The Centennial Bowl

The University of Ottawa celebrated 100 years of football in 1981 and in doing so, attempted to add a little significance and emphasis to its regular match-ups against (very) long-time rival Queen's.  

The plan was to hand out a trophy to the winner of the game annually, much like what is done with Pedro for the Panda Game or the Old Boys Cup that was in play for the Ashbury / Bishop's meetings for many years. The trophy to be put in use had some interesting history of its own, as did the gentleman after whom it was named. 

Unfortunately, the result of the Ottawa U. / Queen's game was not what the university had hoped for.  

Bummer. Ottawa won a close one the following year though...

...but beyond that the Centennial Bowl aspect of the game is rarely mentioned. Not all recaps are available but the last mention I have found of it after a quick search was in 1987. That's too bad, being that the trophy itself dates back to the 1800s.

I became curious as to its origins. The first article above mentions that it was donated by the city in honour of five straight ORFU championships. That could be true but if so, I have yet to locate the actual report of such an offering, if such a report even exists. 

I did find out that there was a dispute following what was Ottawa's fifth Ontario Rugby Football Union championship, earned by defeating Queen's in 1889. If my understanding is sound, Ottawa was asked to travel to neutral sites to defend its title and refused to do so for a number of reasons.

The Ottawa Journal copied commentary from other papers a few days later to illustrate and reinforce that Ottawa was in the right to refuse any other challenges, or at least that their position was a reasonable one. 

Good point. A team could send its scrubs to get hammered following your first challenge, then challenge a second time and force that game to a neutral site by the rule at the time. You could conceivably remove home field advantage from a team and send your top performers to play them on "neutral" ground. To use Toronto as an example, playing in Kingston might not be home game for them, but it's a hell of a lot closer to being one than playing in Ottawa. Clever!

It would seem then that Ottawa meant business and turned the trophy over. Then this appeared in the November 25th Journal.

Well that was nice of them! 

Is this what almost a century later became the Robert Lancaster trophy? Perhaps. It's difficult to know for sure. What we do know is that Ottawa College did follow through with its intentions of leaving the ORFU and an era of success came to an end over a rule that was too easy to abuse.