SIMMONS: How Luke Willson became Canada’s busiest – and maybe most-hated – man in football

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Luke Willson played eight years in the NFL, won a Super Bowl, played 102 games at tight end mostly for the Seattle Seahawks, and never got famous doing so.

He’s getting famous now — famous and infamous and polarizing — as probably the busiest football man in Canada. Not CFL man. Not NFL man. Not Canadian college man.

All of that. Almost every day. Without having time for a day off or a great night’s sleep. His life has become a whirlwind of football activity, his calendar makes the busy look almost inactive.

“If someone had told me this would have happened, I would said you were crazy,” said Willson, the TSN football voice who has drawn so much attention across the country. “I had no intention of doing any media when I retired. That was never the plan.”

What is Luke Willson’s crazy schedule like?

Now almost all he does is media. While coaching football at the University of Guelph in between. On Sundays, it’s NFL all day and all night at TSN. He leaves after the Jay Onrait show closes sometime after 1 a.m.

Monday he wakes up, does his podcast, Film Never Lies, in the afternoon. Appears on OverDrive at 5. On Sports Centre at 6. Stays around to watch Monday Night Football, where he appears on the Onrait show afterwards to give his thoughts.

After the show he drives to Guelph, gets a hotel room, gets to sleep sometime in the middle of the night.

On Tuesday, he’s in the Guelph football offices by 8 a.m., for his first season of Gryphons football. This wasn’t a job he looked for: It looked for him.

Willson helped his brother coach the London Junior Mustangs the past few summers. Somehow that led to him helping out Guelph football and eventually joining their staff. He loves coaching — thinks there might be a future in it for him.

After practice Tuesday afternoon, he drives back to his home north of Toronto.

Wednesday is theoretically his day off, but Willson doesn’t quite understand the concept. Wednesday is production meeting day in the CFL. The game broadcasters meet with the head coach and quarterbacks and defensive players from the teams they are calling games for that week.

Two teams, six interviews: That’s part of the day.

“I watch a lot of film on Wednesday. I love watching film,” he said.

Every Wednesday, in between his CFL work he has a Zoom call with the tight ends from Guelph.

On Thursday, he begins to make his CFL prep sheet for Friday Night Football. This is his first season as a colour commentator. He has been the breakout star of Friday Night Football and, by extension, CFL games on television.

He appears on OverDrive, the popular radio show, at 5 p.m. and then back for Thursday Night Football on the Onrait show.

On Friday morning, Willson is travelling to wherever he is calling the game that night. He loves the convenience of the games in Hamilton and Toronto, where it’s a car ride away. Getting to Western Canada means an especially long day. He sleeps in the afternoon, calls the game at night.

“I’d like to do more calling of games in the future,” he said. “I love the game, but more than that I love the preparation.”

Why do some fans hate Luke Willson?

What he hasn’t come to love is all that goes around being a football commentator in Canada. Willson speaks his mind — outrageously at times — when asked a direct question. That has made him both loved and loathed.

He has become an online figure of derision for long-time CFL watchers and loyalists. There is almost a cult-like hate out there for him, which he has tried to understand and come to grips with.

“There is a narrative online that I’m some sort of deranged lunatic,” the 36-year-old Willson said. “I know I haven’t handled my online stuff as well as I should have. I’m getting better at it.

“I’ve learned it’s easy for a simple Tweet to be misconstrued. There seems to be a deranged kind of CFL fan out there who are just waiting to jump on  someone who had a different opinion than theirs.

“What I’ve found is, online everybody has a strong opinion. I respect that. But when you meet (your critics) and have a conversation, everything gets settled rather quickly. I wish more people would sit back and say ‘this guy had a passion for Canadian football.’

“I come from a place of extreme knowledge of football getting into this. I watch a lot of film. I played a lot of years. I’ve coached a lot. But I wasn’t prepared for the fight that was going to come along with this.”

How did TSN’s view of Willson change?

The worst battle came inside of TSN. Hall of Fame producer Jon Hynes did not like Willson’s approach to broadcasting CFL. He was so anti-Willson that he wouldn’t allow him on his Friday Night Football broadcasts last season

At the end of the season, TSN showed the storied Hynes the door. The reason primarily from the inside: He wouldn’t open his eyes to see what he had in Willson.

“I had never met Jon Hynes, never heard of him and I started hearing all these things about this guy having it in for me,” Willson said. “One of my colleagues told me ‘Jon Hynes wants to light you on fire.’

“I walk by (Hynes) at Grey Cup at he growls at me like a petulant child … if you have a personal issue with me, be a man and bring it up. He never spoke to me.

“A lot of the old-time CFL people wanted nothing to do with me. They treated me like utter garbage, like I was the enemy. One of the regrets in my life is shaking Jon Hynes’ hand. I never should have done that.”

Hynes is out and Willson will head to CFL playoffs and Grey Cup in Calgary as part of the TSN panel.

And he remains pro-football — not pro-CFL, not pro-NFL. He sees great and not-so-great in both. He’s not one of those old-time thinkers that has strangled the CFL for decades from the inside.

“I knew a lot about the CFL and the CFL rules before I started doing this,” said Willson, who grew up in the Windsor area. “But I didn’t know a lot about thinking inside and outside the league. I am more comfortable talking about the American game because I experienced it for so many years. But I had no clue that there was so many factions among football fans, this odd division among fans — that you can’t like both.

“There’s this thought, and I don’t understand it, that if you like the CFL, you can’t like the NFL. And if you like the NFL, you can’t like the CFL. Why not? It’s just football. It doesn’t make sense to me.

“You look at the NFL and the final two minutes is one of the most electric things in sports. There’s no huddle, a crazy sense of urgency, when do you call your time outs, when don’t you use them, so much to think about. There’s so many nuances in so little time with the clock ticking. That’s exciting.

“On the flipside, the final three minutes of the CFL, the clock stops after every play. What you get is check down, check down, and you can really control the clock. You’re going to get more comebacks at the end of games because of that. That means the game is never over and that’s great. It’s a different great.

“You don’t have to decide which ending you like, I won’t say one is right and the other is wrong, but to say the final three minutes in an CFL game is superior to the final two minutes of an NFL game, well, that is completely false.

“I think there’s a lot of people enjoying the NFL who don’t really watch the CFL in this country. And that’s a mistake. And there’s a lot of people enjoying the CFL, who don’t watch the NFL. … The best case for football in this country is for people to enjoy both leagues.”

But back to Willson’s nutty schedule. After doing Friday Night Football, he gets up early Saturday morning to travel back to Toronto and get to wherever Guelph is playing its OUA game that day.

Occasionally, it’s easy. Recently he drove to Ottawa for a Friday night game and then to Kingston early Saturday morning for a Guelph game against Queen’s.

It gets more complicated when the game is in Calgary or Edmonton on Friday night and he has to be on the field before noon at a Gryphons game.

“I know I’m overdoing things,” Willson said. “But I signed up for all of this. I don’t have a contract for next year. I’m burning the candle at both ends. I know that.

“When the season is over, I’ll sit down and figure all that out. “

ssimmons@postmedia.com

Steve Simmons is Canada’s longest-serving sports columnist

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