Gael Force, Second Edition

Book excerpt: Football at Queen’s University has one of the richest and longest histories of any sport in Canada. The Golden Gaels have been a presence in Canadian football at both the amateur and professional levels since 1882. Gael Force traces this history, chronicling the team’s ups and downs and integrating them within the history of the university, the country, and the sport in general. Providing a wealth of interesting facts and engaging anecdotes as well as profiles and photographs of the coaches, captains, and players, Merv Daub takes the reader through more than a century of Queen’s football. Drawing from a wealth of sources, Daub recounts the team’s key milestones including their first Dominion championship in 1893 with “Curtis and his boys,” three consecutive Grey Cup wins in the 1920s, the 1934–35 victory of the “Fearless Fourteen,” the 1955 season when Gus Braccia, Ronnie Stewart, Gary Schreider, Lou Bruce, Al Kocman, “Jocko” Thompson, and the rest of that “band of merry men” brought Queen’s back into the limelight, the golden years of the 1960s, and the 1978 and 1992 Vanier Cup championship seasons. Adding twenty more years of football history since Gael Force was first published in 1996, this new edition includes the 2016 season played at the revitalized Richardson Stadium. It is both a tribute to a long-standing football legacy at Queen’s and an important historical and sociological study of college sport in Canada.