The Canadian Catch

The Portal of Pigskin History takes back to the mid-1970's North of the 49th Parallel in a great rivalry in game and name that had an exciting finish. Introducing the story of the 1976 CFL Grey Cup. 

One helluva game

Upset victories are kind of fun to watch. An underdog winning in a championship game is rarer still and really gets your blood pumping. When the odds-on favorite falls in the last twenty seconds of a game, those are heart wrenching games that are immortalized. The 1976 CFL Grey Cup game was all that and more.
There was a bit of oddness even before the 1976 version of the Grey Cup even commenced in Toronto. It had only happened two times prior to this game where the two teams with very similar monikers met for the Canadian Football League title game. The Ottawa Rough Riders played the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
Before we get into the game itself we need to get some clarity on the backstory of these two teams and why their names are so similar. According to the OttawaRedBlacks.com website. The original Ottawa team, which played rugby formed in 1876. In 1898, as a tribute to Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders unit that fought in the Spanish American War, the team name was changed to Ottawa Rough Riders, with the iconic red and black color scheme. It must have been an inspiration to have that name because they experienced the pinnacle of success just like Teddy R. as the Rough Riders won their first Canadian Championship. Some time after that season, possibly 1924 they changed their name to the Senators and then reverted back to Rough Riders in 1930.
As for Saskatchewan per the Riderville.com site, they organized in 1910 as the Regina Rugby Club and in 1924 after Ottawa seemingly gave up on the Rough Riders moniker they took it as their own but condensed the term to one word, Roughriders. 
A couple of theories as to the change are:
The name “Roughriders” derived from members of the North West Mounted Police who were called Roughriders because they broke the wild horses used by the force.
 
The other states there was a Canadian contingent that fought with Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt’s troops became known as the Rough Riders. Following the war, the Canadian troops returned home, with some of them settling in Ottawa and the rest moving west. The colors worn by Roosevelt’s infantry were red and black.
For clarity's sake, the Ottawa Riders team folded in 1996. When a new CFL expansion franchise in was formed in 2014 the Saskatchewan contingent forbade them from using the Rough Riders name again. It was a controversy all the same but finally Ottawa chose their name based on the colors of Theodore Roosevelt’s 1898 army contingent, the Red Blacks.
 

29 Nov 1976, Mon The Leader-Post (Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada) Newspapers.com

Grey Cup 1976

Ok now that we have that cleared up, let’s talk about this game!

Ottawa was a big underdog entering the game but they did not shy away from the challenge building an early 10-0 lead on the favored Saskatchewan team with a long field goal and a 74-yard punt return by rookie Bill Hatanaka.

Roughrider’s 38-year-old QB Ron Lancaster then used his skill and registered 20 unanswered points in the second and third quarters before the Ottawa defense figured out how to keep them from scoring. Down 20-16 Ottawa quarterback Tom Clements marched the Riders 84 yards to the Saskatchewan one but the Roughriders shunned their opponents from finding paydirt.

That goal-line stand with two minutes remaining preserved Saskatchewan's four-point lead and kept Ottawa's offense from scoring its first touchdown. Saskatchewan took possession of the ball late in the game. But the Rough Rider's defense held, and Ottawa got the ball back with little time remaining. With 20 seconds on the clock, Ottawa’s signal-caller Clements found receiver Tony Gabriel in the corner of the end zone for the winning touchdown. It was like something from a fairy tale for Ottawa and a nightmare for the Saskatchewan faithful.

Everyone in the over 53,000 in attendance and the millions on TV knew that Clements was going to toss the ball to the endzone to his favorite target Gabriel but knowing and stopping the completion were two different things at that moment. Ottawa took home the Grey Cup, and may have stirred up some sour feelings about the whole naming incident that came up again in 2014.

Some interesting points in the game are that every single point was scored by a Canadian and that there were only 24000 seats available at the stadium but the attendance was 53689.

The banner photo is a cropped version of a photo from the Monday, November 29, 1976 edition of  The Leader-Post  in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada via Newspapers.com. See the article and full picture in the body of this post.

A Very Special thanks to information obtained from the following brilliant internet sites mentioned as well as the fine journalists that covered the game in the day with their work preserved on Newspapers.com.