It sure ain't the money

With an average salary of $45,000, playing in today's CFL is no ticket to riches. Most players have to take off-season jobs just to make ends meet. Noah Cantor, an offensive lineman with the Argonauts, co-owns a pair of very popular gourmet hamburger joints in Vancouver called Vera's Burger Shack.

Above, Noah Cantor owns a pair of very popular gourmet hamburger joints in Vancouver called Vera's Burger Shack. Photo by Bruce Berman

By JAY TEITEL -- SportsXtra

 CFL players would appear to be just such athletes. This past winter, after choosing businessman Tom Wright as its new commissioner, the league signed a relatively lucrative new TV contract with CBC and TSN, which will mean significantly more revenue for each team. Players could logically expect some kind of bigger piece of the pie as well in salary, but for now the CFL salary cap (the softest of caps) is still set at $2.5 million, the minimum wage is $35,000 (it goes up $1,000 a year), and the annual pension contribution, matched by the teams, is $2,500. Not only do CFL players have to love the sport more than their NFL counterparts, there can come a time when they can't afford to play anymore because they literally can't afford to. Greg Frers, a free safety with the Stampeders, caused a stir recently when he retired because of the far better opportunities he had with a sales job with the pharmaceutical company he was working for.

 "This is going to be happening more and more," says Giulio Caravatta, the B.C. firefighter and radio colour man, "and it's a shame, because these are guys good enough to play. But they're certainly not getting rich, and they have to plan for their futures."

 The degree to which they plan can be impressive in itself. Cory Mantyka, the offensive lineman/registered nurse who never thought he'd have a career in professional football, says that even if he'd had a chance at an NFL contract, with its relatively huge money, he still thinks he would have stuck with nursing. "Because even if you make NFL money you're not going to play the game forever," he points out, "and you're still going to have something you like to do and enjoy afterward." (This, bear in mind, from a professional athlete's mouth.) "True, when I first started nursing a few of the guys would tease me about my job, and they did nickname me Klinger," concedes Mantyka. "But I could always say at least

 I had a job in the off-season, which seemed to quiet them down. Now they ask me to look at their X-rays, but I usually decline. I've got a saying: 'Football season I'm hurtin', and nursing season I'm healin'."

Deibert, a fullback with the Calgary Stampeders, signed with the team so he could be close to a career in the Alberta oil patch. Photo by Bruce Berman

 The planning can extend beyond choice of profession to choice of team, to facilitate getting close to a certain industry. Scott Deibert, the 32-year-old Calgary fullback who works in sales for an oilpatch equipment company called Alberta Tubular Products, says part of the reason he signed with Calgary was to get into the oil and gas business. Where the majority of the CFL's American players are thinking of a transition to the NFL, most Canadians are thinking of a transition to VP, preferrably of sales.

 "Sales is a good fit for a professional athlete," says Deibert. "We're used to dealing with adversity. When I'm cold-calling, I don't know anybody, and if I was to fold every time somebody said no to me, I would have quit after a day. It's like football. Not every coach is going to like you. Half the guys are going to return the calls, half the guys don't. Until somebody tells me to f-off, though, I'm going to keep calling." He considers. "I have to tell you, the one thing I will miss when I finish playing is the locker room. To be able to go, at this age, into that atmosphere, and be a kid for six hours, I'll miss that even more than winning the Grey Cup in Montreal with Winnipeg. But I guess you can't have everything."

 Or maybe you can.

 "I actually had a tryout in the NFL," says George. "With Dallas. They put me at every position on the offensive line, and I played well at every position. But they had all their veterans back, 10 guys, and they heard I'd had a back injury, which happened to be completely healed. But they didn't buy it, I guess, so it was the CFL, which was just fine for me."

 We're in the truck again, heading back south in the afternoon sunshine from Elephant Butte. Repossessing the boat turned out to be wackily anti-climactic. We didn't have to snatch it from anyone's boathouse, but simply retrieve it from a marina in a town called, believe it or not, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, where the delinquent owner had been storing it. The woman behind the bait-shop cash register took the envelope containing the unpaid storage fee from George and treated him to one of the coldest glares I'd ever seen in my life, which puzzled me. It wasn't until we were halfway back to

 Las Cruces with the boat - a jaunty house-craft with pontoons and a party deck that would have looked at home in a soft-core porn movie - that

 I realized what that look meant: no matter how charming or polite they are, repo-men aren't exactly harbingers of hope. It's not that they're taking your car (or your boat) at this moment - it's that, with a few spins of the Wheel of Fortune, they could be.

 "Did you ever change your minds and leave a call without repossessing?" I ask.

 "Well, I did have a shot-gun pulled on me in the middle of the night once," says George.

 "And I had a 65-year-old man jump on my back," says Greg.

 But did they ever take pity on anyone?

 "Once," they both say it at the same time.

 "We were picking up a car about 15 miles from the Mexican border," says George, "in truly remote circumstances. Imagine a mobile home as far as you can get from anywhere. We pulled up in the truck, and this older guy comes out with his wife, and he says, you can't take our car. Not belligerent, just very factual, you can't take our car. We looked at each other; they were 50 miles from the nearest town, and they had no telephone. They probably had running water, but no drainage."

 "We did consider coming back after dark," says Greg, laudably honest.

 "But we didn't. We just said, 'Okay, take care of it then, sir.' And we went home."

Above Bearman (L) and Hudson (R) prepare for a day of stealing cars. Photo by Bruce Berman

 Home is where we headed now. The sky is darkening over the dun-coloured mountains and the scatterings of mobile homes - the rural house-style of choice in New Mexico, it seems - clustered beneath them. Later, with twilight truly falling, after the two of them spend their hour lifting weights at Gold's Gym in town, I'll drive over to the New Mexico State University campus and watch George and Greg run sprints alone on the immaculate green grass of the university's football stadium, Aggie Memorial, a 30,000 seat facility built not up from ground level, but carved down into a depression in the sandy soil, with no water table to worry about. Greg will run erect and swift 100-yard dashes, and George (who's trying to get down to a svelte 290 to help him switch from offensive guard to centre this year) will follow, a B-52 in the wake of an F-16, falling farther back on each traverse of the field, and then falling altogether on his back in a heap at the end of their session. Afterwards he'll recover enough to spy an ex-teammate outside the stadium, a wide receiver, and recommend that he come up to Canada to play, where, "the football is good, and we've got unlimited motion." And Greg will take me on a tour of the campus athletic facilities, the baseball stadium, the basketball field house, the tennis complex - all of which seem to dwarf the actual academic buildings - and talk about A.J. Eathorne, the LPGA golf pro from B.C., who was a scholarship classmate of theirs at New Mexico State. In three months, they'll both tell me, they'll be driving north to the Renegades camp in Ottawa, possibly in a repossessed vehicle - maybe earlier if, "Bush keeps going it alone without the U.N., and a war breaks out."

 But first we drop off the boat at the Roadrunner compound, and then head over to Old Messilla, a suburb of Las Cruces which is actually a historic Spanish town under renovation. The pueblos surrounding the little town square are 150 years old. There's a fair crowd of pedestrians in the square, and a lot of cars parked. One of them, a maroon pick-up, reminds me of something....

 "Go!" said George. Greg went, deftly flipping the door open, sprinting across the lot to the Chevy pick-up, opening the door with his key, and turning the ignition. The alarm sounded immediately; he tried the cigarette lighter for the over-ride switch, but it kept sounding, deafening and interminable. We were in the open in broad daylight, in a town where you can carry a hand-gun tucked into your belt legally. Greg bent under the dash, and the alarm finally stopped. He shot the truck backwards out of its spot without squealing, rammed it into drive, and took off, and we took off after him. And it was done.

 George breaks my reverie. "You see that building over there?" he gestures. "That's were Billy the Kid was tried, and sentenced to hang."

 "And you see that guy drinking coffee outside that cafe?" says Greg. "I repo-ed his truck."
READ: It sure ain't the money, Pt. 1