Gerry James, pictured in Red Deer, Alta., on Nov. 23, 2012, holds bragging rights to one achievement no one can match. In 1959, James starred for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and helped them win the Grey Cup for the second year in a row. That same 1959-60 NHL season he took to the ice for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the Stanley Cup Finals, where they lost to the powerhouse Montreal Canadiens.JEFF STOKOE/The Canadian Press
On Nov. 28, 1959, Gerry James kicked five points for football’s Blue Bombers in a 21-7 victory over Hamilton. After the game, Mr. James carried the Grey Cup around a jubilant Winnipeg locker-room, tilting it forward so teammates could swig champagne from the bowl.
Just four months and 10 days later, on April 7, 1960, he was on the ice at the Montreal Forum as his Toronto Maple Leafs faced the Canadiens in the first game of the Stanley Cup finals.
In Canada’s rich sporting history, filled with remarkable multisport stars including Lionel (Big Train) Conacher, only one athlete has ever competed in the Grey Cup game and Stanley Cup finals in the same season.
Mr. James, who has died at 89, was called Kid Dynamite, an exciting nickname inherited in part by following in the cleats of his football-playing father, who was known as Dynamite.
On the gridiron, Mr. James returned kickoffs, booted field goals, and rushed the ball with a ferocity matched by few of his peers. He won the inaugural award as football’s outstanding Canadian player in 1954, collecting a $500 prize. Three seasons later, he scampered for 18 rushing touchdowns, a record that would last 34 years. The feat earned him his second title as outstanding Canadian, and he was runner-up to hockey’s Maurice (Rocket) Richard in voting for the Lou Marsh Award as Canadian male athlete of the year.
A key figure in a Blue Bombers dynasty, he played in five Grey Cup games with Winnipeg, helping his team win three. He missed the 1958 victory while recuperating from a broken leg.
On the ice, he was more of a physical than a scoring threat. Football commitments kept him from playing a full season, so he was used by the Leafs as a fourth-line winger on a line with Garry (Duke) Edmundson and Johnny Wilson. Their purpose was to cause mayhem.
“I wasn’t there to score goals,” Mr. James told writer Ron Smith for Kid Dynamite: The Gerry James Story, a 2011 biography. “I was hired to defend. I was an enforcer. At those two jobs, I was pretty good.”
For all his success at the highest levels of two professional sports, he never fully escaped the shadow of his hard-living father, an early football star who had a reputation as “the roughest, toughest player in the west,” according to Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.
Edwin Fitzgerald James was born in Regina on Oct. 22, 1934, to the former Moira Kathleen Fitzgerald and Eddie James. He was the second of two boys. Fourteen months after his birth, his father won the Grey Cup while playing as a halfback for Winnipeg, the first time the Dominion’s football championship had been won by a Western-based team.
The senior Mr. James enlisted in the war effort, serving overseas with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. His marriage ended not long after he returned at the end of the war. Eddie James died on Boxing Day in 1958 of a liver ailment.
Gerry James emerged as a football star for Winnipeg’s Kelvin High Klippers, while also earning notice in baseball, hockey, speed skating and track. He boasted uncommonly strong legs, developed as he bicycled his newspaper route in all seasons, pedalling even through slush and snow.
The earliest reports of his athletic exploits referred to him as a “son of,” a description he carried long after his father’s untimely death.
James catches a football in 1961. He earned a reputation as an outstanding football player as a kicker and running back, and one of the top Canadians to play the game.Supplied
The Winnipeg Monarchs added the 16-year-old youth to their roster for the Memorial Cup playoffs for hockey’s national junior championship. The Monarchs lost to the Barrie (Ont.) Flyers, but scout Squib Walker liked the young player’s rambunctiousness, signing him to the Maple Leafs organization. Mr. James won a Memorial Cup in 1955 with the Toronto Marlboros.
Mr. James skated for the Marlies while attending Runnymede Collegiate, where he starred on the gridiron and won a 100-yard race in a high school track meet with a time of 10.3.
In the summer of 1952, Mr. James was invited to the Blue Bombers’ training camp. He was “green as grass, but as eager and willing as possible,” reported Bob Moir in his Pigskin Parade column for the Winnipeg Free Press. He surprised many by making the roster of the Western Interprovincial Football Union team, a spot likely claimed when he knocked out a veteran Ottawa end with a punishing block during an exhibition game. A James tackle was compared to running into a stone wall. He earned $50 per week.
He and fellow rookie Tom Casey proved an elusive and tricky pair of punt returners, using deft, open-field running and timely lateral passes to bamboozle opponents. As a fullback, the 5-foot-11, 185-pound Mr. James displayed fancy footwork and breakneck speed, as well as an ability to occasionally bowl over opponents, the latter a style preferred by his father. The youngster was immediately adopted as a favourite by Winnipeg fans.
In the 1953 Grey Cup game, Mr. James scored Winnipeg’s only touchdown (at the time worth five points) on a one-yard plunge in a 12-6 loss to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. The sophomore player gained 167 total yards, more than any other player, on 48 yards rushing, 16 on passes, and 103 on returning kicks. He also played defence in the game.
When the 18-year-old stepped onto the field at Varsity Stadium in Toronto, he made the Jameses the second father-son combination to have played in the Grey Cup after Bob Isbister Senior and Junior.
He fumbled four times in the 1957 Grey Cup game after suffering a broken knuckle on his right hand when stepped on by a Hamilton player in the first quarter of a 32-7 blowout by the Easterners. (The game is remembered in Grey Cup lore for Hamilton’s Ray (Bibbles) Bawel being tackled by a fan to prevent a touchdown.)
A one-yard touchdown run, two clutch field goals and two converts by Mr. James for a total of 14 points helped the Blue Bombers win the 1961 Grey Cup against Hamilton, by 21-14 in overtime.
The following season, Mr. James kicked four converts as Winnipeg again defeated Hamilton, 28-27, in a two-day championship game interrupted by foul weather and remembered as the Fog Bowl.
Mr. James skipped the 1963 football season when Winnipeg offered a cut in pay. He returned for the 1964 season with the Saskatchewan Roughriders before retiring as the second all-time scorer in the Canadian Football League. His 645 points trailed only the great Jackie Parker.
For many years, he kept secret an injury to his right eye suffered in a hockey game which limited his vision.
In 1958, Mr. James suffered an injury knocking him out of action in two sports when hit by Jack Hill of the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
“He didn’t tackle me so much as pull me down,” Mr. James told an Ottawa newspaper afterwards. “My cleats stuck and I was twisted. Something had to give, and it was my left leg – fractured just above the ankle.”
After he retired from sports, medical tests indicated he had suffered several concussions, though he exhibited no cognitive effects. According to Ron MacLean’s book Hockey Towns, Mr. James agreed to donate his brain to the London Health Sciences Centre at Western University.
Playing in the era before hockey players wore helmets, the rough-and-tumble player recounted a short span of games in 1960 during which he kayoed one of hockey’s toughest players, cut Eddie Shack of the New York Rangers for 25 stitches, and broke the jaw of Chicago’s Eric Nesterenko.
“I knocked out Ted Lindsay with one punch and that had to be one of the happiest days of my life,” he once told the Regina Leader-Post. “I picked up 26 minutes in penalties that game – three minors, two majors and a misconduct.”
Once, Detroit’s Gordie Howe cut him with the blade of his stick for seven stitches, the incision so precise the victim wondered whether Mr. Hockey had a razor tied to his stick.
In what would be Mr. James’s final season with the Maple Leafs, assistant general manager King Clancy promised him a $25 bonus if he scored five goals. He got four.
Mr. James left the NHL after rejecting a Leafs contract in which he could be assigned to the team’s minor-league affiliate in Rochester, N.Y. Instead, he stayed in the Manitoba capital to skate for the Winnipeg Warriors of the minor pro Western Hockey League.
In 149 NHL games, he scored 14 goals with 26 assists and 257 penalty minutes. His lone point in 15 playoff games came against Detroit in 1956, when he blocked a shot by Mr. Howe and outraced Metro Prystai to the loose puck before scoring against Glenn Hall after a nifty deke. All the way down the ice, he later said, he could tell Mr. Howe was closing in from behind from the sound of his skate blades getting louder in pursuit.
Mr. James spent a year as a hockey coach in Davos, Switzerland, before returning to the ice with the Yorkton Terriers in Saskatchewan. He was a long-time coach in his birth province, working behind the bench for the Terriers, the Melville Millionaires, the Estevan Bruins and the Moose Jaw Warriors.
Among the jobs he held away from the sporting arena were motel operator and an insurance salesman.
Mr. James, a resident of Nanoose Bay on Vancouver Island, died in Nanaimo Regional General Hospital on Feb. 13. He leaves the former Margaret Petrie, his wife of 70 years. He also leaves two sons, three daughters, 11 grandchildren, 18 great-grandchildren, and one great great-granddaughter. He was predeceased by older brother Donald, who died in Sussex, N.B., in 2003, aged 72.
Mr. James has been inducted into the Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame (1982), the Winnipeg Blue Bombers Hall of Fame (1984), the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame (1994), the Yorkton Sports Hall of Fame (1998), and the Saskatchewan Hockey Hall of Fame (2022). In 2016, Mr. James’s name was the third one added to the Ring of Honour at the Blue Bombers’ stadium.
As well, Mr. James was elected to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1981, joining his father, who had been named to the hall with the inaugural class in 1963, making them the first father-son duo to be enshrined. Both have been honoured with steel busts on display in the museum in Hamilton, Ont.
On his induction, Mr. James shared with the Winnipeg Sun an imagined reunion with his father. “When I eventually expire and I, uh, go up or down, probably down,” he said, “I’ll meet him there and he’ll say, ‘If you had only listened to me, you’d have been [inducted] a lot earlier.’”
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