Grey Cup, Bud Grant painful reminders of Winnipeg Blue Bombers glory

There was a time when Grey Cup or Bust was more than the name of a book about the glory days of Winnipeg football.

The 1954 book by Winnipeg Tribune sports editor Tony Allan is a great history of football on the Prairies, up to and including the 1953 Grey Cup game played by the Bombers and the Hamilton Tiger-Cats at Varsity Stadium in Toronto. When I was a boy, we had a few copies of the book around the house because Allan devoted three full pages to my dad, Andy Currie, who was inducted into several halls of fame as a player, coach and football official before he died in 1990.

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When television came to Winnipeg in 1954, Dad became a regular on Football Huddle, hosted by Jack Wells. Before I hit my teens, I had the thrill of standing behind the cameras, watching the live broadcast in Studio 41 at CBWT (better known as the CBC and still in the same building on Portage Avenue). I was hooked on three-down football for life after I got to shake the hand of Bud Grant, the young head coach of the Blue Bombers, who started his coaching career in Winnipeg in 1957.

Grant appears on the cover of Grey Cup or Bust in a drawing from a photo of one of the plays in the 1953 Grey Cup, which the Bombers lost to Hamilton 12-6. Grant, 26 and wearing Number 19 in the cover drawing, spent much of his career in Winnipeg and became one of the most legendary figures in football on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. After an outstanding playing career with both the Blue Bombers and the Philadelphia Eagles of the NFL, Grant started his remarkable coaching career. During his 10 seasons on the sidelines in Winnipeg, the Bombers were champions of the Western Conference six time and drank champagne from Earl Grey's Cup four times. In 1961, led by the great Kenny Ploen at quarterback, they won the first Grey Cup that required overtime. The next year saw the infamous Fog Bowl, the only Grey Cup where it took two days to produce a winner.

Grant left Winnipeg in 1967, moving to Minnesota to coach the NFL Vikings. Over the next 16 seasons, his purple gang made it to the Super Bowl four times, but they lost the big one on every occasion. He is in the Hall of Fame in both the CFL and the NFL, and he is remembered in larger-than-life fashion with a bronze statue at Winnipeg's Investors Group Field, where the 103rd Grey Cup will be played on Sunday.

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So much has changed since Grant first appeared in a Grey Cup game 62 years ago. Hard as it is to believe today, when the NFL is a sports and entertainment behemoth that generates more than $1 billion in revenue each year, in 1953 players such as Bud Grant came north because they could earn more money playing in Canada. Today there are several NFL players who all by themselves will earn more than half of the total salaries paid out by CFL teams.

Bud Grant, now 88, came to Winnipeg for the unveiling of his statue in 2014. In many ways, the statue is an all-too-painful reminder of how long it has been since Winnipeg football fans could regularly cheer for a contender. In the half-century since the era of Grant and Ploen ended, the Blue Bombers have won the Grey Cup three times, the last one in 1990. They last played in the big game in 2011, and they have missed the playoffs four years in a row since then. That's hard to do in a nine-team league where six teams take part in the post-season.

Roger Currie is a Winnipeg writer and broadcaster.