The touchdowns kept on coming after Heather Dufault and her husband, Christopher, landed in Toronto.
Newly married, they boarded separate flights to attend the 1989 Grey Cup game — in which the Saskatchewan Roughriders outlasted the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 43-40 at SkyDome (now the Rogers Centre) in a classic CFL contest.
Now, it was hardly novel for Roughriders fans to make airline reservations to and from Toronto on very short notice after their beloved team’s 32-21 upset victory over Edmonton in the CFL’s West Division final.
But the Dufaults’ story is distinctive because they flew overseas from London — and in a rather unconventional manner.
They were temporarily deployed as couriers who, as it turned out, didn’t have anything to deliver except their friendly smiles.
They travelled to and from Canada without any checked baggage.
And each return plane ticket cost less than $50 apiece.
Nice deal if you can find it.
And, oh, did they find it!
The feverish planning began around midnight in the U.K., after Dufault’s mother made a trans-Atlantic phone call to inform her Regina-born, football-loving daughter that the Roughriders had upended Edmonton and were Grey Cup-bound.
“I raced to the phone and picked it up and all I could hear was my mother screaming into the phone: ‘They won! They won!’ ” Heather Dufault, who now resides in Ottawa, recalled on Saturday before attending the Roughriders’ game against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers at IG Field.
“At that point, I just dropped the receiver and started screaming. Christopher was upstairs, so he came racing down the stairs, and I was literally just spinning around and screaming.
“When all the screaming subsided and we could actually go back to the phone, I said, ‘Tell me what happened,’ so we talked about the game for a while.
“Finally, I said, ‘Well, I’ve got to go to bed. It’s after midnight here.’ Basically, I said at the end of the call, ‘We’ve got to try to find a way to watch the Grey Cup game. Maybe we can find some foreign TV feed or something.’ We didn’t think there was any way we could get to it.”
At the time, Heather was studying music in London and making regular commutes to Cambridge, where Christopher was working toward a doctorate in applied biology at that city’s famed university.
“After I hang up, Christopher comes downstairs with these phone numbers that he has been saving in his files,” Heather said. “He says, ‘See this courier business? Let’s try this.’
“The way it worked, the courier companies arranged to take you on as a courier to meet them at an airport — in this case, Heathrow in London.
“They would give you a ticket for a reduced price and they would also most likely give you a package to take with you — a document or some item that is so small that it doesn’t warrant being checked.
“Then you just have to take this item and ferry it yourself across the Atlantic, or wherever. You’re only allowed a knapsack. You’re not allowed a suitcase.
“Christopher said, ‘Do you think you can manage without any checked bags?’ I said, ‘Oh yeah! No problem.’ So he said, ‘Here’s the numbers. Get on the phone in the morning and we’ll see what we can do.’
“I remember at that point that I had to pour myself a nice big shot of whisky, because I was so excited.”
The Dufaults would soon be whisked across the ocean by British Airways — but on different flights, and not without other complications.
“As soon as it was time for the couriers’ offices to open on Monday morning, I started phoning around,” Heather continued. “I’d say to them, ‘We want to go to Toronto. Have you got anything that needs to be taken to Toronto?’
“I tried two of them, without success. When I called the third number, they said, ‘We don’t have anything at the moment for Toronto this week but, if I recall correctly, Detroit is not that far from Toronto, right?’
“I said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah — not very far at all.’ They said, ‘Good, because we actually have two packages — two openings for Detroit. One will be on Tuesday and the other one will be on Wednesday.
“I said, ‘Oh, wonderful! Great! We’ll take them! How much?’ And that’s when she said, ’25 pounds.’ ”
Or about $43 in Canadian currency — slightly more than $100 in today’s dollars.
Sold!
“Then I phoned my parents back and said, ‘Guess what? We’re coming to Toronto,’ ” Heather said. “My father knew lots of people in business in Toronto, so I said to him, ‘Could you possibly see if anybody has any tickets to the game?’ He said, ‘I’ll deal with it. Leave it with me,’ so I did.”
Heather arrived at Heathrow on a Tuesday, at the appointed time and place, and linked up with a representative of the courier company.
“She said, ‘I have nothing today to give you. I don’t know why we keep sending people to Detroit. We never have anything,’ so I was a courier without a package,” Heather said with a laugh.
“I immediately found a pay phone — there were no cell phones in those days — and phoned Christopher up and said, ‘When you get to Heathrow tomorrow, if they don’t have anything to give you when you ask, just go to the departure lounge and check your flight. It will probably say Detroit via Toronto. If that’s the case, just get off in Toronto. There’s no need for you to go to Detroit,’ so that’s exactly what happened.”
Even though the trip did not proceed exactly as planned.
It turned out that mechanical issues grounded Heather’s flight until Wednesday — the same day Christopher was to leave.
“We ended up going on the same day, but on different aircraft, because they put all the stragglers from Tuesday on one plane and put Christopher on his flight, as planned,” Heather noted.
“We could see that both flights to Detroit were via Toronto, so I just said to Christopher, ‘See you in Toronto.’ ”
Once the Dufaults were reunited in Canada, they stayed with Heather’s uncle in Toronto. Sure enough, Heather’s father had delivered on his promise to secure tickets for the Grey Cup game of Nov. 26, 1989.
That was an aerial display of a different kind, as the two quarterbacks — Saskatchewan’s Kent Austin and Hamilton’s Mike Kerrigan — put on a dazzling show until the waning seconds of the fourth quarter, whereupon the Roughriders’ Dave Ridgway kicked a game-winning, 35-yard field goal.
“It literally was a thrill a minute,” Heather marvelled. “When the time came for the field goal at the end, I was sure I was going to faint. I was sure I was going to collapse. I just felt lightheaded. I had been unable to eat anything, because I was just in a state.”
Not Michigan. That would come later.
“I’m from southern Ontario,” Christopher said. “That was my first-ever Rider game and only my second-ever CFL game. What an exciting introduction to Rider football!
“We had gotten married in January of 1989. If there was any doubt about my bleeding green, there was no doubt after that game.”
Heather’s vocal chords were still recovering when the time arrived for the journey back to England.
Both the Dufaults’ flights — again, scheduled for one day apart — were to originate in Detroit, where a package was to be picked up if necessary.
Therefore, the couple took a bus to Detroit for the purpose of boarding separate flights that would transport them back to Toronto and ultimately to London.
Once again, Heather and Christopher travelled as couriers, via British Airways, without anything to deliver to anyone at the termination of the flight.
The planning of the Dufaults’ most-recent football-related excursion wasn’t nearly as complicated, but nonetheless memorable.
Heather’s visit to the Manitoba capital for the Labour Day rematch evoked treasured recollections another football journey — one from late November of 1972 that, coincidentally enough, also resulted from a Roughriders victory in Edmonton.
After Saskatchewan won 8-6 at Clarke Stadium to advance to the West final, plans were made for the cheerleaders to join the team at Winnipeg Stadium on Nov. 19, 1972.
Heather was on the sideline, then, as the Roughriders overcame a 24-7 deficit and won 27-24 at Winnipeg Stadium.
“It was sort of a last-minute thing that the cheerleaders were approached about going to that game,” Heather recalled.
“We had to make arrangements to get on a bus very early in the morning to get there on time for the game.
“We had to cobble together something we could do with the Lions Band for the pre-game (entertainment) and then do our thing down on the sidelines for the rest of the game.
“So that was a pretty amazing game, too, of course.”
The Winnipeg Blue Bombers run a play against the Saskatchewan Roughriders in the CFL’s 1972 Western Conference final on Nov. 19, 1972 at Winnipeg Stadium. Photo by G. Helen Vanstone-Mather.
The 1972 Grey Cup game also went down to the wire before Ian Sunter kicked a 34-yard field goal on the final play to give Hamilton a 13-10 victory.
When the Roughriders and Tiger-Cats next met with a championship at stake, it was Saskatchewan’s turn to win by a field goal.
“We kind of thought of it as the Riders wanting to give us a wedding present,” Heather said. “It was just a delayed wedding present.”
A gift that keeps on giving.
