Tiger-Cats fans didn’t just watch Speedy Banks … they experienced him

For eight seasons, it was understood that part of the ticket price was the privilege of watching Brandon Banks.

So, it was fitting that tonight when Speedy B was announced as the initial member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame’s Class of 2026, his familiar face was flooded with a jambalaya of shock, surprise, gratitude and joy.

Because that’s how he made Ticats fans feel so often, for so long.

Only the great Earl Winfield, who stirred the same kind of emotional expectation in the pews of Hamilton’s east end football cathedral, had more career touchdowns than Banks’ 62 majors from receiving and kick returning. But it wasn’t just those 62 dashes across the goal lines that moved fans closer to the edge of their seats … it was every appearance on the field.

Like a Hall of Fame slugger strutting to the plate in baseball, possibility throbbed on every play. Banks was potential in a completely unlikely form: just 5-foot-7, and 150 pounds, appearing to be as fragile as butterfly wings, but in reality as hard as steel. Appropriate for this town.

Almost as soon as he arrived, like so many other core players of a great, and long—for the modern era—generation of Ticats, during “The Guelph Year” of 2013, he was as electric as an industrial generator.

In his debut season with the Guelph Year Cats, he returned a missed field goal 107 yards late in their improbable comeback victory over the Alouettes to clinch second place and home field advantage for the Cats in the Eastern semi-final which they won over those same Als. They ended up in the Grey Cup for the first time in 14 seasons, a trip they made three other times in his eight-year career in black and gold.

The next season, the first in the team’s new stadium then called Tim Hortons Field, he again fractured the collective hearts of the Alouettes—who, poetically, shared a field with him tonight—when he returned two punts for touchdowns, and had a third called back on a penalty. The sight of him dashing down the left sideline faking inside, then curving outside, “dead legging” defenders into thinking they had him nailed, was unforgettable.

And in the Grey Cup which followed, Banks had a 45-yard reception for a touchdown and appeared to have created one of the greatest plays in Cup history when he took a punt return back 90 yards for a touchdown in the final minute which would likely have given the Ticats the championship. But it was called back for an illegal block that might not have been called in later years and the Ticats narrowly lost to the Calgary Stampeders.

Even the times he didn’t reach the end zone, you could not take your eyes off Banks. His near-misses were thrilling and when June Jones succeeded Kent Austin as head coach in the midst of the 2017 season and installed Banks as a permanent wide receiver, the accompanying buzz was just as permanent. He required your visual attention on dummy routes, where he was a decoy to set up other pass catchers, because well … you never knew. Maybe this was the one where he’d break loose, and he so often did. He and Jeremiah Masoli quickly became the most prolific pass-catching duo in the league.

And in 2019, Banks unleashed a season for the ages: he broke the franchise record for receptions, and was named the CFL’s Most Outstanding Player, the first Ticat to do so in 20 years and just the second in 32 years. It was one of the most dominant seasons in league history; he topped the CFL in every major receiving category, had 1,550 receiving yards and 13 touchdowns and added another TD rushing the ball.

Banks finished his career as the franchise career leader in kick return yardage, punt return yardage, missed field goal return yardage and was second in total touchdowns, combined yards, and punt return TDs, and despite a relatively short time as full-time receiver was in the top eight in receptions, yards and receiving touchdowns.

He was a four-time All-CFL player and a six-time East Division All-CFL selection, and became as synonymous with the city as the mills that were always in sight beyond the north end zone. He had scored touchdowns in the NFL, and led that league in kickoff return yardage two years before coming north, and was a college all-star at Kansas State.

But it was here, Hamilton, that captured him, just as he captured the town. He always said that the city brought out the best in him and on Wednesday he signed a one-day contract so that he could officially retire as a Ticat. As symbolic as it gets.

He is an all-time Ticat, a presence about whom the statistics, as gaudy as they are, tell only part of the story. You had to experience him in person, to see and feel the throbbing promise that hovered over every kick, every snap, to marvel at how someone built more like a jockey could confound and mesmerize horses twice his size.

He was repeatedly and reliably hypnotic.

And he was, and still is, the Ticats’ own. Now, though, the Cats must share him with the Hall of Fame and CFL history. Utterly deserved.