On Friday, August 9 the match between the Roughriders and the Alouettes finished with 2:41 left in the third quarter because of the thunderstorm hovering over Regina. The Saskatchewan Roughriders won the game after the match was called with a score of 17-10. According to Rob Vanstone of the Regina Leader-Post, the only game he could unearth where the Roughriders had won during another weather-related incident dated to October 25, 1954, when the Roughriders defeated the B.C. Lions 15-9 in Vancouver because of inclement conditions outdoors. However, Steve Daniel – CFL’s senior director – is a whizz with the league’s historical information and statistics. He issued a release underlining a clearer historical perspective over what happened in 1954, which actually wasn’t a CFL game unlike the match played this August.
“Given the 1954 date, historically therefore it was NOT a CFL regular-season game since the league itself was not formed until 1958 when the merger of the old IRFU (Big Four) and WIFU leagues in the East and West was completed,” Daniel wrote.
Daniel referred to an earlier era, when the Canadian Football League had closer relations to the British sport of rugby. Incidentally, Canadians also had a hand in creating the NFL style version of American football.
In 1961, Baltimore football legend Henry Blaha is quoted as saying: “Rugby is a beastly game played by gentlemen. Soccer is a gentleman's game played by beasts. Football is a beastly game played by beasts.” Although the three sports are vastly different from each other, they share a common heritage.
The Canadian Football League was formed in January 19, 1958 with the merger of the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union and the Western Interprovincial Football Union. Rugby’s history in Canada dates to the 1800s when British troops stationed in Montreal played rugby and soccer with the locals. Today, Rugby is still played in Canada. We’ve even competed as a nation in all the Rugby World Cups. But Canadian’s aren’t successful in rugby, as we’ve only reached the quarterfinals in 1991.
During football’s early years in the country, the majority of Canada’s football teams existed under the governance of the Canadian Rugby Football Union – a body founded in 1884. At the beginning of the 20th century, Governor General Earl Grey donated the Grey Cup to the winning team in the Senior Amateur Football Championship of Canada. By the early 1900s, Canadian athletes were playing the American version of football with notable differences borrowed from rugby.
A team of Canadian university students were responsible for influencing the NFL version of football as the sport evolved in the U.S. In 1874, Harvard University invited McGill to play a new sport the Americans had invented – a style of football based on rugby, but with American alterations. In Boston, the Americans discovered their Canadian counterparts didn’t understand the rules of their new sport, as they watched these northern neighbours kick, chase and run with the ball in practice sessions. In particular, running with the ball dishonoured the American football playbook of the 1870s.
Henry Grant, the American team captain, decided to have a talk with the Canadian team captain, David Roger. Roger said running with the ball was an essential part of Canadian football, since the McGill team were rugby players by tradition. Eventually, both university teams decided to play the game with a mixture of Canadian and American rules.
After those historic matches in Boston, the resemblances and disparities between American and Canadian football progressed in each country. Harvard didn’t have a full-sized rugby pitch – their field was 91 metres long and 46 metres wide. With a smaller team, the Americans preferred to have 11 players on each side compared to 15 players in Rugby Union. The Americans also wanted more offensive play, so they increased the downs to four instead of three as preferred by McGill. But the Harvard players liked running with the ball, so they incorporated this Canadian preference.
Today, many differences between the CFL and the NFL still exist, such as the size of the field and the number of players on each team. The game of North American football is based on negotiations between British, American and Canadian sporting traditions – a mixture describing the fabric of English Canada – almost half of the nation subsisting as a concession between British heritage and modern American expertise.
