Former Lions coach not upset to be passed over for Roughriders’ top job
By Mike Beamish,
Vancouver Sun
After moving 18 times in the 47 years he spent coaching football, Dave and Sharon Ritchie really didn’t have the stomach for relocation No. 19.
The news Wednesday that Dave Ritchie, the former defensive coordinator of the B.C. Lions, had been passed over as head coach of the Roughriders in favour of Ken Miller was surprisingly greeted with some relief in the Ritchie household.
When Ritchie, 69, heard that Miller was Saskatchewan GM Eric Tillman’s choice, he told The Vancouver Sun of his official decision to pack it in. Which means no more unpacking. Time for the Ritchies, who married as college sweethearts in 1957, to embrace their AARP cards and become full-time grandparents.
“I’m happy for Ken Miller,” Dave said of the Roughriders’ 66-year-old offensive coordinator. “He’s been in coaching a long time [41 years] and he hasn’t caught a break. Eric spoke to me a week or so ago. I kind of had the feeling he liked Ken. I think it’s wonderful to see an organization promote from within.”
Ritchie secretly told Lions head coach Wally Buono before the start of the 2007 season that it would be his last in the CFL. Many of his players thought he was joking. How can somebody, marinated in the game over six decades, simply walk away from a job and a lifestyle that had become his life?
Easier than you think.
Sharon Ritchie began preparations for the exodus in the middle of last season when she bought a home in McDonald, Pa., about 30 kilometres southwest of Pittsburgh, and began moving crates of football memorabilia to the couple’s retirement home.
Four of their eight grandchildren live in the small Pennsylvania community where NFL coaches Marty Schottenheimer and Marvin Lewis grew up.
Dave Ritchie had never seen the home before he and his wife moved in two months ago following the Lions’ elimination in the West Division final by the Roughriders. When Ritchie’s name was mentioned as a possible replacement for Saskatchewan head coach Kent Austin, after the latter joined the University of Mississippi in January, the timing was hardly fortuitous.
“He didn’t seek the job. He didn’t go after it,” Sharon Ritchie said. “If it came up that Dave was going to be offered the Saskatchewan job, we really would have had to talk about it. It really would have confused our lives. Right now, Dave’s tired. We’ve been unpacking. He hasn’t had a break.”
The Ritchies spent 25 years in Canada, 11 of which Dave was the head man, amassing 108 wins to rank him as the CFL’s seventh all-time winningest coach. He led the Lions to victory in the first Canada-U.S. Grey Cup game, in 1994, over the Baltimore Stallions, and was named coach of the year in 2001 with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers.
It is the small things, however — the enduring friendships with players, their families, and their affection for the burly, avuncular coach with the soft chuckle and impish smile — that mark Ritchie’s legacy of great humanity.
After years in which the Ritchies operated as surrogate grandparents for a host of CFL players, Dave and Sharon are thrilled to be re-connecting with their own grandkids, in backyard games of touch football and in the cheering sections of high-school basketball games.
“I’m getting accustomed to retirement now,” Dave Ritchie says. “I’ve probably gone to more high school games in the past week than I did in the last 25 years. It’s a time of life to visit friends and family and take it easy. Six months from now, who knows?”
He leaves without fanfare, another Grey Cup ring or a farewell press conference, in the ordinary manner of a clergyman, salesman or military man.
Old soldiers, as the saying goes, never die. They just fade away. So do the decorated generals of football.
