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CFL fumbled its way through southern expansion

Ed Willes looks back at three-down football's brief foray into the U.S. in new book
CFL
The CFL’s attempts to push the Canadian game into expanded territory brought both heartbreak and victory, writes Ed Willes in his new book End Zones & Border Wars: The Era of Expansion in the CFL available through Harbour Publishing.

The Canadian Football League treasures its past.

Most of it, anyway.

There are a few seasons in the mid-1990s that are forgotten in CFL lore; tucked away like those crates at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are stories from those years, as well as nicknames and cities no one associates with the CFL anymore, if they ever did: Shreveport and Sacramento, the Barracudas and the Posse.

In his new book End Zones & Border Wars, longtime sportswriter Ed Willes delves into those American Canadian Football League teams that showed up, threatened to change everything, and vanished.

With new interviews and old newspaper clippings, Willes chronicles the league's doomed dalliance with football-frenzied American markets.

The affair began, predictably enough for a Canadian institution, when the beer ran out.

The CFL was secure in the hands and hops of Carling O'Keefe in the 1980s, but when the threeyear $33 million deal expired, the league scrambled.

"We never replaced the beer money," notes former league president Bill Baker in the book. "It was a helluva job preserving what we had."

After taking it on the chin at Ogilvie Mills flour company, former Montreal Alouette and future senator Larry Smith went after the vacant commissioner's job.

He'd earned degrees in economics and law while carving up the gridiron as a fullback.

But as impressive as his credentials were, he wouldn't be hired without the CFL's version of royal assent.

The day after Smith's job interview, he got a call from B.C. Lions owner and Vancouver Stock Exchange kingpin Murray Pezim.

"Murray, are you calling from an echo chamber?" Smith asked.

"No, kid, I'm on the crapper. ... Do you support expansion to the States?

Everyone wants it. If you support it, you've got my vote."

Smith agreed and Pezim offered his blessing.

The league needed money. The Tiger-Cats were in such dire straits that one of Smith's first acts as commissioner was to show up at Hamilton city council and ask for a loan to keep the beleaguered franchise afloat.

Like a 12-man offense looking downfield, the league's brain trust set its gaze on the United States - and for a three-year stretch sandwiched between the failures of the United States Football League and the XFL - Smith tried his damndest to cram even more pigskin into world's most football-saturated nation.

Franchises popped up in Baltimore, Las Vegas, Shreveport and Sacramento. The game on the field stayed the same, but the CFL was morphing from a Canadian institution into a roulette wheel run by venture capitalist cowboys who were never too stingy to throw someone else's money at a problem.

For those who remember and despise that era, Larry Smith is the fall guy.

As the expansion began, Smith would not confirm the league would continue to be called the Canadian Football League.

The website abolishthesenate.ca blasts Smith for his stint as commissioner.

"After three years of empty stadiums and tired fans, the league retired back to the true north, but not without the Americans winning at least one Grey Cup," the site notes, as though Smith coughed up the championship trophy in a badly-negotiated postwar treaty.

"His stewardship has largely been regarded as a joke in CFL circles," Willes says.

But while the expansion was an embarrassment, Willes' research casts doubt on whether or not it was a failure.

"We needed the money," B.C. Lions GM Wally Buono tells Willes in the book. "It bought time for everyone. You can say what you want about Larry, but I guarantee you that money allowed the Stampeders to survive."

The expansion also led to what Willes calls: "The CFL's equivalent of the Summit Series."

The idea for Willes' book came about when he was writing preview stories for the 2011 Grey Cup in Vancouver.

In anticipation of the game, Willes looked back at the 1994 Grey Cup, which pitted the B.C. Lions against the Baltimore CFLers (they'd been the Colts until a lawsuit from the NFL's Indianapolis Colts ripped the horse from their helmets).

For many fans, it was Canada vs. the United States.

"You concentrate on the game, not the politics," says legendary Lions kicker and Vancouverite Lui Passaglia in the book. "But you could sense there was politics in this one."

Willes touches on nationalist fervour, the war of 1812, the ramifications of a Baltimore win on the league's Canadian quota system, and quarterback Danny McManus's thigh bruise in the lead-up to the 82nd Grey Cup.

"I knew a lot of the players who played on the Lions and I knew there were some good stories to be had," Willes says. "I couldn't believe the richness of the stories, the characters involved and everything that was at stake in that game."

The Lions won, the expansion turned into a contraction, and by 1996 the CFL was back to its old self.

"They were fighting too many foes on too many different fronts," Willes says.

The CFL was a square peg in a round hole in the U.S., according to Willes, who cites football-crazy Birmingham, Alabama as an example of the CFL as a misfit league.

"They were fine until the University of Alabama started playing and then forget it, they were yesterday's news," Willes says of the short-lived Birmingham Barracudas.

Now with an all-Canadian lineup and a lucrative deal with TSN, the CFL isn't likely to go anywhere, according to Willes.

"That TV contract gives them a level of stability and a level of security I don't think the league's ever had."