Canada's Super Cup

Employees at the Royal York hotel in Toronto will strip the lobby bare, moving couches, chairs, lamps and even rugs to the basement for safekeeping. Liquor stores across Canada plan to stock an extra supply of beer and rye whisky. Toronto police are scheduled to work overtime shifts, and families will cut short outings this Sunday to gather at home. All this in preparation for a football game.

The Grey Cup game, to be sure, is no ordinary contest. It is both the Super Bowl of Canadian football and the occasion for a weekend of national celebration. The partying, like Canadian football itself, is wide open.

Fans supporting the Western Conference contender will stream into Toronto to rampage through the town just before the game and rally the support troops. This practice dates back to 1948, when 250 boosters of the Calgary Stampeders chartered a 16-car Canadian Pacific train for the trip to Toronto, bringing with them 16 horses. The visitors rode through downtown hotel lobbies in a wild stampede. Eventually, the game itself will take place before a packed and spirited crowd of 36,000 at Canadian National Exhibition stadium.

Untamed Play. Millions of other fans from the Yukon to Newfoundland will slow down their own parties long enough to watch the game on TV. They may be joined by American viewers who stumble on the Grey Cup while switching channels to catch American Thanksgiving weekend games.

Representing the West will be either the Saskatchewan Roughriders, built around a strong running attack and Canada's senior quarterback Ron Lancaster, or the Edmonton Eskimos, a tough defensive team featuring the league's top receiver. For the East it will be the veteran Ottawa Rough Riders banking on a terrorizing defensive front four, or the Montreal Alouettes, led by N.F.L. Dropout George Mira. Whichever two survive the divisional finals, the style of play promises to be untamed.

Occasionally the theatrics are improvised: in the 1957 Grey Cup a halfback racing down the sidelines suddenly fell on his face, tripped by an overwrought fan. For the most part, the play is livelier than in the U.S. because the rules are different. The fields are 10 yds. longer and 12 yds. wider, leaving far more space for the running game. Unlimited motion in the backfield makes it harder to defend against the run. The deeper end zone (25 yds. v. 10 yds. in the U.S.) allows attacking teams a chance to run full-throttle pass patterns from inside the 20-yd. line. Because a team has only three downs instead of four in which to gain 10 yds., there is a greater temptation to gamble. One less down does, however, increase the number of punts.

The potential for electrifying run-backs after kickoffs and punts is never short-circuited in Canada; fair catches and downed balls are prohibited. On punt returns, even downfield blocking is illegal. The receiver is protected only by a mandatory 5-yd. neutral zone before he catches the ball. After that the runner is either obliterated or he makes a mad dash for daylight. In another novel twist called the rouge play, any punt, kickoff, or quick kick scores a point for the kicking team if the ball reaches the opponents' end zone and is not run out.

If the procedures are peculiarly Canadian, many of the athletes executing them are not. Of the pro players in Canada, 47% are Americans, the maximum allowed by quota. Most have been bypassed by the N.F.L., and head to Canada where the competition is less severe. They earn an annual average of $16,000, compared with $27,000 on American teams. George Reed, an obscure running back for Washington State, signed with the Saskatchewan Rough-riders a decade ago and today holds the unofficial pro-rushing record in North America. Reed surpassed Jim Brown's 12,312 career yards this season.

No Endorsements. Joe Theismann, one of Notre Dame's great quarterbacks, ignored the N.F.L. to sign with the Toronto Argonauts. Last year's Heisman Trophy winner, Johnny Rodgers of Nebraska, spurned an offer from the San Diego Chargers to join Montreal for the fattest contract in Canadian football--$100,000 a year for three years. "I'm only an ordinary superstar," says Rodgers. "I figured there are lots of stars in the States but not as many up here, so I'd get to handle the ball more and get more endorsements." He also hoped to find less racial tension in Canada. Rodgers has been disappointed in his first two hopes. Though he is leading the league in pass-reception yardage, he has rushed for only 303 yds., and the endorsements have so far eluded him.

Last year American TV coverage of the Canadian games put in a brief appearance; this past June the weekly matches returned, and were watched by an estimated 6,000,000 football-famished fans. Consideration has even been given to establishing a Canadian franchise in New York or Chicago. That proposal was rejected by Canadian officials. If U.S. fans are patient, though, they may yet see some of the Canadian rules imported. That would inject some needed punch into N.F.L. contests, where the offense has grown too cautious and the defense too efficient.

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