Grey Cup’s return to Hamilton takes on added importance with Tiger-Cats in title game

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A sellout crowd at Tim Hortons Field will receive the Grey Cup on Sunday as warmly as a long-lost friend. It is only the third time in nearly a half-century that Hamilton will be host of the CFL championship and to add to the hullabaloo the city’s beloved Tiger-Cats have a chance to win on their home turf.

It has been 22 years since they last hoisted the trophy, the longest drought of any of the teams, and the opportunity arises at a time when people are eager to clutch onto anything other than more COVID-19 protocols. The entire season was scuttled by the pandemic last year so there was no Grey Cup to award for the first time since the end of the First World War.

There were fewer-than-usual festivities this week as a concession to contagious illness but more than 23,000 people will pack the stands and millions more will watch on television as the most uniquely Canadian of all sporting championships unfolds.

The Grey Cup itself was flown into Hamilton on a Royal Canadian Air Force helicopter on Tuesday. On Thursday night, a horse named Tuffy Nuff was ridden into a downtown hotel’s lobby by a member of the city’s host committee. That is a tradition, as is a halftime show involving Canadian entertainers, in this case Arkells and the Lumineers.

“We are excited to host the Grey Cup,” Fred Eisenberger, the mayor of Hamilton, said Friday afternoon. “The good news is that we are more open today than at any time in the last two years and that we are able to do this.

“The added enthusiasm and pent-up demand is liberating for a lot of folks and the game is being warmly embraced. It is a great boost for our local economy and couldn’t happen at a better time.”

The game itself is a rematch of the most recent Grey Cup, in 2019 between Winnipeg and Hamilton. The Blue Bombers won that one in Calgary rather easily, 33-12. The Tiger-Cats were big favourites going in and are sizable underdogs this year.

Winnipeg is 13-3 and has been the CFL’s best team throughout. Hamilton is 10-6 now but at various points was 0-2 and 4-5. They met in August in the opening game, a 19-6 Bombers victory.

Intersting story lines abound: The Tiger-Cats’ quest to end two decades of futility on their home field; head coaches who are former teammates and long-time friends; and, a quarterback who came off the bench last week to rally his team and has now been appointed to start in the most significant game of the season.

All of that, of course, comes with COVID-19 as a backdrop.

“This journey has just been so different than in 2019,” Orlondo Steinauer, the Hamilton coach, said this week during a news conference that featured him and Mike O’Shea, his counterpart in Winnipeg. “It has been a roller coaster ride but enjoyable.

“At the end of the day it is why everyone goes to training camp. It is why you prepare and try to get better in the off-season. This game and this opportunity is the reason.”

Steinauer and O’Shea were teammates with the Detroit Lions, played together in the CFL, were once members of the same coaching staff, and are now squaring off in their second successive Grey Cup.

“I have to keep it light or I’ll get emotional,” Steinauer said. “That’s the truth. I care about Mike as a person.”

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O’Shea is finishing his seventh season as the Blue Bombers head coach, and his teams have won 10 or more games in each of the past five years. The victory in the 2019 Grey Cup was the club’s first in three decades and his first as a head coach.

He had two different stints as a player with the Tiger-Cats and was a favourite with their fans, but they don’t treat him kindly as a visitor.

“After hearing some of the messages I have been getting from people, one of our trainers said I should wear a helmet on Sunday just in case,” O’Shea said. “There are a few fans that feel jilted. But I love that. That’s part of the CFL.”

Hamilton could become the first team to win the Grey Cup at home since 2013 when the Saskatchewan Roughriders beat the Tiger-Cats at Taylor Field in Regina.

“It’s something we tried not to talk about all year,” Steinhauer said. “We addressed it at the beginning. We were well aware of where the game would be and always understood the end goal, but we focused on the process along the way.

“There were peaks and valleys but we are here.”

Steinhauer named Dane Evans to start at quarterback against the Bombers and Zach Collaros, who threw for 3,185 yards and 20 touchdowns and was chosen the CFL’s most outstanding player on Friday night. Evans began the year as the Tiger-Cats’ starter but was injured and lost his job to Jeremiah Masoli.

Masoli took every snap in the team’s East semi-final victory over Montreal but struggled in last week’s final against Toronto. Evans replaced him in the second quarter and went 16 for 16 for 249 yards and one score and ran for two touchdowns in the defeat of the Argonauts.

“You have to make a decision,” Steinauer said. He handed the keys to Evans even though he only attempted 109 passes in the regular season. “You can’t start them both.”

Evans, 28, is completing his third year in the CFL. He played collegiately at Tulsa.

“I am just happy to be playing,” Evans said this week. “It is magnified because it happens to be the Grey Cup. I am excited about it, but I am not making it bigger than it is. It’s not really about me. It’s about the team.”

He was on the losing end in 2019 but hopes for better this time.

“Hopefully I am a bit more mature,” he said. “I know a little bit more what to expect this year.”

This is a streamlined Grey Cup and one in which everyone in attendance will have to wear masks and prove they have had two vaccines. But it is still the Grey Cup.

“The city of Hamilton deserves this game,” Steinauer said. “It is long overdue.”