It’s not easy being green… if you’re a Winnipeg Blue Bombers season-ticket holder.
Dave Dech ordinarily arrives at his designated seat in Princess Auto Stadium fully decked out in blue and gold. That won’t be the situation this weekend, however, when the Bombers clash with their principal Canadian Football League rival, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, in the annual, sold-out Banjo Bowl game.
“No, I’ll be in green pretty much from head to toe. People sitting around us kid me, but by now they know if it’s the Banjo Bowl, Dave’s showing up in green,” says Dech, 63, possibly the biggest Saskatchewan supporter this side of Moosomin.
JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS
It’s nothing but sweet (green) dreams. Dave Dech has converted a bedroom into a shrine for his beloved Saskatchewan Roughriders.
Not only does the married father of two grown sons have 25 Roughriders jerseys hanging in his closet — at press time, he was still mulling over which one to throw on for Saturday’s tilt — there is a main-floor lair in his and his wife Patti’s Westwood abode you’ll probably want to avoid if you suffer from prasinophobia — a fear of the colour green.
“Welcome to what we lovingly call the Roughriders Room,” Dech says, referencing a 100-square-foot space wholly dedicated to Rider Nation.
There, dozens upon dozens of team-crested keepsakes are on exhibit; everything from cowbells to cribbage boards to coasters… even an unopened case of Riders Championship Cola that was marketed by a major grocery chain following the squad’s 2013 Grey Cup victory over the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.
(Dech points out that the room used to be bright green. Except after adding a bed for guests — yes, it’s covered with a green-and-white blanket — he and Patti painted the walls a more neutral shade of tan, in an effort to make it “a little more hospitable.”)
JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS
Dech comes by his love of the Roughriders
honestly. He was born and raised in Regina.
Dech, 63, comes by his love for the five-time CFL champs honestly. He originally hails from Regina and was in kindergarten when his father took him to a pre-season scrimmage that pitted the team’s defence against its offence.
“The game was in Saskatoon and for whatever reason, my dad, who has since passed away, decided we should drive there to watch,” he says, cradling a Roughriders mini football in his hands.
“What’s interesting is that this May during the pre-season, Winnipeg played Saskatchewan in Saskatoon. I made the trip and it felt like I’d gone full-circle, with that being the first occasion I’d seen the Riders play there since I was a kid.”
Dech was nine years old in 1972 when his family moved to Winnipeg from Regina.
JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS
Dech has a room full of Saskatchewan
Roughriders paraphernalia that is always growing.
He continued to follow the Riders closely and in 1992, four years after tying the knot, he convinced his Elie-born wife to accompany him to his birthplace for the annual Labour Day showdown between the Roughriders and Blue Bombers.
The Dechs snapped a slew of pictures that weekend, including a shot of their eldest son at 11 months old, sporting green pants, green-and-white socks and a size-small sweatshirt bearing the Riders “S” logo.
Shortly thereafter, they hung the photo on a blank wall in their spare bedroom, steps away from the kitchen. One pic turned into two, two into 10 and before you could say Ronnie Lancaster, they had transformed the room into a family photo album documenting what is presently 34 consecutive trips to Regina for the annual Labour Day Classic.
About 10 years ago, Dech took things to a whole other level by introducing Riders souvenirs to the photomontage — pieces he’d been scooping up both in-person and from online sources such as eBay.
JOHN WOODS / FREE PRESS
Dozens upon dozens of team-crested keepsakes are on exhibit; everything from cowbells to cribbage boards to coasters.
“Besides the Montreal Canadiens and Toronto Maple Leafs, I think the best marketing effort by a Canadian sports team is done by the Roughriders,” Dech says.
“They seem to always be coming out with new stuff for fans to buy and I guess you could say I do my best to keep up.”
He’s not kidding.
Besides officially licensed apparel such as T-shirts, ball caps and scarves, he shows off plush toys depicting Riders mascot Gainer the Gopher and bobbleheads made to look like Roughriders legends George Reed and Roger Aldag.
There are also sports cards from various Riders eras, game-day programs dating back to the 1970s and an intact box of Darian’s Darios, a brand of breakfast cereal unveiled in 2011 in honour of Darian Durant, the Riders’ quarterback from 2006-16.
(Alas, all that remains of a 220-gram bag of All-Dressler Flavoured Potato Chips — for former Saskatchewan receiver Weston Dressler — is an empty, ironed-out sack. Its contents are long gone, Dech laments.)
DAVID SANDERSON / FREE PRESS
Lance Hackewich boasts
what is considered the
largest’s Riders memorabilia collection in the
world.
Saskatchewan is often referred to as the breadbasket of Canada, only another Roughriders fan is giving new meaning to that motto.
Regina native Lance Hackewich has built what experts have described as the largest collection of Riders memorabilia on the planet.
By far the most unique specimen in the 59-year-old Roughriders season-ticket holder’s hoard is a mini-loaf of bread from 1951, the year Saskatchewan lost 24-21 to the Ottawa Rough Riders in the 39th Grey Cup championship game.
“From what I’ve been told, the Riders cheerleaders were on a float in the Grey Cup parade, held the day before the game, and were tossing loaves of bread out to people lining the street,” Hackewich says, welcoming a visitor to his Riders recess, tucked inside his and his wife Linda’s northwest-Regina split-level.
“My loaf — which I’m 100 per cent sure is the only one that’s survived 75 years — came from a person in Saskatoon who found it while cleaning out his dad’s stuff. He contacted me to see if I was interested and I picked it up in-person a few days later.”
Like Dech, Hackewich has been a Riders “nut” for as long as he can remember. He collected the odd item growing up but got into the hobby “big time” in 1993 following the birth of his son, Nelson.
“As soon as he was able to walk, the two of us would attend autograph days at the stadium and put up whatever we had signed. It kind of got out of control from there,” he says.
DAVID SANDERSON / FREE PRESS
A 75-year-old mini loaf
of bread is among the
most unique items in
Lance Hackewich’s display.
To spare him or his wife Linda from having to dust 24-7, the majority of his treasures, including game-worn cleats, commemorative bottles of J.P. Wiser’s whisky and multiple action figures, are kept under glass.
And what doesn’t fit inside his customized display units rests on a pair of shelves that, in another life, served as bench seating at Taylor Field, the Roughriders’ former home stadium.
“These are from the very row we sat in for years,” Hackewich says, patting one of two wooden structures fastened to opposite walls.
“Ours was the longest (row) in Taylor Field — 42 seats altogether — and I brought it home in my Ford Ranger, in 16-foot pieces. There are a handful of Riders collectors as serious as me and even they’ve said they haven’t seen anything quite like it.”
Back in Winnipeg, Dech says that while he is hoping for a Riders victory in the Banjo Bowl, it won’t be the end of the world if the home side gets the W.
“It’s a tight rivalry but it’s also good-natured, I think, for the most part. I love football and all the enthusiasm that goes along with it but at the end of the day, I understand that it’s just a game. Will I cheer for Saskatchewan? Sure. But if the Bombers win, I’ll be the first one to say, ‘Hey, congrats,’ to anybody in a blue jersey.”
david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca
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