One of my earliest football nightmares was Ottawa Rough Rider quarterback Russ Jackson. I hated the guy. The main reason for my lack of love for Jackson was his amazing talent as a player in the CFL. He could do what few guys can do in the ultimate team sport of football — he could single-handedly change a game.
Any quarterback can change a game in a negative way. A few errant passes get picked off and hello massacre. But the top echelon of passers can accomplish the seemingly impossible and win a game by sheer talent and iron will. I think of Doug Flutie in this context, and I also think of Russ Jackson in this same light.
I will give the nod to Flutie as the greatest quarterback that I ever witnessed on a football field, on either side of the border. He could escape certain annihilation and make something out of less than nothing better than anybody else that played quarterback as a small man in a big man’s job.
Maybe Russ Jackson was not quite Doug Flutie, but he was the greatest Canadian-born quarterback to ever play in the CFL. Russ Jackson stayed north of the border because he was paid more to play in the CFL during a less glamorous era in the NFL. He was also a proud Canadian who liked to play in Canada during a bygone era when the CFL was considered an elite Canadian sports league.
So I mentioned that I hated Russ Jackson earlier in the program. Russ Jackson was a thorn in the side of the Saskatchewan Roughriders because of his immense talents. The mid-to-late ‘60s might have been a dynasty era for Saskatchewan; only Calgary, Hamilton and Ottawa stood in the way.
Russ Jackson retired as a three-time Grey Cup champion quarterback in 1969. He beat the Saskatchewan Rough Riders in his final game as a pro. He won three Grey Cups in a brief 11-year career, with two Grey Cups in a row to end his career. It was a magnificent finish for a CFL legend. Too bad he was playing for the wrong ’Riders.
But now I can look back on Russ Jackson and realize that Jackson was an amazing athlete. There have been several attempts to groom Canadian quarterbacks for the CFL. Most are forgettable experiments in failure. An American quarterback begins to play football shortly out of diapers, roughly the same time that Canadian kids are fitted with their first skates. It is fair to say that football programs start much younger in Canada today, so it is also fair to say that football players in Canadian programs are getting better in leaps and bounds.
That makes Russ Jackson’s accomplishments at the pro level even more remarkable. Jackson was a college star in Canada in the ‘50s. Canadian university football was not even close to today’s CIS brand of football.
Russ Jackson stepped onto a pro football field as a quarterback and stayed in that position for the rest of his career. He was so good that a young Ottawa rookie named Ron Lancaster had to play defense for the team. Lancaster was subsequently traded because nobody was going to take Jackson’s job away from him. He was that good and I hated him for it. These days I would love to shake Jackson’s hand. I would just squeeze a little harder than normal.
Jim Sutherland is a local freelance writer whose columns appear on Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at mystarcollectorcar.com