Fan Blog: Why I bleed Blue & Gold

Cameron Hayglass
Special to CFL.ca

Words are still not coming together quite the way I want yet, but I guess that’s what happens when your favourite team’s archrival has its way with your team twice in as many weeks, including a slim six and a half touchdown win on your own home field. I’ve spent most of the last week trying to decide whether I should just leap out my bedroom window and end it all already or not, but then, I’ve spent most of the last nineteen years having that same debate.

My name is Cam, Cameron HayGlass if you want to be formal about it, and for better or worse, with a definite emphasis on the latter, I’m a Bomber fan. I bleed blue and gold right to the core, and I will right up to the day they turn me into tulip fertilizer.

You could say I was born into it. I was born the day after the Bombers ended a twenty two year streak without even an appearance in the Grey Cup, November 18, 1984. Better yet, they ended it in style, winning 47-17 at Commonwealth Stadium over the Hamilton Tiger-Cats for their eighth Grey Cup championship. They’d add two more in the next six years, something I regard as entirely fantastical, the way you might look at a story about Zeus, or at Brian Burke turning down an interview.

You see, my earliest Bomber memory is going to a game with my parents during preseason 1991. It poured all game, the Bombers played Ottawa, and in a sign of things to come, we lost 21 – 19 to a team that wouldn’t be within a country mile of competitive that year. I was especially masochistic for my age, and I was hooked.

My parents rapidly became fans, and things just built from there. I’ve had season tickets since 2003, and I’ve missed something like three games in the last decade. Unfortunately I remember not only this decade, but all the fun parts of the one before. I’m convinced the next Grey Cup I don’t go to (Calgary this year will be seven consecutive for me) will be the first they win that I remember.

Now granted, at least for the last twenty years this is flat-out Manitoba tradition. The Jets haven’t won a playoff round since 1987, and even fleeing the country didn’t help them in that particular pursuit. The Moose lost the Calder Cup finals in six this year, at home of course, while the Goldeyes have lost something like their last six appearances in the Northern League final. That the Bombers find unique ways to blow every game they can is well, just the way of things.  It grows on you, the same as winters in Iqaluit, or flossing with barbed wire.

You need two things to be a Bomber fan and to have survived the last twenty years sane (some would argue the very combination of those two is impossible). The aforementioned masochism is one, a strange pervading sense of optimism the other.

Whether it’s this year, the Daley years, the Reinebold years, or the end of the Ritchie or Murphy eras, we’ve got a whole lot of practice at going 6-12 or so and realizing only around Week #17 that yeah, maybe we are in fact only two measly games out of a playoff spot but that with one game left there’s not much chance of that changing.

Yet somehow, the next year we walk the same perverted dance, this belief that this year is our year, that how can it not be when we’ve already suffered so many long years.  The fact that our team has gone from 1941 to 1958 without a title, then from 1962 to 1984, then from 1990 to at least 2009 is best not brought up. Yet many a Bomber fan will mention it, finishing the sentence with the current year even if we’re 1-14 at the time in a strange dance of delusion and hope.

I’ve travelled from coast to coast, and seen a game in all ten stadia (counting Ottawa and two in Montreal), and there’s nothing like the passion prairie fans have for the game. I’m not degrading anyone else; every team in the league has great fans and their own unique and wonderful game day experience. But the 30,000 at Taylor Field on Labour Day weekend can give any crowd I’ve ever heard a run for its money, and so can 30,000 crammed into Canad Inns when it’s so cold nobody dares sit on the steel benches lest you freeze to them and be found there in the spring (which starts around May 15 in Winnipeg most years).

Win or lose, every gas station, every bus, every library holds a conversation about the team. The only thing the result changes is the amount and nature of the profanity.

Twenty years of great memories, twenty years of things I wouldn’t trade for the world but would hawk in a second for just one darned Grey Cup ring. Here are just a few of the moments that stick out in my mind:

I remember my tenth birthday doubled as the 1994 East Final, and darn it, I don’t care what anyone says, Blaise Bryant still didn’t fumble early in the first quarter, but that’s the way it was called, Baltimore returned it 15 yards or so for their only touchdown of the game, and late in the game Dunigan bounced a sure touchdown off the crossbar, a wide open Gerald Wilcox staring in disbelief from the endzone. Baltimore 14, Winnipeg 12.

I remember fighting off tears the whole way home, in complete disbelief that the Bombers could lose on my birthday. Little did I know we were as close to the top as we’d get for a long, long time. We played the Stallions again in the playoffs the next year, in Maryland, and lost something like 57-20, thanks to not having a QB.

Speaking of quarterbacks… Kevin Mason. Brian Ah Yat. Troy Kopp. Mike Quinn. Kevin McDougal. Sammy Garza. Tee Martin. Jose Davis. Jay Walker. And of course, the immortal T. J. Rubley. No further comment, but can we just elect Milt Stegall to some sort of divine position now?  We should live in awe of the man for catching 147 touchdowns playing with so many from that group of players that are uh, shall we say unlikely to be seen in the CFL Hall of Fame any time soon.

I remember standing outside the last regular season game for the whole first quarter last year to make sure as many people as possible could sign the two Bomber flags me and my best friend taped up on the outside of the stadium to give to Stegall. Person after person wrote a paragraph or more on the flags, you could see the line from across the parking lot by the end of the game, and we booked an afternoon off work the week before the West Semi to go to practice and give the flags to Stegall.

He looked surprised to receive something, rather than be asked to sign it, but very appreciative of it, and that minute long conversation is something I will treasure forever. Strangest thing on artificial turf but I swear it was awful dusty out there walking off the field.

I remember the loudest I’ve ever heard Canad Inns, the day Stegall got 138. Not even the playoff wins compare to that day.

I remember the second loudest when Juran Bolden robbed Danny Mac clean for a pick six to seal the 2001 Eastern Final.

I remember the roar Khari got when he came back at the end of the 2004 season, Stamps jersey or no Stamps jersey. We might be fickle, you’re darn right we’re cheap, and we’ve got a bandwagon thing going on some days, but if there’s one thing Winnipeggers are it’s loyal, and that roar said it all.

I remember the 1984 TRUE BLUE book I have in my room that says something to the effect “Nobody hates Winnipeg more than Winnipeggers… nobody loves trashing Winnipeg more… but nobody else is allowed to either.” and the older I get the more I realize just how well that describes this city’s relationship with the Bombers, as well as my own.

I remember knowing even at nine years old that you can’t win a Grey Cup game if you turn it over seven times, even if you do beat the same team by 40 both times in the regular season.

I remember watching previews of the 2001 Grey Cup, and even in my seventeen year old mind I was thinking that the Bombers sounded awful sure of themselves. So sure they forgot to actually show up. There’s still a mark in my parents’ basement from that one.

I remember treasuring every moment of Guaranteed Win night, 1998. After all, we were down three scores to the Riders and 0-10… yet we came all the way back and won th
e thing on a five yard toss from Troy Kopp to Dimitrious Stanley. 1-10 or not, there’s still nothing like beating Saskatchewan.

Sorry Rider fans.

Talking on the way home we wondered if Kopp might just be our ticket back to oh, say, something less than a light year from respectability. Naturally, I don’t think he won more than another game or two in a Bomber uniform.

I remember the not quite immortal Sefa O’Reilly blowing up a third down gamble by the 7-1 Alouettes in 2001 to clinch a 24-19 win that told me that for the first time in too many years, the Bombers might just be good. I remember sprinting across the Winnipeg Stadium turf with thousands of others, Twisted Sister blaring over the PA, everyone who could screaming along in joy. Little did we know what that November held for us.

I remember Stegall getting a standing ovation at Taylor Field for passing Allen Pitts in receiving touchdowns and being struck by the complete surreality of the situation.

I remember John Avery rushing for approximately three point eight miles in the first half of the 2002 West Final at Commonwealth, and trailing 31-3 or thereabouts at halftime. We came charging all the way back to need a last minute drive for a field goal, and left our business unfinished right out there on the natural grass to die when the best healthy receiver we had left was Chad Plummer.

We’re not even going to discuss Kenton Keith in 2003 or James Johnson in 2007, but we’ll call that making up for the Saskatchewan comment earlier.

More than anything on the field, I remember off the field, and all the great friends I’ve made right across this league, all the great tailgates, and the realization several years back now that yes, it’s a whole lot of fun to beat the ever living heck out of anything green, or black and gold, or orange. But the CFL’s about so much more than that. Like the commercial says, it really is the fabric that binds a nation. It is the one league that we can call truly, completely, overwhelming Canadian, and the best of what’s in all of us.

I learned so much of this from an Argo fan that we lost last year, Garry (GreyCupGarry) Terpstra, a man who really truly defined in every way what it means to love life and to love the CFL. We still miss you Garry, and I think about you nearly every day.

Garry, myself, and many others are heavily involved in http://www.cflfansfightcancer.com, a site I hope you’ll check out today, even if I don’t update it nearly as much as I should.

Where does all this leave me?

With the realization that no matter how poorly this year goes for my beloved Blue, that I’ll be there, Section S, Row 41 until the final whistle of every game.

That if next year goes the same or even worse, I’ll be there again. That somehow, by kickoff I’ll convince myself we have a chance, no matter who we play.

That by the end of that game I’ll probably be cursing beer sales that cut off after the third quarter.

That someday, my future children will be introduced to everything that’s wonderful about the CFL, and I hope they learn to love it the way I do. Even if they’re Rider fans. That’s just going to make my will that much easier to write.

Come heck or high water, I’ll be there. Because I was, am, and always shall remain a Bomber believer.

Cameron Hayglass a loyal supporter of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and a member of CFL Fans Fights Cancer. You can follow him on Twitter at @chayglass.

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