Courtesy Regina Leader Post:

As CFL commissioner during some of the league’s darkest days in the early to mid-1990s, Larry Smith fancied himself more a firefighter than a leading sports executive.

In his dealings with the Ottawa Rough Riders during that same period, Smith must have felt like Paul “Red” Adair, he of worldwide fame for fighting oil well fires.

The Riders of that era didn’t look to the next game or the next season. They looked to the next payday — to see if it would be there.

So it might seem surprising that a decade later, the man who has sold out every home game for the Montreal Alouettes since 1999, says the Ottawa group poised to return CFL football to Ottawa as early as 2010 has many advantages over the situation he inherited in 1997, upon stepping down as commissioner to become president of the Alouettes.

Smith was in Ottawa Friday for a luncheon to both hype the 2008 Grey Cup in Montreal and lend his support to Ottawa 67’s owner Jeff Hunt and his group of local developers in their bid for a Rough Rider revival.

Smith has high praise for the troika of Roger Greenberg, John Ruddy and Bill Shenkman, the would-be ownership group that already has a conditional CFL franchise if it can get the go-ahead to build a world-class sporting venue at Frank Clair Stadium.

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