1945: Arnie McWatters is Awarded the Imperial Oil MVP Award

I'd gradually been putting together a list of the men who have played for the Ottawa Combines/Trojans of the ORFU from 1943 to 1947 prior to that team amalgamating with the Rough Riders.

The list usually only grew in small spurts. Today, I decided to dedicate some time to that task specifically.

I took a longer look at some mid-week articles from September through November of 1945 and 1946 instead of only game summaries from that time range. The mid-week articles often listed injured players being removed from the roster and their potential replacement as teams resumed training. They used the players' full name in doing so. Far too often, game summaries only refer to players by family name. 

Reaching the end of 1945, I landed on the union's MVP award announcement. It was given to Trojans  veteran player/coach Arnie McWatters and that seemed like a notable achievement to record here. I believe McWatters is the only Ottawa recipient of the award but that's hardly shocking since Ottawa was in the ORFU only a short period of time while that award was being handed out. 

McWatters was the most valuable player but was not named to the union's all-star team. Only George Sprague represented Ottawa in that regard. That would suggest that McWatters' coaching ability and sportsmanship were substantial decision influencers in determining his "value".

McWatters' career started in Sarnia but he joined the Rough Riders in 1939, won the Grey Cup with them in 1940, and stayed with the club until it was disbanded after the 1942 season because of WW2. He then joined the Ottawa Combines/Trojans in 1943 and stayed with that club until the aforementioned merger with the Rough Riders prior to the 1948 season. He has coached at both Ottawa universities. 

Oct 11th, 1947: Ottawa Trojans 21 @ Sarnia Imperials 06

I'm in the middle of adding some game summaries from either the Ottawa Citizen or the Ottawa Journal to the Trojans page, being the ORFU club that played from 1943 to 1947 inclusively. I've added one from 1943 and another from 1947, their most successful (yet final) season.

I'd like to shine a little more of a light on the game below from October 11th, 1947. Why is that, you ask? Was it a particularly impressive team or individual performance? Is there something about it that makes it iconic? Was it a turn-around performance after a winless 1946?

Not really, I just laughed out loud at the chaotic nature of the game and it was made all the funnier to me by the casual way in it which it was reported. Read on.

Very few games include brawls, fan swarms, and a manager having a bucket of water dumped on him after "just retaliation" from having an opposing player get in his face. We go from a mention of that incident right into the description of the success of the off-tackle play.

This may be my favourite game summary in nearly 150 years of Ottawa football history. 😁

"Rough Rider Dad"

Partial credits for this article are included at the bottom of the second image but as the article will quickly make clear, it was written by George Fraser's son, Andy. Rough Rider Dad was the article's title, which I've cropped off.

I bought the October/November 2012 issue of Canada's History Magazine when it hit shelves at the time but had no memory of this article being included. I came across it this past weekend while cleaning out a drawer at my cottage and thought you fine folks might enjoy it. Sorry I didn't do a better scanning job of it. 

The article makes no mention of it but George Fraser was also involved with the 1943 and 1944 Ottawa Combines/Trojans. 

That Whole Name Thing

One of the more interesting aspects of researching football history directly from media reports from the time is the frequency with which you find that things thought to be common knowledge are completely inaccurate or at least open to debate.

There are already several examples on this blog, none of which I deliberately sought to find. Rather, while trying to support or add to a certain claim, I instead found myself questioning it. These include...  

• The CFL lists four draft choices for Ottawa in 1952 when there were at least twice that. 
• Tom Clancy is often named as the Ottawa Rough Riders coach for 1904 but looking more closely into it, that seems doubtful. 
• The Rough Riders are often said to have "changed names" to Senators for the 1925 and 1926 seasons but the headline announcing the team's Grey Cup victory that first year makes that claim easily questionable.

So let's stay with the name thing...

The club adopted the name Ottawa Rough Riders on Friday, September 9, 1898, and changed its team colours to red and black. Since then, red and black have been Ottawa's traditional sporting colours. Although in later years the name was said to derive from logging, the team based its colours on Teddy Roosevelt's regiment in the Spanish–American War, which, with the date of the renaming, suggests that the name also comes from the war. The team changed its nickname to Ottawa Senators from 1925 to 1930.

That's from Wikipedia and its source is the 2009 Canadian Football League Facts, Figures & Records book. One could reasonably expect it to be reliable but I think a lot of it is based on assumption.

Let's start at the beginning; The club indeed held its annual meeting on September 9th, 1898, but neither newspaper of the time, the Journal and the Citizen, makes any mention of a new name being adopted. In fact, the Journal's report's headline is "Ottawas Are Ready For Rugby". The first practice was held the following Monday and articles about that also made no mention of a new name. The Citizen referred to the team as the "Ottawa Football Club" specifically in its recap of that first practice. 

Let's also bear in mind that on November 10th, 1897, the Ottawa Football Club was suspended from the Quebec Rugby Football Union for "having played roughly against (Ottawa) College last Saturday and for having been rough in the match here against McGill".

The above is from the November 11th Citizen. The match against McGill was in Montreal. McGill was believed to be pushing hard for Ottawa's expulsion (more so than "College", which was a reference to Ottawa U. ) from the QRFU and threatening to refuse to play their scheduled game in Ottawa. The Journal added that an Ottawa City player named Walters also attempted to assault officials during the game against College.

So Ottawa joins the Ontario Union instead. Problem solved. Until...

This may be the first instance of the Rough Riders name being put in use...sort of.  It's not capitalized so it obviously was not an official name, it was meant more as an insult. 

What prompted said insult? You'll note that this partial article is copied to Ottawa papers from the Hamilton Herald. Evidently, Hamilton media types were upset at Ottawa handing Hamilton a loss and accused them of rough play again, the very thing that got Ottawa bounced from the Quebec union less than a year earlier. 

Issues of the Herald from that era are not available (at least to me, at the moment). Here's how one Ottawa paper described the game between Hamilton and Ottawa from the previous Saturday that had that Hamilton writer all riled up.  

Nicely said! 😄

Before we go on, we would benefit from seeing the lineup. 

The above will be beneficial when reading the summary of violence that took place on that fateful Saturday.  

Hey, there's Walters again! I'm going to start thinking of him as the OG Rough Rider.

All that took place during the first match-up between these two teams, in Ottawa. It seemed as though Ottawa was mostly on the receiving end, though that may have been the local bias at work in reporting it.

Ottawa had to travel to Hamilton about two weeks later. They did so and won that contest as well.

Murderers might have been a little strong...

From that point on, the name Rough Riders comes into play frequently in the Ottawa papers. It's hard to believe that the name was decided upon at the annual meeting in September but didn't appear in a local newspaper until one of them decided to copy a Hamilton writer's article six weeks later. It seems more likely that after someone in Hamilton got his nose out of joint over the result of a game and used that term derogatively, Ottawa media (and the team) embraced the club's renegade image and ran with it. I'm reminded of the Millwall soccer club's "No one likes us, we don't care" chant, as an example. 

Why did that Hamilton writer get so bent out of shape, anyway? Surely it wasn't the first time he was exposed to rough tactics while covering a game.

Oh.

As far as the mention of Roosevelt's Rough Riders goes in that Wikipedia article, I've never seen a quote or report to the effect that our Rough Riders had anything to do with his (but if do, I'll add it here). There were a great many articles about Roosevelt's RR at that time so it would have been an easy assumption to make but the names appear to be independent and with completely different meanings.

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.

Rod Smylie of the Ottawa Trojans

The image below is from the September 29th, 1947, Ottawa Citizen. There are very few images of the Trojans that are of even decent quality so I like to capture all the ones I come across.

That was the fourth game of the 1947 season for the Trojans. They had tied the first and lost the next two so this was their first victory of the season.

The two major papers at the time (Citizen and Journal) speculated that the team had turned the proverbial corner after going winless in 1946 and they turned out to be correct. The team would finish with a 5-4-1 record and win the Ontario Rugby Football Union.

The line-ups for those games often only listed last names but the recap for this one itself was quite detailed so I've begun a list of players who have performed for the Trojans from their 1943 season as the Combines to their final season in 1947. It'll be a slow build, as I'll only add to it when I happen to see a game report which displays full names, but gradually the mighty Trojans will be fully represented. 

The 1947 Eastern All-Star Team

The 1947 Eastern All-Stars included players from both the Ottawa Rough Riders and Ottawa Trojans even though they played in different leagues and, while it is irrelevant to this site, the university of Western Ontario also contributed a few players to the second team.

At the time, players were chosen from all Eastern football-playing unions, whether Interprovincial (or Big Four, meaning the Riders), the Ontario Rugby Football Union (Trojans) and even the university teams.

Interesting approach, though based on this particular year's dominant results, the IRFU was already judged to be the highest level of play even between pro leagues.

I haven't looked at the all-star teams for the 1945 and 1946 season, the other years in which the Trojans and Rough Riders both played but in different unions, to see whether players from both teams were included. The Trojans and Rough Riders would merge in 1948 though, so if this is not the first time it's happened, it's certainly the last.

Here are the IRFU selections in particular, obviously ecstatic at having been chosen. 

Haigh, in particular, looks like he has somewhere to be! 😄 

1943: Ottawa Combines 20, Toronto Navy 07

I was looking to beef up the Ottawa Trojans page by including long game recaps such as the one below would be awkward so I include it as a blog post instead.

The team used the name Combines for their first year and changed it to Trojans the following year until they merged with the Ottawa Rough Riders in 1948. 

This was the team's first victory of the season after losing their first six, hence the opening paragraph snark.

Just Added: Wally Masters

The Rough Rider Coaches page displays win-loss records for most of the coaches throughout the team's history, even if some of the official data from the early years is somewhat questionable.

My plan was to provide a spotlight on the more accomplished gentlemen on the list (don't expect me to elaborate on Fred Glick much, for example). Unfortunately, the best accounts of one's career often take the form of an obituary.

Such is the case with Mr. Wally Masters. I did not originally intend to include any sort of more detailed biography about him, frankly, being more preoccupied with the Cup winners.

However, while Master never did win a Grey Cup as a coach, he is a member of the Ottawa Sports Hall of Fame. Also, it is true that the page was meant to be specific to Rough Rider coaches but Masters' coaching of the 1947 Ottawa Trojans to the ORFU championship certainly should not be discounted.

Read on, from the July 12th, 1992, Ottawa Citizen.

CFLOAA Player Profile: John Fripp

While looking up something largely unrelated, I came across a pdf version of an Ottawa CFL alumni newsletter from November 2017. Much of the document was advertising but it did include a bio on a local player who performed for both the Rough Riders and the Trojans in the 40s. I've carved up that page and share it with you now,.

Mr. Fripp is a good example of the type of player I want to include on the Rough Rider Player Database (see the pages listed under the banner). The list from which much of the info is copied only dated back to 1949 and I want to add players from prior to that time. Mr. Fripp fits that description and has therefore been added.

"Hall of Famer Moe Segal Still a Winner"

I spent a bunch of time adding and updating pages the other night. To be specific, I tracked down some details about the Cumberland Panthers junior club that played in the Quebec Junior Football League from 2004 to 2012 and am recording their accomplishment during that period in the hope that like the Jr. Riders and Carleton Ravens, they return some day.

I also rebuilt the Ottawa Rough Rider player list and while doing so, found an article I'd saved years ago about one Moe Segal. The original, complete version from 2008 by Irv Osterer for the The Canadian Jewish News is still available here, at least for the time being.

Moe Segal...competed in an era that featured leather helmets and cleats, canvas football pants and players that played their hearts out on offence and defence. 

At Ottawa Technical High School, Moe was an offensive and defensive lineman, and co-captain of the 1943 City of Ottawa Junior Championship team. 

Upon graduation, 18 year old Moe joined the navy and was assigned to a wireless communications training course on the HMCS Donnacona in St. Hyacinthe, Quebec. When the navy fielded a team in the Quebec Rugby Football Association, he decided to try out for the squad. The five-foot-nine, 190 pound, Segal made the team... 

The Montreal St. Hyacinthe-Donnacona Navy team – ‘the Donnies’ – had a terrific season...During the pre-CFL war years, the Grey Cup was contested between the amateur Ontario and Quebec Rugby Football Associations and the Big Four professional teams in Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and Hamilton.

Moe starred in the playoffs, blocking punts and picking up fumbles on the way to securing the 1944 QRFU title. Montreal St. Hyacinthe-Donnacona Navy then beat York to advance to the Canadian Championship, but in that game, Segal was injured in a freak collision with CFL Hall of Famer Annis Stukus. Moe was convalescing in the hospital, when Navy upset the Hamilton Wildcats 7-6 to win the Grey Cup at Varsity Stadium.

The triumph was short lived. The team was disbanded after the season and by December 1944 Segal was serving in Plymouth, England...Even overseas, football was not far from Moe’s mind as Ottawa scout Tom Daley had contacted Moe about trying out for the Rough Riders, which he did upon discharge from the navy.

Moe made the team as a two-way lineman in 1946, the first year the Big Four allowed American imports. Moe received the princely sum of $50.00 per game to play in the 1946 season..

Moe jumped to the Ottawa Trojans in 1947 for a guaranteed $500 contract. In the league semi-final, he recovered two fumbles to help defeat the Hamilton Wildcats 16-7. Ottawa then beat Toronto Balmy Beach to win the ORFU title. In what was to be Segal’s final professional game, the Trojans were defeated by Joe Krol’s Argonauts in the Grey Cup semi-final. Moe had suffered two concussions during the season and decided that it was time to retire.

The image above is not from that article. Rather, it was included in a separate piece  (by the same writer) from August 2016 shortly following Mr.s Segal's passing. The video referred to in that article is embedded below.