The stars were out. The scene was set. And so the Green and Gold decided to put on a show.
It just wasn’t the one that most of the 33,626 fans at McMahon Stadium came to see.
On Sept. 1, 1986, Edmonton defeated the host Calgary Stampeders 42-19, in what remains the most high-scoring game for the Green and Gold out of the 60 times Alberta’s CFL teams have met on the Labour Day.
The Green and Gold led 14-0 before the Stamps’ offence could even get on the field; Edmonton’s Bryan Kelly hauled in a touchdown toss from Matt Dunigan on the game’s opening possession, and the EE duo proceeded to hook up for a second TD moments later, after Calgary turned the ball over on the subsequent kickoff.
“In those games you’ve got to play as a team, you’ve got to create turnovers and capitalize and that’s what happened. We went up early and the never really could rebound,” says Dunigan, who had one of Edmonton’s great quarterbacking performances in Labour Day history, scoring one rushing touchdown to go with four TD passes.
“I remember everybody getting involved: Kelly getting the first two (touchdowns), Rick House for one, Marco Cyncar for one, so it’s just spread around … that was one of those games where things kind of fell our way and we controlled the time of possession and therefore the game.”
This was the provincial rival’s second meeting of 1986, the first coming 10 weeks earlier in the opening game of the season, also at McMahon Stadium, where Edmonton won 21-20. On that night, Stamps set a then-CFL record with 11 sacks, but Dunigan persevered, and would find Stephan Jones for a 56-yard touchdown strike as time ran out, setting up a game-winning convert for Tom Dixon.
Many had billed the Labour Day Classic as a revenge game for the Stamps, but the Green and Gold weren’t for following that script, to the chagrin of most in attendance.
“There were almost 34,000 people on that day in 1986. Packed house, capacity,” says Dunigan, a member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame. “(We had) 3,500 Edmonton fans down there – they took full advantage and used every one of our allotted seats – and the other 31,000 were Calgary Stampeders fans.”
Somewhere in the crowd was Huey Lewis, one of the biggest names in music at the time, riding high off the success of the smash single “Power of Love” from the movie Back to the Future. The singer’s group, Huey Lewis and the News, were set to play Calgary’s Olympic Stadium the following night, giving him opportunity to witness Canadian football’s most intense rivalry in person.
“He was just a football fan. They traveled everywhere and he was at ball games,” says Dunigan, who got to meet the star singer when Huey Lewis and the News brought their tour to Northlands Coliseum Edmonton a couple nights later.
“Back in the day, he was one of the most well-known artists that was a sports fan; he just enjoyed the competition, and we enjoyed listening to his music, so it went hand-in-hand, a mutual love affair. But you needed a little love in the air we got together with Calgary because there was a whole lot of hatred going on. A whole lot of dislikes.”