Kevin Sousa/CFL.ca
There are few people in the CFL right now that are as well-versed in the OK Tire Labour Day Weekend rivalry than Ryan Dinwiddie.
Through a five-year CFL career and now into his 10th year as a coach in the league, the Toronto Argonauts head coach has gotten a taste of all three of the long-established rivalries that exist across the league. He played for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers from 2006-2008 and jumped over to the Saskatchewan Roughriders for the 2010 and 2011 seasons.
After three years with the Montreal Alouettes (2013-2016), he moved over to Calgary and was the Stampeders’ quarterbacks coach for four seasons. He was hired as the Argos’ head coach for the 2020 campaign before the pandemic hit and got to make his debut on the sidelines — and got to experience the rivalry with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in 2021.
This year, of course, the Argos and Ticats have locked figurative horns three times already, with their final regular season meeting set for the Labour Day Classic at Tim Hortons Field.
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“I want to believe ours (Toronto and Hamilton) is the most intense,” Dinwiddie said in the midst of the team’s schedule being nothing but Black and Gold these past few weeks.
“It gets pretty rowdy, just with the close proximity with both teams, right?”
The Argos have taken two of the three games, with their most convincing win coming last week, where they downed the Ticats 37-20 on a particularly strong defensive effort. Labour Day, regardless of the records, stands as its own difficult hurdle for the Argos. The Ticats have won the last seven consecutive Labour Day games against the Argos. Dinwiddie got his first taste of the rivalry last year on Labour Day and it still stands out to him as a special game.
“It was pretty eye opening,” he said. “I’d seen on TV, but you TV’s not going to do it justice for what the environment is. It was great. I was excited about it. I think players and coaches normally are for that environment, but it was a little bit more tense than I anticipated.”
It’s a little different as well when you’re the head coach on the sideline at Tim Hortons Field and you have the Ticats’ animated fans in close proximity for the entire afternoon.
“If you’re the head coach you’re just like the players, right? You’re a target for some of the smack talking but that’s a nice part of it,” Dinwiddie said. “The fans get to enjoy it and we’re a fan-driven league. You take it in stride and have fun with it.”
Dinwiddie first learned about the intensity of Labour Day as a member of the Bombers, traveling to Mosaic Stadium to face the Riders. By the time he was wrapping up his playing career, he saw the other side of it, heading back to the Bombers’ former home of CanadInns Stadium to close out the Labour Day series.
The Argos lead the season series with the Ticats 2-1 this year, but Ryan Dinwiddie is still looking for his first win as the team’s head coach on Labour Day (Kevin Sousa/CFL.ca)
“I just felt like, every time we played them back-to-back in Winnipeg and when I was with Sask, we always split with them,” the coach said.
“It just shows you how tough it is to win the second game, or how important it is to win the second one, if you’d lost the first one. So that’s what I always took from it, is just that no matter what happens in the first game, the second game is always going to be the challenge for both teams.”
In his time with the Stampeders, Dinwiddie enjoyed the on-field Labour Day rivalry between Bo Levi Mitchell and Michael Reilly. The Stamps won all of those games, most of them convincingly.
“Both teams had high-powered offences,” Dinwiddie said. “It was a battle and then it was on a five-day week and you’re going back to Edmonton. It was a great environment. When they had the jets fly overtop it was pretty neat, that always gets you going.”
On Monday in Hamilton this year, Dinwiddie knows what to expect. If the Argos can break that holiday Monday trend and get a win in a hostile environment, they take the season series and can bear down on the second half of the season with first place in the East in their sights. If history repeats itself, we’ll have a deadlocked season series and the East Division will feel more up for grabs.
Just a couple of games into their four meetings in five weeks, Dinwiddie knew it wouldn’t get stale.
“I think it will increase the intensity as it goes,” he said. “That last one being in Hamilton there’s going to be a lot at stake. But I think you know, the emotions will be high and and the intensity will be there.”
