Rick Moffat
CFL.ca
During the 2009 Grey Cup revelry in Calgary, Tony Proudfoot’s long-time on-field nemesis, a Canadian Football Hall of Famer, came charging up to him. A confrontation like this for more than a decade would have meant forearm smashes or helmet hits to the ribs, back or gut. But this head to head would be so much different.
Tony Gabriel, Rough Rider alumnus, came charging into the official Alouettes’ pre-Cup party. The perennial Eastern Final opponent of Tony’s Als spent a career trying to shake free of Tony Proudfoot’s defensive coverages. This time he made a beeline for his adversary.
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Never one for flamboyant endzone celebrations, Gabriel surprised even himself and kissed Proudfoot on the head. Tony gave his signature thumbs-up gesture, shocked look all over his face. Gabriel departed as suddenly as he’d arrived.
“I thought you two hated each other?” I asked.
“We do!” replied Proudfoot.
But when Proudfoot and Gabriel’s paths crossed, sparks flew on the field. Careers measured in Grey Cup rings and spectacular battles can so rarely be crystallized into one play. But Gabriel insists in their case it can.
And now all these decades later, Gabriel is astounded. Proudfoot has won all the more begrudging respect after Tony Gabriel hears Tony Proudfoot’s secret for the first time.
But before we get to The Secret… here is The Play.
“We were at the Big O. It must have been ’77. Clements (Tommy Clements, former Notre Dame college star, now coaching with the NFL’s Green Bay Packers) is throwing,” recalls Gabriel. “I’m diving for the ball and Proudfoot is diving for the ball. We both hit mid-air. Helmet to helmet. You could hear it on TV. Thundering doesn’t do it justice.”
“I always tried to hide the pain, you didn’t want the other guy knowing he’d hurt you. But I lay there stunned and dazed,” says the four time CFL Most Outstanding Canadian. “Devastating hit.”
Deception is a part of the game. Gabriel could hide his hurts with the best of them. But he had no idea Proudfoot was the master in that regard.
“Did I have a concussion? I know it didn’t feel good,” chuckles the CFL’s leading receiver that year. “It affected me and I couldn’t hide it. It’s indelibly imprinted.”
Proudfoot’s battle with Lou Gehrig’s Disease has reminded Gabriel football can be a small world, but a cruel world. The prototypical tight end won a ’76 Grey Cup championship (Proudfoot insists the Als would have won had he not been injured that season) with Jim Coode in Ottawa, who died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease in 1987. He recalls Proudfoot’s teammate Larry Uteck, who died of A.L.S. as well in 2002.
“Tony was so bright and so animated. That peck on the forehead? It was a matter of respect. It was an impromptu move. I always used to say ‘I never met a linebacker I ever liked’. Now I feel we’re all CFLers. Fans say to me, ‘’You’re Tony Gabriel. I should hate you.”
“I guess respect is a form of forgiveness,” reasons Gabriel. “I’m proud I played against Tony ‘cuz you had to lift your game.”
Before Proudfoot’s secret is revealed, I have to know… did Gabriel knock Proudfoot out, too, on that epic play?
“I have no idea!” Gabriel says, guilt-free but memory-free as well. “Tony Proudfoot is obviously a hero… fabulous that he’s taken his struggle to help others in the future.”
“I lost a very close friend to Parkinson’s Disease, one of the former Eskimos who was on that Staple Game losing team. Passed away Dec 12th. We have to wonder: Neuro damage? Damage to the spinal cord? Was it linked to football?”
That’s a medical secret researchers are still looking into. But Tony Proudfoot had proven to be a medical marvel and master of secrecy many years before his diagnosis with A.L.S.
Tony Proudfoot and his teammates celebrate after winning the Grey Cup. “Tony Proudfoot was ruthless,” said college teammate Peter Merrill.
“Tony Proudfoot was ruthless,” recalls his college teammate Peter Merrill, who also was invited to Alouettes’ rookie camp in 1971.
“Before games he was so intense,” says Merrill, a quarterback at the University of New Brunswick, but given a look by the team Tony would learn to hate the most, the Edmonton Eskimos, as a defensive back.
“He’d always whack me on the side of the head so hard my ears were buzzing, so I had to avoid him!”
As in high school, Proudfoot was a dominating linebacker.
“He was always smiling,” recalls coach Mel Reece, the coach of the Montreal championship team at John Rennie High School. “Former Alouette Charlie Baillie (the long time McGill University coach) had donated a playbook and Tony was our defensive captain. We ran some pro-style offense, but Tony could sniff anything out.”
The high school team’s theme was “Great to be alive in ‘65”. Unless of course Proudfoot was punishing you on the field. “George Brancato (long-time Ottawa Roughriders coach) gave us a defensive playbook. Tony was an inside linebacker in our ‘4-4 Blitz’. If we called ‘Mississippi 62’ Tony had the range to bust up the play anywhere on the field.”
Small, cruel football world. Brancato coached Gabriel and Coode. Reece lost a niece to A.L.S. several years ago. Each of the last four years he has joined family, friends and Alouettes in “Team Proudfoot” in Montreal’s annual “Walk to Tackle A.L.S.”
Devoted to Team Proudfoot, but Coach Reece had no inkling of Tony’s secret either.
Merrill did.
“You have to remember, Tony was All-Canadian and a Hec Creighton nominee (national MVP honours) and that was rare enough for a defensive player,” explains Merrill. “Our college coach loved him. Dan Underwood was a Rose Bowl hero in our eyes. He’d won at Michigan State (where he’s in the university’s Hall of Fame) and he always said Tony was like an extension of the coach on the field.”
“So we get drafted by J.I. Albrecht and the Als’ defensive coach Bob Ward loves Tony. He gets moved to ‘monster-DB’; like a strong safety. Tony had intuition, he pounced, he always had a real jump.”
“We decide we’re going to ask for signing bonuses. We cooked it up together. We got laughed out of the office.”
Proudfoot survived all the roster cuts at training camp held in Vaudreuil that year. “Sign or you’ll never play in this league,” Albrecht told his top draft choice. Tony dutifully signed for $9,600. Only because Albrecht hadn’t exposed Proudfoot’s secret either.
“We had to go for our physicals,” reveals Merrill. “And that included an eye test. Tony had a congenital cataract and was blind in one eye. But I don’t think anyone ever found out.”
They would laugh under their breath every time Canadian football Hall of Fame player-coach Gene Gaines would holler out advice: “Keep one eye on the receiver and one eye on the quarterback.”
“He didn’t know Tony only had one eye,” Merrill says incredulously.
How did he pull it off that fateful day at the eye test?
Typical Proudfoot ingenuity in the face of adversity.
“You had to put one hand up over your eye and read the chart, then switch. Tony simply changed hands, but he didn’t change eyes! They never picked up on it.”
Nor did CFL quarterbacks and receivers for the next 13 years.
Hall of Famers like Tony Gabriel had been robbed, bashed and beaten by a one-eyed bandit.
In the whirlwind that is the week after Grey Cup Victory, future Hall of Famer Ben Cahoon had one special person he wanted to visit before rushing home to his family in Utah. Head Coach Marc Trestman, the first in franchise history to direct back-to-back title runs, was also drawn to the West Island home of this unique figure: one part mentor, one part guru, one part friend.
It was less than 24 hours after the Grey Cup Parade, Cahoon and Trestman had an emotional debt to pay to their inspirational figure. Tony Proudfoot had never bothered to tell them his little secret either.
