THE CANADIAN PRESS
It’s somewhere near the 2.5-hour mark of a movie that it stretches into marathon-length territory. No matter how good that movie might be — think The Wolf of Wall Street, Titanic, Lord of the Rings, American Gangster — time inevitably nudges you, forces you to squirm in your seat a bit and you wonder: How long will this go? How is this going to end?
As Ricky Ray begins the 16th season of his surefire hall of fame career, fans across the Canadian Football League might be asking the same questions.
Now 37, a three-time Grey Cup champion and fourth in CFL all-time passing yards (54,883), Ray’s resume is almost completely filled out, his story almost completely told. Entering the final year of his contract and playing on a roster that’s full of questions after a tough off-season, Ray isn’t trying to deny that he’s in the final chapter or chapters of his career. He hears the clock ticking, the same way that Henry Burris did and the same way that Peyton Manning did. But he’s not consumed with getting the storybook ending that those two QBs got.
“There’s urgency to win every year,” he said this week after a practice at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla. “That’s the feeling you (always) have. It’s not because I know my time is limited. Thats just the feeling you get when you have such high hopes of winning (every year). So you feel the urgency to do the best you can to help your team and put them in that position.”
Maybe in part because of the spotlight that comes with the position, quarterbacks seem to hear Father Time doing his work more loudly than their teammates. Each season that ends without a championship, each obstacle that pops up along the way: a team’s bad season or the serious injuries like the ones that have found Ray over the last few years, tick tock through the game for everyone to hear. Another imperfect chapter coming to an abrupt close.
Recently we’ve watched Burris, Anthony Calvillo and Kerry Joseph stay behind centre past 40. Kevin Glenn will go into Roughriders training camp as the No. 1 QB and he’ll be 38 by the time the season starts.
The common storyline with these guys is usually that they’re a Grey Cup away from retiring. Ray says he’s not driven by that.
“When you watch guys like Peyton Manning, Henry Burris, you think that’s kind of a cool way to do it but it’s not something that I really think about too much,” he said. “Obviously it would be great for anyone to go out with a positive note in anything that they do but it’s nothing that I’ve said, ‘Hey that’s going to make or break what I want to do.’ I mean, that would just be icing on the cake to do something like that.”
It’s classic Ricky Ray. Whereas Burris seemed consumed by proving he was still a starter, still great, still a winner in this league, Ray has gone about putting together one of the best careers in CFL history while being church-mouse quiet.
He knows that the end is somewhere down the road and that this year’s journey is a unique one, with a brand-new GM, head coach and coaching staff. There are lots of new faces on the roster that got together on the field for the first time this week at the mini-camp. Playing under Jim Popp and Marc Trestman — the Montreal GM-coach duo that he played against in three Grey Cup games — is a storybook twist unto itself.
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Ray takes part in mini-camp in Florida ahead of the 2017 season (Johany Jutras/CFL.ca)
“When you’re his age, you have to make the decision: Do you really love football and do you still want to play it?” Trestman said of Ray. “It’s got to be 100 per cent and it’s very clear to me that it’s 100 per cent. He’s out here and he wants to make the best of his time remaining on the football field.
“I think he’s looked really good. I’ve enjoyed the meetings, the interactions, enjoyed all of that. I watched him play for five years and was amazed watching him play. I thought he was literally a Houdini, how he made plays. He’s a champion and there’s nothing wrong hanging out with champions. He is (a champion) as a person and as a player.”
Many would consider the Argos a long shot to win a Grey Cup this year. Ray isn’t worrying about that. As the season approaches, with what’s beyond that murky right now, Ray is channeling his new coach’s philosophies.
“Coach said that if there’s one new guy on the team, you’ve got a new team. You’ve still got to come together, you’ve still got to put the work in, you’ve still got to earn everything you get. That’s the process we’re in right now, is seeing what kind of team we have,” he said. “Coming together and building. It’s a long journey so we’ve got to build together.”
