Blue plot hostile takeover

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This article was published 04/09/2011 (5388 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

REGINA — It’s been a field of broken dreams.

Picture, if you will, the opposite of that soft-focus baseball diamond that Kevin Costner built in the Iowa corn field. Picture a place where instead of eating apple pie and feeling good about yourself, you get kicked in the nuts for three hours and advised by people wearing watermelons on their heads about the intimacies of your mother’s most private moments.

And then picture having to do that once a year, every year, with precisely the same humiliating results.

Picture all those things and you have a rudimentary sketch of what Mosaic Stadium on Labour Day has been like in recent years for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in general — and their veteran defensive tackle, Doug Brown, in particular. Six times the Bombers have come in here on Labour Day weekend over the past six years and six times they have headed home with their tails between their legs.

And in the middle of it all — literally — has been Brown, the longest-serving Bombers player who had an unexpected answer Saturday when he was asked if he’d miss travelling to Regina for Labour Day if he retires at the end of this season as he he’s promised to do.

“It sounds strange,” said Brown, “but it’s kind of fun having 30,000-plus fans tell you that you suck for 3 1/2 hours. I’m really going to miss that happening once a year once it’s all over. It’s just the energy you feel — the excitement. It’s an electric atmosphere out there on the field.

“As a visiting player, it’s probably the most hostility you’re ever going to feel,” Brown continued, “… and you just try to channel that and use it as motivation.”

Those Saskatchewan Roughriders fans will once again be in full throat here this afternoon as the woeful 1-7 Riders try to get back on track against the 7-1 Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the annual Labour Day Classic.

On the surface, the game is a total mismatch. The Bombers have yet to be beaten on the road this season (3-0); they have, by far, the best defence in the league; they are riding a five-game winning streak; and the Riders are awful.

But a coaching change in Saskatchewan on Aug. 19, back to the much beloved Ken Miller, has produced a renewed sense of optimism in Regina and the Bombers are likely to be presented this afternoon with the incongruous spectacle of a 1-7 home team and 30,000-plus cocky fans.

Bombers QB Buck Pierce said he welcomes all of it — and knows nothing else in a visit to Regina.

“Canad Inns (Stadium in Winnipeg) has been a place of a lot of noise and excitement for the last few weeks,” Pierce said here Saturday. “But everytime I come here, it’s always like that… It’s just a good CFL atmosphere.”

While the Saskatchewan coaching staff has changed dramatically since last the Riders played, the players themselves are mostly the same. So if nothing’s really changing, nothing’s changing, right?

Well, funny thing about that — folks were saying the same thing about a 4-14 Bombers squad in 2010 that chose to stand pat last winter and do battle again this season with pretty much the same club as last year. And we all know how that turned out.

“A lot of people throughout the off-season looked at us like we didn’t know what we were doing,” said Pierce. “I think all the hard work and determination it took for our organization to stick with what we had, it’s paying off.”

Beginning this afternoon, the Riders will attempt to resurrect a similar phoenix from charred ashes of their own. And Winnipeg? They have a rare opportunity — to snuff whatever tiny shred of life and optimism the Riders have left while continuing to put distance between themselves and the rest of the CFL.

Extra motivation? Brown says his team is already plenty motivated.

“We’ve won three games here in the (nine) I’ve played in. And we haven’t won one in six (years). So I don’t know if you could add any more motivation on top of that.”

In a forbidding place that has been the site of so many of their own broken dreams, the Bombers have a chance to shatter someone else’s for a change.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca