The CFL season would have ended without Peter Dyakowski having seen a single minute of action if the Hamilton Tiger-Cats hadn’t rebounded from a 2-7 start to reach the East final. But the year could have turned out much, much worse for Dyakowski, a 30-year-old offensive linesman who grew up in Point Grey and graduated from Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»College.
Playing for the 2013 Grey Cup in Regina against the host Roughriders and their rabid, watermelonned nation of fans (“hospitable in their own way,” he said), Dyakowski exited the game on a stretcher and watched the final quarter in medical care for a torn patella tendon in his right knee.
“I made the mistake of looking at it and that was particularly awful,” he said. Hamilton lost, and it would be one day short of a year before the linesman, 20 pounds lighter at 305, returned after knee surgery, plus a blood clot, pulmonary embolism and collapsed lung.
“Given what I had to recover from, it was going to be a roll of the dice if I was going to get here or not,” Dyakowski said Wednesday after a Ti-Cats practice at B.C. Place. “But after a certain point, it seemed like my recovery really accelerated. I could push myself more and more, I could lift more in the weight room and then follow that up with higher and higher intensity on the field. I wouldn’t be on the field if it hadn’t been for the team getting us to the East final and then to the Grey Cup. I’m really excited to have the opportunity.”
And he should be. Dyakowski disregarded unusual but intensifying pain in his back until it reached an excruciating high. “A football player deals with pain maybe differently,” he said. “I figured, I just played a full season. I tried to ignore it as hard as I could.” And after surgery, his knee was painful enough. But then he couldn’t breathe.
At Hamilton General Hospital in the middle of the night with his wife and the Ti-Cats trainer, his leg still in a cast, Dyakowski was treated with blood thinners to address a clot in his lung, a potentially fatal condition.
“The trick when you go to the hospital,” he said, a grin spreading on his boyish face, “tell them you’re having trouble breathing and they’ll take care of you right away.”
In the East final, Dyakowski took the field for converts and field goals and says he’s grateful for the playing time he gets, he said. “It was great to be back out in a pressure situation. You had to get ready to take someone’s best and give them a good shot. I’m hopeful that I’ll get as many chances as they’ll give and I’ll make the most of them.”
He wasn’t anxious but, in practice, was lifting his feet like the ground was alight. “I was really firing my feet early on because I didn’t want to leave my feet on the ground for any period of time. Now, it is just like normal again.”
Dyakowski, who rebuilt a ’79 Pontiac Firebird his senior year of high school, wasn’t a football player until he crossed paths with Todd Bernett, the head coach at Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»College who worked with the Grade 10 student in the weight room and on the field until he became the first Canadian to play football at Louisiana State University. In 2006, he was drafted in the second round by Hamilton.
His last playoff game at B.C. Place was in 2001. He was a Grade 11 student playing for the AAA B.C. Championship and lost, “by a wide margin,” he conceded, to Carson Graham secondary in a 41-8 drumming.
“Now is the chance for redemption,” said Dyakowski, who won the inaugural CBC game show Canada’s Smartest Person in 2012. “I had to pass the diamond tiara along,” he said, grinning again, since the contest awarded a new winner earlier this month.
“It’s really satisfying to come back home and have this chance. [in 2001], we let everyone down and lost. After that game, I came back out here and all the lights were off and I said to myself, I was going to come back and play on this field again,” he said.
His first start for Hamilton in 2007 was at B.C. Place. “It’s kind of a special place for me,” he said and won’t be surprised to see a cheering section dressed in gold and purple at Sunday’s Grey Cup between Hamilton and the Calgary Stampeders. Otherwise, it will be a home crowd for Dyakowski.
Cheeseburgers and Mensa
An articulate speaker and tweeter, six-foot-five, 300-plus pound Hamilton Tiger-Cats offensive linseman Peter Dyakowski has a Mensa-certified IQ and a hobby for rebuilding classic cars. A White Spot bacon cheeseburger is his ideal pre-game fuel.
- At Louisiana State University as a freshman, Dyakowski was nicknamed “The Mullet” because of his Canadian roots and… roots.
- In his senior year at Â鶹´«Ă˝Ół»College in 2002, he did not allow a single quarterback sack.
- A tackle on both sides of the ball for the Fighting Irish, he was singled out as a big factor in the team’s 2,801 yards rushing and 1,100 yards passing in 12 games in 2002.
- Out of a possible 1,600, he scored 1,420 on his SAT exam. His family members are recognized by Mensa.
- In his first mention in a newspaper, in 2001, he was identified by the Province as the “best offensive lineman in B.C. this year.”
- Cheeseburgers deliver “ideal pre-game nutrition,” he said: “It’s an ideal blend of carbohydrates, protein, fats that are going to let you have energy to get you through a fourth quarter.” When away from B.C., he misses the double-double with bacon from White Spot. “It’s seized a position in my imagination as one of my top burgers. I miss it and I can’t get it anywhere else.”
