Looking back at Labour Day Classics with Roughrider historian Rob Vanstone

The Saskatchewan Roughriders and Winnipeg Blue Bombers are ready to square off in the 60th Labour Day Classic on Sunday in Regina.

This year’s game has already sold out, and the excitement is building across both provinces as the teams prepare for their annual showdown. Winnipeg won last year’s game 35-33, but the Riders triumphed in 2023, taking a 32-30 victory.

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Ahead of this year’s game, Rider historian Rob Vanstone and members of the public got a chance to look back at some footage of the very first Labour Day Classic, which was played all the way back in 1949.

Vanstone joined Jamie Nye and Locker on the Green Zone to share his thoughts on the importance of the annual game and the many ways CFL football has changed over the years, while having a few laughs along the way.

Listen to the full interview here, or read the transcript below:

The following questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

JAMIE NYE: You weren’t alive in 1949. I know this. I could have joked that you were, but I wasn’t about to do that.

ROB VANSTONE: That was a layup you didn’t take. You know it was right there.

NYE: No, I didn’t want to.

LOCKER: So what did you pay for a ticket back then, Rob?

VANSTONE: All the currency was just gold or silver back then.

NYE: How much was a beer? They probably didn’t sell beer at the stadium back in 1949, but what’s it like to see this footage in color of the first of the 60 Labor Day Classics?

VANSTONE: It really is something. The provincial archives and the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame have done such an amazing job. Matthew Gourlie, the communications co-ordinator, has put so much work into editing this and figuring out who some of the players are and, you know, squinting to figure out what’s going on in some of these grainy images. And Tom Fuzesy, a Roughrider historian and my next door neighbor on Acadia Drive in Regina growing up will also be there. And Tom’s the one with the content – I just make tacky jokes. But it really is something to look at this. And initially I thought, “Boy, it must been a lot of effort to colorize it.” And then he said, “No, it was actually filmed in color.” And that just stunned me. And we just finished a dry run here at the provincial archives in the CBC building. I’m actually sitting on a cement thing outside there, and it’s just so cool to watch it. I could watch that over and over again.

LOCKER: I have been here not quite a year now, but any time a question about the history of the Roughriders comes up, somebody will inevitably say something like, “We should give Rob a call, and Rob might know.” So I’m curious, how many Labor Day Classics have you attended?

VANSTONE: This will be my 50th in a row this year. 1975 was the first. We missed one with the pandemic year, obviously, so the Riders beat Winnipeg 27-23 in 1975. Ron Lancaster threw a nine-yard, game-winning touchdown pass to Steve Mazurak in the north end zone of Taylor Field, and that was my first Labor Day Classic. My mom took me to games is when I was like an infant, so I hope I was at the 44-0 game against Montreal in 1966, but the first one that I would have any recollection of was September of ‘75.

NYE: What are your top three, Rob? If you’ve gathered your thoughts on Labor Day Classics past, do you have you know, a top three – bronze, silver and gold for Labor Day Classics?

VANSTONE: Because there’s been so many and so many great games, it’s almost like picking the cutest puppy out of the litter sometimes. And I am legitimately torn. It’s almost like the Ronnie/George debate, right? There are two that stand out to me as being absolutely, I was gonna say unbeatable, but there’s two of them and I think, you know, odd days I’ll like one game and even days I’ll like the other. The one, I think, that is most popular response would be the 2007 game against against the Bombers team that the referee would ultimately face and defeat in the Grey Cup. And the Riders won 31-26. Kerry Joseph would be a quarterback draw, 27-yard run, crossed the goal line with with six seconds remaining in the fourth quarter, and there was just so much wrapped into up in that game. It was a storybook season for the Riders, and they would have ultimately play the Bombers. It was a classic Labor Day game, and just an amazing spectacle. And people were just so in love with that ‘07 team. I think people, when they look at their signature moments, they’re thinking their signature memories from ‘07. You think of the James Johnson interceptions in the Grey Cup. I think the mob quickly defaults, if it doesn’t go immediately, to the Kerry Joseph run in 2007, the other one, 1983, and I for human interest angle I think this is unbeatable, not only for Labor Day, but for any game in Rider history. Dave Ridgway was the Riders’ place kicker back then, and he got injured tackling Nate Johnson on a kickoff return. The Riders without were without a place kicker. Of course it came down to a field goal in the last minute. Ken Clark, who was the Riders’ punter, was called upon to attempt a 43 yarder into the wind. He hadn’t tried a field goal since he was with Hamilton in ‘76, so that was seven years earlier, and Ken Clark made the winning field goal in the final minute. Riders one 32-30. And the other aspect of this, he had just returned from Toronto from the bedside of his ailing mother. And his mother, Veronica, passed away shortly after the game. So with the heaviest of hearts he flew back to Regina for the game, and they kicked the game-winning field goal that nobody would expect from a punter. And the same game he had a 101-yard punt, which was the riders longest in Riders history until 2011.

NYE: So 1949 we have the first Labor Day Classic. This is the 60th anniversary coming up here this weekend, but you didn’t start calling it the Labor Day Classic in 1949 – pretty tough to do that. That would have been amazing foresight. Do you know when it started being referred to as a Labor Day Classic?

VANSTONE: It’s funny, the Regina Press Club had a mixed softball tournament in the mid ‘80s, and that had the Labor Day Classic label. I couldn’t find a reference of reference pertaining to the Roughriders/Bombers until 1988 in a in a newspaper ad in the Regina Leader Post, and and through 1997 the only references I found to “Labor Day Classic” were in advertisements either purchased by the team or by one of the team sponsors, or in a combination of the two, referencing Labor Day Classic. And then, all of a sudden – and here’s a plug for your your correspondent, Darrell Davis – the first reference I saw was leading up to the 1998 Labor Day Classic, when Daryl mentioned in his story that the Bombers were 0-9 heading into the Labor Day Classic. And that’s the first reference I saw to it in print or in writing that wasn’t an advertisement. So you can take it back to ‘88 or, if you want to give it the Davis endorsement, ‘98 is the first official, documented, uncontested Labor Day Classic.

NYE: We’ll have to add that paragraph or sentence to his Sports Hall of Fame or Canadian Football Hall of Fame – “The man who first dubbed the Labor Day Classic in print, Darrell Davis.” But leading into this game, Rob as the Roughrider historian you are, how big is this one? This year, the 60th, compared to the other years? Because many years they weren’t in the same division, sometimes one team was 7-1 and one was 1-7, or they were both bad. It’s been pretty rare, probably more often than not, lately, where you have two teams battling in what could be a huge playoff implications for home-field advantage later this year?

VANSTONE: Well, I remember leading up to the ‘07 game – and I don’t remember the numbers or the what I’d reported at the time, but I remember going back and back and back, trying to find the last time a Riders/Winnipeg game on Labor Day Weekend that featured a matchup of two sort of comparable tears, and so it sort of has the same vibe as the 2007 game. I mean, the Roughriders are first overall in the league at 8-2, the Bombers are 6-4, and they are they’ve been in five consecutive Grey Cups, and it does sort of that same feel that Edmonton did in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, when that’s the team you’ve got to go through. And now Calgary has introduced itself into the equation by playing magnificently so far this season. But Riders/Bombers, with two teams well above .500. Plus it being the 60th, there’s just so much going into this game. I can hardly wait. It feels like a playoff game. It’s even had that feel, you know, when if it’s both teams are struggling, it sort of feels like, OK, this is our Grey Cup this year. But it really whets the appetite, not only for seeing the game on Sunday, but for seeing the stretch run of the season. It’s just going to be fascinating.

LOCKER: So Rob, this replay of the 1949 Labor Day Classic at the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan, have you watched much of it?

VANSTONE: I watched what they’ve got – the entire first half and a bit of the second. And so I saw the raw footage, there that was before it was magically enhanced and before it was edited. It’s a shorter version that they’re going to show, but it’s all the good stuff. There’s a there’s three instances of a dog running onto the field, and they played through. The Bombers are near their goal line, and they’re running a play, and this dog runs onto the field, and they just kept playing. And just the style of play. It’s borderline unrecognizable from the way the game is played today. And there’s there’s T formations, and there’s single-wing formations and all these other things, and the Riders are wearing almost all white. The place kicking is not at all like the place kicking of today. It’s not soccer style, and the kicker is about maybe a foot and a half away from the football, lining up. It’s interesting. It’s legit. It’s literally three yards in the cloud of dust. Just hammer, hammer, hammer away the line of scrimmage. There’s two, I think, in the entire span of footage, I think there’s one completion and then one pass which should have been dropped, and the teams combined for 10 fumbles. It’s just a glorious play of football. It was a different game back then, with all laterals and pitch outs and stuff like that. You’re going to have more fumbles just because of the way the game was played. It was much more of a ground-oriented game, and it’s really fascinating to see the way the game is involved and how the degree to which teams are absolutely ravenous in terms of appetite, wanting a single point. A touchdown was only worth five points back then, so the single point was such a big deal back then, and they’re just scratching, clawing, doing everything to either get out of the end zone or hold the opponent in there. It’s it’s so cool to see the way the game is involved. And there’s still a house in there behind the north end zone that is still very recognizable today.

NYE: Yes, and a 22-9 win for the riders. But finally, we’d be remiss today, Robert, if we didn’t remember a great football man, the Grey Cup champion of 2013, former director of player personnel, Craig Smith died yesterday at the age of 69 after a valiant fight with many health issues and cancer. Players, coaches, media members, anybody who’s anybody around football knows Craig Smith and adored Craig Smith, and the football world is less without him today.

VANSTONE: It truly is. Jamie, you said it so well. And if you think of Craig Smith, or if you saw Craig Smith in a football-related environment, or just having supper, a key part of the equation was his wife Cathy, and they would do a lot of scouting together. She’d take notes for him. I mean, Craig and Cathy Smith, they’re just wonderful people. And Craig fought so hard for so long and, you know, he was at the combine in late March, taking notes and watching and scouting. And it was like a lineup of who’s who in the CFL walking over to say hello to Craig Smith. He grew up in Winnipeg, you know, worshiping the Bombers and knowing everything there was to know as a little guy about Kenny Ploen and Farrell Funston and Herb Gray and Leo Lewis, etc., and and then the Riders with whom he won a second Grey Cup – a fun one in B.C. – so those are two teams that were so close to his heart and presently playing back to back. Boys, nothing, nothing, Craig loved more than Riders and Bombers.