Legendary Coach, Groundbreaking Quarterback Custis to join Ticats Wall of Honour

Bernie Custis –humourist, raconteur, loyal friend, prince of kindness,  legendary coach, committed educator and ground-breaking quarterback—possessed an unshakable belief in the fundamental goodness of mankind and the resilience of the human spirit.

And he used all of that raw material as tools to construct relationships and help young men and women find their way in life. If that isn’t the personification of building, I’m at a loss to say what is.

On Wednesday morning the Tiger-Cats Alumni Association announced the selection of Bernie Custis as just the third person to be inducted onto the Ticats Wall of Honour as, of course, a Builder.

Custis’s  friend Jason Riley, the former all-star Ticat lineman and himself an educator, recalls being at Teachers college in the mid-1980s and receiving an assignment on team culture.  They’d first met a couple of years earlier on the Canadian university football awards stage when Riley was accepting his all-Canadian honours and Custis was named coach of the year for an undefeated season at McMaster.

“I went to him about the project because I knew he’d coached Sheridan, the Burlington Braves and Mac, and that he was a high school principal,” Riley says. “He invited me to his wife’s and his house in Burlington and we talked for three hours about how he believed – and I concur—that football is the best sport on the planet for adolescent young men to learn everything they need to be successful in life. He was a pure advocate of that.”

As an example, Custis told Riley about a young player he’d coached who’d been a bully all of his life, and none of the players or coaches wanted him on the team. But from his experiences in schools, Custis knew that there had to be a reason for a kid being a bully. He kept him on the teaSm and despite setbacks, at the end of the year he named that bully the team’s Most improved player. The one-time bully started crying in front of his teammates who, in turn, gave him a unanimous standing ovation.

Building.

As a builder on the wall – right across the street from the high school named for him –Custis will join Ralph Sazio and Jake Gaudaur who were his teammates when Custis came north in 1951  from Syracuse where he’d starred and been the roommate – and eventually lifelong friend—of future Oakland Raiders owner . Custis wore  black and gold for only four years. However, what a four years it was.

There had been a few other black quarterbacks in pro ball, but  by the late 1940s the professional game on both sides of the border had settled into virtual  apartheid under centre.  African-Americans need not apply.

The Cleveland Browns had drafted Custis fifth overall in 1951 but they wanted him to play safety not quarterback, which he’d become in his third year at Syracuse. Legendary Browns owner  Paul Browin sympathized and said that if Custis wanted to be a quarterback he’d only release him to a Canadian team, and Custis chose Hamilton because it was closest, even though he was not familiar with the city or Ticats. On Aug. 29 that year he became the regular starter, breaking what was essentially a North American colour bar at the position.  And much of that was because the fans were wowed by his first game  and pressured management to start him at quarterback. He was a Big Four – the CFL East—all-star and those same fans voted him the most popular Ticat that season and again in 1954.

But coach Carl Voyles, moved him to halfback the following year, in what Custis told me several times was an act of racial prejudice.  Custis preferred to keep those feelings quiet but did say when the Ticats honoured his colour-bar-breaking achievement in 2011, “I wasn’t a pioneer but I did help pave the way.” And of course, he made the all-star team in 1954 at halfback.

In 1955 a severe charley horse was medically mishandled. Voyles traded him to Montreal and, at 26, his playing career was soon done.

He went into education in the Hamilton-Burlington area for 35 years and also became one of the most successful coaches in the history of Canadian amateur football. There was virtually no level of the game he didn’t affect. He coached East York, an Argos senior farm team, won a couple of senior titles in four years running the Oakville BlackKnights, was the face of the Burlington Braves coaching them from 1964-72, with three Ontartio titles and two eastern Canadian crowns, won the provincial community college championship six times in his eight years at the helm of the Sheridan Bruins and took the McMaster Marauders from seventh to first in his inaugural year of an eight-year stint there. He also scouted for Mike McCarthy when he was GM of the Argos and in his second tenure with the Ticats.

There was nothing in local football that Custis left untouched, which helped create a gridiron-favourable environment in this area that helped expand interest in the  sport – among players, fans, coaches and officials—which, in turn, was beneficial to the Tiger-Cats.

“The main thing about Bernie is that he was always a gentleman,” says McCarthy, who is on the Wall of Honour selection committee. “A sweetheart of a man. You could tell he grew up with good influences and discipline.”

McCarthy remembers Custis and Ron Lancaster watching practices together then, as part of their daily ritual, adjourning to neighbouring coffee shops, and Riley had a similar experience.

“Bernie Custis, Ang Mosca, Ron Lancaster and Ellison Kelly — four bastions of Hamilton lore – would be sitting on old chairs by the tunnel at Ivor Wynne, where the players came out. They’d be giving us encouragement and maybe a tip here and there. That’s where I first really got to know Bernie and how much of a gentleman he was.”

I spent hours with Custis and Lancaster as I covered practices from that same spot, the two of them slapping each other on the knee like they were each the funniest guy on earth. And they’d often make me and other outsiders the butt of their jokes. I’d call them Statler and Hilton, like the two Muppet balcony critics.

After Custis died in 2017 at the age of 88, his memorial at the Burlington  Performing Arts Centre lasted far longer than most because so many friends and former players had been touched by him and wanted to speak.

“Bernie feasted on life, then graciously shared his table with everyone,” said Rev. Tim Graham.

Hall of Famer Tony Gabriel whom Custis coached in junior ball and  helped send to Syracuse said, “He was a gentleman. I don’t even remember him getting mad on the sidelines.”

CFL commissioner Jefferey Orrisdge saidm, “He believed that it was not the colour of your skin but the thickness of it.”

And many players remembered his favourite game advice, especially in tough situations: “Gentlemen, show poise.”

This week Mike McCarthy added, “The accolades for him were unbelievable. Sometimes you don’t have the words to describe Bernie Custis.”

One would definitely be: Builder.