There is many a thing that can stir the seeds of nostalgia.
Take the current undefeated 5-0-0 record that the Sudbury Spartans are sporting, with dreams of an undefeated regular season firmly entrenched in their minds.
At a glance, many of the partisans who make it a point a couple of times a summer to come out and take in a game or two with the silver and blue in action would quickly attest to the fact that it had been some time since they can recall a similar claim being made by the local NFC’ers.
Some time indeed.
In 1960, the Sudbury Hardrocks ran the table during the regular season (6-0-0), only to fall 47-37 to North Bay in the two-game total point league final (time to dole out my appropriate thank you to John Metcalfe for these statistical nuggets).
Nine years later, the Spartans strung together ten straight wins and beat North Bay 32-22 in a two-game final before being outclassed in the national final, losing 62-7 to the St Vital Mustangs from Winnipeg, Manitoba.
In 1985, however, the Spartans endured not a single loss, putting together a 7-0-1 campaign, moving on to eliminate the winless Brampton Bears (41-6) in the semi-finals before stopping the Oakville Longhorns 27-25 in an outstanding championship final.
NFC records were falling by the wayside with regularity that year – the sort of thing that happens when you close out your schedule with a 75-7 shellacking of the rival Soo Steelers. In throwing for 384 yards against the Soo, quarterback Paul Gauthier bumped his season total to 2,017 yards, easily eclipsing the previous league mark by nearly two hundred yards.
After setting a new record for completions the previous summer, the future NFC Hall of Famer would bump that bar up even further, adding 18 to his total and raising the standard to 141 passes.
In his third season with the team, St Charles College graduate Neri Fratin would add 186 yards to his receiving numbers, giving him 597 on the season and sliding ahead of teammate Jeff Bell in that category.
Despite these gaudy offensive statistics, it was a defensive play which ultimately allowed the Sudbury side to hoist the hardware.
Trailing 27-19, Oakville signal-caller Mark Demerling marched the Longhorns the length of the field, capping a last minute drive with a 10 yard touchdown pass to Kevin Ford with just 10 seconds showing on the clock.
Thankfully for the bulk of the 1500 fans on hand at Queen’s Athletic Field, defenders Rob Irvine and Scott Spurgeon were in perfect position to stop Ford just short of the goal line as the visitors opted for a running play in trying to force overtime via a two-point conversion.
That said, the cushion the Spartans enjoyed actually came roughly five minutes earlier when rookie defensive back Mike Stevenson intercepted a Demerling pass and scampered 38 yards down the sidelines to give Sudbury a 27-11 lead. But with Longhorns’ special team threat Bob Riley giving his team great field position on multiple occasions, this contest was far from over.
That definitely did not surprise the left-handed gunslinger that went on to coach high-school football for many years with the Collège Notre-Dame Alouettes. “That’s a typical game between Sudbury and Oakville,” suggested Paul Gauthier, now retired from teaching, living just outside of the nickel city, but in Ottawa for at least part of the summer, helping build his daughter a new home.
“Those early eighties games that we played were always back and forth. We were really well matched up. They had a great quarterback in Demerling and they had those huge offensive linemen that they would get from the CFL cuts. We always had a great rivalry with those guys.”
Interestingly enough, for as much as four championships in a row is one heck of an accomplishment, Gauthier still laments the chance to make it six as the Spartans blitzed the Brampton Bears 42-22 two years later, after losing their crown in 1986 to Oakville.
“That was a mud bowl in Sudbury,” he recalled. “We were down near their goal line late and passing the football was like throwing a Vaseline-coated watermelon. I remember (Brandon) Dougan was open coming across the middle near the five yard line and I missed him by about three feet.”
Still, Gauthier marveled at the environment that existed in and around the Sudbury summer football tradition that is the Sudbury Hardrocks / Spartans, even as he acknowledged how much more difficult it is today to duplicate all that existed back then.
“I can remember having fifty guys at practice,” said Gauthier. “I think the biggest difference is that in the early eighties, none of the businesses were open past six o’clock at night. Nothing was open except for Thursdays and Fridays. The poor kids now want a summer job but everything is open until 9:00, 10:00, 11:00 p.m., or 24 hours.”
“It’s tough for these kids to commit because they have to work to go to school.”
All of which allows someone who has been there to appreciate even more the 2022 edition of his old team, a squad which has absolutely benefitted from a favourable schedule, but also from attracting a group of young men who differ from most of what has been seen since the turn of the millennium or so.
“I was just talking to Junior (Spartans head coach Junior Labrosse) last night and he was saying that practice attendance has been really good, guys have been buying in. I think that’s what winning does; it gets the kids motivated.”
And in that sense, it doesn’t get much better than an undefeated season.
