I’m already feeling mixed emotions about the upcoming CFL season. Mini-camp is well underway in Florida so the farewell season at Taylor Field is just around the corner. There’s both a happy and a sad feel to it. Happy that it looks like the Saskatchewan Roughriders assembled a good team in the offseason and we will see this team playing respectable again. Sad because it’s the last time we’ll all congregate in the old concrete, steel, wood, and tin monolith for games at the classic Taylor Field. It’s the place we all have gathered so many times before. These are my tales of Taylor Field, and I encourage you to share yours in the comments.
Taylor Field- A Special Place
I remember it was around 11 PM on a weekend night in August 1992. My friend and I drove to Mosaic Stadium with a couple of teenage boys from southern Ontario who had been in Regina visiting their cousin. The Riders had unfortunately been away for consecutive weeks. Taylor Field, as it was known then, and will always be known to many, wasn’t exactly the landmark it is today. I remember us Queen City kids contemplating sneaking in to show the guys around. It would have been a cinch.
After a quick huddle we agreed that it wouldn’t be right to elude the barriers; it bordered on the desecration of a place that held many spirits of the non-potable variety. Somehow we felt that Neil “Piffles” Taylor himself would know and disapprove of our presence. Maybe Eagle Keys would convince God to strike us down with a bolt of lightning? It’s not that our moral standards were so high that that sneaking in would have been out of the question. It just didn’t feel like the right thing to do at the time, or ever.
I’m not one for ghost stories, but spirits do inhabit this old relic – not just players and coaches, but fans too. I’m reminded of my friend’s grandfather, who was in his 70s. He was ordered by his doctor to stay away from the stadium because the way the Riders were playing, he might have another severe heart attack. Yes, another. It was a considerable risk for anyone watching the early-to-mid 1990s editions of the Riders. I’d be absolutely amazed if he wasn’t peering in regularly from his spot in the prairie skies.
The Toronto Blue Jays
The two games that I watched where the Toronto Blue Jays play the Canadian National team were life changing. The first game, I was maybe seven or eight-years-old, was full of my childhood baseball heroes and I was glued to the action from behind home plate. At the second game, a few years later, we acquired spots just over the left field wall. Man, did we get a lot of homers that day! Balls came off of bats of Kelly Gruber and Fred McGriff. I later saw the Jays at the Skydome in Toronto and I don’t remember having nearly as much fun. The games in Regina made a Jays fan out of me and many in Southern Saskatchewan.
My Personal Experiences
I played just enough football at Dr. Martin LeBoldus high school to call myself a Golden Sun, but I was more of a soccer and basketball player. If there is one unhappy memory of my minuscule experience playing at Taylor Field, it might be the road-rash the old omni-turf gave me when I slid on it. Ouch! 20-plus years later, I’m still healing.
My mother and father were inspired by the 1989 Grey Cup victory and bought season tickets for the first time in 1990. They were fans long before that, but only occasionally went to games. My parents and I sat in that stadium rain or shine through the lean, and downright scary, years. For fans like us, the decade was highlighted by attending the 1995 Grey Cup. It was the first of the three Grey Cups that Regina has hosted, and it saw the Baltimore Stallions crowned champions. “Huddle up” we did for the first, and only foreseeable, Grey Cup won by an American city and without a Canadian on the roster. The family seats were eventually given up as my dad wasn’t getting any younger. What began with a Grey Cup in ’89 culminated with a Grey Cup in 2013, and by 2014, I attended less than a handful of games. Call it a Grey Cup hangover if you want.
I was spent – or at least I thought I was. The year 2014, a big year in its own right around Regina, marked 30 years since my first year as a season ticket holder in the old Safeway section. (Tickets were just $10 for the entire year back then!) I never thought that by watching this football team at Taylor Field I would be reporting on the Riders for Last Word On Sports in 2015. To have press access to this great theatre of football was like finding a pearl in a clam. Clams are great but pearls are valuable. No big deal — just access to media rooms, the locker room, players, guys like George Reed and Scott Schultz, coaches, staff, and other media personalities. It was really special and I thank Michael Kovacs, Lance Keiser, Matt Bin, Ryan Pollock and everyone else involved.
Thank you Saskatchewan Roughriders. Thank you Saskatchewan. Thank you Regina. Thank you Mosaic Corp. Thank you Rider fans. Thank you to Louise, Ryan, Brett, Tim, Ron, Rob, Carm, Rod, Craig, Jim, and Tom.
Thank you to the people whose taxes went up the first time, and continue to go up now, to fund my favourite playground. Thanks for building a special facility and keeping it mostly great right up until its end. Thanks for the laughs, and to the builders themselves for the cheers, the jeers, the thrills, the Jays, the pre-game BBQ system in which you purchase the bun before you get the meat, the pee-troughs, the tears, the elation, the flyovers by the Snowbirds and Royal Canadian Air Force, and for all the other wonderful memories. You did it right once, Regina, and from all early indications this city is about to repeat history.
But we’ll always love Taylor Field and we’ll never forget you.
Main Photo.
