Hard to imagine that any sport could ever have a class quite like this, unless retirement is imposed on them now and times change and the law doesn't intervene and Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds wind up making the trip to Cooperstown together five years hence.
By a quirk of timing, three remarkable players, on a very short list of the best in history, will be entering the Canadian Football Hall of Fame together in the summer.
Mike Pringle is the CFL's career rushing leader. Michael Clemons is its career all-purpose yards leader. Doug Flutie is, at worst, the second best player to have ever put on a CFL uniform (a tip of the cap to Jackie Parker), and no one was ever so dominant playing the game's most important position.
(A fourth player is also going in, John Bonk, who will obviously be overshadowed by the others' star power and whose inclusion is, frankly, a bit of a mystery, 23 years after his retirement after a good, workmanlike career in Hamilton and Winnipeg. Like the puzzling inclusion of Rocco Romano last year, it must be an offensive lineman thing inexplicable to those of us with no first-hand knowledge of the trenches.)
Beyond their achievements on the field, Clemons, Pringle and Flutie also represent three distinct phases in the CFL's evolution. There aren't many sports that have changed so often, so dramatically, over such a short period of time that contemporaries could symbolize so many shifting currents.
Pinball, though his careers as player, coach, club president and all-round bearer of goodwill spanned so many of the CFL's growing pains, is in many ways typical of the way the game used to be. Magnificently talented, but built in a way that didn't jibe with NFL orthodoxy, he fell through the cracks after a short stint in Kansas City. His first connection to Canada was Ralph Sazio, a fellow William and Mary alumnus who long before had come north to ply his trade. On the wide field, in a game that rewards improvisation and versatility, Clemons was a perfect fit. And like so many American CFL players who came before him, he liked it here and he chose to stay, adopt a foreign land as his own and become part of the community.
Flutie, though he also was initially rejected by the deep thinkers in the NFL, would never have come to Canada in the first place but for the brief era of the Big Time, which coincided, not shockingly, with a succession of flim-flam men, all selling the notion that by pumping cash into the CFL (not necessarily their own), they could turn it into something else entirely. Hard to forget his first training camp with Murray Pezim's B.C. Lions, when Flutie shared a dressing room with Mark Gastineau and seemed unsure whether the quest for a chance to play and lure of a big fat paycheque really justified joining the circus.
After that, he was part of the tumultuous Larry Ryckman show in Calgary, played in the first CFL game in the United States, an exhibition in Portland, and the first regular-season game in Sacramento. By the time he found his way back to the NFL after winning consecutive Grey Cup titles in Toronto, for what turned out to be a very satisfying second act, the kind of salaries he'd earned were a thing of the past, and the CFL had come within a hair of closing shop.
Without the ill-conceived U.S. expansion, Mike Pringle might never have stuck in the CFL. He was cut in Edmonton and in Sacramento before finding a home in Baltimore, where he played behind an NFL-calibre offensive line, on a team that may have been the most powerful in league history. The Stallions and their next incarnation in Montreal went a long way to reviving the run-first offence in Canadian football, with Pringle carrying most of the load. He adapted as times changed, enjoying a long career in a sport where import running backs are a dime a dozen,
You could argue that those weren't the best of times, that while Clemons and Flutie and Pringle were playing out their magnificent careers, the CFL was run by the delusional and desperate, who set it on the path to self-destruction — before it finally was forced to return to its more modest roots.
But without the dreamers and schemers and the near-death experiences that went with them, consider how different the pantheon might look right now.
