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Fraser: Big Red and the Double Blue

Contributor
@ByGoneBoatmen

For about thirty years before taking part in their first amateur draft in 1952, the Toronto Argonauts of the Big Four football league refreshed their playing talent by scouting local high school and junior games. Prospective semi-professional players would be invited to training camp in the fall, and the club manager and head coach relied on the process of competitive elimination to churn out the next class of rookie Boatmen.

In those days the city of Toronto served up an embarrassment of riches where football prospects were concerned, but the Double Blue were not alone in their annual rummage for new faces.

The University of Toronto fielded two senior football teams between 1922 and 1934 — the intercollegiate league Varsity team and a team of second-stringers in the Ontario provincial league. This meant a high school graduate could head straight to university without giving up on the dream of playing big-league football.

And in 1927 the Balmy Beach football club, founded in the east end in 1924, quickly established serious competitive credentials by winning the Ontario senior league and the Grey Cup.

Faced with competition for players from three other strong teams, the Argonaut Rowing Club took steps in 1929 to up their game as a football organization. They entrusted the whole business to Tommy Alison, who as Chairman appointed Herb Boynton to assist team manager Hugh Jenney by setting up and managing an in-house junior program.

Tommy Alison. Herb Boynton. Names worth remembering, Argo fans.

In the second year of Boynton’s revitalized junior program the Little Argos won the 1930 national championship. Three years later a Double Blue senior squad composed mostly of graduates of the program won the 1933 Grey Cup, the club’s first in twelve long years.

Job done. Well, almost.

In 1935 the Argos won the first six games of an experimental nine-game regular season, only to drop the last three games and miss the playoffs. A post-mortem of this humiliating collapse revealed a dysfunctional squad deeply divided between a close-knit core group of Canadian players and Hugh Jenney’s U.S. imports. These Americans had badly underachieved, and the morale of the core Canadian group had dissolved during the season as the players grew increasingly resentful at having to carry their high-profile and (it was said) overindulged teammates.

Faced with criticism and gloomy predictions of mass player defections, Tommy Alison intervened with an astounding decision: U.S. imports henceforth would not play for the Argonauts.

Soon afterwards, the chairman made the obvious follow-up decision that assistant manager Herb Boynton would succeed Jenney as the manager of the club.

As a result of these developments, few Argo rookie classes have ever been scrutinized as closely as the Class of 1936. Under no illusions as to the implications of rebuilding around a bunch of kids, fourth-year head coach Lew Hayman sought to lower expectations as Boynton went about coaxing the cream of the city’s summer crop of teenaged talent into double blue jerseys.

The biggest challenge faced by the import-less Argos in 1936 would be keeping pace with passing attacks built around imports in Montreal, Ottawa and Hamilton. The key to Boynton’s success that season would be his recognition that the passing game had developed further in high school football in the six years since its introduction than it had developed in the more conservative Big Four game.

As his first priority the Double Blue manager wooed the three stars of the pass-happy St. Michael’s College football team. Backfielder Harold Jackson signed with Balmy Beach. But family connections helped Boynton to recruit end Billy Burkart, whose father Otto played five seasons with the Boatmen before and after World War One. After a good camp, Burkart made the team and enjoyed a solid rookie season backing up superstar end Wes Cutler. The high point came in the home opener, when he registered a third-down touchdown catch against Ottawa. He would be lured away by Hamilton in 1937, but Burkart was back in double blue in 1938 for one injury-plagued season before he retired.

More than any other prospect, Boynton wanted to sign backfielder Bill Stukus, whose stellar passing and ball-carrying made the St. Mike’s offence tick. “Little Stuke”, the younger brother of Argo sophomore quarterback Annis Stukus, was expected to follow Jackson to the Beach before Boynton pulled off a minor miracle by signing him. Although the teenaged phenom created an early buzz at camp, Coach Hayman thought he needed more seasoning before he could be asked to run a Big Four offence. A pre-season ankle sprain kept Little Stuke out of the line-up until mid-season and affected the rest of his campaign. Still, his passing and running as the number-two quarterback impressed the critics. Bill Stukus played six more seasons in double blue, blossoming into the finest Canadian quarterback of his era and winning three Grey Cups.

The Stukus Brothers

Along with the two St. Mike’s boys, Herb Boynton had high hopes for Steve Levantis, star running and kicking back for Northern Vocational high school, city football champions of 1934 and 1935. Despite Coach Hayman’s decision to convert the teenager into an end, Levantis made the team after “tackling like a veteran” in a pre-season loss to the Sarnia Imperials and provided solid backup all season to veteran Doc Bryers. After an abortive year at Queen’s University, Levantis would return to the Boatmen in 1938. Now converted into a tackle, he remained a fixture at that position with the Double Blue until his retirement in 1948, winning four Grey Cups.

Future stars were all well and good, of course. But unless Boynton uncovered some teenagers who could replace veteran imports right away, his chairman’s “All-Canadian” policy was going to look as ridiculous as its critics thought it sounded.

A student at North Toronto Collegiate, where he and his teammates were sick of falling to Steve Levantis and Northern Vocational in city finals, Art West was expected to follow the well-worn path from North Toronto to Balmy Beach until Herb Boynton intercepted him. Without the skill-sets of Stukus or Levantis, this teenager came to camp with no fanfare to live up to. But there he proved himself to be a special talent thanks to his prime attribute: Art West was the fastest player that Lew Hayman had ever seen.

On pure speed he survived training camp, his pre-season having ended literally with a whimper when he was forced out of the exhibition loss to Sarnia after receiving “a kick south of the belt line”. But by his third regular-season game nobody doubted that in “Whippet” West the Argonaut manager had the rookie find of the year.

The teenager was unquestionably the player of the game in his league debut as the Double Blue opened the Big Four season by upsetting the Rough Riders 18-1 in Ottawa. In the fourth quarter, having already returned an interception 65 yards for a touchdown, West made a second pick and took it 40 yards to set up another Argo major.

After the game in the Boatmen’s dressing room, a reporter overhead somebody compare West to a whippet, and one of the great Toronto sports nicknames was born.

Seven days later at Varsity Stadium, playing in front of the Faithful for the first time, Whippet West burned the Riders all over again, returning a fourth-quarter interception 50 yards to set up a point off a missed field goal. “How about that kid West?” Hayman gushed after the game. “I don’t mind telling you, I’m sold!”

In Hamilton the following Saturday, the Whippet sparked his coach’s offensive genius when he tore around left end for a 40-yard touchdown on a routine extension play. On Hayman’s version of this play the tailback rolled out for a lateral, assessed his own passing or running options, and then fired a second lateral to a halfback out in the flat. The “Argonaut end run” soon became Whippet West’s signature play as Lew Hayman began to build his championship offences of 1937 and 1938 around it.

Although he struck gold with Art West, Herb Boynton had nothing to do with the other rookie sensation of the Class of 1936.

Legend has it that this giant eighteen-year-old was playing junior lacrosse one Saturday for the Orillia Terriers when he caught the eye of a spectator who was rooting for the opposing Mimico Mounties. After the match this onlooker, himself a former junior lacrosse star, approached the burly Terrier and asked an odd question: did he happen to play football? The teen said that he didn’t, but admitted that he’d often wondered about playing.

On a hunch, the Mounties fan introduced himself — he was none other than the captain of the Argonauts, Teddy “Iron Man” Morris — and invited the young man — who called himself Red Storey — to training camp.

With his lineman’s physique and straight-ahead speed to rival that of the kid they’d soon be calling “Whippet”, the redheaded stranger was the talk of camp that fall. Storey reminded sportswriter Mike Rodden of a player against whom he had played and coached fifteen years earlier: the “Big Train”, Lionel Conacher. His career in double blue was never going to measure up to such an excitable comparison, but Storey was a football star from the moment he first stepped onto a field. True, he played the game for six years with the naivety of somebody who had never played a down of high school football. But in most games the stars lined up just right — as they would in the fourth quarter of the 1938 Grey Cup victory over Winnipeg — and “Big Red” would enjoy a spell of play as devastating as the “Big Train” in his prime.

Even as a rookie the strapping kid from Barrie showed a handful of these “flashes of brilliance” as Coach Hayman tried to figure out a position for him. His first career interception, made at home against Montreal, delighted his well-wishers, of which Red Storey had acquired a great number by the time his season was ended by a shoulder injury that caused him to miss the whole season of hockey — the sport that would make him a Canadian sports icon.

The other feel-good story from the Class of 1936 comes with a much sadder ending. A walk-on like Big Red, Billy Bucheski was a high school boy of fourteen when he hitchhiked to Toronto from Windsor in the hope of making the Argos. The impossible dream paid off, for the plucky kid so impressed Coach Hayman with his raw talent and attitude that roster space and a smattering of playing time were found for “Pooch” Bucheski.

When this football summer camp of a lifetime was over, Hayman sent his Pooch back home to Windsor. He would never wear double blue again. With the outbreak of the Second World War he decided to answer the call of duty to his country ahead of the call of senior football. Billy Bucheski was twenty when he and over a hundred crewmates lost their lives in the sinking of the Canadian destroyer HMCS Ottawa by a U-boat in the north Atlantic in the small hours of September 14, 1942.

With six high school kids and no U.S. imports on their roster, the “All-Canadian” Argonauts surprised everybody — including themselves — by finishing the 1936 Big Four season with a respectable 4-2 record, good enough for first place in the standings. The Double Blue would fall to Ottawa in the two-game playoff series that followed, but post-season disappointment could not dull the lustre of a spectacular rebuilding year that paved the way for back-to-back Grey Cup wins in 1937 and 1938.

Six teenaged rookies. Two impact players (Storey, West). Four future all-stars (Levantis, Storey, Stukus, West). Two future captains (Levantis, West). One future league MVP (Stukus). All in all, the Class of 1936 was not a bad harvest gathered in by Herb Boynton under tremendous pressure.

But the manager’s success also stood as a tribute to the courage and decisiveness of Tommy Alison, whose six Grey Cups in eighteen seasons as Argonaut chief executive has thus far been judged an achievement too ordinary to merit Hall of Fame recognition.