The Hamilton Tiger-Cats—and the entire Canadian football community—are deeply mourning the passing of Ted Goveia.
Goveia, the Ticats General Manager, died Friday morning at the age of 55, from an esophageal cancer which had been diagnosed in the spring, right before the opening of Goveia’s first training camp in the role he repeatedly characterized as his “dream job.” The hometown boy, running the hometown team.
His impact on the Tiger-Cats far outstripped his 10 months at Hamilton Stadium. This corner—and the entire organization—send deep condolences to Goveia’s loving and supportive fiancé, Jennifer Martin, and all of Ted’s family.
Canadian football has been deprived, far too early, of not only one of its most tireless workers and multi-tooled connoisseurs of the three-down sport, but also of one of the warmest, most communicative, empathetic and comically quick-witted men in the game.
The Burlington native was hired in early December as the Ticats’ General Manager, after 10 years as one of the principal architects of perpetual Grey Cup contenders in Winnipeg, where he was assistant General Manager and Director of Player Personnel.
The players he provided for his longtime friend and colleague Scott Milanovich staked the Ticats to a rebound 7-5 record through the season’s opening two thirds, including the franchise’s longest winning streak in six years. After a thorough review of the 2024 roster, he had retained a number of critical players but also released several, and seven of the 12 starters on defence for Friday’s Team Ted Game against the Bombers were brought to Hamilton by Goveia.
But Goveia’s influence on the three-down game catapulted well past the borders of the pro ranks. He packed one of the most extensive and varied resumes in the history of Canadian football, which should eventually earn him a spot in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame as a builder.
He played on the offensive line in high school at Burlington Assumption, for the Burlington Braves in the Canadian Junior Football League, the Oakville Longhorns in senior football and at Mount Allison in New Brunswick, after first earning his tuition money by working for a year on the production line at Ford Motors.
He coached minor football, junior football with the Braves, and at three Canadian universities: four years as an assistant coach and offensive coordinator at Mount Allison; four years as UBC head coach; and another four years as an assistant at McMaster where he was also the head recruiter of teams which won multiple provincial championships. He also scouted for and was in the personnel departments of three CFL teams: the Tiger-Cats, Blue Bombers and Toronto Argonauts, where he began as a position coach.
His career combined a rare trifecta of full-time coaching, full-time scouting and full-time administrative duties, and he also found time to serve on the board of Football Canada. He was a huge proponent of the explosion in flag football because he thought it would benefit football everywhere in Canada and even as a high-ranking CFL executive, would be asking amateur officials what he, and pro teams, could do to help the grassroots game.
Goveia worked for the Toronto Argonauts as a coach, and longtime guest coach at training camp, then became the club’s director of player personnel in 2013, the season after he served on Milanovich’s coaching staff which won the 100th Grey Cup.
Orlondo Steinauer, the Ticats’ president of football operations, and the man who led the GM search that hired Goveia, was also on that gifted staff.
“Ted was more than a colleague to me; he was a friend,” Steinauer said. “I miss the little things already; how he’d look over his glasses, fold one leg over the other, and rub his chin in deep thought.”
“From the moment we hired him in December, I got to know not just how he thought and operated but the heart and passion that drove him. As an organization we are deeply grateful for the impact Ted made, and we’ll remain committed to building in the direction he helped set. Our thoughts are with his family as we honour his life and the legacy he leaves behind.”
Goveia said that one of the attractions of coming to Hamilton was the chance to work with Milanovich’s “creativity and incredible vision of the game.” Milanovich, who’s known Goveia well for close to 15 years said on the eve of the Team Ted Game that, “Ted is one of the funniest human beings I’ve ever met.
“The thing is, we all love football, everybody involved in this is putting in a lot of hours. But Teddy is the next level of football. I’m trying to get home, just get some sleep, and Ted could go all night.
“For me, just the way he tried to battle this disease and continue to do his job as our general manager, it’s been inspiring. He’s done a great job with the team. We’re better on the field. We were just, really, really pulling for him.”
Through sheer will and dedication, studying everything about football he could lay his hands on, taking numerous coaching clinics, watching years of video, and travelling hundreds of thousands of miles to scout players, meet them in their own environments, and “just being there” Goveia evolved into an astute, and elite, judge of football talent…and character, something he considered essential when building a team and a staff.
It is a credit to him that the personnel department he recruited from a variety of levels and experiences from Canada and the U.S. has stepped up seamlessly since Goveia became ill. While most insiders only became aware of the severity of his diagnosis in recent weeks—his illness and impending treatment were officially announced on June 5, three days after he turned 55—the top level of Ticats administration had known before that. With Steinauer guiding the way and Goveia working the phones from home until only recently and providing significant input, the day-to-day player personnel business has been capably handled. The quartet of new men Goveia brought to the department have shouldered the load, divided up the work, and will continue to do so: Director of Player Personnel Cyril Penn; Director of Scouting Alex Russell; Director of Pro Scouting Dane Vandernat; and National Scout Tom Flaxman. They’re supported by Hamilton-born CJ Paduano and Nick Roberto, Director of Football Operations and Manager of Football Operations, respectively.
As part of Friday’s Team Ted Game, friends and fans attending the game can buy the same t-shirts the players have been wearing all year—they’ve also worn a helmet logo of a guitar, to recognize Goveia’s long association with music; he was part of the vibrant Burlington punk rock scene in the ‘80s and ‘90s—with proceeds donated to the scholarships Goveia established to give a deserving player every year, in partnership with the football teams at McMaster and Mount Allison, the two universities he said he owed heavily for helping him get a leg up on a football career.
He also always spoke highly of his high school coach Mike Harris and how football at Burlington Assumption helped change his life when he was struggling to find his way.
“Each university (he saw) was different, and the support was not equal,” Goveia said in an interview with friend and high school coach Chris Dooley earlier this year. “It made me realize that the support you receive and the people you work for make the difference.”
Mount Allison head coach Scott Brady is thankful for the scholarships and what Goveia did for the game, and for those who guide those who play it. Like Goveia, he played locally—at Burlington Iroquois Ridge, from which Goveia tried to recruit him for UBC—and both played and coached at the New Brunswick university and also coached at McMaster. They were on the same Marauder staff and Brady also guest-coached with the Blue Bombers, backed by Goveia’s recommendation.
“We’ve always kept in touch and I’ve always had a lot of respect for him and the work he’s put in and how he went about building himself in the profession,” Brady says. “He’s somebody I looked up to, for his work ethic.
“He was a role model and mentor for a lot of people, especially young coaches. He went out of his way to meet young coaches and help them as they were coming up and give them advice. It always came across as really wanting to help: you always knew that he understood what it was like for a young coach, how much time you invest in the business and how hard you have to work to build yourself up. He had gotten through it, and the guys would share stories about him early in his career, the things he did and how hard he worked; so you felt that this was somebody who knew what you were going through. He didn’t get to where he got to because of some connections. It was because he worked his butt off.
“Everybody knows how long he worked to get his dream job and be the GM of his hometown team. And to have this happen right after he got that dream job really sucks.”
Earlier this week Goveia’s close friend Michael O’Shea, the head coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers where they spent a decade together and went to five Grey Cups, spoke of Goveia as his team prepared to play the Ticats in Hamilton Friday night.
“He was a pillar in the organization that helped us get to where we wanted to get to,” Mike O’Shea said.
“I’d turn on the tape to watch U Sports players and invariably I’d see Ted on the sideline walking up and down. And that always made me feel good that when he gave us information, there was always going to be a nugget that somebody else didn’t have because he was going to be right there within earshot when a guy made a play or didn’t make a play and he was going to hear the conversation that the kid had with his coach or teammates.
“There’s still Ted’s fingerprints all over our roster.
“Ted meant a lot to Canadian football. He’s donated time, money and effort to things we don’t even know about to make sure Canadian kids have opportunities. Ted’s always been wired that way, and it didn’t matter what level. He took his job so seriously and understood that getting kids opportunities and opening doors for kids that might’ve been closed is pretty powerful.”
O’Shea said of Friday’s celebratory Team Ted match between the two teams whose lineups he was instrumental in creating: “You wish you’d never have to have a game like this but it’s a great tribute.”
Ticat star receiver Kenny Lawler who’s already caught more touchdown passes and has more pass reception yards than in any previous year of his glittering career, with still a third of a season to go, was the No. 1 off-season signing of a Goveia free agency harvest which all CFL critics agreed “won the off-season.” It was the third time Goveia had signed Lawler, including two separate stints in Winnipeg. He referred to Goveia as a fighter, a description heard regularly as friends and football family discussed him.
“Everybody that he picked in that locker room,” Lawler said, pointing to the Ticats’ dressing quarters, “he picked a bunch of fighters. One thing he had was for us to go out there and just continue to fight, to continue to battle, to do it for one another and win.
“So that’s what we’re doing here. We’re trying to do our best to honour him. We know that’s what he would want.”
When industry insiders would refer to Goveia they would invariably mention that he built his career one step at a time—“He took the stairs, not the elevator,” was a sentence used more than once—and made sure each step was part of the continuum. He never forgot what it was like to be on it, and who was there with him. His network of contacts across the entire continent was massive and, always at his fingertips.
He and Ottawa General Manager Shawn Burke, for instance, stayed in close contact, visited each other whenever they could and crossed paths for years scouting on the road: Goveia for Winnipeg and Toronto, Burke for Hamilton (where he was an assistant GM, like Goveia) and Ottawa.
“I had the good fortune of coming up through the league together with Ted and we were on the road together a lot,” Burke said Thursday. “His knowledge of football and his intellect? Ted was indescribable. And I always enjoyed competing against him. His team usually got the better but he was always gracious and made sure you knew you’d done a good job for your team.”
In the most recent of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of talks this corner and Goveia have had over the past 15 years or so, he recalled how he loves to pull pranks on his players, especially offensive linemen with whom he so identified, but that he and they knew he could be tough and make the hard personnel decisions when he needed.
“That’s what all the good players in a locker room want,” he said a few months ago of his decisiveness and eye for who fits into the close culture the Cats have had for some time and are still evolving. “The reality is the leaders of the locker room and the guys who are really good, they want to be surrounded with pros who want to win.”
Friday night the Ticats will honour not only Goveia’s commitment to building a winning team, but one with character, one the city is proud of, one that extends the hard-nosed gritty tradition of the area he grew up in and was loyal to. And to the selfless hours he donated to help broaden the base of football in Canada.
“The celebration at the Winnipeg game is an outstanding tribute to Ted,” Orlondo Steinauer says. “Yet it still leaves me with a swirl of emotions; the gift of having known him, sadness in losing him, even anger at the unfairness of it all. Watching him fight daily with a quiet toughness, while carrying so much pain, showed me a strength few people ever got to see.
“Ted, I know you’re watching down on us and we’ll carry your spirit with us every step of the way. We’ll do our very best to make you proud.
“As an organization we are deeply grateful for the impact Ted made, and we’ll remain committed to building in the direction he helped set. Our thoughts are with his family as we honour his life and the legacy he leaves behind.”
