Famed Argonaut Fred "Scooter" Doty helped establish Canadian football after World War II
On Remembrance Day, it's worth looking back at some of the stories of how Canadian football was affected by World War I and II. From 1915-1919, the Grey Cup wasn't contested thanks to World War I, but play continued through World War II with many teams linked to military units and bases, such as the 1942 champion Toronto RCAF Hurricanes. A lot of top players went off to serve overseas during World War II, though, and their returns in 1945 and 1946 helped to change Canadian football. One notable one was Fred "Scooter" Doty, the Toronto Argonauts' star who passed away Sunday at the age of 90. His granddaughter, Ainsley Doty, wrote a remembrance of him for Sportsnet, and discussed just how much football meant to him when he returned from his service as a RCAF lieutenant:
I always knew my Grandpa adored football, but it wasn’t until he got sick that I realized the love affair stretched back to the 1940s and helped to define a sport.
Fred Doty, returned home from duty with the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1945 with one thing on his mind: football. He’d discovered the game playing pick-up on the barracks in Calgary, Alta., and now that the war was over he finally had a chance to play for real. He was 21-years old, five-foot-six and 140 pounds — not exactly an obvious pick when he showed up at the Toronto Argonauts’ camp as a walk-on. But it had been seven years since their last Grey Cup victory, and the Boatmen were desperate for new talent.
Stepping onto the turf that day was surreal for Doty. His idol, Joe “King” Krol, formerly of the Hamilton Flying Wildcats, was there, along with newcomers like Royal Copeland and Doug Smylie, who made Doty look like a pipsqueak in comparison. But head coach Teddy Morris noticed Doty’s exemplary skills right away; he was a natural quarterback with speed, agility and a talent for reading the field. Better yet, he could return punts and play defence as a capable safety. It was a no-brainer: Doty was in.
Doty wound up being an essential part of the Argonauts' run to the 1945 Grey Cup (where they beat Winnipeg 35-0), playing both ways as a quarterback and safety. The next year, he wound up playing for the University of Toronto Varsity Blues and helped lead them to a 13-3-1 record; he was also named a conference all-star at quarterback, and he still managed to sneak away for three games with the Argos (who went on to win the Grey Cup that year as well). In 1947, he returned to the Argos full-time and helped lead them to a third-straight Grey Cup (and according to Ainsley Doty, the last Grey Cup won by an all-Canadian roster). He played for the team for two more seasons before retiring to pursue an engineering career, excelling in punt returns and setting team records for interceptions along the way.
Doty's story is notable on a couple of fronts. For one thing, the way he learned football from pickup games at his barracks in Calgary during the war illustrates how integrated into military life it was at that time, and for another, his time playing after the war shows some of the challenges Canadian football was facing then. This was before the CFL was founded, in an era when university teams could still compete for the Grey Cup (although none made it to the big game between 1945 and 1954, when university football officially split off), and Doty being pulled away from the Argos by the U of T shows some of the challenges the big clubs faced. However, that roster mentioned above, with famed players like Doty, Krol, Copeland and Smylie, illustrates the amount of talent Canadian football had in those days too, and the prominence of football in the Canadian armed forces helped bring players like Doty to the game. The story of the world wars' impacts on Canadian football is a long and complicated one, but Doty's story shows us a notable part of it.
