Arden Zwelling
CFL.ca
TORONTO — Growing up as a football player in Toronto at the turn of the century, it would have been sacrilegious had Tristan Black not been a fan of Mike O’Shea.
That’s why Black — a 6-foot-3, 232-pounder who was practically bred to play linebacker — emulated his game after O’Shea, the three-time CFL All-Star who patrolled the middle of the field for the Toronto Argonauts during 12 of his 16 CFL seasons and was named the league’s Most Outstanding Canadian in 1999.
Now, after a long string of twists and turns, Black finds himself living his boyhood dream: filling O’Shea’s shoes and playing middle linebacker for the Argonauts. And if he ever wants some pointers on the position, he can always just knock on O’Shea’s door.
“I always watched him as a kid and eventually I wanted to do what he did,” Black said of O’Shea who currently serves as the Argonauts’ special teams
coordinator. “To be in the position that Mike O’Shea was and to wear the same jersey as he did is incredible.”
For Black — who grew up in the Toronto’s west end — just being on the field at all is a feat after his football career was all but written off two years ago.
Black broke his ankle just five games into his rookie season while playing for the Calgary Stampeders — an injury so severe that many thought he may have seen the field for the last time in his life. But just a month shy of the two-year anniversary of that nearly career-ending game, Black is getting ready for his second week in a row as the Argonauts’ starting middle linebacker.
It’s a scenario that Black almost has a hard time believing himself.
“I couldn’t really dream up this sort of thing,” Black said. “As a kid, it’s something that I wanted but for it to happen is still taking me a little bit by surprise. It’s just too bad the way it had to happen.”
The tragic irony of football is that it took a season-ending knee injury to another local talent, six-year CFL veteran Jason Pottinger, to open a spot for Black to see regular playing time.
Pottinger went down in the second quarter of the Argonauts’ season opener against the Stampeders and was replaced by Black who had served as his backup for most of 2010. It didn’t take long for Black to make an impact against his former team, intercepting Stamps quarterback Henry Burris at the end of the third quarter with the Argos holding on to a tenuous five-point lead.
Of course, the pick quickly became moot in the small picture. The Stampeders forced a turnover less than a minute later as momentum swung back and forth in a game the Argonauts would eventually go on to win 23-21 — their first win in Calgary since 2005.
But in the greater scheme of Black’s young career the interception meant validation. It was a testimonial to the fact that, despite the odds, the 27-year-old is not only still in the CFL, but making big plays at the same time.
“A lot of doctors and stuff said I wouldn’t be playing any more. They kind of told me that I didn’t have a future. I’m happy to prove them wrong,” Black said. “There were a lot of people coming out that didn’t really believe that I could be a good linebacker in the CFL. It just shows them that I’m still here and I can do it.”
The interception itself wasn’t the hard part. Burris didn’t put enough on the ball as he fired the pass — intended for Stamps receiver Ken-Yon Rambo — low and straight into the waiting arms of Black at Toronto’s 30-yard line.
No, the hard part was the onerous climb to the CFL from a sprawling, vocationally-focused high school in Toronto called Central Technical where Black learned the game.
Central Tech won back-to-back Toronto championships in the late 1980’s but hasn’t been able to raise a banner since, reaching the championship on three occasions and losing every time.
But that wasn’t for a lack of talent as the school has produced a number of CFLers including O’Neil Wilson, Adriano Belli and Black who was a two-time Toronto Star All-City selection and was recruited to play at Detroit’s Wayne State University.
Black was a star at Wayne State almost from the moment he arrived on campus in 2005. It took him just five games to earn a starting role in his rookie season and he would end up finishing second on the team among linebackers in tackles with 40, including a 10-tackle game.
Four years and 43 games later Black left Wayne State sitting ninth on the school’s all-time tackles list with 289. That was enough to encourage the Stampeders — with current Argonauts head coach Jim Barker serving as a Vice-President — to select Black in the second round of the 2009 CFL Entry Draft.
Barker had actually met Black several months earlier at the 2008 East Coast Bowl in Petersburg, Virginia — a college football all-star game for players from the Mid-Atlantic region.
Barker was coaching the Southern All-Stars who pummeled Black’s Northern All-Stars 27-0 in the only shutout in East Coast Bowl history. But Black’s performance on the other side left a mark on Barker, who drafted him in Calgary and traded for him last August shortly after he took over the coaching reigns with the Argonauts.
It’s been a long journey but things have finally come full circle in Toronto where everything started a decade ago in the schoolyard at Central Tech.
“I don’t get ahead of myself. I can’t live tomorrow unless I get through today so I try to do well snap-to-snap and practice-to-practice,” Black said. “You just have to know that eventually everything will come together.”
Central Tech sits in the heart of Canada’s biggest city and is far from a wealthy school. Most of its students choose to go there because they’re better with a hammer or a drill in their hands rather than a textbook. Even for the athletically-inclined like Black, it seemed like the naysayers always outnumbered the role models.
That’s why Black — along with three fellow university football players who reached the next level from Toronto high schools — founded the Canadian Football Factory (CFF), a nonprofit organization focused on the development of Toronto high school football players both on and off the field.
“I realized when I was a kid that there weren’t too many people to look up to when you’re a young student-athlete,” Black said. “I know that one day nobody’s going to care who I am. So right now, when I have a little bit of influence on these guys, I’m going to try to take advantage of it,”
The program runs off season training every weekend at Central Tech and is currently working towards its week-long preseason camp in August which leads into the beginning of the school year. This will be the second year Black and company have run the camp and much of the linebacker’s time off the field is devoted to securing sponsors so that the CFF can subsidize costs.
Many of the players who take part in the camp are from disadvantaged backgrounds and the more sponsorship dollars Black and the CFF can secure, the more opportunities they can provide.
Several Argonauts have joined Black at his camps to run drills with the young athletes including fellow Torontonians Mike Bradwell, who went to Leaside High School, and Matt Black who graduated from Northern Secondary School in mid-town.
But more than just teaching techniques and skills, the camps are a chance for Black and company to show high schoolers just how achievable their football dreams can be. Black says he sees a little bit of himself in every teenager that he instructs at the CFF.
That’s no surprise — it wasn’t that long ago that he was in their shoes.
“I went to the same school as them. I took the same busses as them. I want them to realize they can do it too,” Black said. “I want to be the one to tell them they can do it and show them how to do it. Be someone positive in their life that they can look up too.”
Having just reached his goal of filling O’Shea’s shoes, the passionate Torontonian is hoping he can inspire some local teenager to one day fill his.
“The opportunities are there but they just don’t always see where they are,” Black said. “I’m someone who took advantage of the opportunities so I want to let them know that they can do it. They can do well in life.”
