The Canadian Football League has a lot of fun weirdness, from passes hitting the crossbar to Joker facepaint to prop celebrations and wacky kicking situations. And a lot of that CFL weirdness gets further amplified at the annual Grey Cup, which is a week-long celebration of Canadian football as well as a title game, with fans coming from around the country to hang out with others who love the CFL. At the 107th Grey Cup in Calgary this week (the game takes place at 6:30 p.m. ET Sunday on TSN/ESPN2), one group of CFL fans has done so in particularly cool fashion with a tribute to one of the stranger footnotes in CFL history; quarterback Kevin Glenn belonging to every single one of the league’s current nine teams at one point or another, something that finally came to pass when he signed with the Edmonton Eskimos last year.
Glenn retired after the 2018 season, but he’s well remembered at this year’s Grey Cup thanks to the Wandering Glenns. That’s a group of CFL fans from across Canada that made a plan to hang out together at this year’s Grey Cup while donning each and every one of Glenn’s various CFL jerseys. They’ve shown up at a wide variety of the team parties, and it’s quite something to see all of them together:
The Travelling Glenn’s have set up shop at @spiritofyeg pic.twitter.com/qSc2jPo4XR
— Morley Scott (@Morley_Scott) November 22, 2019
The Glenns have been noticed by former CFL stars who played with Glenn, like Marquay McDaniel:
And they even got a great shoutout from Glenn himself:
That piece, by Postmedia’s Zach Laing, is worth a read on just how this all happened.
Glenn’s unique accomplishment is what led Ryan Ballantine and a dozen other football fanatics to honour the veteran.
“The Wandering Glenns are a celebration of the CFL, and nothing is more CFL and more Canadian than a guy whose rights were owned by every team at some point or another,” said Ballantine.
…The members of the group know each other through a series of podcasts they each host covering the CFL and its individual teams. Ballantine, who hosts a Calgary Stampeders podcast dubbed the Horsemen Radio Podcast, said getting everyone together has been three years in the making, as logistical issues have kept them from all getting together.
Until this year, that is, when many of the Wandering Glenns will meet for the first time.
“We’re pretty hyped up — we’ve been talking about it now for the past couple of months and the events we want to make sure we hit,” said Ballantine. “Each of the shows is sending someone into town . . . and represent our hometowns — we even have an American Glenn. He’s our Bombers fan, he lives down in Minnesota.
“We’re really excited the Grey Cup is where many of us can finally put a handshake to the name and face we’ve seen on video calls.”
But the best quote there from Ballentine is “We thought, in what has been a rather divisive time in Canada, why not find the thread that sows us all together, and that’s the CFL and Kevin Glenn.” And that’s absolutely true. There’s no one else who fans of every single CFL team can claim.
[The Calgary Herald; The Wandering Glenns on Twitter]