My wife has never watched as much Canadian football as her husband, but it pretty much disappeared from her entertainment calendar the day they got rid of Matt Dunigan. Just to be clear, that didn’t happen this summer, when TSN started televising the new season’s games without Dunigan, for the first time in 25 years.
For her, it happened in 1989.
Dunigan was the first-string quarterback with the B.C. Lions then. He was such an exciting player for such an unexciting team that she became a football fan, again. Then, the bumbling duo of General Manager Joe Kapp and coach Lary Kuharich traded him to Toronto, and she was done, again. That the Lions received six players in return didn’t matter. They had let their most compelling player get away, in her view, and not even the arrival of another one a year later — Doug Flutie — was going to bring her back.
Now Dunigan is gone again, this time as a TV personality, this time almost certainly for good. It happened quietly and nobody is saying why. My spies tell me only that TSN thought it was “time to move on” from Dunigan, who was having trouble collecting and connecting his thoughts. While this was true, it was always true. Dunigan was definitely a better quarterback than he was a commentator, yet the finality of replacing him leads to the word nobody wants to hear.
Concussion.
If the after-effects of his dozen concussions have made it impossible for Dunigan to continue on TSN, then ending it without fanfare is the decent thing to do. He long suspected he would one day pay for being a target in such a violent game. His last game as a player was with Hamilton, his fifth Canadian team, in August 1996. His 12th concussion was delivered by the Lions, his second team. In his biography, “Going’ Deep,” Dunigan wrote:
“This was more than a physical injury. This was something inside. I wasn’t me any more. The question was, would I ever be?”
Following that game, he took a taxi to the airport, booked a flight and went home to his wife and three children in Alabama, and didn’t remember any of it.
Once Dunigan turned to broadcasting, he was both versatile and unique. TSN used him everywhere — a colour commentator supporting the play-by-play, on the expert panels at pre-game, half-time and post-game, and on a myriad of shows that set up a big game. He had his own southern-drawl style of speaking that entertained many and annoyed some, especially when the words didn’t come out just right.
By the time his 14-year Hall of Fame career was over, he was surely the only player to be traded for six players TWICE, by Edmonton and B.C. Only Dunigan quarterbacked four different teams to the Grey Cup; winning twice, the last leading the Toronto Argonauts to victory while playing with two broken collarbones and three painkillers. With Winnipeg and playing in B.C. he compiled 713 yards passing in one game, still the record.
If he’s never seen again, Dunigan must always be remembered for how he entertained fans as a great, great CFL quarterback. Just ask my wife.
