Legendary impact on and off the field

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/07/2017 (3257 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It looks like the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ season-opening win in Saskatchewan last weekend was worth more than two points.

On Tuesday, the CFL team reached a one-day record for ticket sales at Investors Group Field. And Wednesday was tracking even higher.

Three of the tickets were purchased by me, as I had invited my two grandsons to join me at Friday night’s home-opener against the Calgary Stampeders.

When one reaches a certain age and reflects on the path from the past that leads to the present, it becomes clearer how we got here. And easier to understand who inspired and guided us.

People we looked up to, especially as children.

Our parents, hopefully. And, sometimes, our chosen heroes.

My heroes were football, hockey and baseball players.

Only one of them played in Winnipeg in the 1950s and ’60s when I grew to be a tall, lanky kid with a big throwing arm and even bigger dreams.

His name was Kenny Ploen and, with Bud Grant, the future Pro Football Hall of Fame coach, they would create a Bombers Grey Cup-winning dynasty.

More than a half-century later, I can still remember the numbers many of the Grant-era Blue Bombers wore.

My idol wore No 11.

Back then, I wanted to be just like Kenny Ploen. So I became a quarterback who wore No. 11, and even tried to copy the way he trotted from the sideline to the huddle.

Later, I would be invited to a Blue Bombers rookie camp for local minor league players, but that’s as close as I came to being like Ploen the player. Coming anywhere close to Ploen, the prince of a person, was impossible. I first met Grant at that rookie camp, posing with him for a Free Press photographer as we stood in front of a chalkboard and he pretended to diagram a play.

Years earlier, I was a member of the Hudson’s Bay Co. Junior Quarterback Club, for which Bombers players volunteered their time and travelled to sign autographs and coach children at various community club fields around Winnipeg.

We all got patches to sew on our jackets to show we were club members, plus a chance to sit in cheap end-zone seats.

That’s where I first met Ploen. I asked him how he rolled out of the pocket and passed the ball. Instead, he told me how Stampeders quarterback Herman (Eagle) Day did it.

That was Kenny Ploen, a humble, gracious person.

The junior quarterback club was a brilliantly simple way to encourage Winnipeg minor league football — and nourish the fan base of the future. The Bombers of today, under chief executive officer and president Wade Miller, reach out to children and the local minor football community in similar, but different, ways.

In my day, the junior quarterback club encouraged and nurtured me to try to follow my hero which, without realizing it then, also helped me create a lifelong sense of can-do confidence connected with setting goals and succeeding. That, and being a member of a team and the lifelong friendships and memories it brought.

It was much later in life — through the privilege of being on this perch at the Free Press — that I sought to recognize and say thank you for what Ploen and Grant did for me, and for who-knows-how-many-others like me.

In 2010, I suggested in a column a street be named in honour of No. 11. With my pal and former Blue Bombers placekicker Trevor Kennerd carrying the ball with the team board, Ken Ploen Way became a gateway to Investors Group Field when it opened in 2013. Later that year, I suggested a statue of Grant be erected at IGF.

“Ideally,” I wrote, “it would show Grant with a Bombers ball cap and headphones standing on the sidelines next to a kneeling Ploen.”

Kennerd lugged the ball to the board on that one, too, with David Asper blocking for him all the way.

Less than a year-and-a-half later, in the fall of 2014, at the age of 87, Grant stood in front of Gate 1 and watched as his statute was unveiled.

“People are dead before they get one of these put up,” he told the crowd on that sunny day.

(Grant was right, of course: witness this week’s announcement a statue in honour of another Bombers Grey Cup-winning head coach, Cal Murphy, will be erected at IGF in September. Murphy died in 2012.)

On the day Grant’s statue was unveiled, Ploen wasn’t represented kneeling with him on the sideline — but he was sitting nearby as a few geese did a low, perfectly timed fly-by just as Grant was about to salute all the Blue Bombers players he said the statue stood for. Especially, Ploen.

“If I was to say what was the No. 1 ingredient to our success, originally, it was this guy right here,” Grant said of Ploen.

As I was suggesting, that’s how I feel about Ploen’s impact on my life. Grant’s, too.

Which is why, when my 10-year-old grandson, Jacob, started playing flag football this spring, I decided he might like to go to his first Blue Bombers game.

On Tuesday, I bought three tickets that, tax included, totalled less than $60. On Friday, before Jacob and my other grandson, 14-year-old Holden, enter through Gate 1, we will pause at the foot of Grant’s statue and rub the toe of his bronze boot.

Just for some Bombers good luck.

Who knows, maybe that good luck — and the kind of winning drive both those Bombers greats had — will eventually rub off on Jacob and Holden.

The way it has for their most grateful grandfather.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca