalo Bills (won 38-21 by the Cats in Hamilton, the only Canadian victory of the era) that just passed its 50th anniversary in August.

And even the Philadelphia game between the Rough Riders and Tiger-Cats wasn’t the first time Ottawa and Hamilton sides had played football in the U.S.

The very first elite Canadian football game in the U.S. was a 1909 exhibition match in New York City, sponsored by the old New York Herald, featuring the original Rough Riders and the Hamilton Tigers. A crowd of 15,000 — just shy of the total audience 49 years later — visited Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx to watch the IRFU champion Rough Riders lose 11-6 to the Tigers.

smilton@thespec.com

905-526-3268

Via: http://www.thespec.com/sports/ticats/article/597481–home-game-on-the-road-has-happened-before-for-ticats

9/20/2011 3:48:15 PM

The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — Saskatchewan tried to do an end-run around rules that would prevent the province from tapping into a pot of more than $1 billion to build a new CFL stadium in Regina, new documents indicate.

And a senior official at the Crown corporation that manages the fund alluded to a possible change in the rules for funding pro sports venues with federal cash.

The Conservatives designed the $1.2-billion P3 Canada Fund to help pay for infrastructure projects in partnership with other governments and the private sector. Money from the fund cannot be spent on facilities “primarily” used for pro sports.

Not a problem, said Saskatchewan.

The province said its Canadian Football League team would only use the venue 10 days a year. The rest of the time, the $400-million stadium would host university and high school football games, concerts, other sporting events and a few conferences.

“The Saskatchewan multi-purpose entertainment facility is not primarily a professional sports facility,” says an August 2010 presentation to fund manager P3 Canada.

But it is clear there could be no stadium without the Roughriders.

The province prepared two financial statements: a conservative estimate and a rosier one. The team would account for most of the facility’s annual revenue under both scenarios.

The Canadian Press obtained these and other documents under the Access to Information Act.

The conservative estimate has 31 events at the stadium, which would bring in close to $4.5 million in revenue. Of that, the 10 CFL games would bring in about $3.5 million, or 79 per cent of the facility’s revenue.

The rosier estimate projects 71 stadium events and revenues of almost $4.9 million. The Roughriders would account for 72 per cent of that money.

The estimates come from a feasibility study on building a domed, all-weather stadium. The federal government helped pay for the $1-million report, and Conservative MPs Gerry Ritz and Andrew Scheer sat on an advisory committee that directed work on the study.

“The project is clearly economically feasible and will generate related and recurrent benefits throughout the province of Saskatchewan,” the study says.

“The benefits are overwhelmingly positive.”

But time on the clock ran out, and Saskatchewan spiked the stadium project this spring. The city of Regina is now looking at how it could build a stadium.

Regina Mayor Pat Fiacco disputed any suggestion the province tried to skirt the rules when it applied for federal cash for a stadium.

He said it was the federal government that told the province to apply to the fund.

“That advice came directly from the Government of Canada,” said Fiacco.

The P3 Canada Fund is considered a potential source of federal money for sports facilities such as the Regina stadium and a politically charged proposal for a hockey arena in Quebec City.

The arena-funding debate has been a political minefield for the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, pitting the provinces — and even some members of the Tory caucus — against each other.

Some Conservatives fretted about alienating the party’s western base by helping fund a new Quebec City arena as part of a bid bring back the city’s beloved National Hockey League franchise, the Nordiques.

Harper has since made it clear that his government is not in the pro sports business.

“We will not spend taxpayers’ money on a professional sports arena or stadium in Quebec City,” Harper said in March, just weeks before winning a majority government in the spring election.

“And we will not participate in such projects in Regina, Halifax, Edmonton, or my hometown Calgary.”

But newly released documents suggest that as recently as May, bureaucrats were still trying to figure out if possible rule changes would allow Ottawa to fund sports venues such as the one in Saskatchewan.

“We are trying to determine which projects may be impacted by a potential change in (government) policy that may alter our (terms and conditions) restricting stadium-spectator facilities that have an anchor tenant that may own a team and run it as a commercial venture,” senior P3 Canada official Rob Mackay wrote in a May 10 email to colleagues.

Mackay does not elaborate on the “potential change” he referred to. He was not available for an interview.

But Saskatchewan Tory MP Scheer, who now is Speaker of the House of Commons, also mentioned a policy change in March.

“We did caution them that as the funding criteria prohibited funding for professional sports facilities, that they would have to structure the project in a way that was not the focus,” Scheer told The Canadian Press.

“We told them that it was a potential program that might be available, but it wasn’t a perfect fit and they would have to be aware that if they did make an application through it, it would likely still require a policy change. And that’s why we are where we’re at today.”

P3 Canada said it could not comment on project applications to the fund.

“However, the terms and conditions of the P3 Canada Fund have not changed and remain clear that ‘facilities used primarily by professional athletes’ are ineligible for funding from our program,” spokeswoman Lisa Mitchell said in an email.

She did not respond to follow-up questions.

http://www.tsn.ca/cfl/story/?id=376270