The Surprising History of Sunday Football

The Regina Leader-Post shows the results of the municipal election on June 23, 1963, including the referendum on Sunday Sports (second column). Retrieved from newspapers.com.

By Tom Fuzesy

In American football, Sunday gameplay was commonplace as soon as the sport was introduced in the late nineteenth century. In Canada, however, it was once quite different. Various laws and social norms dictated that playing professional football on Sundays was not permissible, a position that did not change until the late 1950s and 1960s. How did this pivot in policy come about?

Initially, football and rugby matches in Canada occurred primarily on Saturdays and statutory holidays. For the Regina Rugby Club, renamed the Regina Roughriders in 1924 , there were only a handful of games to be played in any given season. Scheduling them on Saturdays, Thanksgiving, and Remembrance Day made it convenient to accommodate all matches before ending the season with playoffs in late November. Games were usually set for 3:00 PM, which allowed them to finish before nightfall, while giving each team time to travel to and from the games.

This Saturday and holiday format worked well until the late 1940s, when the growing number of games per season required having two matches in a single week. Monday was chosen as the additional day, and games were played in the evening or, if it was a holiday, in the afternoon. Newly renamed in 1946 as the Saskatchewan Roughriders, the team played eight games in 1946, increasing to 12 games in 1948 when it became a provincially owned and operated club, and eventually reaching 16 games in 1952. That year, the Riders had six occasions where they played the first game of the week on Saturday, and then played again the following Monday.

This comparatively grueling schedule—two games played two days apart—resulted in more injuries because of a lack of recovery time between matches. Nevertheless, this intense routine continued throughout the 1950s. To address the problem, the season was scheduled to start earlier in the year and included midweek games to space out each match. This prompted all nine Canadian Football League (CFL) teams to explore the option of scheduling Sunday games.

Prior to 1959, no Canadian football games were played on a Sunday. The only exceptions were rare occasions where Canadian teams played in the United States, an example of this being when the Regina Roughriders played an exhibition game against the Minot Panthers on Sunday, October 1, 1933. Sunday gameplay in the United States was a weekly occurrence and had been commonplace for professional football from very early on. The biggest reason for this was the overwhelming popularity of college football in the U.S., which traditionally took place on Saturdays. To avoid competing for fans, professional football games were scheduled on Sundays. In Canada, however, there was no equivalent competition, and strict Sunday bylaws often prohibited certain activities. The federal Lord’s Day Act of 1907 specifically banned paid spectator sports and other commercial transactions on Sundays. This clash between sports fans and the status quo was on full display when CKCK-TV first aired in 1954. The network aired that year’s Grey Cup game on a tape delay, meaning it was broadcast the following day, Sunday at noon. This timing clashed with many Sunday church services and led to objections from local church leaders.

Starting in 1959, Canadian teams slowly began scheduling Sunday games as various Sunday sports bylaws and restrictions were relaxed. Toronto was the first team to play on Sunday when they played Ottawa at Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium on Sunday, September 13, 1959. Other teams slowly followed, and by 1967 all CFL teams’ schedules included some Sunday games.

As televised Sunday sports became more common over the years, the debate over changing the Lord’s Day Act, which effectively banned Sunday football, reached a boiling point. People began to realize that Sundays were becoming just as important for sporting events as Saturdays, while views about holding paid spectator sports on Sundays were becoming obsolete. The issue was finally brought to Regina’s electorate on June 23, 1965, after getting the green light from the provincial government. With a 2-1 margin, the Sunday sports restriction was struck down, which finally allowed for Sunday home games for the Roughriders and any other sports teams charging admission to their games. Thus, on Sunday, October 17, 1965, the Riders played their first Sunday home game against the Winnipeg Blue Bombers. The federal Act remained law until it was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1985. As a result, certain sporting events kept restrictions on what time of day the games could begin. Curling briers, for example, started Mondays and wrapped up by the following Saturday in order to avoid Sunday altogether. Football, though, as an afternoon and evening game wasn’t affected after 1965.

The October 18, 1965 edition of the Regina Leader-Post after the Riders’ first Sunday game, retrieved from the Provincial Archives of Saskatchewan. The review from the sports editor? “If this is what Sunday football does, forget it.”

The Grey Cup championship followed suit four years later, with the first Sunday championship game occurring in 1969. Although it briefly moved to Saturday in 1970, it switched back to Sunday in 1971, where it has remained a staple of the day ever since.

Tom Fuzesy is a volunteer for Heritage Regina and is an avid sports fan, researcher, and local historian.