Lorne Cherney remembers watching the Green and White in black and white.
He was 16 years old, living in Saskatoon, and glued to the TV set when the Saskatchewan Roughriders defeated the Ottawa Rough Riders 29-14 in the CFL championship game of Nov. 26, 1966.
“That was when I first really got into football — that Grey Cup,” remembers Cherney, a long-time resident of Regina. “Until then, we had never won one.
“We were huge underdogs. It was almost as if Saskatchewan wasn’t even in the game. There was no point playing it because Ottawa was going to win it.
“I laughed about that.”
Forty-seven years later, less two days, he witnessed another landmark moment in Saskatchewan football history.
Cherney and his wife, Mary Anne, were at historic Mosaic Stadium when the Roughriders downed the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 45-23 in the 101st Grey Cup game.
“It was wonderful,” he recalls. “You live to see games like that at home.”
The next home game, slated for Oct. 7, will also be a spectacle.
Hamilton will be the visiting team, appropriately enough, on Legends Night.
Next Saturday, the 2013 Roughriders team will be enshrined in the SaskTel Plaza of Honour during a halftime ceremony.
Wendy Kelly, the first female to serve on the community-owned team’s Board of Directors, will be posthumously inducted into the Plaza as a builder.
The festivities will take place in a $278-million, state-of-the-art facility that has been the Roughriders’ home since 2017.
Previously, the team was housed in a patchwork palace, if you will — a place we all loved unless we were craving, well, amenities.
The lack of luxuriance was easily overlooked when the Roughriders won it all in front of our very eyes. A Saskatchewan Grey Cup victory happened right here, a few first downs away from where this column is being typed.
“It was almost like it was magical,” Mary Anne marvels.
“Who would have ever thought that the Rolling Stones would come to Regina? That’s what it was like.”
The Cherneys remember, perhaps too vividly, what it was like at a different time.
Season-ticket holders for 40 years, they sat through an 11-year playoff drought, back-to-back 2-14 seasons, the telethon era, etc.
“I started out watching Ron Lancaster and George Reed and saw everything after that,” Lorne recalls.
“During one of the rough years, when people were leaving the game early, I remember yelling, ‘We just got a first down! Come back!’
“We kept on going, through all that, knowing that everything would cycle out and it would get better.”
Their patience and perseverance were rewarded when the Roughriders won championships in 1989 and 2007, in addition to reaching the league final in 1997, 2009 and 2010.
But there was that one void … that one last chance … the prospect of doing something new at the old stadium.
As it turned out, Saskatchewan led a Grey Cup game by 25 points (31-6) at halftime. That was new.
A screen legend visited Regina. That, too, was rather novel.
“Showing Tom Hanks (on the MaxTron), that was another element that made it special,” Mary Anne recalls.
Hanks, who sat near the top on the east side, was shown wearing a Tiger-Cats toque. Many of the 44,710 fans booed.
He then removed the headgear to reveal a Roughriders toque — and the crowd erupted!
“There was just the sound in the stadium that day,” Lorne remembers. “I couldn’t hear myself think.”
All of that while the unthinkable happened.
The Roughriders were going to win a Grey Cup at home.
A Darian Durant touchdown pass to Weston Dressler helped Saskatchewan assume a 43-16 lead with slightly more than four minutes remaining.
By then, the celebration in the stands was long underway.
The Cherneys’ niece, Lori Dattilo, was also in that stadium that day. She had travelled back home to Regina for the game.
Family ties were also evident on the field. Mary Anne’s second cousin, Regina-born Chris Getzlaf, caught three Durant passes for 78 yards en route to being named the game’s outstanding Canadian.
It was all so … perfect.
“After the game, we stayed in the stadium much longer than usual,” Lorne says. “Everyone we ran into, they just couldn’t believe it.”
Just as unbelievably, nearly 10 years have elapsed since that day.
It still seems like yesterday, with the memories in living colour — a far cry from the Cherney family’s TV screen on Nov. 26, 1966.
“It was black and white,” Lorne confirms, “with shades of grey.”
REMEMBERING CARL CRENNEL
I have written many times, many ways, that the 1981 Roughriders will always be my favourite edition of the team.
No, they didn’t win a Grey Cup.
They didn’t even make the playoffs.
But that was such a fabulously fun year — such a fun team.
After back-to-back 2-14 seasons, the Roughriders rebounded in 1981 by going 9-7.
They filled the air with footballs, with Joey Walters catching 91 passes for 1,715 yards (an enduring team record) and 14 touchdowns.
Vince Goldsmith was named the CFL’s top rookie after amassing 17 sacks.
Lyall Woznesensky (a.k.a. The Woz) performed what will always be my favourite sack dance — the Woztusi.
John Hufnagel and Joe Barnes formed a quarterbacking hybrid that was dubbed “J.J. Barnagel” by John Chaput, who would become a colleague at the Regina Leader-Post.
Hufnagel and Barnes combined for 33 touchdown passes, only two years after the collaborative efforts of Tom Clements, Larry Dick, Craig Juntunen, Danny Sanders and Lloyd Patterson produced more than four times as many interceptions (38) as aerial TDs (nine).
Let’s reprise the words of Lorne Cherney: “We just got a first down! Come back!”
That was 1979 … and 1980.
But not 1981, because that season was a joyride, even without the happy ending.
A young team — one that had been nurtured, with the inevitable growing pains, during the 2-14 years — took several steps forward in 1981.
That would not have occurred without some great veterans such as Hufnagel, Barnes, The Woz, Ken Clark, Ken McEachern, Lawrie Skolrood, Mike Samples, Steve Dennis and Carl Crennel.
Cool Carl, as he was dubbed, was a Roughrider for only one year — his last in the CFL, as it turned out.
Most of his professional football career had been spent with the Montreal Alouettes, for whom he played from 1972 to 1979.
Along the way, he contributed to Grey Cup championship teams in 1974 and 1977, while earning East Division All-Star honours in 1973, 1978 and 1979.
Oddly enough, though, he finished the latter campaign in the West Division, having been traded by Montreal to Edmonton after playing 13 games with the 1979 Alouettes.
From the only-in-the-CFL department, Crennel then helped Edmonton defeat the host Alouettes 17-9 in the 1979 Grey Cup game.
He returned to the championship game in 1980, as a member of the Tiger-Cats, and endured a 48-10 loss to Edmonton.
Nearing 33, Crennel was released by the Tiger-Cats during the off-season of 1981.
Roughriders General Manager Jim Spavital, needing a veteran on the linebacking corps due to the departures of long-time stalwarts Cleveland Vann, Bill Manchuk and Roger Goree, seized the opportunity to snap up Crennel.
As Leader-Post legend Bob Hughes put it, Crennel “signed a contract on the practice field just prior to the morning workout” that began the Roughriders’ 1981 training camp.
I shook Crennel’s hand a few weeks later, during a Meet the Riders event, and got an autograph — one that is still part of my collection.
I realized very quickly that Crennel, one of the CFL’s best linebackers for the better part of a decade, was also a very nice man.
So it was with the utmost sadness that I read the other day that Crennel had passed away in Norfolk, Va., on Aug. 19, less than a month shy of his 75th birthday.
While digesting the news, I instantly recalled the time that I asked the great Carl Crennel for his autograph, appreciating that he had already left his signature on the CFL in so many ways.
ROLL CREDITS …
- Nice people who deserve a plug: Bill Hamilton, Reila Bird, Juleah Duesing-Bird, Kieran Link, Kevin Flood, Christian Albright, Jason Nicurity, Jacob Carr, Gord Craig, Evan McFeeters, Brayden Barnett, Logan Nijhoff, Jessica Furlan, A.J. Allen, Cody Roscoe, Lorne Cherney, Mary Anne Cherney, Braxton Whitehead, John Paddock, Ken Schneider, Alan Millar, Kade Linford, Kelsey Brazil, Kerry Joseph, Alicia Dorwart, Shirley Prokop, Mike McCullough, Tristan Jackson, Ken Linnen and Sue Linnen.
