Sep
Obie’s education
Courtesy Hamilton Spectator:
At first Bob O’Billovich didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line. He assumed it was close friend and former Ottawa Rough Rider teammate Bill Siekierski pulling a cruel prank by offering him his first CFL head coaching job, at the helm of the Toronto Argonauts.
“What the hell are you talking about, Siekierski?” O’Billovich barked into the phone. “This is nothing to joke about!”
Then, in the gruff, no-nonsense tone which for the next eight years would be the soundtrack to Obie’s professional life, the caller snapped impatiently:
“Do you want the job or not?”
“And I realized, ‘Oh shoot, it IS Ralph Sazio,’ ” O’Billovich recalls with delight, “and I quickly said, ‘I want the job! When do you want me down there?’ ”
And so began a symbiotic relationship which would not only snatch the Toronto Argonauts from competitive oblivion but would form the DNA of what, 27 years later, is the on-field revival of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
There is no double twist remotely like that in the other two great CFL rivalries — Winnipeg- Saskatchewan and Edmonton-Calgary — and it speaks to the deep recognition by great football men that, no matter the animosity, both the Argonauts and Tiger-Cats depend upon the good health of the other.
Sazio, the quintessential career Cat who had played for the Cats, then spent 13 years as their coach, general manager, vice-president or president, had become president of the Argos in 1981, the year before he hired O’Billovich.
It was a shocking — and, in some local quarters, still regarded as traitorous — move by Sazio, who had coached the Cats to three Grey Cup titles in the glorious 1960s.
But, it would also prove to be real-life literary irony:
One man who will be forever associated with the Tiger-Cats resuscitated their hated rival. Sazio, always a Ticat to the hardiest Hamilton fans, also set in motion the career of another man whom so many Cat fans associate with Toronto — he’s their winningest coach ever, was elected as the coach on the all-time team, and served a second term there in the early ’90s. That man is now leading Sazio’s home franchise out of the competitive wilderness.
Monday will be the first Labour Day Classic since Sazio’s death last September, adding extra depth to a theme which could run through a novel.
In short, Ralph Sazio was Bob O’Billovich’s mentor.
“Mentor? I think that’s a good word for it,” O’Billovich says. “He’d been a coach and a GM and knew the league as well as anybody. It was a great situation for me. He helped me understand the job better, and I think there’s a correlation between that and the situation we have right now in Hamilton (with rookie head coach Marcel Bellefeuille).”
Sazio, O’Billovich says, was intimidating to many people and saw most things “in black and white.” His public persona was more demanding and like a military leader than that of his smiling, accommodating coach. They didn’t socialize a great deal, but the privacy-protecting Sazio and his outgoing new coach were cut from the same football cloth and formed a solid bond.
O’Billovich had a solid playing career and was an assistant coach with the Rough Riders when Sazio included him among several candidates — some, on the surface, far more qualified — to replace Willie Wood as head coach of a 2-14 team.
Their initial interview was scheduled for an hour but they talked football in Sazio’s office for the entire day. And almost every morning for the next eight seasons they met in that office at 10 a.m. to analyze the team and dissect the league.
“What always made an impression on me from those discussions from a management standpoint was that although a lot of people thought he was cheap, Ralph didn’t mind spending money, as long as he got the return on his investment,” O’Billovich says, who incorporated the same philosophy into his GM years. “But he didn’t like wasting money.
“A lot of the things he stood for in the game, I did too. Tough football. Defensive. Canadian content. He told me a year later that the only thing he wasn’t sure of when he hired me was that I had those big sideburns.
“He was a very competitive guy. He hated to lose and so did I.”
They didn’t have to endure much losing.
With better players and O’Billovich coaching and eagerly inhaling Sazio’s accumulated wisdom, the Argonauts were immediately transformed.
After nine successive losing seasons, still the longest streak of sub.-500 futility in Argo history, Toronto made it all the way to the Grey Cup in O’Billovich’s rookie head coaching season, but lost to the then-dynastic Eskimos.
But the next year, the Argos ended Edmonton’s five-year reign — and a Toronto Grey Cup drought which stretched all the way back to 1952 — by edging the B.C. Lions 18-17, right in Vancouver.
When O’Billovich, despite Sazio’s pleas, left the Argos in 1989 after the team had been sold, Toronto had been in six eastern finals and three Grey Cups during Obie’s eight years.
Most of those eastern finals were against their archrivals, who had also undergone a positive change of fortunes.
A sad and limiting aspect of Toronto-Hamilton football history is that the Tiger-Cats and Argonauts have rarely been really good at the same time.
The latter six years of the 1970s were the combined worst-ever for the QEW twins: neither team had a winning record in any of those seasons and only once (the 8-8, ’76 Ticats) did either of them break even.
The 1980s, however, were the polar opposite.
The Cats began to recover first, with Sazio still vice-president, reaching the 1980 Grey Cup where they were annihilated by the Eskimos.
And the eight-year stretch after O’Billovich and Sazio combined forces is the longest sustained period of Argo-Cat excellence in history. Only once (Argos, 1985) did both teams fail to make the playoffs. One or the other represented the east in the Grey Cup every season except 1988, when Winnipeg triumphed.
“It was good for the league and great for the rivalry,” O’Billovich recalls.
“Of all the teams, losing to Hamilton bothered Ralph the most. He had a loyalty to Hamilton but when it came down to ‘them or us,’ it was always ‘us.’
“I don’t have the loyalty to Toronto that Ralph had to Hamilton,” says O’Billovich, who worked with the Roughriders, Stampeders and Lions between his Toronto and Hamilton stints. “The only thing I will say is that if it’s not at our expense I hope they do well because it’s good for the league.”
And there was nothing better for the league in the 1980s than the slew of dramatic eastern finals featuring the two teams from Canada’s richest market.
Among others, there was the 1986 two-game total-point final, which the Argos led by 26 points in the second quarter of the second game … and lost. In 1983, with the Argos down two points and at 3rd-and-one at the Argo goal-line with 27 seconds left, O’Billovich decided to go for a touchdown instead of the easy field goal. Cedric Minter was actually stopped for no gain, but rolled off the tackler for a touchdown and a 41-36 Argo win.
“Ralph applauded that choice,” O’Billovich said. “Because the way the game was going, Hamilton could have still come back to tie or win if we led by only one.”
But in the 1984 final, O’Billovich went for a single instead of a 48-yard field goal, to break an 8-8 tie with four seconds left in regulation time. That brought him a lot of wrath from double blue fans when premier hoofer Hank Ilesic didn’t make the single and Hamilton won in overtime. What no one knew, OBillovich says, was that Ilesic had had to remove his square-toed field goal shoe for his punting boot and didn’t have the proper warm-up time, which may have accounted for the uncharacteristically weak punt.
“Here’s how serious Ralph took games with Hamilton,” O’Billovich says, recalling an incident after the 1983 Labour Day Game, a whupping (50-16) of the Cats by their detested visitors.
“He would sit up there in the press box in a space by himself — I learned to do that from him — and rest his elbows on the table. A day or so after we’d beaten them Labour Day, I could see that both his elbows had scabs on them.
“He was embarrassed to tell me, ‘Goddamn it, I get so worked up, I don’t even know what I’m doing and I really grind my elbows.’”
They also had differences — O’Billovich, for instance, was more patient — and they eventually found ways that their strengths and weaknesses could complement each other, especially in dealing with players and agents.
Sazio, O’Billovich says, was passionate about his profession, and the CFL, a very solid family man and a leader. And his word was his bond. If he shook hands, he considered it a contract.
“It was good for me to see some of those qualities,” O’Billovich says. “I could take them and use them, with my own personality. Coaches are great at borrowing things from other coaches.”
Obie’s move to Hamilton could have happened several years earlier, with Sazio again playing a role. On the advice of Sazio, after Bob Young bought the team, he talked to O’Billovich and considered hiring him, but Ron Lancaster became the GM instead.
“I talked to Ralph by phone when I agreed to take the job here (two years ago),” O’Billovich recalls, “and he was really glad to hear I was coming.
“Ralph went to Toronto for the same reasons I went to Hamilton. Ralph saw it as a challenge. He thought it was in the best interests of the league if he could get that franchise on its feet the way it should be.
“And I felt the same challenge here. This city deserved to have a good football team.
“His life was the CFL and my life is the CFL. We both made similar decisions to finish our careers on the right note.”
