Return of the Napkin Man

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/09/2009 (5865 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sometime today, a bookish looking fellow dressed in green who looks more like an unmade bed than a sports executive, will make a brief cameo on the field at Canad Inns Stadium before slipping into the background to watch the game from a luxury box far from the fray.

There will be no triumphant return to Winnipeg for Brendan Taman. No big dinner at Rae and Jerry’s with flagons of wine and heavy-hitters stopping by the table for a hug or a handshake. Not his style, says the former GM of the Blue Bombers, now making a living as the director of football administration for the Saskatchewan Roughriders.

“It’ll be low-profile, that’s for sure. I’ll probably eat at Kelekis or Alicia’s,” said Taman of his return to Winnipeg after leaving the club in the off-season under circumstances that to this day remain cloudy. “I don’t think I’ll spend much time down on the field. I think a couple of guys got in trouble for being friendly with me last week in Regina. I don’t want to put any of them in a bad position.”

Taman worked in a number of roles with the Bombers for a decade, joining the club in 1999 as a player personnel man and rising to the position of GM and vice-president of football operations. The 42-year-old, who got his start in the CFL as a ballboy, took the Bombers to two Grey Cups as the club’s key personnel figure and made the post-season in seven of his 10 campaigns.

“There are a lot of people there that I still have relationships with. There are players and people on the staff that I had a lot of fun with during my 10 years there,” said Taman. “We made the playoffs more than we didn’t. I think we were pretty successful as an organization and I take pride in what we accomplished over there.”

Taman arrived in Winnipeg with the team on the verge of bankruptcy and never had much money for scouting or signing players. Bombers CEO Lyle Bauer has repeatedly said he thinks Taman did more with less than any other GM in the CFL. Taman says he always took the tight budget as a part of the job in Winnipeg.

“I loved it. I love a challenge or however you want to put it. Lyle would tell me how much I had to work with and I would say, ‘great,’ and then go out and do it,” said Taman. “The harder it was, contrary to what some people might say or believe, the harder I worked. We didn’t have 15 scouts running around the universe.”

This past winter, just months after Mike Kelly was hired as the club’s head coach, Taman resigned his post citing burnout. The rumours of he and Kelly not meshing, however, have refused to go away.

Kelly hired John Murphy as his director of player personnel and upon introducing him to the media took a number of shots at Taman, saying he left the club’s scouting department and personnel files in disarray.

“We have no system right now in place with any bank of information on players,” Kelly said in a conference call with the Winnipeg media. “There’s nothing in the offices. We have to start running this organization, on the football side, as a professional football organization, not as a club sport. And if some people take that and think that I’m throwing a jab, I am.

“We have nothing. I’ve never seen it before. Even when I’ve taken college jobs, at least there’s been a list of recruits and evaluations on those players… A good pro personnel director is going to write upwards of 1,200 reports in a season. We don’t have anything like that at the Bombers. We don’t have a database for it. Everything was done on napkins, I guess.”

Taman took a couple of months off but was immediately rumoured to be in the running for a job with the Riders and was there by the time Week 1 of this season rolled around.

It would be easy for Taman to return to Winnipeg this weekend with a taste for blood in his mouth but that’s just not the man’s makeup.

“I don’t take any satisfaction in seeing the controversy that’s going on over there now,” said Taman. “I don’t have any ill will towards the organization. Lyle Bauer is a good friend and I know the hell he’s going through right now. I don’t like seeing that. I hope we win. But I hope things work out over there too. Just not this week.”

gary.lawless@freepress.mb.ca

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