Allan Byron (Teddy) Morris started out his competitive sports career playing junior football with the Native Sons team in Winnipeg, going all the way to the Canadian junior championship final. The rest is history. And it’s not just ordinary sports history at that. A distinguished football career spanning more than three decades led Morris inevitably to an arm’s full of honours, including a place in the Canadian football Hall of Fame, Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame and the Mississauga Sports Hall of Fame.

     Morris qualifies as a bona fide Mississaugan, having lived in his Cooksville home on RR 1 throughout his professional career as a football player and coach. It was here that the Toronto Argonauts’ original hard-nosed player died of a heart attack at the age of 55 on September 5, 1965. He was inducted into the Mississauga Sports Hall of Fame posthumously in 1976.

     The only man ever to play on three Grey Cup winning teams, then coach three more in successive years to Canada’s symbol of football supremacy, Morris was a great believer in Canadian talent. It was his proudest boost that he won three Grey Cups as a coach with all-Canadian line-ups at the time when other teams were already using U.S. imports. Even though he never made a great deal of money (he got paid something like $500 a season as a player), Morris said he owed “everything to football,” a game in which he spent more than 40 of his 55 years. He joined the Argonauts 1927 and, despite his slight 155-pound frame, soon established a reputations as one of the hardest runners and devastating hitters in the game.

     During his nine years of stardom with the Scullers, Morris helped them to Grey Cup triumphs in 1933, ’37 and ’38. He was named to the Canadian Football League’s all-star team on six occasions and won the Jeff Russell Memorial Trophy as the league’s outstanding player in 1937. After retiring as a player, Morris became assistant coach to Lew Hayman in 1940.

     He moved on to coach HMCS York Bulldogs for three seasons during the Second World War years, Winning the Services title in 1944. Eighteen players from his navy team formed the nucleus of the Argos he coached to the Grey Cup in 1945, ’46 and ’47. He left the Argos in 1949, but remained involved in the game in one capacity or another, including a spell from 1956 as chief scout for the Eastern Conference all-star teams.

     Football was truly Teddy Morris’ life. He put his heart and soul into coaching, lived and died with each play on the field. That’s the only way he knew how to do it – the Teddy Morris way.