Ottawa Redblacks celebrating decade of football

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When the Ottawa Redblacks take the field at TD Place on Friday night against the Edmonton Elks, they will — as far as home games are concerned — officially be kicking off the second decade of their existence.

While they made their Canadian Football League debut on July 3, 2014, in Winnipeg, they played their first game in the nation’s capital 15 days later: July 18, 2014, against the Toronto Argos.

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Exactly 10 years and one day ago.

You will have your own memories of that nail-biting 18-17 victory, whether it’s the splashy pre-game ceremony, the last-minute 23-yard field goal by Brent Maher — his sixth three-pointer of the night — the 35-yard reception by Kierrie Johnson off a Henry Burris pass to set up that game-winning kick, the interception by Jasper Simmons of a Ricky Ray throw to seal the deal or the Gatorade shower the players gave coach Rick Campbell at the final gun.

For Mark Goudie, who was the Redblacks chief operating officer at the time, the night was, for the most part, a complete s*** show.

Literally.

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“We were just running for our lives, trying to finish the construction of the stadium so that we would be able to host that game on the 18th,” remembered Goudie, who is now the Redblacks president and CEO, as he looked at a bottle of champagne that will get cracked open after Friday’s game. “And we literally got the occupancy certificate, so our ability to actually occupy the concession stands and host a football game, hours before the game, which was hectic enough leading up to that.

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“About 15 minutes before the start of the game, we lost our biggest men’s washroom up in the northside stand and lost our biggest concession stand up in the north side stand. The bathrooms had construction materials stuck down into the piping in the toilets and the toilets backed up into the concession stands.”

A complete mess, as you can imagine.

“On top of people that were just really being trained on site and hawkers that didn’t really know how to hawk beer, it just turned into a chaotic kind of thing in the upper northside stands,” Goudie continued. “So we put an all-call out to any available staff, including me and our CEO at the time, Bernie Ashe, and anybody else that was around, to head to the northside stands and we became beer hawkers for the next two and a half hours.

“They were driving forklifts up the ramps with cases of beer and we would just stand there, selling beer to whoever was looking for them and stuffing money in beer cases. Obviously we had no ability to make change, so we had staff just making up their own prices, based on what they thought was reasonable and what people had on them that they could pay in cash bills.

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“So that’s kind of how things went for for a couple of hours up in the northside stands. It was a beautiful night and it was frantic. Everybody wanted a whole bunch of beers to enjoy their first professional football game in a while and that was our night.”

Goudie figures he saw the last two minutes of the game.

“Pretty memorable time,” he said. “I remember being yelled at by little old ladies because of the state of the upper north.”

From an organizational standpoint, there was great disappointment in the fact the party didn’t go off as planned. But there was also great anticipation for the next home game, against Saskatchewan, and the chance to get it right.

“I remember just being exhausted and kind of standing on the stairs and when Mahar kicked that field goal, it was ‘thank God,’” Goudie said. “Then we just held on for our lives to win the game and everybody went home happy.

“The next day, everybody was back in the office at 7 a.m. We acknowledged that’s not what we want things to be like at TD Place going forward. Nobody pointed any fingers. We just kind of said, ‘what do we need to do to get better, to fix it?’

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“I received a whole bunch of apologies from people that were the ones otherwise screaming and yelling up in the northside concourse, just saying they were so overcome with emotion and excited to be back, and lost their minds, and were really sorry for how it went, but love the fact that they’re back at football games and look forward to kind of a long journey with us.

“We worked really hard on that for two weeks and then, from an operations perspective, two weeks later, against Saskatchewan, we knocked it out of the park. We had a really, really solid game. Unfortunately, we got destroyed in that game on the football field, but it kind of set the tone for our organization going forward, that we knew what it felt like to provide good hospitality.

“And, you know, we wanted to make this a really special place to be able to come and enjoy not just sports, but all the other events that happen at TD Place. So it was kind of a really seminal moment, in the startup phase, and I think one that’s served us really well through through all of that we’ve done in the last 10 years.”

Goudie was in the tech industry before accepting the job offer from Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group (OSEG), and truth be told, he thought it was only a matter of time before he’d be going back.

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That was 12 years ago and he’s clearly happy to be where he is.

“I was here for 18 months before we opened up and there was a lot of super positive teamwork in those 18 months, as we just figured stuff out and solved problems, and figured out what things were going to look like,” he said. “And that was all positive energy. Opening night wasn’t right. It was disappointment.

“I think we were able to kind of feel the relief that we got this and look what we’ve been able to to bring back to Ottawa after that Saskatchewan game, when we saw that we did do a good job, and we’re going to do a good job going forward. There was not much back-patting happening until after that Saskatchewan game.”

The most special memories Goudie has had in the past decade include the famous “second and 25” pass from Burris to Greg Ellingson for the touchdown that sent the Redblacks to their first Grey Cup game in 2015 and the snowy game a year later in which “Kienan Lafrance ran for a billion yards (157 to be more precise),” that included Ellingson catching a pass in the in the end zone and made a snow angel.

“That snow angel was there for a couple of days,” Goudie recalled, “kind of as a homage to the fact that we’re going back to the Grey Cup.”

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He also obviously has very fond memories of the Redblacks winning the Grey Cup game against Calgary at BMO Field in Toronto that same year — although he gave away what would have been a pretty special souvenir from that victory.

“If you remember, we were up pretty big late in the game … I honestly didn’t expect us to win against a Calgary team that had kind of a record year,” Goudie said. “But then it was like, ‘Holy crap, we’re gonna win the Grey Cup.’ So I got out of my seat in the upper tier and onto the field to be able to be there. And then, if you remember, the sky started falling in and Calgary came back to tie the game, probably should have won it, not, if not for (Abdul Kanneh’s) shoestring tackle there near the end zone.

“I was standing on the sidelines and caught myself swearing more than I should be, so I sequestered myself into the back and in zone all by myself and I watched the rest of the game, including the overtime, right there. If you look at the video on that last pass that went incomplete by Calgary, the ball bounced right to me, so I ended up with game-winning football.

“I don’t have it anymore. I gave it to to (then GM) Marcel Desjardins, who was the architect of that Cup victory, after the game.”

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The “coolest moment of all” for Goudie happened at the parade two days later.

“If you remember, there was an ice storm that day and schools were closed and I thought, ‘this is going to be horrible, nobody is going to be showing up for this,’” he said. “We were marshalling just off Bank Street, up near the Queensway, and I was prepared to come around the corner and see nobody up Bank Street, but then we came around the corner and saw 50,000 or whatever it was people. It was took my breath away.

“At that time you had a chance to kind of relax. You weren’t running a football game or in Grey Cup. Got to decompress a little bit.

“To see the passion of the fans and all of the kids that weren’t in school that convinced their parents to come down for the parade, I think it’s something I’ll never be able to recreate.”

The goal now is to recreate that run in history that saw the Redblacks play three Grey Cup games in four years.

After slogging along with a 14-58 record the past four years, it looks like they just may be turning the corner.

“I think on the field, we’ve got the right people in the right places right now,” Goudie said. “We just need to learn how to trust ourselves and to win. I think we’re all cautiously optimistic about where we’re headed.

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“Off the field, we’ve seen the passion in Ottawa for professional football. Over the last four years, including a COVID year, there’s been the natural turnover that happens. Some of the angry turnover that happened, because we were  underachieving on the field hasn’t been replaced by new people coming into our particular season ticket base.

“I think as we prove that were back to where we need to be over this year, the next couple of years, I hope that grows again and we get back to where we were, which was selling out whole seasons at the TD Place. There’s something magical when you’re in a sold out game at a Redblacks game on a Friday night under the lights of TD Place.”

Slowly but surely, people are starting to remember that.

Goudie says the June 30 game against Hamilton — a pre-Canada Day victory over the Hamilton Ticats — was the “second biggest casual ticket sales game we’ve had in our history.”

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The first was when Johnny Manziel, the former Heisman Trophy winner and first-round NFL pick, came to town as quarterback of the Ticats.

“The group sales have been very good, it’s really just our season ticket base,” Goudie said. “We’re probably at about 12,000 now. At our high we were 17,000, so I think if we want to get back to, you know, 16,500, 16,000 … that gives us under 10,000 seats to sell on a game day basis. I think that puts us in a good place.

“I think that’s not going to happen because we win two or three a row in a row at home. It’s going to happen because we’re back to being competitive and exciting and winning and hosting playoff games, and that’ll happen over the next couple of years.”

dbrennan@postmedia.com

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