Toronto Argonauts head coach John Huard (centre) watches the game during first quarter CFL action against the Hamilton Ti-Cats in Toronto on July 28, 2000.KEVIN FRAYER/The Canadian Press
John Huard had a disastrous, short-lived tenure as head coach of the Toronto Argonauts football team.
Mr. Huard (pronounced HEW-ard) was replaced after just eight games in 2000 with a record of one win, six losses and one tie. He quit after losing a game to the B.C. Lions at home by 51-4. His replacement, Michael (Pinball) Clemons, guided the team to six wins in the final 10 games of the season.
While not the worst Argos coach in recent memory (Dennis Meyer went 1-9 in 1993 before being sacked), the ignominious stint was a blemish on a lifelong football career for a former athlete considered one of the greatest athletes ever to come from the state of Maine.
Mr. Huard, who has died at 80, guided the Axemen of Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., to two unlikely Vanier Cup titles as Canadian university champions.
The Axemen defeated the mighty Mustangs of the University of Western Ontario (today known as Western) by 34-12 in 1979 before 20,300 fans at Varsity Stadium in Toronto, the largest Vanier Cup attendance ever at that venue.
Two years later at the same stadium, the Axemen defeated the powerful Golden Bears from the University of Alberta by 18-12.
Over three seasons, the coach compiled a 27-3 record. He was twice named regional coach of the year and won the Frank Tindall Trophy as Canadian university football’s coach of the year in 1981.
The Axemen roster that season included 27 student athletes from the Maritime provinces, a remarkable number considering several graduated from high schools without football programs.
“Just because you come from a small place,” the coach once said, “doesn’t mean you can’t achieve your hopes and dreams.”
He should know. He was born in a mill and college town of about 17,000 far from America’s football hotbeds.
John Roland Huard was born on March 9, 1944, in Waterville, Me., to the former Rita Landry and Roland Joseph Huard, a U.S. Navy veteran and maintenance man known as Zip from his time playing semi-professional hockey and football. John was the second oldest of four children – three boys and a girl – born to the couple.
Mr. Huard captained the football team at Waterville High School, where he was a four-sport letterman. In his senior year, he took turns playing several positions on both sides of the ball, including quarterback, fullback, linebacker, nose guard, offensive guard, defensive end and defensive back. He also kicked extra points.
After graduating, he married high-school girlfriend Helen Martha Liberty, a cheerleader and a second runner-up in a Miss Waterville beauty pageant.
At 6 feet, 228 pounds, Mr. Huard starred at the University of Maine as a middle linebacker. He made 22 tackles in his first game and later set school records for most tackles in a game and in a season. He also recorded the school’s longest interception return at 95 yards.
In 1965, he helped lead the Black Bears to a Tangerine Bowl showdown against East Carolina in Orlando, Fla. Though Maine lost by 31-0, Mr. Huard, who had a fumble recovery, was named the bowl game’s best defensive player.
A small-college first team All-American in 1965 and 1966 for Maine, the hard-hitting linebacker was selected by the Denver Broncos at No. 113 overall in the fifth round of the 1967 National Football League draft.
He led the Broncos in unassisted tackles in 1968 and 1969 before suffering a season-ending injury to the calf muscle in his right leg in the 1970 pre-season. He was traded to the New Orleans Saints for future draft choices only to tear the Achilles tendon in his left leg in the 1971 season-opener against the Los Angeles Rams. He missed the rest of that season.
Mr. Huard was lured north of the border the following year by Montreal Alouettes general manager J.I. Albrecht only to change his mind when the New England Patriots offered a tryout. When the Pats cut him during training camp, he finally joined the Als. The linebacker had only ever watched a Canadian football game once on television.
In his second season with the Alouettes, the linebacker suffered a pulled hamstring. He played three games with the nagging injury before being put on the injured list.
He was approached about playing in the new World Football League, but when contract talks with Birmingham were unsuccessful, he retired as a player, becoming a coach in his home state.
The successes with the Acadia Axemen were followed by a series of unfortunate appointments involving Mr. Albrecht. He hired Mr. Huard in 1984 to be head coach of a proposed CFL expansion team to be called the Atlantic Schooners, though the franchise collapsed before a game could be played. A decade later, Mr. Albrecht hired Mr. Huard to coach the expansion Shreveport Pirates in Louisiana only to have the owners fire the new coach before the first game. Finally, Mr. Albrecht hired Mr. Huard for the Argonauts job.
While Mr. Huard did not have success as a coach in pro football, he fared better coaching high school and college football in his home state.
“There’s something about this game that sucks you in and holds you,” he told his hometown Morning Sentinel newspaper in 1996. “It’s tough to let go. When it becomes that time of the year, it just feels right to have football back.”
In 1999, Sports Illustrated magazine named him No. 20 on its list of greatest athletes from Maine in the 20th century.
In 2014, he became the first – and so far only – Mainer to be inducted into the U.S. College Football Hall of Fame, in Atlanta.
He was the first football player to be inducted into the University of Maine’s Sports Hall of Fame and, in 2003, he was the inaugural inductee named to the University of Maine’s Alfond Stadium Ring of Honor. He was also named to the Acadia Athletic Hall of Fame in 2009, while the 1981 Axemen players and staff were inducted into the Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame in 2013.
In 2021, graduates of his Acadia football program launched the John and Helen Huard Award to assist student athletes in the football program.
After retiring as a coach, Mr. Huard, a computer consultant, became an executive for a company selling artificial turf. He took part in a 2006 midseason replacement of the field at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., which is home to the Patriots, the team that cut him. In 2007, he donated nearly $1-million for the placement of an artificial field at Raymond Field in Wolfville, N.S., where he had once guided young athletes to national titles.
Mr. Huard died Jan. 29 at his home in South Portland, Me. He leaves Helen, his wife of 59 years, as well as three children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Huard once told a Maine newspaper about arriving at Acadia only to learn the players had not been provided travel bags for their football gear. He distributed trash bags to the players. When a garbage truck drove past the team bus with garbage bags visible in the rear hopper, one of the players said, “Look, coach, there goes another team.”
You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.
To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at [email protected].
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Maine-born football star John Huard fumbled as coach of Toronto’s Argos )
Also on site :
- Numbrix 9 - May 11
- PM affirms key role of NERIC factory in railway industry localization
- Huge restaurant fire in Heliopolis kills 1 person, injures 3 more