Shameful plug and rambling post alert.
First the plug. I have been working for the last year with my animator friend on three documentaries on aspects of Winnipeg History or more specifically buildings in Winnipeg that have been lost to the wrecker’s ball. The documentary shorts, Reconstructing Winnipeg, are now playing on MTS television. One of the shows is on the old Osborne Stadium, which was home to many of Winnipeg’s sport teams both football and baseball.
The Winnipeg Blue Bombers played at Osbourne Stadium, which sat where the Great West Life Building now sits. The Bombers, along with baseball teams like the Maroons and Goldeyes, played there for many years and it was their success that ultimately doomed the old barn. That and trying to play Canadian football on a soccer field. The Osborne featured ten-yard end zones. I’d like to see how today’s players would have handled that.
But in my research for the doc I answered a question that had always bothered me. What is a “Blue Bomber” anyway?
It has to be one of the oddest names in sport. I always thought it was something to do with the city’s aerospace industry; that being the reason for the name of the old hockey team the Winnipeg Jets. But the name has a really odd beginning.
Winnipeg originally had two teams: the Winnipeg Johnnies (stop snickering back row) named because they originally played at St. John’s Park and then moved to the Osborne, and the imaginatively named Winnipeg Winnipegs, who played at Wesley Park Stadium behind what is now the U of W. Both teams were regularly smoked by the Regina Roughriders and so merged and called themselves the Winnipegs, or the Pegs. A little later, American boxer Joe Louis was being called The Brown Bomber, in a vaguely racist short of way down south. Local Winnipeg sports writer Vince Leah saw the combative style of the Pegs and likened them to Louis and just started calling them the Blue Bombers (after their shirt colours) in his stories. It was a case of the public preferring the weird nickname over the lame official name and the Blue Bombers were born.
It got me thinking about the entire CFL. I always thought the name Hamilton Tiger Cats was a bit redundant. Aren’t all Tigers cats? But again, it was a merger of two teams that created the name; the Hamilton Tigers and the Hamilton Flying Wildcats joined in the 50s. How could you dump Flying Wildcats? Now, that is a team name.
And when you think about it, the Toronto Argonauts is another strange one. What does Toronto have to do with Greek myths, especially seafairing ones? Turns out the team was born from the Argonaut Rowing Club, which makes more sense.
The Roughriders of Saskatchewan and Rough Riders of Ottawa are both named after the guys who ride logs down the river. Makes sense for Ottawa, but not so much for prairie, treeless, flatland around Regina. The BC Lions take their name from two mountain peaks over Vancouver, The Lions, while the Montreal Alouettes (which is skylark in French) take their name from the old Quebecois working song “Alouette.”
Stampeders is pretty obvious, but tell me, is Eskimo the best name they could have come up with? Still, it could have been worse, they could have stuck with the original spelling of the team — Edmonton Esquimaux.
