Dad was a Gray Cup champion. I want to hate what the game did to him but it’s not that easy

This first-person account is the experience of Hayley Chown, who lives in Toronto and is the daughter of two-time Gray Cup champion Gary Chown. For more information on CBC’s first-person stories, please visit FAQ ,

One of my earliest memories is of rotating a large gold ring with mysterious inscriptions. My dad’s gray cup ring. He played for the Montreal Alouettes for four seasons in the 1970s.

The neighborhood kids and I displayed the signed Alouettes logo on the tops of our hands, where my father had stamped it on each of us, one by one, and pressed for a few seconds to ensure a good impression on our skin.

Apart from those “Alouettes tickets”, football made no impression on me.

Dad had a daughter who was equally a horse girl, theater artist and history buff.

Football became a symbol of what I disliked: brute force, aggressive masculinity, the disability of the body. So I kept it at a distance.

Instead of forcing football on me, he supported me in the things I loved. Even though he was allergic to horses, he still took allergy pills and drove me to the barn three times a week, helped by carrying tack boxes to the car at my horse shows and always made sure I was well-fed for competitions.

When my father’s health declined rapidly in 2024, I realized I needed to return the favor, to support him in his greatest passion. So I took up the game the best way I knew how and through one of the passions nurtured by my father: connecting with history. Once I realized I didn’t need to know about punts, yardlines and sacks to be close to him, but I could dive into newspapers and scrapbooks, I was in.

One evening, I looked over Dad’s shoulder as he sat at the kitchen table watching grainy football footage on his laptop. The 1977 Gray Cup game between Montreal and Edmonton.

“Where are you, dad?”

“I’m number 26,” he said.

I could see him. We were taken back in time.

He swings his arm like a sickle with his head bent towards his opponent. He reduces the progress of the enemy. Falters. Sliding against artificial turf that would burn icy hot through its tiny treads. The whistle blows. He picks himself up with surprising ease for a 230-pound linebacker.

As we continue to watch together, I can tell by my father’s voice how much he longs for the younger self who runs back to the shore, at the bottom of the frame. The man clenches her hand into a fist and presses it towards himself in triumph. With his hands on his hips, fingers crossed, he surveys the frozen battlefield. The camera zooms in. A cloud of hot breath emerges from his helmet. Only his eyes are visible through the mask, but I can tell he’s proud of his work.

Later, and while digging through the albums, I come across a photo taken a few hours after that game. That chalice: frozen in a sip of champagne from a gray cup. This is the highlight of his career, a tremendous win.

But my father’s athletic performance also made a tremendous impact. Beneath that so-called armor – the helmet – lies another secret: trauma.

The last time I saw her, I asked a question I’d been wondering about after years of watching her painful smiles and frustrations with her body. Shoulders do not rotate properly and loss of sensation in the hands.

Dad had his hand placed just above his knee, the gem in his 1977 Gray Cup ring gleaming.

“Dad, do you think how much damage playing football has done to your body?”

He looked straight at me.

“About 95 percent.”

Perhaps he expected to find evidence of this statistic when he became a participant in a study about the long-term effects of repeated concussions in professional athletes., Ten years ago, as part of his research, he donated his time to various cognitive assessments. And just a few months ago, he kept his post-mortem promise: He donated his brain.

I didn’t fully appreciate it until I discovered the impact football could have on him A concussion can be caused by a blow to any part of the body, if the force of the blow causes the brain to move around inside the skullAnd repeated hits – in football parlance – can cause a fatal brain pathology known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE),

A scan of the brain of a CTE victim highlights its severity. Black spots – some delicate, others heavy – scatter across the delicate surface. This accumulation of tau protein is fatal, destroying nerve cells.

The CFL has taken measures to minimize the impact of the concussion. Now it allows protector capA soft shell placed over a hard helmet, designed to reduce impact. Still, the Guardian Cap website tells me that no device can prevent shock. We only have one brain.

There is another image. One I’ll probably never see: a scan of my dad’s brain. I imagine dirty spots. Fossilized remains of tackles, fumbles, collisions. To win, they endured repeated beatings and learned to move through human walls. In doing so, he set himself up for loss.

I want to hate the game that did this to my father. Then I remember the liveliness of his football stories and the bounce in his voice when he recalled the moments he was so eager to return to. I realize this would be a betrayal.

So how do I remember him? My father’s ring is forever imprinted in my memory. But his sacrifice is also similar. His desire to dedicate himself after death, without the promise of any cup or ring. Undoubtedly, this is my father’s biggest victory.

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