This Sunday, the 90th Grey Cup match will be played in Edmonton. The Saracens are celebrating the occasion by watching the match at the club. Show up early, pull up a chair, and enjoy the show.
(The following text is from historytelevision.ca)
For over 90 years, the Grey Cup has been a fixture of the Canadian sport\'s world. Like many of our country\'s sporting traditions, the Grey Cup trophy evolved over numerous years from an award for an amateur football game to the icon for the professional football championship in Canada it is today.
Governor General Earl Grey first conceived of donating a trophy for Canada\'s senior amateur hockey championship. However, in 1910 banking mogul Sir Hugh Andrew Montagu Allan (Hugh Montagu) donated his Allan Cup in 1910 for that very purpose, so Earl Grey agreed that his trophy should commemorate the "Amateur rugby football championship of Canada" (Thiele 3). It\'s oddly ironic that Governor Grey donated his cup to a football championship, considering his interests lay in the arts, primarily in music and drama festivals.
By the time of the first Grey Cup championship game, early forms of Canadian football were already gaining in popularity across the country. Canadian football evolved from British rugby, a game developed by William Webb Ellis in 1823, when he picked up the ball during a game of kick ball, and ran. In Canada, rugby players were men who came to the country for various reasons, personal and professional, from England. By 1882, two amateur rugby unions, the Quebec Rugby Football Union and the Canadian Rugby Union, had formed.
One of the earliest collegiate matches was the cross-border challenge between McGill University and Harvard University in Boston. Harvard extended the invitation to play a game of football to the Montreal university in 1874, and after discovering that both teams played a variance of the same game, two different games were played out - one with Harvard\'s soccer rules and the other with McGill\'s rugby rules. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, within a year of this match, Harvard had convinced its Ivy League counterparts to adopt the game.
In 1909, the first Grey Cup game took place in Toronto. By now, a more modern game was being played, based on changes to the rules made by John T.M. Burnside. Burnside introduced many of the defining aspects of Canadian football, including our player limitations and the three-down per 10 yards regulation (Thiele 10). The University of Toronto\'s Varsity Blues faced off against the Toronto Parkdale Canoe Club on December 4, 1909. The University of Toronto beat Parkdale by a margin of 20 points (the final score was 26-6). Even though the University of Toronto won the championship game in December 1909, the actual trophy wasn\'t ready until March 1910 — almost three months after the two teams battled for football supremacy!
The Grey Cup was suspended from 1916-1920 because of the First World War, and this is the only time in the history of the championship that a game has not been played. Over the years, the game has become a battle between the teams from the East and those from the West.
Western teams were played their first Grey Cup game in 1921 when the Edmonton Eskimos played the Toronto Argonauts. The Eastern teams dominated the championship for a number of years, until 1939 when the Winnipeg Blue Bombers beat the Ottawa Rough Riders 8-7. The 1929 Grey Cup game changed the face of Canadian football forever when the Regina Roughriders, who had made a bid for the championship six times in as many years, introduced the forward pass.
When it became apparent Canada would once again go to war, instead of halting the Grey Cup, football clubs were organized by the military, and the games managed to lift spirits across the country. By 1958, professional football emerged. The Canadian Football League was formed, and players were recruited from both here and the United States to ensure the best possible team for competition. The 1969 Grey Cup game was important because it marked the first time the championship was played on a Sunday and Prime Minister Trudeau stepped in to do the celebrity kickoff.
Over the years, the Cup itself has suffered quite a few mishaps. From being locked in a vault during the First World War to surviving a fire in the Toronto Argonaut Clubhouse in 1947, the Cup has been left behind, dented, cracked and even stolen. Yes, the Grey Cup remains a tried and true aspect of our sporting tradition and the ultimate goal for professional football players in this country.
Read more at History Television Canada
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