My father once stood on top of the football world, a Grey Cup champion whose legacy is etched into the sport’s history

My dad was once a Grey Cup champion, and part of me wants to be angry at the sport that eventually damaged him so deeply. But the truth isn’t that clean. When his health began to fail, I had to set aside my resentment toward football so I could finally understand the story that shaped his life.

One of my earliest memories is of a heavy gold ring on his hand—etched with symbols I didn’t understand at the time. His Grey Cup ring. He spent four seasons with the Montreal Alouettes in the 1970s, though aside from the “Alouettes stamps” he pressed onto the neighbourhood kids’ hands, football never made much of a mark on me. I became someone entirely different from what people might expect from a football player’s daughter: part horse girl, part theatre kid, part history fanatic.

To me, football represented everything I avoided—violence, hypermasculinity, the notion that bodies can be used up and discarded. So I kept it far away from my world.

But in 2024, his health deteriorated so quickly that I realized I needed to bridge that gap. If football had been his great love, I owed it to both of us to try to meet him there. And the only way I knew how was through history—something he had always encouraged me to explore. I didn’t have to memorize rules or understand formations. Instead, I immersed myself in old clippings, scrapbooks, and archives, searching for the man he had been.

One night, as he watched old game footage at the kitchen table, I sat beside him. “Where are you, Dad?” I asked.

“I’m number 26,” he answered.

And suddenly, I could see him. We were pulled back into the past together.

On the screen, he charged toward an opponent, arm slicing through the cold air. He slammed into the ball carrier, slid across the frozen turf that must have scorched through his thin uniform, then got to his feet faster than you’d expect for a 230-pound linebacker. Watching with him, I could hear in his voice how much he missed that version of himself—the man jogging off the field, fist pumping, breath fogging the winter air, proud and unbroken.

Later, flipping through albums, I found a photo from that very night. He’s captured mid-drink, champagne spilling from the Grey Cup. The moment he reached the peak of his career—the 1977 championship blowout over Edmonton.

But the same body that once delivered those hits and celebrated those victories eventually paid a price. The helmet that was meant to protect him also hid the reality: trauma that settled in quietly and stayed. I had long wondered about the grimaces, the stiffness, the numbness in his hands, the shoulder that no longer moved as it should.

The last time I saw him, I finally asked.

He rested his hand above his knee, the ruby in his Grey Cup ring catching the light—brilliant, heavy, and full of history. A reminder of both the triumph that defined him and the suffering that came after.