Thrill of a lifetime

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/10/2015 (3762 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Long before he moved move to The Pas for work, Harvey Ander sold peanuts and popcorn at the old Osborne Stadium where the Winnipeg Blue Bombers did battle from the mid-1930s until it closed in 1952.

It’s there his love for the Blue and Gold and the Canadian Football League first blossomed.

“Indian Jack Jacobs, I seen him once throw a pass to Bud Grant, who missed it; he threw it so hard it cracked a board in the 20-foot fence behind the end zone,” he recalled.

That’s just one of the stories that comes to mind as Ander flips through the pages of a scrapbook his sister made for him over the years before giving it to him before she passed.

“Bud Tinsley, John Brown, Tom Casey — the running back — Joe Gray” said Ander, listing off players from an old team photo in his collection, his smile growing with every familiar face he sees.

He was so captured by the feel of the old stadium, he decided to play football the following year, suiting up for Daniel McIntyre’s high school team in 1950. He would go on to win three consecutive provincial championships on the very field he once worked. In fact, his team was so dominant they were dubbed the “DMCI Dynasty” and were inducted into the Winnipeg High School Football Hall of Fame in 2002.

Ander never played another game after high school — “I wasn’t heavy enough to make the junior team,” he said — but his love for the game never died. Despite moving hundreds of kilometres away, he still keeps a close eye on the Bombers and has watched every Grey Cup game.

The Grey Cup has become more than just a football game for Ander and fans like him. The trophy resembles a piece of history. Every name engraved is a story. With every championship, a new chapter written.

Like a drug, it’s an addiction that once it grabs a hold of you, it’s next to impossible to shake. It consumes you, and sometimes can make you do things you’d never thought imaginable.

Take Joanne Basson, another resident of The Pas. When games weren’t on TV, she and a girlfriend would hop in the car and drive until they could get a signal on the radio. Her greatest memory is when she got the chance to see the Bombers beat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the 1984 Grey Cup in Edmonton.

“The only reason I could get time off was because I said it was my honeymoon,” she said with a smile. “So I went to the Grey Cup game with nine of my husband’s buddies and that was my honeymoon.”

Then there’s Lyle Borgstrom, a resident of Flin Flon who thought he missed his only chance to see the Cup up close when he showed up late for a rare visit from the CFL’s holy grail Monday because he had to drive his grandkids around for their own sporting events. Missing it brought him to tears.

But it was tears of joy Tuesday morning when a friend of the family took a shot in the dark and reached out to the handlers of the Cup with his story. He almost fell over when the Cup was delivered to his doorstep the next morning.

“This is unbelievable,” said Borgstrom. “Things in life happen, they come and they go and I thought this was one time where it that happened to me. My family, we’re nuts about the CFL.”

“When we missed it last night at the park I was so upset,” said Kristina Lies, Lyle’s daughter, tears running down her cheek. “The kids were saying ‘that would have been a lifetime memory’ because when are you ever going to get to do that again? You know, that’s what made me feel so bad. So when they said this could happen, I was, well obviously emotional.

“Just incredible. It’s something that brings all of us together.”

jeff.hamilton@freepress.mb.ca twitter: @jeffkhamilton