Gridiron America Radio

During his 19-year CFL career, Anthony Calvillo never talked a lot about his past. It was known the Canadian Football League’s all-time passing leader grew up in a tough neighborhood in Los Angeles and that he chose football over a life of street gang crime, but over the years he gave few details of just how difficult it was. Director Shelley Saywell’s documentary “The Kid From La Puente” shows both the horrifying and uplifting aspects of the star quarterback’s upbringing that he had kept mostly to himself.  It features a boy growing up in La Puente, a crime-ridden, mostly Hispanic community east of Los Angeles, with a violent, alcoholic father and an older brother David who was drawn into a street gang and later jailed for attempted murder.

The seventh chapter in a ten part documentary series detailing the history of football and the Canadian Football League through the early 21st Century. The series is also available for viewing at www.cfl-films.ca 

The Photograph focuses on a picture of the 1942 Toronto Royal Canadian Air Force Hurricanes, a team that inspired a nation en route to winning the first ever non-civilian Grey Cup game. On Dec. 5, 1942, the Hurricanes beat the Winnipeg RCAF Bombers 8-5 in front of a sellout crowd on a frozen field at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium, boosting the country’s morale during the Second World War while thousands of Canadian soldiers listened overseas on radio.

The sixth chapter in a ten part documentary series detailing the history of football and the Canadian Football League through the early 21st Century. The series is also available for viewing at www.cfl-films.ca 

Through the turbulent decade of the 1960s, which was defined in American by assassinations, the Space Race, the Vietnam War, and the struggle for civil rights and equality, a rebel league took on an established major American sports entity, and not only survived, but thrived, ultimately forcing a merger prior to the 1970 season that helped create the modern-day behemoth American football has become.

In 1970, professional football in America picked up where it left off in the 1960s, when the game truly started to make the leap as America's No. 1 pastime. This era of pro football saw Dallas, after years of heartbreaking championship defeats, finally break through as champions. The decade also bore witness to the Miami's perfect season, the rise of Oakland's autumn wind and the birth of the Iron City's dynasty. It can be argued that this period in pro football had more dominant teams at one time than at any other period in the game's 100-year history in America.  This era also included several compelling rivalries between teams that were perennially in the mix of the championship chase. These rivalries helped either start or end some of the greatest dynasties in American pro football history. In the process, the rivalries further increased the game's popularity, as it was the undisputed king of the hill as far as professional sports was concerned as the '70s drew to a close. 

To quote the dean of football myth making, "I have loved football as an almost mythic game since I was in the fourth grade. To me, the game wasn't even grounded in reality. The uniform turned you into a warrior. Being on a team, the mythology of physical combat, the struggle against the elements, the narrative of the game." That is what the championship chase is all about.

For gridiron fans in Canada, America and everywhere around the world, the game of football is more than X's and O's. It is a sport filled with drama and story, all of which make it more than a game.

A nostalgic look back on the year in which the top tier of modern day American professional football took shape.

In their first Grey Cup appearance in 20 years, the 1971 Toronto Argonauts committed a last-second fumble, spoiling their run. Now, the stars of the team reunite to relive the game and the wild days in Toronto.

The fifth chapter in a ten part documentary series detailing the history of football and the Canadian Football League through the early 21st Century. The series is also available for viewing at www.cfl-films.ca

Western Swagger shares the genesis of an East vs. West rivalry both on and off the football field that reached a fever pitch in November 1981.  As the Edmonton Eskimos embarked on an unprecedented Grey-Cup winning streak, former Eskimo and Alberta Premier, Peter Lougheed, was in a battle off the field with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau over a National Energy Program – the implementation of which could send Alberta’s economy into a tailspin – and collaborating with his fellow Premiers during a Constitutional crisis that had the country on the brink of chaos.

The fourth chapter in a ten part documentary series detailing the history of football and the Canadian Football League through the early 21st Century. The series is also available for viewing at www.cfl-films.ca 

The third chapter in a ten part documentary series detailing the history of football and the Canadian Football League through the early 21st Century. The series is also available for viewing at www.cfl-films.ca

Set against a backdrop of violence in Québec in the late ‘60s, quarterback Russ Jackson was determined to win what was destined to be one of the greatest games in CFL history.