By Stampeder.com staff
The first three years of the Calgary Stampeders’ existence were relatively uneventful.
The end of World War II meant the return of professional football in Calgary as the newly created Stampeders took part in the 1945 Western Interprovincial Football Union playoffs (there was no regular that year because of the war).
The Stamps lost in the WIFU final in 1945 and then went 5-3 and 4-4 over the next two seasons with losses in the West final in each year.
After the 1947 season, there was a change on the sidelines as Dean Griffing was out as head coach and Les Lear was installed as player-coach.
To say the results were immediate would be an understatement. The 1948 Stampeders went undefeated in a 12-game regular season, ousted the Saskatchewan Roughriders in the two-game West final and then beat the Ottawa Rough Riders 12-7 to win Calgary’s first Grey Cup championship.
Part of Lear’s game plan for the 1948 Grey Cup was Norm Hill’s so-called sleeper play.
When quarterback Keith Spaith completed a pass to Woody Strode on one side of the field, Norm Hill flopped on the ground at the opposite side of the field. Hill essentially was hidden and, when the next play began, he sprung to his feet. Before Ottawa players could react, Hill was open to catch Spaith’s fluttery pass as he fell backwards in the end-zone.
In addition to being the Stamps’ first title, 1948 was also the year a group of rowdy Calgarians made the trip to Toronto for the big game — not to mention a horse that made its way into the Royal York hotel lobby — and launched the week-long Grey Cup coast-to-coast party that we know today.
For good measure, Lear won his first 10 games in 1949. All told, Lear started his Stampeders coaching career with a 24-0-1 mark in his first 25 games.
Things didn’t go nearly as well during the rest of Lear’s time in Calgary — the Stamps were 15-29 from 1950 to 1952 — but that unbeaten championship in 1948 gives him an honoured place in franchise and Canadian football history. It’s still the only unbeaten season in Canadian professional football history.
Lear’s Calgary stint is only part of his story as a Canadian football legend. He won a pair of Grey Cups (1939 and 1941) as a player with the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and in 1944 became the first Canadian-raised player to make it to the National Football League.
Born in Grafton, N.D., but raised in Manitoba, Lear played three seasons with the Cleveland/Los Angeles Rams and one with the Detroit Lions before joining the Stampeders in 1948.
Lear left football in the 1950s to become a very successful owner and trainer of thoroughbred horses in California.
He was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1974.