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Ex-Bomber head coach Jeff Reinebold, now defensive co-ordinator in Montreal, gives pointers at Alouettes training camp in Sherbrooke, Que. (PETER MCCABE / POSTMEDIA NEWS ARCHIVES )

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Reinebold in 1998 (JOE BRYKSA / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS ARCHIVES) Photo Store

MONTREAL -- The outward trappings suggest the Jeff Reinebold on the sidelines of Molson Stadium tonight as the new defensive co-ordinator of the Montreal Alouettes is very different than the Reinebold who prowled the Canad Inns Stadium sidelines as head coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in 1997 and 1998.

The Harley-Davidson motorcycle on which Reinebold famously rolled into the Winnipeg Convention Centre in 1997 in his formal introduction to Bombers fans is now gone, replaced by a comparatively utilitarian Jeep Wrangler.

The earrings? Gone. The flip-flops? Those too. And the reggae music blasting during practice? Nope. If Als head coach Marc Trestman, the most humourless man in the CFL, is going to be pumping any music into his practices, it's going to be Wagner.

So from all outward appearances, the 54-year-old CFL prodigal, who will fittingly mark his return to three-down football tonight when the Als take on the Bombers in a pre-season game, is a changed man from the 39-year-old upstart who rolled into Winnipeg in 1997 with a deafening roar. And we're not talking just about the rumble emanating from the hog he was riding.

But appearances can be deceiving and the big question for Als fans this season -- and, by extension, fans of their East Division rivals in Winnipeg -- is this: Has Reinebold really shed that inner flamboyant self-promoter who was all show and no go in a two-season debacle in Winnipeg that saw the Bombers tally a combined 6-26 record under his leadership?

I'd like to let Reinebold tell you himself, but I cannot do that because one of the other things Trestman did in the off-season was install a new policy that prohibits the media from speaking to any of the Als assistant coaches.

Requests this week to speak to Reinebold by CJOB's resident hall of famer Bob Irving and yours truly were politely but firmly denied by the Als' communications department.

Maybe Reinebold being hired and Reinebold being muzzled are a coincidence. Maybe in an off-season in which Trestman also hired a new offensive co-ordinator to replace Scott Milanovich, now the new field boss in Toronto, he just decided it was time to take full and complete control of his team's message, a default position for the man sometimes likened to the Canadian version of NFL control freak Bill Belichick.

On the other hand, maybe in not allowing Reinebold to speak this season, the Als are saying more than Reinebold ever could about just how much he really has changed from the flaky caricature of himself that Bombers fans to this day seem to recall with equal parts wistfulness and horror.

So with a muzzle now attached, we are left only to study Reinebold's resumé over the intervening 15 years and parse the handful of public comments the Als did allow him to make in the days following his hiring last February.

Since getting canned by Winnipeg, Reinebold has been a senior manager for international player development in the NFL, a defensive line coach at Hawaii and, for the past four years, the receivers coach at Southern Methodist University. He's also had a cancer scare, battling melanoma a couple years ago.

In an interview in February with The Canadian Press's Judy Owen. who as the Bombers beat writer for the Winnipeg Sun in the late '90s had a front-row seat for the Reinebold tragicomedy, he said he has matured and suggested he's determined not to be defined by the worst thing he ever did in football.

"We've all changed, we've all grown, hopefully, and we've all evolved in the 20 years since I first went (to the CFL)," Reinebold told Owen.

"You live for today and tomorrow. You don't let the past define you, whether it was positive or negative, because if you do that, then you're living in the past, and I'm not interested in that."

Still, Reinebold is not naive enough to think CFL fans don't have a lasting image of him from his short but exceptionally memorable time in Winnipeg.

"There's an expectation level of people, based on what's remembered," Reinebold told the Gazette's Herb Zurkowsky. "But that was 15 years ago. We all adapt, mature and grow."

The expectation in the Als organization is that Reinebold can only improve a defence that struggled last season. How bad did it get in Montreal? The Als scored 44 points in last year's East semifinal -- and lost. At home. To Hamilton.

Expectations will be high for Reinebold in Montreal this season, as they were in Winnipeg in 1997.

The difference this time is the hog has a muffler. And so does the man.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

today's training camp report c3

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 14, 2012 C1