Don’t be blue, Bomber fans

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This article was published 25/11/2010 (5427 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Better days are nearer than you think.

That was the message to Winnipeg Blue Bomber fans yesterday from Michael (Pinball) Clemons.

A member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame and a man who has run for more all-purpose yards than any professional football player in any league ever, Clemons said Wednesday the Bombers are a much better football team than their 4-14 record in 2010 might suggest.

“What I see is a whole lot of opportunity,” Clemons said during a visit to Winnipeg. “I see a young coach who came in and got a quicker start than anyone thought. And they struggled through the balance of the year but they had some real challenges. Losing both quarterbacks is not an easy thing to do.

“Had he had one of those quarterbacks for the whole season, this is a team that probably would have made the playoffs.

“I think you could not only get into the playoffs next year, I think you could go deep into the playoffs. Now, things still have to go right, you have to build on it and it has to go forwards not backwards. But from what I see, you have a nucleus that’s pretty strong. It’s where I was in 2002. We came in and got to work. In 2003, we knocked on the door. And in 2004, we won it.”

Clemons took over as head coach of a troubled Toronto Argonauts team in 2002 after Gary Etcheverry was fired midseason. Two seasons later, he was the first black head coach to win the Grey Cup.

Clemons, who won four Grey Cups with the Argos (three as a player and one as a coach), remains the club’s vice-chairman, but is perhaps better known these days as a motivational speaker whose services are sought after all over North America.

He was in Winnipeg yesterday to provide the keynote address at the Winnipeg Convention Centre to the Association of Manitoba Municipalities, an organization for which he has a soft spot.

Clemons told an estimated crowd of over 1,000 AMM members that his mother worked for the municipality in Dunedin, Fla., where Clemons grew up.

“She was a single parent and she was given an opportunity,” Clemons told the crowd. “She was the first person of colour to work for the municipality in an administrative position.”

Clemons says he understands Bomber fans here are growing impatient, but he thinks the fundamentals in Winnipeg right now are sound.

“The problem is, you can spend so much time figuring out how you got it wrong that you don’t see what you’ve done right,” Clemons said.

“I’m a friend of Coach (Paul) LaPolice, I was rooting for him and I was really impressed how he handled himself.

“What I do see here is hope. I see a couple of young quarterbacks here who can make a real difference. There’s some question about those concussions for Buck Pierce, but there can be no question about his resolve.

“And the way (Steven) Jyles played this year really surprised me. If you can have two quarterbacks in this league, that brings you back to some of the dual monsters we’ve seen in this league in the past.

“That’s the foundation. And after that is defence, and you’ve still got a guy in Doug Brown who can keep that part of the team together. You’ve got Fred Reid, you’ve got a lot of the pieces to the puzzle here right now.

“The thing with leadership is people are usually too impatient to be smart. They always want to change. And so for me, what I see is a lot of the pieces in place and I think the task is for the people inside the organization to make those pieces work together.”

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca

Michael (Pinball) Clemons used to electrify football fans with his running style. These days, he does it with a motivational speaking style that is just as electric. He had a crowd of 1,000 members of the Association of Manitoba Municipalities on their feet clapping and yelling at the Winnipeg Convention Centre Wednesday morning as the former Toronto Argonauts running back stalked the huge hall during his keynote address and urged his audience to embrace “substance over style.”

Here are some snippets:

— “We’ve learned how to make a living, but not how to make a life. We’ve added years to life, but not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but we have trouble crossing the street to greet a neighbour.”

— “We talk about the sub-prime crisis. The average home has doubled in size the last 30 years. And at the same time, the size of the average family has been cut in half. We didn’t need all that home, but we were caught up in the style.”

— “My greatest strength is I understand how important I’m not.

“Coaching was a dream job. Why did I stop? Because there’s a saying, ‘Every successful man is not a successful father, but every successful father is a successful man.'”

— “There’s a thing called humility and that’s really important and I need you to hang on to that. But there’s another thing called false humility and false humility has the habit of denying that which is fact. And if you deny that which is fact, you can’t possibly do your job with the level of passion and zeal that is required.”