CALGARY — Can this be true?
McMahon Stadium hits the big five-oh on Sunday?
The place George and Frank McMahon built for $1 million — and constructed in a world-record time of 103 days — turns 50 when the sons of the two McMahons re-enact the ceremonial kickoff by their fathers from the game on July 15, 1960 when the Edmonton Eskimos meet the Calgary Stampeders on, appropriately, retro day, almost exactly a half-century later.
McMahon Stadium was the perfect size and shape for a Canadian Football League stadium when it opened. And it still is today, in its 35,650-seat configuration.
The first CFL game this scribe ever covered was in McMahon Stadium in the mid-1960s. I was in love with this place then. And I’m in love with this place now.
It is my contention that there have been more laughs, more wonderful one-liners delivered in the McMahon Stadium press box than any other press box by the cast of characters who have populated the place over the years. But that’s not it.
Stuff happens at McMahon.
Stuff happened a lot to Al McCann, the host of CTV telecasts, in this place.
Like the time the Edmonton broadcaster opened the show with the words “From McCann Stadium in Calgary, I’m Al McMahon.”
Then there was the time Quick Six, or one of the long line of Stampeder touchdown horses, ran over McCann on the sidelines here. It was no brush block. He got clobbered.
There’s just something about McMahon. Always has been.
There’s more to it than the size and shape, which reminds me of so many classic college stadiums in the U.S. It’s the U.S. college atmosphere which has existed in McMahon, particularly for the Labour Day Classic, which has long been THE regular-season game in the CFL and will be again this year even if the Eskimos go into it 1-7 and the Stampeders 7-1.
It’s the location, too. The Rocky Mountains visible on a clear day at one end of the stadium and Calgary’s downtown skyline at the other. The setting also lends itself to tailgate parties and pregame sociables.
Maybe it’s all those Labour Day games here.
I remember standing beside then-Stampeder head coach Wally Buono, in the middle of McMahon the day before one Labour Day game, when he urged me to take a smell.
“You can smell football in the air,” he said.
You can always smell football in the air in McMahon.
Again, maybe it’s having covered so many Labour Day Classics here but it seems to me about half the greatest CFL games I ever covered were in McMahon Stadium.
In one of Edmonton’s very first visits in 1961 I think it was, Jackie Parker kicked a game-winning field goal that witnesses swear landed on the crossbar and seemed to sit there for a second before it fell over for the three points.
Like my all-time personal favourite, the one in the ’70s when Wayne Overland was the columnist at the Edmonton Journal and I was the football writer at the same sheet. The Eskimos managed to get down by a couple dozen (I think it was 29-2) at the half and Overland decided he’d had enough and caught a Pacific Western airbus back to Edmonton, the pilot informing the passengers upon landing that the Eskimos had stormed back to win it. I was left on site to record the story of the remarkable comeback solo.
The first Grey Cup on the prairies was held here in 1975 and I remember scraping the windows in the press box to see the 9-8 win by the Eskimos — their first Grey Cup win since 1956 — in -15 C degree temperatures.
And there was the Grey Cup streaker that year, one Nadia Stoochnoff who appeared buck naked on the field during the national anthem. To my horror I recognized her. Not from the naked parts. She was from my hometown of Lacombe.
The Eskimos also moved into the Stampeder dressing room to win the second Calgary Grey Cup game in 1993.
The B.C. Lions won the 2000 Grey Cup 28-26 here over the Montreal Alouettes, as the 8-10 team became the first with a losing record in the regular season ever to win a Grey Cup.
McMahon has always had good Grey Cup games, highlighted, of course, by last year’s never-to-be-forgotten Saskatchewan Roughriders Grey Cup win turned-into Grey Cup loss with the too-many-men on the field call.
And there have been some fabulous Western Finals like the one the Stamps won 23-22 over the Esks in 1992 when, with 19 seconds to play, Doug Flutie lost his shoe while scoring the winning touchdown.
McMahon Stadium was also the venue of the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1988 Olympic Winter Games and there are still people in Calgary who have yet to forgive me for writing that, while parts were spectacular, the opening ceremony suffered because it was in desperate need of an editor.
Hopefully that won’t be the case for the special half-time 50th anniversary celebrations Sunday.
terry.jones@sunmedia.ca
