Jeff Piercy
CFL.ca
“Ladies and gentlemen we are preparing for take-off so if everyone could please find their seats, stow their cabin baggage in the overhead compartments, and stop crawling up and down the aisle of the plane barking like a dog, it would be appreciated.”
If you’ve ever been lucky/unlucky enough to fly on the same flight as a CFL football team you may have heard a similar sentence from one of your friendly flight attendants. I say lucky because it may just be one of life’s unique experiences. I say unlucky because that unique experience likely involved being sandwiched between two oversized mouth breathers who command the entire armrest and encroach on your space with their supersized everything.
Now some fellow flyers will be lucky enough to be sitting next to the Rob Hitchcock’s of the CFL. Handsome. Friendly. Debonair if you will. I mention Hitch because although he is retired, I know one Regina family that still reflects fondly upon their time in the air sitting next to him.
However, for every Hitch there are plenty of others that may not be quite as charming. There are those that have their ties flipped up over their mouths, and held in place under their sunglasses so they can sleep peacefully without having to worry about a mischievous teammate dumping a salt packet in their open mouth. There are also those who handle turbulence about as well as a 12 year old handles a horror movie, and yell at the flight attendants to tell the captain to “go the other way”.
And then, of course, there are the washroom follies. That closet of claustrophobia has caused more than its share of grief over the years. Some of the big guys choose to back in, because they can’t turn around to lock the door if they walk straight in. Some just refrain from any forms of hydration in hopes that they can avoid “the closet” altogether. But when nature calls, and when the cubic footage of the washroom mathematically eliminates entry, you have to call an audible: the half in half out approach. All of a sudden this is no longer a family show!
You can forget about getting a seat in the exit row, and you might have people offering to finish your snacks for you, but at the end of the day I would guess that flying with a CFL team would be very entertaining.
Just don’t use the washroom after the half in half out approach has been implemented. Turbulence can makes things tricky!
Jeff Piercy is in his fourth CFL season. He was a second round pick in the 2005 Canadian Draft.
