Few players have felt the kind of pressure Paul McCallum felt when he became a member of the Saskatchewan Roughriders for the second time back at the beginning of his CFL career.
After spending the previous four seasons as a back-up kicker with the Riders and B.C. Lions, the Surrey, B.C. product was given the chance to take the starting job for himself — only the player he was replacing was one of the greatest to ever do it in the league.
But not only did McCallum successfully take over from Riders legend Dave Ridgeway, he went on to become one himself. And thanks to his incredible 24 year career that touched on three decades, he now has one of the most prestigious honours imaginable to his name.
The Roughriders Plaza of Honour.
McCallum joined fellow inductees Rob Bagg and Dan Clark to talk about entering the Riders Hall of Fame earlier this week and touched on what the team and community meant to him right from the start.
“When I was in B.C. at the very beginning, there was a mystique to Saskatchewan,” McCallum said. “All of the history and everything that they have and the stadiums you'd go to, there's just as much green as there is whatever team they're playing. Everyone jokes ‘how did you live there for so long?’ I say ‘you don't understand it until you live it’ and I think that's the same thing with the team, the community. People want to talk about it and it's something all the other teams in the league need to pay heed to.”
Like his inductee compatriots, McCallum was surprised to receive the Plaza honour, and once the news had sunk in, the memories of his near-decade in Regina began to come flooding back.
“In everyday life I'm not really thinking about the past and things that have happened in my career and everything else, but as soon as you get the phone call all of a sudden your brain starts to go and the memories start clicking,” McCallum said. “They tell you that you've got to come up with a seven-minute speech and I'm like, okay, I can't be Scott Schultz and go for an hour, but I've got more than seven minutes worth’. It's an honour and hopefully I can sort of relay how much it means to me. It goes by quick and it's amazing.”
One thing that all three inductees touched on was the hard work it took to get to a point where they were able to succeed in the CFL. For McCallum, that meant paying plenty of attention to the players that came before him and working on his unique craft as much as he could, even when things were difficult.
It certainly didn’t hurt to have an absolute legend of CFL football to work with at the beginning of his career, either — none other than Canadian Football Hall of Famer Lui Passaglia.
“I learned from Lui how to treat the kicker below me,” McCallum said. “He did so much in teaching me how to be a professional, how to carry himself. You go to training camp back in the day and you might not have got a lot of sleep, but he was the first guy up in the morning working hard doing what he had to do. So for me, it's being able to try and instill that kind of work ethic that was taught to me in how to carry yourself.
“Don't take the highs too high, the lows too low. That’s something I've taken from people like Lui and to be able to use them. They work for me and that’s what I try and help the younger people I work with. I get just as much joy out of helping the young kids come up and see them succeed in everything like I did.”
McCallum added his fellow Plaza inductees show just how far effort and desire can take a player.
“The common thing is it's hard work,” he said. “When I'm helping the young guys and talking to young people, it's whatever you want to do. If you put in the hard work, anything's possible. Dan came in from junior, he didn't go to a major college or anything like that, but he put in the hard work. (Riders running back coach) Andrew Harris as well. So it's passing the message on, just put in the hard work and things like that and look what can happen. That's my message to the young people and hopefully they're listening.”
McCallum so thoroughly enjoyed his time with the Riders that potentially playing his whole career in Saskatchewan was on the table. That famously didn’t work out as planned, and even though he’d go on to play nine seasons in B.C. and win a couple of Grey Cups, he was more than happy to return to Saskatchewan at the end of his career.
“I didn't ever want to leave, but as we all know, some of the circumstances and people that made me leave. I've got more fond memories of it than bad,” McCallum said. “When things changed for me in Vancouver and I had the opportunity to come back, I welcomed that. I was excited to come back. And it's because of the community, because the organization of everything around the football club itself.
“Thinking about my whole history of everything, it was an honour that I was considered to come back. Back in 2004, I never thought anything like this would ever happen again. So I'm very grateful and appreciative.”
All three Plaza members were asked who an influential coach was with the Riders, and McCallum began his reply with a bit of a joke.
“Ray Yauch… he cut Dave Ridgeway,” he said to laughs from the assembled media. But as it turns out, after Yauch brought McCallum in for the final two games of the 1995 campaign, the plan was to head to NFL Europe for the following season. Then, plans changed.
“When it was time to go to NFL Europe, (Riders GM) Al Ford said, ‘I can't let you go’. I ‘well, no, that was our agreement’. He says, ‘I can't let you go, because if you go there and don't come back there's going to be a (riot) outside of Taylor Field because I just cut Dave Ridgeway. So Ray Yauch pushed for me to come back here and if it wasn't for Ray Yauch, I wouldn't have been here.”
You can check out what Rob Bagg and Dan Clark had to say about their Plaza of Honour inductions by clicking the links in their names above.
