PLAYER #113 - JIM PALMER (1928-38)

Modern-day sports fans may remember the name Jim Palmer as a Cy Young Award-winning pitcher with the Baltimore Orioles, who was also the spokesman for a popular brand of men's underwear.

Fans from a previous era would remember the name Jim Palmer as a tough, two-way player who spent 11 years in a Double Blue uniform from 1928-38. Thoughts of him advertising a pair of men's briefs were probably out of the question, unless he wanted to be the victim of a heap of abuse, particularly at the hands of arch-rivals like the Hamilton Tigers.

"My first experience playing them was that football was not the same game I had played before," related Palmer to Globe and Mail football writer Gord Walker. "They were so much tougher, so much stronger, and they hit you so much harder than anyone I had ever played against before. You knew you had been in something."

When the Toronto-born Palmer joined the Argonauts from their junior squad in 1928, the team was not very good, but it was on its way to winning three Grey Cups during his tenure with the team (1933, '37 and '38). "We were beginning to build a fairly good team, in 1930, 1931 and 1932, but we were badly organized," said the four-time Big Four all-star, who played "inside" (or guard) on offence, and "middle" (or tackle) on defence.

However, in 1933, the Argos found the right captain to steer the ship, the one that would lead them to a Grey Cup they hadn't won in 12 years. His name was Lew Hayman, and his mark on the team would last for decades in one capacity or another.

"The Hayman teams were by far the best conditioned teams that played in the league in those days," claimed Palmer. "We would go out and play the game and at the end of the third quarter, the other team would be gasping on the field and we would still be going. We would score a lot of points in the fourth quarter."

They would also successfully utilize a new element of the game that evolved during Palmer's career: the forward pass. First introduced in 1929, the forward pass was fully legalized in all games and all leagues by the 1931 season.

"It changed the whole nature of the game," said Palmer. "Before that, if you had a good punter and a couple of big, strong men who could carry the ball, you could win games. But when the pass came in, that was impossible."

While playing in his latter years, Palmer also helped coach a bit under Hayman, a position he also took with the arch-rival Tigers for the 1939 season, after he had and a few teammates had a falling out with Argo management. After football, Palmer worked at the Imperial Surgical Company, among other things, and retired into the good life with his wife Jean.

However, in 1983, as he and Jean were leaving on a trip to the Maritimes, Palmer put away his wife's charm bracelet, which had two gold footballs on it commemorating the Argos' 1933 and 1937 Grey Cup wins. As Walker recalled it, Palmer had misplaced the bracelet and could not locate it upon his return, until finally four years later, a box containing the bracelet fell from under a couch he was moving. The Argo Bounce lives on!