Over 14 seasons, the Saskatchewan Roughriders quarterbacks collaborated with Ray Elgaard to the tune of 830 catches, 13,198 receiving yards and 78 touchdowns.
And it all began when a member of the CFL team’s front office called his number on Feb. 15, 1983.
Shortly before the phone rang, the future Canadian Football Hall of Famer had been drafted in the second round, with the 12th overall selection.
Looking at it 40 years later — as Tuesday’s CFL Draft looms — the landscape as it existed back then was unimaginable.
But it was all very real to a 23-year-old Ray Elgaard, who was coming off his senior season at the University of Utah. He had played tight end at the Salt Lake City-based campus for two years after attending Golden West Community College in Huntington Beach, Calif.
“It was cool that I was drafted in the second round in the CFL,” he recalls from his home in Las Vegas.
“Up until that point, I hadn’t had a conversation with anybody. I didn’t know I was being scouted. I was just playing my senior year.
“Nobody ever talked to me about any of it — not a word. There was not a single conversation with anybody associated with the CFL.
“After my senior year was over, I just carried on with my time at Utah until somebody phoned and said, ‘Here. Come to Saskatchewan.’
“It was a cool experience — although there wasn’t much of an experience to it.
“There wasn’t any fanfare. There wasn’t any expectation. There weren’t any sort of nervous moments because the draft was coming.
“I didn’t know it was coming, frankly.”
Nobody in the CFL had the slightest inkling of what was coming at the time Elgaard was drafted.
Otherwise, he would not have lasted until the second round. Or until the second overall pick, for that matter.
As it was, 11 players — including linebacker Mike Emery, who went third overall to Saskatchewan — were selected before Elgaard.
So what happened? Or, more to the point, what didn’t happen everywhere else but at Roughriders’ draft central?
Monte Charles, the Green and White’s receivers coach of the day, shed some light on the situation in a 1983, post-draft interview with Jens Nielsen of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
“A lot of people thought maybe he was a 5.0,” Charles told Nielsen, referencing a long-discredited myth about Elgaard’s rumoured time in the 40-yard dash, “but we have a good contact down there (in Utah) and he’s a legitimate 4.7 man.
“He’s tough, has good hands, and was a producer in college. He’s a dynamic-type person who loves to play.”
Those numbers — 5.0, and even 4.7 — were news to Elgaard.
“I don’t know anything about it,” he says. “I’d never heard any of these stories until they were being written about in camp. I wasn’t aware of any reports, good or bad.
“But if that’s a true story, it’s ridiculous, because somebody gave them a bad steer. I never ran a 40-yard dash in five seconds. I could have run a 50-yard dash in five seconds.
“I was running 4.6s at Utah and I ran a 4.6 when I got to training camp. That was the end of that story.”
And the start of something special — considering that the 6-foot-3, 220-pound Elgaard became only the second CFL player to record eight 1,000-yard seasons, sparkled in the playoffs for the 1989 Grey Cup champions, and was thrice decorated as the league’s most outstanding Canadian.
“When Ray came into his first camp, they were doing ‘skelly’ drills — receivers versus defensive backs — and it was easy to see that Ray would walk on to the team,’ ” recalls 2003 Hall of Fame inductee Dave Ridgway, a Roughrider from 1982 to 1995.
“You could see that just from watching. And, as a kicker, I got to watch a lot of it.”
It helped that a few key people were watching out for Elgaard — people like Ron Morehouse and Ron McBride.
Morehouse, a CFL linebacker from 1979 to 1983, coached Elgaard with the Vancouver Meralomas juvenile football team in the late 1970s.
“(Morehouse) pulled me aside and said he could send me to college,” Elgaard recalls. “I thought, ‘OK, great.’
“It was an event that I didn’t create, other than being a guy who was playing something, but somebody else stood up in front of me and said, ‘Go do this and I’ll make it happen for you,’ so I said, ‘Yeah, OK.’ ”
Morehouse played an instrumental role in Elgaard and two members of the junior Meralomas — Gerald Roper and Dean Claridge — joining the football program at Golden West Community College.
McBride entered the equation in the early 1980s.
At that time, he was the Utah Utes’ offensive co-ordinator, and the NCAA team happened to be looking for tight end.
The Utes’ brass was intrigued by a junior college All-American who was at Golden West, but the interest was not reciprocal. However, the understudy — Elgaard — had impressed the Golden West coaches to the extent that one of them whispered to McBride: “You might like this Canadian kid.”
McBride proceeded to do his homework in trademark fashion.
“I was the kind of guy he liked to recruit,” Elgaard says. “He’s a guy who has confidence in his own ability to be a coach, so he’s looking for a person. He’s looking for a body that could do the things that needed to be done and he’s looking for an attitude.
“When I got to Utah, the team was full of guys like me — good athletes and tough guys who maybe didn’t have some pedigree or didn’t have this or didn’t have that. We were a team of renegades — guys who were on the edge or fell off the rails or whatever.
“He figures out that I’m possibly that kind of a guy, but he doesn’t have any film, and I’m not a starting tight end. He tells me later: ‘I can’t give you a scholarship. I can’t justify this. I can’t tell my head coach to look at this guy,’ because I was hardly playing.’ ”
Fortuitously, Elgaard was playing rugby on the side, so he invited McBride to check out a match in Huntington Beach.
“So he comes to this game and I’m doing what I always did in rugby,” Elgaard says. “I’m kicking converts and I’m scoring tries and I’m knocking people out. I’m a one-man wrecking crew in this rugby game.
“McBride marched out on to the field after the game and said, ‘You’re coming to Utah! You’re going to be Ute!’ So that’s where I went.
“There’s an example of what doesn’t happen anymore, even in college. Now they get on their computer and they read their stats and they have all the film that gets mailed to them. They don’t have to get in their cars and drive around and meet the people and sit down and try to get inside your head.
“But they did that back then. McBride was one of those guys who did that and he knew what he was looking for.”
And he loved what he saw.
“It was a no-brainer,” McBride, now 83, says from Salt Lake City. “He was tough, he was athletic, and he had foot skills. All he needed was to get a little better training.
“I always wanted to see what kind of athlete a player was. I did that type of thing a lot. I’d go to see a guy play basketball to see if he could change direction, for example. If I wasn’t sure about someone, I’d put him in some other athletic event to see if he was what we wanted him to be. If he was, then we’d coach him up.”
As a first-year university player, Elgaard caught 18 passes for 265 yards and three touchdowns.
He followed up in 1982 by making 10 receptions for 202 yards and three scores. Most memorably, he caught six passes for 168 yards and two touchdowns as the Utes routed the Utah State Aggies 42-10 on Nov. 6, 1982.
It was the type of game with which Roughriders fans — and overmatched rival defensive backs — would become very familiar.
After an impressive training camp and pre-season, Elgaard made his CFL debut on July 7, 1983 against the host Montreal Concordes. Starting at slotback, he made one reception for 17 yards in the Roughriders’ 21-14, opening-night victory.
The following week, Elgaard caught three passes for 16 yards in a 50-19 home-field loss to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Included was a seven-yard toss from John Hufnagel that produced Elgaard’s first CFL touchdown.
After that, the Roughriders’ coaches reactivated slotback Chris DeFrance — who had spent the first two games of 1983 on the reserve list despite recording back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons — and started him alongside fellow American slotback Ron Robinson.
Over the course of the 1983 season, Elgaard caught seven passes for 41 yards in 15 games.
At the time, he was wearing No. 72 — after donning 75 during his introductory CFL training camp.
By 1984, however, he was resplendent in what would become the familiar No. 81 jersey.
“I hated Number 72,” Elgaard explains. “Whenever I had a chance to speak up and pick my own number, I took it. I said, ‘I don’t want that (bleeping) number on my back.’
“Number 81 was available and I had it in college, so I took it. I wouldn’t have cared if it was some other number. I didn’t search it out because I wore it at Utah. I searched it out because 72 felt like a 15-pound weight — and 81 was available so, ‘Great, give me that one.’ ”
When they started giving him the ball, oh, was it something!
After going without a reception in each of the first two games of the 1984 season, Elgaard caught 18 passes over the next eight contests while re-emerging as a starter, alongside DeFrance.
Then came a four-game flurry in which Elgaard emerged as the formidable force who would dominate for more than a decade.
Sept. 16, 1984: Elgaard caught four passes for 104 yards in a 21-18 victory over the host Toronto Argonauts. In addition to scoring a 48-yard touchdown on a shovel pass, he made a 30-yard reception late in the fourth quarter to set up Joe Paopao’s 14-yard, game-winning TD toss to Craig Ellis as time expired.
Sept. 22, 1984: Elgaard made five receptions for 98 yards, including a 29-yard TD strike from Paopao, in a 37-28 road victory over the B.C. Lions.
Sept. 30, 1984: Led by seven catches and 115 yards by Elgaard, Saskatchewan downed the visiting Ottawa Rough Riders 31-15.
Oct. 6, 1984: Elgaard caught five passes for 84 yards in a 30-24 conquest of Montreal at Taylor Field. A 21-yard major gave him three TDs in four games — all of which were Saskatchewan victories.
During that winning streak, Elgaard made 21 receptions for 401 yards — an average of 19.1 yards per catch — and scored all three of the touchdowns he would register in 1984. On the season, he caught 45 passes for 744 yards in 16 games.
Come 1985, he hit the ground running, befitting someone who used pre-snap motion — the waggle — to considerable effect during a legendary career.
Elgaard caught 79 passes for 1,193 yards in 1985 en route to being named a CFL All-Star for the first of four times. He also made the West Division’s dream team on six occasions.
“That didn’t surprise me,” McBride says of Elgaard’s excellence in the CFL. “That league was ideal for someone with his skill set, someone who runs that well, and someone as strong as he is.
“He’d just make people hurt when they’d try to tackle him.”
Such was the uniqueness of Ray Elgaard.
There hasn’t been anyone like him — before or since.
Depending on what was required at the time, he could run over or past would-be defenders.
A consummate technician and student of the game, he possessed an absolute command of the offence and was therefore quarterback-friendly in every respect.
All these years later, Elgaard remains grateful to the Rons — Morehouse and McBride — and everyone else who helped along the way.
“The moons aligned and certain people showed up here and there and that’s what happened,” Elgaard reflects.
“I got drafted by the Roughriders and the moons aligned. They needed what I had and they showed up and offered me a place to go and away I went.
“It’s a great story — the type of story that will never happen again.”
He remains grateful that it happened just once, which was all it took.
“If you know the inside story and you were the person who lived it, it was very cool,” says Elgaard, 63, who entered the SaskTel Plaza of Honour in 1999 and was called to the Hall three years later.
“It was an honour to be drafted and an honour to play in the league and an honour to play for Saskatchewan. I’ve got very good thoughts and memories about it all.
“I tell people all the time that it was a great job. I didn’t get rich. You get a little bit of fame, but you get zero fortune. You get your ass beat up and you’re all broken down, but it’s a great job.
“I feel very fortunate that all these different circumstances happened for me. I earned it, so I don’t look at it like somebody just handed it to me. But it was an interesting life and I’m fortunate for having it.”
