Courtesy Edmonton Journal:

Keith Stokes may never manage to completely outrun his reputation for being a tad pudgy in recent seasons with the Toronto Argonauts and Winnipeg Blue Bombers.

So go ahead and call the 29-year-old kick returner fat, chunky or any other descriptive term normally reserved for the plus-sized.

Why? First of all, he doesn’t care what other people say about him. And, secondly, he can come up with worse adjectives himself.

“I was disgusting,” Stokes said after Day 2 of training camp Monday with the Edmonton Eskimos. “I couldn’t even watch myself on film. I was like, ‘Who is that guy?’ ”

He wasn’t the only one mystified with the ballooning of Keith Stokes — the CFL’s outstanding rookie in 2002 and outstanding special teams player in 2004.

The heftier version of Stokes failed to dominate in the manner that once led him to pull a magazine out of the padding on the goal post and pretend to read all about it.

“I wasn’t happy with the way I was weighing, but there was nothing I could do about it at the time” he said. “I had a cracked collar bone. My AC joint was torn. I had a herniated disc in my back. I had tendinitis in my Achilles. And this was all at the same time. But you deal with it and move on.”

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