The Grey Cup

On Sunday 11/29 we had a "Grey Cup" party in the clubhouse.

For those not familiar with Canadian sports The Grey Cup is the Canadian equivalent of our "Super Bowl". It was only available on Canadian satellite so one of the Canadian campers here in the park set up his satellite dish on the clubhouse patio and ran the cable to the clubhouse TV.

There are several important specific differences between the Canadian and American versions of the game of football:

The playing field is 110 x 65 yards instead of 100 x 53 1/2 yards, the end zones are deeper, there are 12 players per team instead of 11, and a team has only three downs to reach 10 yards instead of four. Additionally there is a scoring difference in that a single point is awarded on kickoffs to the kicking team if the receiving team declines to return the ball from the end zone (at least that's the way that I understand it) and there are some other subtle differences that I don't understand.

This year the Grey Cup was between the Montreal Alouettes from the East and the Saskatchewan Roughriders representing the West. We were all pulling for the Roughriders who led the entire game against the highly favored Alouettes up till a heartbreaking loss in the final seconds. Bummer.

We all had a good time though and hope to do it again next year.

I'm becoming a big fan and might even order myself a Saskatchewan T-shirt.