Nov
Stamps learned how to win
Courtesy Calgary Herald:
Define the most difficult challenge in pro sports. Many will say it is to win a championship as a favourite. Underdogs are cushioned by diminished expectations. Plucky challengers can lose a big game yet still win in the hearts of their fans.
But if you are a favourite, as the Calgary Stampeders have been for much of the past four years, you operate without a net. With a large target painted on your back. Opponents circle your game on the calendar as their defining contest. When the stumbles come, they are devastating. Your fans grow bitter, the media get cynical.
As the Stamps learned three years running. Darlings of the media during the season, they imploded in the postseason with turnovers and missed assignments. Those things add up on the psyche of a team such as the Stamps. “In my sabbatical year last year, I did read the (Stampeders) press clippings — and that included the day after they lost to Saskatchewan,” says rookie Calgary head coach John Hufnagel.
“I understood the atmosphere that last week’s game (with B.C.) was going to take. So I made some analogies to other teams in other leagues that faced the same problem and the success they went on to have.”
How suffocating was the pressure heading into Saturday’s Western Final against B.C.? Nik Lewis admitted afterward that he might have retired had the Stamps squandered another season with a rapid playoff departure. “It’s just so emotionally draining when you lose a playoff game,” Lewis told the Herald. “It would be different if we would have won a semifinal and lost in the final (in past seasons). But lose the first game, and I didn’t know if I could handle the stress in the off-season.”
The Stampeders have now won that first game. Have shipped the gorilla back to Calgary Zoo from its accustomed spot on their back. Have put paid the notion that they are more fragile than Reidel crystal.
They head to Montreal purged of doubt, lightened of insecurity bred by failure. Backed by success — finally.
Don’t underestimate the effect. A talented team that eventually learns how to win, how to trust in a time of stress, is a formidable foe. The Detroit Red Wings were the pretty boys who couldn’t win the Stanley Cup through the ’90s. They failed and failed till everyone assumed there was a fatal flaw in the team’s character. But when Steve Yzerman finally led the Wings to the 1997 Cup, it opened a dam for Detroit.
They’ve won four Cups in the past decade, much of it on the inner confidence that winners learn that, in a time of stress, they will do what they do best while the opponent loses his way. The New England Patriots were an undistinguished NFL franchise when they met the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI as a 14-point underdog. But Tom Brady defied the experts, beating St. Louis. The Patriots have subsequently been to the Super Bowl three times more this decade, winning twice.
