The Grey Cup is both the championship game of the Canadian Football League and the trophy awarded to the victorious team. The game is contested between the winners of the CFL’s East and West Divisional playoffs and is one of Canadian television’s largest annual sporting events. The trophy was commissioned in 1909 by The Earl Grey, then Canada’s governor general, who originally hoped to donate it for the country’s senior amateur hockey championship. Play was suspended from 1916 to 1918 due to the First World War and in 1919 due to a rules dispute.
About Grey Cup in brief
The Grey Cup is both the championship game of the Canadian Football League and the trophy awarded to the victorious team. The game is contested between the winners of the CFL’s East and West Divisional playoffs and is one of Canadian television’s largest annual sporting events. The trophy was commissioned in 1909 by The Earl Grey, then Canada’s governor general, who originally hoped to donate it for the country’s senior amateur hockey championship. Play was suspended from 1916 to 1918 due to the First World War and in 1919 due to a rules dispute. The Toronto Argonauts have the most Grey Cup wins since its introduction in 1909. The Edmonton Eskimos formed the Grey Cup’s longest dynasty, winning five consecutive championships from 1978 to 1982. The latest, the 107th Grey Cup, took place in Calgary, Alberta, on November 24, 2019, when the Winnipeg Blue Bombers defeated the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 33–12. Two awards are given for play in the game, Most Valuable Player and the Dick Suderman Trophy as most valuable Canadian player. The Grey Cup has been broken on several occasions, stolen twice, and held for ransom. It survived a 1947 fire that destroyed numerous artifacts housed in the same building. The first Grey Cup game was held on December 4, 1909, between two Toronto clubs: the University of Toronto Varsity Blues defeated the Parkdale Canoe Club 26–6 before 3,800 fans. The trophy has a silver chalice attached to a large base on which the names of all winning teams, players and executives are engraved.
It was originally intended to serve as the senior amateur championship of Canadian football, but Sir Montague Allan donated the Allan Cup before he could finalize his plans. Grey instead offered an award for the Canadian amateur rugby football championship beginning in 1909, but he initially failed to follow through on his offer. Competition for the trophy has been exclusively between Canadian teams, except for a three-year period from 1993 to 1995, when an expansion of the league south into the United States resulted in the Baltimore Stallions winning the 1995 championship. Since 1969, the game has always been played on a Saturday until 1968, but since 1969 has alwaysbeen on a Sunday. Most recently, in the 2017 game snow fell, at times heavily, throughout the game. It has been played in inclement weather at times, including the 1950 \”Mud Bowl\”, in which a player reportedly came close to drowning in a puddle, then the 1962 \”Fog Bowl\”, when the final minutes of the game had to be postponed to the following day due to heavy fog, and the 1977 \”Ice Bowl\”, contested on the frozen-over artificial turf at Montreal’s Olympic Stadium. The Cup was also sent for storage for a lack of interest from 1919 to 1916, due to Canada’s participation in World War I, during which time the game was forgotten. The cup was later discovered as the redo of an employee of the Toronto trust company where it had been stored.
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This page is based on the article Grey Cup published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 06, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
