As a farmer, Rod Lustig can truly appreciate a combined effort.
Lustig and three friends — Ken Fuchs, Bill Curtis and Tegan Huber — recently teamed up to win the largest 50/50 jackpot ever awarded after a Saskatchewan Roughriders regular-season game.
The total pot for the Sept. 3 Labour Day Classic against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers amounted to $535,073.
Half the amount will support youth mental health, wellness and amateur football in the province, via the Saskatchewan Roughrider Foundation. The remaining $267,851.50 will be split four ways, between Lustig, Fuchs, Curtis and Huber.
“I’m getting lots of advice from my kids on where to spend it,” Lustig, who farms near Bethune, says with a chuckle.
Lustig, 61, was working on the combine when the wheels were set in motion for a group purchase of 250 50/50 tickets, at a total expenditure of $150.
The idea was floated in a text-message group. It turned out that four of the participants decided to team up.
That was Step 1.
“Then it was a bit of an adventure, though, because nobody had a credit card (on their person),” Lustig says.
He eventually persuaded his wife, Nadine, to pay for the tickets on her credit card.
“Then there was a rain shower, so I went into the house and totally forgot about the 50/50,” Lustig says. “I watched the game on TV, and it was really exciting, so I got caught up in that.”
After purchasing the 50/50 tickets — with profuse thanks once again to Nadine — Lustig sent all the numbers to the entire text group.
One of the recipients who had decided to purchase tickets on his own checked the numbers to see if he had won. No such luck. But he did notice that one of Lustig’s numbers corresponded with the lucky digits.
“After the game, he said, ‘I think you won,’” Lustig recalls.
Sure enough …
“We were in total disbelief,” he says. “We were all excited at the end of the football game because the Riders had won in exciting fashion (32-30 in overtime).
“The next day, it started to sink in.”
The Saskatchewan Roughrider Foundation 50/50 is presented by Information Services Corporation (ISC), a Saskatchewan-headquartered international provider of registry and information management services. ISC is proud to present the Foundation 50/50 and to support many other community initiatives in Saskatchewan.
It felt like another lottery win for Lustig when he received a phone call a from Roughriders receiver Kian Schaffer-Baker.
“He called and congratulated us on the win,” says Lustig, who reciprocated. “It’s not every day that you get to talk to a Roughriders player, so that was nice.”
Better still was the formal receipt of the winnings. Lustig, Fuchs, Curtis and Huber visited Mosaic Stadium on Tuesday morning, when they were presented with a very large cheque — in terms of dollars and square inches.
The routine wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to Lustig, who about 20 years ago won a Ford Focus in the Friends of the Riders Touchdown Lottery.
“It lasted a long time, until my wife had a collision with it and totalled it off,” Lustig says with a laugh.
“They turned it into a beer can, I think, in 2009.”
