Not just another game for Newman

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This article was published 26/06/2015 (3988 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg Blue Bombers quarterback Drew Willy insists it’s just another game. Ditto Bombers linebacker Sam Hurl.

But ask Graig Newman — another former Saskatchewan Roughrider who will be making his return to Mosaic Stadium Saturday in a Blue and Gold uniform — whether the 2015 regular-season opener against the Riders is just another game and Newman has a decidedly different take.

“Absolutely I have something to prove,” Newman said Thursday following Winnipeg’s last full practice in advance of travelling to Regina today. “Any time you leave a team, whatever the reason, you always want to show to them that they lost out on a good player. That’s especially true when it’s your hometown team. I grew up in Saskatchewan, learned to love the team and then it didn’t work out.

“So yeah, I wouldn’t mind rubbing it in their face a little bit.”

If that wasn’t fodder enough for the bulletin board, Newman got a little more specific about what that face-rubbing might look like.

“There’s nothing more in this world I’d like to do,” the defensive back continued, “than to pick off Darian Durant in front of my mom and dad and friends.”

It was a refreshing bit of honesty from Newman in a week in which all the former Riders players on the Bombers — there’s lots of them — were insisting, all evidence to the contrary, the trip to Regina is just a regular, old business trip.

“It’d just be sweet to go 1-0 as a team and get off to a fast start again,” insisted Willy, who was the backup in Saskatchewan for two seasons before the Bombers acquired him in February 2014.

“I wouldn’t say necessarily (there’s any special hunger to win in) Regina. I think just in general being hungry every week is something as a team we need to take forward.”

Hurl, who began last season as the starting middle linebacker in Saskatchewan before he was stripped of the job midway through the campaign, also insisted he was nursing no special grudges against the Riders.

“Am I going to Regina with something to prove? I feel like I’ve got something to prove every week,” said Hurl. “It’s a business and you can’t take things personally. It is what it is and I’m just excited about this season and not worried about anything that happened last year.”

Hurl was a free agent, non-import signing last winter for the Bombers, who gave him big bucks — more than $100,000 per season — in the belief he can be the ratio breaker at middle linebacker they haven’t had since Henoc Muamba went to the NFL following the 2013 season.

Bombers head coach Mike O’Shea, who played 16 seasons in the CFL as a non-import middle linebacker, says everything Hurl has shown in training camp and the pre-season suggests he’s ready to be the dominating force in the middle for Winnipeg he never was in Regina.

“One of the things I liked was he had constant energy in training camp. No matter what the play, he pursued and pursued and pursued,” O’Shea said Wednesday.

“I and his teammates expect big things from him.”

Newman, meanwhile, expects big things from himself. After toiling for two seasons in Regina — most of it as a special-teamer — the 26-year-old former Saskatoon Hilltop signed with the Bombers as a free agent in February 2014, when the Bombers told him they’d give him a chance to start on defence.

That never happened last season because an injury during training camp wiped out Newman’s entire 2014 season. But he’s healthy this year and will begin the season as the club’s fourth linebacker — you will see lots of him on passing downs — in addition to playing special teams.

While he considers himself a Saskatchewanian, Newman says he knows as a member of the Bombers the reception he will receive at Mosaic Stadium will be a hostile one this weekend.

But he will have his supporters.

“I’ve got 20-plus friends and family coming for the game,” says Newman. “So there will be some people cheering for me, just not everybody.”

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @PaulWiecek