Flutie Finds Magic in CFL : Pro football: The 5-9 quarterback says of his stint in the NFL that he “was winning, but I wasn’t flashy enough for them, or big enough.”

HAMILTON, Ontario —  Give him just one more last chance, pleads Doug Flutie. He is peeling tape off his ankles, sitting at his locker in his red football pants and sweaty gray T-shirt, muttering. “All I know is, there’s still a second on that clock. At least a second.”

It is 10 years since his so-called “Hail Mary” pass, that 48-yard lightning bolt that lifted Boston College past Miami on Thanksgiving weekend, 47-45, as time expired. That pass, one of football’s most unlikely and memorable, conjured by one of the smallest men on the field for a national TV audience, virtually won Flutie the 1984 Heisman Trophy and, more than that, painted the official portrait of Flutie: Miracle worker. Patron of lost causes. Irrepressible little big man.

When Colorado’s Kordell Stewart, a month ago, threw a 64-yard Flutie on the last play of the game to stun Michigan, “everybody compared it to mine,” Flutie noticed. Which was both a compliment and, somehow, an affront: As if that were the only play Flutie ever made. As if, in spite of that play and all that goes before and after it, Flutie still must prove that he is big enough and fast enough to play this sport at the highest level.

And he sits in a Canadian Football League locker room last week, summarily peeved over the unjust loss of one second. At least one second.

His first-place CFL team, the Calgary Stampeders, had just lost to the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, 27-24. With 48 seconds to play, Flutie, his equilibrium still imperfect after an earlier blow to the head, started the game’s final drive from his own 35-yard line and winged Calgary quickly down the field, to the Hamilton 35, by throwing four passes--one dropped, three completed.

In the CFL, with its 110-yard field, that’s 40 yards, covered almost instantly. In the CFL, with the goal posts situated on the goal line, that put Calgary in position for the tying field goal, and overtime. But, as Calgary receiver Pee Wee Smith scrambled off the turf after the 29-yard gain, the game ended.

“I looked at Pee Wee and then I looked at the clock and I saw it change from 2 to 1 to zero,” Flutie insisted. “That’s B.S.; absolute B.S. That’s aggravating. I mean, the whistles are in those guys’ mouths. All they have to do is blow them when he hits the ground.”

In high school, Flutie’s Natick, Mass., team was losing to Braintree with 30 seconds to play when Flutie marched his team into field-goal range and, though he never had attempted a field goal before, he kicked the winning 36-yarder. Natick was losing to Needham in the final minute when Flutie scrambled for a first down on fourth-and-20 to keep the game-winning drive alive.

He was a fourth-string freshman quarterback at Boston College when he was called off the bench in the fourth quarter against Penn State and threw for 135 yards and a touchdown. “It was like somebody flicked on a switch,” said Jack Bicknell, his coach at the time. During his senior season at B.C., Flutie twice threw touchdown passes on fourth down to beat Alabama, threw six TD passes against North Carolina and, of course, beat Miami when he threw to roommate Gerard Phelan on the last play.

Over and over, for years and years, he has caused hardened old football people to shake their heads with a reverence that would set choirs to singing “Amazing Grace.” Even his teammates said he was “magic.” Yet, to Flutie, “I guess what’s aggravating is that, because you’ve done it so many times, or you’ve got a reputation for doing it, people think of it, like, ‘Flutie magic.’ It’s hard work. It’s not magic. It’s not mirrors.”

Watch closely. Not drafted until the 11th round by the Los Angeles Rams, Flutie opted for Donald Trump’s USFL New Jersey Generals in 1985 and didn’t make it to the NFL until the Chicago Bears signed him midway through the 1986 season. He still was considered too small--listed as 5-9 at B.C. and sarcastically called “America’s midget” by Bears veteran Jim McMahon--but in his first NFL start, late in the ’86 season, he quarterbacked an upset against Dallas.

In early ’88 he went to the New England Patriots as a third-stringer, came off the bench in his first game to spark a 14-point rally, including a last-ditch 80-yard drive and a 13-yard bootleg run for the winning score. With the Patriots, a bad team, he proceeded to win seven of the 10 games he started, “but in the NFL, they just want big guys who just throw the ball,” Flutie said. “They want to program everything.”

Even this latest NFL gizmo--planting speakers inside quarterback helmets so a coach can call every play--tees off Flutie, who calls 50% of his own plays in Calgary and can make due with hand signals from the sideline the rest of the time.

“I was winning but I wasn’t flashy enough for them, or big enough. In the NFL, it’s, you know, ‘Let’s put in a guy who’s 6-4. We’ll lose but we’ll look good losing.’ It amazes me the guys who hang around, sitting on the bench in that league. There are guys in the NFL that I’ve never lost to.

“And I was getting shorter and shorter. I was measured at 5-10 in high school, and pretty soon I’m 5-7. And slower. One watch has me running a 4.33 (for 40 yards) this year, another 4.41. I’m 32 years old, so I probably could run a little faster when I was younger. But the NFL has me at 4.87, and once it’s on the books . . . Shoot, I never was timed my senior year at B.C. because I signed with the Generals. Some NFL scout came around my junior year, when I was playing an intramural basketball game, and timed me at halftime in basketball sneakers. But you ask Jerry Glanville about the time we played Houston and I was pulling away from his defensive backs. He said I was at least running 4.5.”

So Flutie went to the CFL, signing with British Columbia where, in his debut in July 1990, he threw a 37-yard touchdown pass with one second left to send the game into overtime. In 1992, Calgary signed him for $1 million and gave him 10% of the team on top of that. And, in the CFL’s Western Division final that year, Flutie took the team 73 yards in the last 73 seconds to beat Edmonton, 23-22. “Better than the John Elway drive” (in the AFC playoffs against Cleveland), CFL followers insist.

Flutie has been to Canada’s Super Bowl, the Grey Cup game, twice in four seasons and won it once. He has won three consecutive CFL MVP awards and is the runaway favorite to win a fourth. He has passed for 4,800 yards already this year and more than 26,000 in just 4 1/2 seasons, and he just keeps pulling rabbits out of his hat.

“He just makes ungodly plays,” said Hamilton Coach Don Sutherin, who was a defensive assistant on Flutie’s Calgary team in 1992 and 1993. “I know in the ’92 Grey Cup game, two blocks were missed in our offensive line on one play, and it didn’t matter. Doug completed a 35-yarder, anyway.”

“This guy’s a Houdini,” said Dan Kepley, widely considered the greatest linebacker in CFL history and now a TV commentator. Kepley has seen plenty since he played in the league 20 years ago, but he’s never seen Flutie-like escapes before.

Flutie is so valuable that the CFL has rewritten its rules to allow each team to sign one “marquee” player and not include his salary under the $2.5 million salary cap. As Calgary’s marquee player, he has solidified the Stampeders as the league’s glamour team, only three years after an S.O.S.--Save Our Stamps--campaign to keep from selling or moving the team. In a league with a minimum salary of $30,000, where Flutie’s Calgary teammate Stu Laird has a day job as a fireman and Hamilton wide receiver Wally Zatylny runs a deli, Flutie is a multi-millionaire and the biggest draw. “The greatest player who’s ever played the game,” said Calgary owner Larry Ryckman. “Even Joe Montana, who’s my idol, doesn’t have the stats Doug has.”

Every pat on Flutie’s back somehow seems to come with a slap in the face. This is, after all, the CFL. And, though it has nurtured such star NFL quarterbacks as Warren Moon, Joe Theismann and Joe Kapp, with its wide-open, three-downs-instead-of-four urge to throw the ball, it remains “minor league” in perception--not only on bar stools but in same-thinking football minds around the land.

“I remember we went down to play Alabama my senior year at B.C., when Ray Perkins was coaching there,” Flutie said. “And he said that I’d be a good CFL quarterback. I took it as an insult, or a backhanded compliment at best.” Former New York Giants assistant Joe Galat, the head coach of the CFL’s now-defunct Montreal Alouettes during Flutie’s last year at B.C., was so convinced Flutie would be rejected by the NFL--because of his size--that “Galat went around talking about what Flutie would do for the Alouettes,” said Chris Cuthbert, a CFL broadcaster. “Then Flutie threw the Hail Mary pass, and Galat was walking around like he’d seen a ghost. He knew the NFL would have to try to get Flutie then.”

“He’s so suited for the CFL,” said Hamilton’s Sutherin. “It’s a shame he hadn’t come up here when he was younger; he’d have broken every record in the world.”

He is, Flutie says, “much prouder of things I’ve accomplished here right now” than for a single play a decade ago. “But I guess if that’s what I’m going to be remembered for, it’s rather that than not to be remembered at all.”

Meanwhile, the ending here, just last week, “won’t be out of my system until we get back out on the field and win,” Flutie said. “It will sit there. I can’t just blow it off and go out and get drunk with the fellows and forget it. I don’t drink, anyway, but it’s more important to me than that.”

He looks up from post-game undressing of his feet, to make eye contact.

“It’s my job.”