CFL.ca Staff

MONTREAL -- John Walker, one of Canada’s finest film directors, says he likes to tell stories that most people know very little about because it makes it easy to open their eyes.

That’s why when he was approached to direct ‘Playing a Dangerous Game’, the fourth documentary in TSN’s ‘Engraved on a Nation’, his interest peaked.

Walker is, after all, a native of Montreal, and while playing high school football as a kid he grew up cheering for the Alouettes, along with star players like Hal Patterson and Sam Etcheverry.

But he also knew it was going to be a new challenge for him; it was something he had never done before.

“When I was approached to do a sports documentary, I thought, ‘I haven’t made a sports documentary before’,” Walker recalls.

“But I quickly realized that with a sports documentary, it’s not really about the game. It’s about characters and individuals and storytelling, and that’s really what they were looking for.”

The story is set in Montreal in the midst of the FLQ Crisis, when Jake Gaudaur was the commissioner of the CFL and Pierre Elliott Trudeau was the Prime Minister of Canada.

Whereas Trudeau saw Quebec as pivotal to Canada’s success as a country, Gaudaur similarly believed that in order for football to thrive in Canada, there needed to be strength in Montreal.

Despite the dangers of ongoing terrorism and a general fear among the population, Gaudaur decided to hold the 1969 Grey Cup in Montreal, in an effort to engage francophones and to start the long process of turning football around in the province of Quebec to become a truly bilingual sport.

It didn’t come without its dangers though, as the threat from the FLQ was in everyone’s mind, with the scale of security at the Grey Cup game that year at a mind-blowing level.

With ‘Playing a Dangerous Game’, Walker faced the challenge of melding sport with politics with the story of the ’69 Grey Cup game against the backdrop of an infamous terrorist crisis that truly threatened the lives of Canadians.

He knew that if he was going to intertwine sport and politics into a larger context, he would need strong characters from each side.

The first character, Russ Jackson, was easy. He was awarded as Canada’s top athlete in 1969 and a year later, received the Order of Canada.

“I knew I had a very strong person there, that knew the game well at the time and had a good memory, and of course that was at the end of his career,” says Walker. “It was a fairytale end to his career, one of the great Canadian heroes.”

Robert Cote, a cop from Pointe-Saint-Charles in Montreal during the ‘60s who had volunteered for the bomb squad in Montreal, is another strong character in the film.

He was an unsung hero at the time, defusing hundreds of bombs and saving peoples’ lives with little or no recognition. He was also responsible for checking the Grey Cup parade as well as the stadium, giving him a role not only in the FLQ crisis, but in the game itself.

“I knew then that I had two very strong superstars, really,” says Walker.

Then there was the political side, with Trudeau facing potential threats to his life from Quebec nationalists, who hated him. That’s where it all comes together – none of that stopped Gaudaur from bringing the game to Montreal and having Trudeau present to kick it all off.

Suddenly the Grey Cup game was in the middle of it all. That’s what Walker hopes to show with his latest film.

“The challenge is putting it into the larger context and showing it as a metaphor for the country, and that’s where Trudeau and Gaudaur come in in terms of what they were attempting to pull off with this game,” he says.

“So that’s the challenge, putting it into the larger context.”

Ultimately, Walker says he thinks this is a story that’s gone untold. Both in politics and in sports, it was a time that was well-documented in terms of live footage and recollections – but a lot if it’s never been seen before.

He points out that archives have footage of Cote in action, on the scene at live events doing his job in the bomb squad.

These images, combined with a backstory of a threat to public safety that was so real and so serious, provide the ammo for a story that’s unique and compelling, whether it’s looked at through a Canadian football lens or not.

“I think for a lot of younger viewers, particularly those that didn’t live in Quebec, they have no idea we had this kind of terrorism in Quebec – that these kinds of politics were going on” says Walker.

Meanwhile, Walker points out, it’ll offer something for people who lived through that era, too.

“For people like myself who were living in Quebec at the time, it’s a trip down memory lane and looking at what everyone had lived through at that time,” he says.

“It was a very significant game,” he continues. “It showed that you could bring in a Canadian sport, a national sport and pull it off without any incidents.”

Linking politics and sports is never an easy task, and with the latest TSN ‘Engraved on a Nation’ documentary, we have another unique story of how football in this country has brought Canadians together.

It’s something Walker says should be quite an eye-opener.