Patience with Buck paying off in big way

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This article was published 15/08/2011 (5196 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg Blue Bombers fans — and their team’s management — have been enormously patient with Buck Pierce.

And now — as those same fans, team and quarterback head into a bye week — their patience is being rewarded in a very big way.

Approaching the midway point of his second season as the Bombers starting quarterback, the 29-year-old Pierce has morphed into exactly what fans and management had always hoped he would become — an elite CFL quarterback.

Consider the numbers: With an 18-for-24, 237-yard performance in a 30-17 win over the B.C. Lions Saturday night, Pierce has now completed 71 of 96 passes for 1,064 yards, six TDS and two INT over his last four games.

You know what other quarterback is on a tear like that in the CFL right now? No one, that’s who.

Not future hall-of-famer Anthony Calvillo in Montreal. Not the resurgent Ricky Ray in Edmonton. And not the pesky Kevin Glenn of Hamilton.

No, the only quarterback who’s been completing 74 per cent of his passes with a 3:1 touchdown-to-interceptions ratio over the last four games is the same one Winnipeg football fans have been praying would someday reward all their patience with precisely this kind of roll.

It hasn’t been flashy — six TD passes in four games is very respectable, although it does not exactly invoke memories of Warren Moon — but then Pierce never has been the type to burn out the lights of a scoreboard.

In a blue-collar town, Pierce is a blue-collar quarterback, the kind of guy who shows up for work, puts his head down and gets the job done without generating much attention.

He is, in that way, almost the perfect embodiment of the city he represents — and it is perhaps precisely for that reason that fans in these parts have been so fiercely loyal to him.

It is worth remembering that prior to this remarkable season — a season in which the 4-14 2010 Bombers have transformed, almost as if by magic, into a 6-1 CFL juggernaut — Buck Pierce had started the grand total of five games in a Bombers uniform, finished just two of them and mustered precisely one win.

One win.

And yet through it all — the knee injury that sidelined him near the start of last season; the dislocated elbow midway through the year that ended his season; and the mysterious ‘quadriceps’ and ‘calf’ injuries that chased him from Games 3 and 5 this season — there has been a loyalty among Winnipeg football fans to Pierce that exceeded his accomplishments.

And now, it would appear, it’s payback time.

If there is a major city anywhere in North America that is more deserving of some good fortune on a football field right now, I cannot think of it.

Through all the Bombers’ foibles of the past couple seasons, Bombers fans paid their dues by paying at the turnstile. And then coming off a 4-14 season and with a new NHL team in town, they ponied up for season tickets this year like never before.

And they did it on little more than a wing and a prayer and a promise from team management that this really would be a much better Bombers team this year, even in the absence of any significant personnel changes to prop up all that enthusiasm.

And then when, as promised, the team showed signs of life early this season, the fans ponied up even more — selling out the last two games and putting the club on the verge of selling out for the next two as well.

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And they did it all for a quarterback on whom others had long ago given up. On the eve of his return to B.C. — where Pierce toiled for five tumultuous seasons — Lions head coach Wally Buono was not shy about telling the media that as much as he liked Pierce personally, he simply didn’t think the oft-injured pivot was worth all the injury drama anymore when he cut him loose in 2009.

Buono gave up on Pierce, in other words. And Buono is 1-6 this morning.

It would have been easy for Winnipeg fans — and management — to have done the same as Buono and given up on Pierce after last season’s debacle.

But loyalty has its rewards. And the reward as the Bombers take a break for the next 11 days is the satisfaction that Pierce, the Bombers and their fans are, for the moment at least, the very best in the entire Canadian Football League.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca