Wager a sure bet for Mounties

“I’ve taken a lot of big hits,” Gary Wager said as he shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.
Wager, now a wide receiver for the Mount Allison Mounties after playing two seasons as the team’s quarterback, sat back and recalled “the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life.”
It was against Saint Mary’s, which has one of the country’s best football programs, in the second game of last season. It was early in the game and. . . .
“So I’m rolling out left and I’m kind of slowing down because I don’t want to pass the line of scrimmage, and my receiver is running a 16-yard comeback pattern and he slips,” Wager recounted.
“I should’ve thrown it in the dirt but I’m waiting for him to get up.
“And I just stopped, and as he gets up, I’m just about to throw it and I got hit hard on the blind side,” he added. “Everyone on my team could see it coming because the guy had a 20-yard full sprint at me and he hit the right side of my head.”
Wager, a former Muskie pivot who also starred on the basketball court for the black-and-gold, didn’t play the rest of the game and Mount Allison didn’t win it (nor any other game of the season for that matter). But looks can be deceiving.
“There are a lot of people who look at 0-8 and think, ‘Wow, that team is just terrible,’ and that happens with a lot of people who don’t know football.
“The problem with us is just we don’t know how to win yet. We just can’t get it done because we’ve never done it before,” he reasoned.
“But we’re older now and everyone’s bigger, faster, and stronger. And we’re [ticked] off,” he stressed. “That’s what drives us—proving ourselves to people because we know that we can do it and we haven’t wavered as a team at all.
“We’re just getting hungrier and stronger, and more [ticked] off,” said Wager, who is entering his third season with the Mounties and has two more years of eligibility.
The 22-year-old from Fort Frances is working towards a degree in marketing at a school Maclean’s magazine ranked as the second-best university in the country for undergraduate programs.
But time for study is in short supply as the time commitment for football demanded at the university level is dramatically different from a high school program.
“It’s all football. Right from the time you get there from training camp [Aug. 31] until I leave for the summer,” said Wager, who sports a 3.1 GPA but has hopes of attaining a 3.5 GPA this year and being named an academic All-Canadian.
Aside from the 10-day training camp, which is different kind of hell, here’s a preview of the schedule Wager looks forward to come the regular season.
Class until 2 p.m., work out for an hour at the gym, meeting for that day’s practice at 3:30, on the field at 4:15 until 7, go home, cook dinner, start studying at 8:30, and “I usually have an hour-and-a-half before I’m completely crashed and have to go to bed.”
But Wager is not seeking pity as a student. Rather, he’s seeking payback as a player.
After all the years of taking hits as a quarterback, Wager finally is looking to dish out some punishment as a wide receiver.
Wager did start out as the team’s pivot, but due to its weak receiving corps and having two other passers that were of the same skill level, Mounties’ head coach Scott Fawcett, a former Muskie coach, asked Wager to switch to the receiving spot.
The Mounties’ roster also fields four other players who would be recognized by district residents in Chad Canfield (RB), Jock Gemmell (LB), Eric Morris (QB), and Derek Schelske (RB).
“It’s payback time,” said Wager, who hasn’t dropped a pass yet in his four games at receiver and hopes to make the All-Conference team. “I want to be the best I can be and I want to be able to push people around.”
As a receiver, Wager is the happiest and most comfortable he’s ever been as a player. The stress factor he felt as a quarterback has decreased dramatically, and he’s falling back in love with the sport he’s played since his youth.
“I love it. It’s great and it’s a lot less pressure and a lot less stress,” said Wager. “I go to team breakfasts before games now a lot more relaxed and I can eat a full meal.
“Before, when I was playing quarterback, I could barely eat a piece of bacon.
“I’d just shake because a million things were going through my mind and I’d just stress right out and that affected my ability to play,” he admitted.
Football players are a different breed of athletes. In a way, they are crazy. In a sense, they are immune and deranged. But at least they know it.
Football focuses around pain. But what you do with that pain is what counts. Will you give up and let defeat wash you away? Or will you take that pain and suppress it, mold it, and use it to become “bigger, faster, and stronger?”
“You have to look at the stuff we go through and some people just can’t understand why we do it,” Wager said. “I mean, I love playing and I love trying to get better every game. You can never have a perfect game and that’s what drives me.
“Striving for perfection, which will never come, cannot stop you from reaching your goals. You can’t stop,” he stressed.
Football revolves around the philosophy that makes men face fear and endure pain—and excel from it. Fear derives pain. Pain derives pleasure. And for Wager, the rewards always have outweighed the risks.
“My body has taken a beating, but I’ve prepared my body for that beating,” he said. “And I’ll probably be paying for it later on in my life, but you can’t think about it that way.”
So far, Wager has suffered from two Grade One concussions, a torn ligament on his left thumb, tendonitis in both elbows, and a sprained LCL in the left knee that still bothers him.
“You got to live in the now. You can’t live in the future because you’ll always be worrying about everything. You got to do what you want to do now, and do what makes you happy at any costs,” reasoned the man who is part football player, part student, and part philosopher.
And at the end of every season, those sacrifices, those injuries, those hours, upon hours upon hours of work are neatly summed up in a 15-minute highlight tape.
“The best thing is when we all get together and watch the highlight tape [at the end of the season],” said Wager. “It’s an unbelievable experience because that’s the one thing that sums up all the hard work that you’ve done throughout the year.
“I get goose bumps watching it and it’s just an amazing feeling.”
It’s all worth it at the end for Wager. The sacrifices. The pain. The sweat and the blood. Don’t question him because he knows no other way.
“Live with no regrets, and do as much as you can now so you don’t have regrets in the future.”
And most would “wager” that his philosophies are well-founded.