Kevin Sousa/CFL.ca
Paddy Neufeld pauses for a second or two, feeling that he’s getting a little choked up.
He is talking, in a personal way, about his boss, the head coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, Mike O’Shea.
“I’m trying not to get emotional here,” says the veteran offensive lineman, “but I’ve gone through some things in the past that I’m not gonna speak about. He’s helped me out a tremendous amount.”
“He means a lot to me,” says Neufeld.
Blue Bombers’ defensive coordinator Richie Hall says he would “do anything,” for O’Shea. “Wouldn’t even be a thought.”
The team’s offensive coordinator, Buck Pierce says, warmly, that O’Shea “is as a coach as he is as a man.”
And offensive lineman Stanley Bryant calls O’Shea a “father figure,” adding, with obvious admiration: “I just love him.”
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As Mike O’Shea’s Winnipeg Blue Bombers prepare to meet the Montreal Alouettes in this Sunday’s 110th Grey Cup game, the team’s head coach and spiritual leader – he would never call himself that second thing, by the way but it is obviously true – is saying the kinds of things we’ve come to expect from him.
Asked, this week, how he felt about perhaps being called a legend O’Shea replied: “That just sounds goofy.”
At the podium, he often answers questions in economical, guarded fashion, especially when talking about the status of injured players or about individual performances. He’ll glow a little about his players, he’ll crack the odd joke in his dry, soft-spoken way. But never, and I mean never, is a discouraging word heard.
As highly regarded as the 53-year-old native of North Bay, Ont. is outside the Blue Bomber office walls, it is inarguable that he his held in even higher esteem within them. What is it about Mike O’Shea that makes everyone around him want to, as Neufeld says, “run through a brick wall” for him?
Hall, who’s been O’Shea’s defensive coordinator with the Bombers since 2015, remembers well how the head coach treated him when his brother passed away four years ago.
“His outreach, which he did to me without me asking, shows you that he cares,” Hall says of O’Shea. “He got on the phone. He goes ‘I got a plane booked for you goin’ back To Denver.’ He just took it upon himself. It’s those kinds of things where he tries to take pressure off of you as an individual, regardless of what it is. It’s about life. Has nothin’ to do with football.
“This is just who he is.”
Winnipeg’s special teams coordinator Paul Boudreau has known O’Shea since he joined the team in 2016, and he has his own story of gratitude to tell.
“After one game (in Vancouver) I had a little issue with my ticker,” Boudreau says, pointing to his chest. “The team doctor told me I had to go to the hospital. He (O’Shea) went to the hospital with me and waited. He waited there until about one. He ran my meeting the next day because I didn’t get seen (by a doctor) until about four in the morning. I’ll always remember that.”
“Not too many head coaches that would go wait at the hospital and hang out right after a game,” says Boudreau.
“I think those stories are a great reflection on the kind of man he is,” says Neufeld, a CFL All-Star for the third season in a row. “That he cares about you as a human being. He fosters those relationships because of the sacrifice you make on this football team. He respects you so much for those sacrifices that he’s willing to do that stuff for you as a person. He’s willing to take time out of his personal time to make sure you’re okay as a human being.”
Neufeld remembers back to those times that he will not speak of, when he had his struggles and the coach who’s more than a coach to him made sure to lend support.
How did O’Shea help?
“One on one, in the office, embracing me as a human,” says Neufeld, a Blue Bomber since 2013, pre-dating O’Shea by about two months. “Letting emotions be emotions. Giving me space away from football and making sure that I was gonna be okay as a person.”
Fast forward to this season – to just a few weeks ago, in fact – to when Neufeld and his wife, Paula, were expecting a baby. It just so happened that the Bombers had that rather large game against the BC Lions on the schedule the same week that the couple’s baby girl was due. Neufeld was feeling a little guilty about the likelihood of having to miss the game – a battle for first place in the West – in order to be present for his daughter’s birth. He says O’Shea, though, didn’t even blink. Of course Neufeld would need to leave the team to be at his wife’s side.
“He said ‘make sure that Paula’s okay, make sure your family’s okay,’” says Neufeld. “‘Make sure that the birth goes well.’ That just makes you respect him so much. Because he cares about you, truly, as a person.”
When it comes to football, Pierce says, O’Shea is the same way.
“He’s all about allowing people to show their best,” begins Pierce, the Bombers offensive coordinator who was first hired as an assistant by O’Shea in 2014.
“He’s very strong in his beliefs in what a player should be, what a man should be. He surrounds himself with those kinds of people.”
Hall believes O’Shea has built up an ironclad bond of trust with his players and that a lot of it springs from good ol’ fashioned integrity.
“He’s very transparent to the players,” explains Hall. “He’ll say something where ‘I know it’s hard, I didn’t have to do it when I was a player but this is what I’m asking you guys to do.’ He shows you his vulnerability.”
“He’s not really a hollerer or a screamer or anything like that but he has a way of bringing you down to earth. But he also has a way of building you up.”
For Bryant, the four-time Most Outstanding Offensive Lineman and eighth-year Bomber, being built up by Mike O’Shea does not feel like it is merely being done in cookie-cutter fashion.
“He loves each one of us a different way,” says Bryant, adding “he’s very emotional, which is a good thing. He’s just a wonderful guy.”
Emotions are not something we see very often from O’Shea while he is patrolling the sidelines during a game nor when he is behind a podium for post-game questions, nor during the countless media avails that come along with the blur of Grey Cup Week. But inside the Bomber walls, where the knitting is tightest, they are there.
Hall talks about having seen O’Shea cry. And in that there is, once again, evidence of why the Blue Bombers love their coach so dearly.
“He’s very sensitive,” says Hall, admiringly. “And it’s the simple things in life that really touch him. And when I talk about crying, it’s not always tears of sorrow, but it’s tears of joy and happiness and winning things for his players. Winning things for other people.”
It is astounding, now, to think that at one time, Mike O’Shea’s future as the Winnipeg Blue Bombers’ head coach was in question. Back in 2015, the team was struggling and there were the usual calls for change as the Bombers finished fourth in the West with a record of 5-13.
But since then, week by week, practice by practice, game by game, Mike O’Shea has built the Winnipeg Blue Bombers into a football powerhouse where star players stay and new players arrive and soon flourish and where everyone thinks about running through walls for each other.
Now, as his team vies for a third Grey Cup in four seasons, the two-time CFL coach of the Year is a giant in Winnipeg and in Manitoba, and revered by football fans well beyond those borders.
It’s about the football, sure. But not entirely. Not nearly entirely, according to those close to him.
“At the end of the day, whatever he does, you know that he cares, says Hall. “He cares about you.”
“Whether you look at him as a coach, as a friend, as a father figure, this is Mike O’Shea.”
