Stampeders set to honour star-studded 1998 Grey Cup championship team

“One. Damn. Chance.”

Twenty-five years later, those three words still resonate with members of the Calgary Stampeders' 1998 Grey Cup champion team that will be honoured during Friday's game versus the Winnipeg Blue Bombers at McMahon Stadium. 

“One. Damn. Chance.”

Ahead of the 1998 championship game in Winnipeg against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats (which Calgary won 26-24 on a last-second field goal by Mark McLoughlin), first-year offensive line coach Dan Dorazio delivered a rousing pre-game speech that still gives Stamps alumni chills.

“The main line I remember, and Dan was a fiery guy, is, ‘You’ve got one damn chance. You’ve got one chance to win with this group of people,’” said former Stampeders fullback and current TSN colour commentator Duane Forde. 

“That’s something that has always stood out to me from that game.”

Dorazio still recalls that speech and the message he was trying to impart to a team that had experienced several playoff disappointments after winning the 1992 championship. 

“I said, ‘We have 37 guys and 37 guys playing with one heartbeat,’” Dorazio, now an assistant with the UBC Thunderbirds, recalled.

After that 1992 Grey Cup win, the Stamps finished first in the West Division the following four seasons and won a combined 57 regular season games, plus a second-place showing in 1997, but had fallen short of another title. Those Stampeders teams, led by coach Wally Buono and featuring the likes of Doug Flutie, Allen Pitts, and Alondra Johnson, felt they could have and should have won more. The 1998 Grey Cup in Winnipeg was a culmination of five years of hard work and lessons learned the hard way.

“I just made a point that it’s a team,” Dorazio said. “Everybody’s in it together and we’ve all got to be together…we’re all going to play with one heartbeat. We’re going to play hard and we’re going to win.”

Jay McNeil, a star offensive lineman for that team and now the Stampeders’ vice-president of business operations, said Dorazio delivered another inspirational message ahead of the West Final versus Edmonton.

“It was one of the most intense speeches I’d ever heard,” McNeil said. “Guys were truly ready to run through the wall…[the message] was along the lines of, ‘How long will it be acceptable to not win the championship? Or are we going to change that today? It was a great message because we had come up short.”

The Stamps would go on to trounce Edmonton 33-10 and the team asked Dorazio to deliver another pre-game speech a week later in Winnipeg ahead of the Grey Cup.

“It still gives me chills thinking about it,” McNeil said.

That Stampeders squad was equal parts talented, hard-working, and tight-knit, a star-studded cast including future NFL Pro Bowl quarterback Jeff Garcia (who would be named the 1998 Grey Cup MVP), running back Kelvin Anderson, and Grey Cup Most Valuable Canadian Vince Danielsen. Current Stampeders head coach and general manager Dave Dickenson was a backup quarterback as well. 

“We had a culture where the guys were proven veterans,” Buono said. “They had high expectations…a lot of guys had been with us a lot of years and their roles had changed at times.”

“You always prepared to the point that it allowed you to be very confident,” Forde said, crediting Buono.

“It wasn’t an arrogance…we kind of knew that we had worked harder than everybody else and that we were always going to be mentally and physically tougher and more ready to play.”

He still recalls how tight-knit that group of men was.

“It was the kind of team where when we traveled, you almost could have pick names out of a hat as to who was going to room together,” Forde said.

“Any two-person combinations in a room, they were going to get along fine…everybody got along very well and liked each other, respected each other, supported each other. It was a pretty cool environment.”

In his role leading the business side of the club he once starred for, McNeil sees Friday’s celebration as both nostalgia for the past and giving current fans and Stampeders players a glimpse of franchise greats. 

“You want the fans that remember that team to come experience that and to relive it with the group,” McNeil said, “But also to our new fans to understand the tradition that this organization has.”