It was 50 years ago Saturday (December 9) that the CFL reacted with shock to the word that five players of the day had died in a plane crash on a remote BC mountainside.
The five were returning from the then Canadian Football Council’s East-West All star game which had been held in Vancouver. Trans-Canada Airlines flight 810 crashed on Dec. 9, 1956 into Mount Slesse near Chilliwack, taking the lives of Gordon Sturtridge, Mel Becket, Ray Syrnyk and Mario DeMarco all of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, along with Winnipeg Blue Bomber Calvin Jones. It would mark one of the darkest of days in Canadian sports history.
The wreckage would not be discovered until the spring of 1957, when the remains of the plane were found on May 10. The wreckage was in such a terrible state that it proved to be impossible to pinpoint a cause for the tragedy, other than to assume that the plane suffered some form of catastrophic engine failure.
Professional sports disasters seem to be few and far between, which considering the amount of travel that the athletes make in a year is a bit of a miracle, though modern travel is by far light years ahead of the days gone by. Today’s athletes should be thankful of the state of modern air travel, normally the worst they have to worry about is a flight delay an inconvenience but in the scheme of things something that would be easy to accept.
To put things into perspective, we need only look back fifty years and a day that shocked not only the football community but the nation as a whole.
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