The miracle at Lansdowne Park

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This article was published 22/07/2017 (2980 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The memories of that day in Ottawa, almost 39 years ago, are still clear and focused.

It was a comeback so improbable, so ingenious in its conception and so perfect in its execution (well, almost perfect), Joe Poplawski can laugh about the thrill of it all.

He was a 21-year-old wide receiver, fresh off the campus of the University of Alberta, and he was tearing up the Canadian Football League in his rookie season with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. But on Sept. 9, 1978, with the clock winding down in the fourth quarter and the Blue Bombers trailing the Ottawa Rough Riders 29-17 at Lansdowne Park, it looked like it was lights-out for the Winnipeggers.

Then something miraculous happened.

A 10-yard touchdown pass from Ralph Brock (he had yet to morph into Dieter) to Poplawski, with a Bernie Ruoff convert, pulled the Blue Bombers to within five points with 62 seconds left in the game. Poplawski had caught the ball at the back of the end zone and was sent reeling into the field-goal netting by Ottawa defender Ken Downing. That foolish move, borne out of frustration, resulted in a roughing penalty that moved the Winnipeg kickoff from the Blue Bombers’ 45 (as was the rule in those days) to the Ottawa 50.

Then things got really interesting.

Winnipeg head coach Ray Jauch sent out his kickoff team with Poplawski, not Ruoff, as his intended kicker. Star Bombers wide receiver Mike Holmes, meanwhile, was part of the “hands” team on short kickoff attempts while Rough Riders head coach George Brancato countered with tight-end extraordinaire Tony Gabriel.

In that era, squib kicks were unheard of as part of any short kickoff repertoire.

“It was always ‘chip it in the air and let the best athletes come down with the football,’ and it would have been Holmes versus Gabriel,” Poplawski recalls. “But things didn’t work out that way because of the shift that Ottawa undertook.”

Holmes set up on the far left of Poplawski as the teams assembled for the kickoff; Gabriel took his position just across from Holmes.

“Mike, I’m 99 per cent sure, would have been on that recovery team anyways because his vertical (leap) was so good and Tony Gabriel probably would’ve been on their recovery team as well because he was so tall and he was on that side,” Poplawski says.

Jauch had been plotting for such a situation from the beginning of the season, working on the details in practice and drawing on Poplawski’s soccer background and dexterity with both feet.

“I had talked to Joe previously about practising kicking with his left foot on short kickoffs,” says Jauch, now 79, retired and living in Waxhaw, N.C. “He could do that very well. Being a soccer player, I knew he could kick with either foot. The circumstance came up in the game. The funny part of it was there was a television camera on my side of the field, and so we were on the side of the field where if he kicked with his right foot, the ball would come our way.

“So to create a diversion, I started hollering at the television camera guy to get the camera out of the way in case the ball comes over and people are going to run into it. I don’t know if they shifted over or not, but I gave Poplawski the signal to kick it over to the other side, which we had worked on and had a signal for. He kicked it perfect.”

Poplawski also followed Jauch’s two-digit numbering system for short-kick scenarios. It enabled him to pinpoint the direction and location of the kick, calling it out to his teammates just before he was ready to strike the ball.

“The first digit was the distance I was going to kick and it was always 10 yards, so the first number was always going to be one, sometimes you’d chip it 20 or 30 yards so it would be a two or a three and the second digit would be where (it was going) from left to right,” Poplawski says.

“So ‘11’ would have been 10 yards downfield on the left-hand side. And so, I was given the opportunity to call out what I would like to see. Well, I was going to be calling out a number and I wasn’t absolutely sure and then, suddenly, I saw there was a shifting of the Ottawa coverage team. And so, it became pretty simple for me to call out ‘19.’”

Gordie Patterson, Winnipeg’s crafty slotback, was lined up on the right side of the formation and caught the ball on a dead run. Then, inexplicably, he fell down on the Ottawa 34-yard line.

“It was a perfect kick,” says Patterson, now a 66-year-old vice-president and investment adviser with RBC in Calgary. “The only thing I did wrong was I wanted to make sure I caught the ball before I ran, but I could have probably caught the ball and run downfield quite a ways.

“He just put a perfect flip wedge about 15 yards deep and there was nobody around but me. I caught it on the fly, but I went down and held it. In retrospect, if I’d have been a real athlete, I would’ve just kept running. We ended up scoring on a nice drive.”

The setup had been virtually flawless. From Jauch’s misdirection (the Ottawa coverage team was completely baffled, shifting over completely as he yelled at the CTV camera operator) to Poplawski’s perfectly placed boot (he set up slightly left of the ball and hit a fluid chip to an ideal spot).

“It wasn’t like we were totally unprepared for it, but execution is another part of the game,” Poplawski says. “Everything fell into place. I’m still trying to remember if there was one guy in front of me or shaded to the right, but there was nobody over on Gordie. He was wide open.

“He wanted to make sure he caught it, and I was thinking, ‘Get up and run Gordie! Get up and run.’ But he didn’t.”

It didn’t matter.

Two plays and an Ottawa offside penalty later, the Blue Bombers took the lead with 38 seconds left. Jim Washington, the club’s superb tailback, rambled 29 yards to the Rough Riders’ five-yard line and then got the ball again from Brock for the winning score. Only 38 seconds were left on the clock. Poplawski had caught seven of Brock’s passes for 81 yards, increasing his league-leading number of catches to 45 as the Bombers improved their record to 5-4.

The Riders, destined to lose in the East Division final that season, fell to 7-2.

“We lost our poise,” Brancato complained to reporters after the game. “The guys just went to sleep. I don’t care who was kicking, where he kicked or anything. We design things so both sides of the field will be covered. That No. 75 (Canadian Dan Fournier) wasn’t even watching the ball. He was looking to the other side.

“Of course we should have won. We had an 11-point lead in the last three minutes and simply blew it.”

It was bedlam in the cramped Winnipeg locker room after the final whistle as the Bombers celebrated their improbable comeback.

“Jauch brought us all together… and you know how Ray could spin a story. (With) that big smile of his, he said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ and it was his tradition to give the game ball to one (player) each game,” Poplawski says. “And Dieter had such a great game. He said, ‘We only give out one, and this time it’s going to be shared between Dieter and Joe Pop.’ Ralph stood up and for me, he was my idol… when he stands up and says, ‘No, this one’s not mine, it’s Joe Pop’s,’ and he gives it to me, I thought, ‘Holy smokes, this is something very special for me.’”

Later that season, Poplawski gifted the game ball to Tim Allan, an undersized backup offensive lineman and friend on the 1978 squad.

“He was the ‘Rudy’ of the football team,” says Poplawski. “He never saw the field. I don’t know if he dressed for a game…. He was such a team guy, he worked his ass off in every practice. I think he may have dressed for two or three games, but he didn’t see the field much. All of us rookie Canadians hung out together.

“I gave the ball to him. I said to Tim, ‘You’re the greatest teammate. If you never get a chance, you’ll always be remembered as one of us. Here you go.’”

Poplawski has never forgotten that game nor his former teammate, although they fell out of touch after Allen was released later that season. But earlier this summer, Poplawski got a surprise in his mailbox. He received that same game ball, with Poplawski’s original inscription, in a package from Allan, now a retired teacher in the Toronto area.

Jauch, for his part, loves his place in CFL lore and the part he played in that memorable game so long ago.

“I never had a guy who kicked with either foot, and that was unique to Joe,” he says. “I always get a kick out of telling that story.”

mike.sawatzky@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @sawa14