Ticat legend Mike Walker was wheelchair bound for a year. The new Hall of Famer is hoping to walk onto the stage come November

By Steve Milton Spectator Columnist
April 16, 2021

Mike Walker is a tough man. And he needs to be.

Walker played famously robust and ferocious football in a town often described by the very same adjectives. Played that kind of tough football so dominantly, he was named to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame this week.

When he’s back in Hamilton for November’s induction, he wants to walk onto the stage at Tim Hortons Field, taking the steps without physical aids or the assistance of another human.

The kind of steps he hasn’t quite been able to take fully on his own for more than three years.

In February of 2018 a series of surgeries on compressed spinal discs put Walker into a wheelchair for a full year. Since then he’s endured severe pain and gruelling recovery therapy to slowly graduate to moving around with hiking poles.

“My goal is to be able to walk and to walk right up to that podium,” the legendary Tiger-Cat defensive lineman said from his home in Washington state. “It’s still a few months away, so that’s my target. I’m working my butt off trying to do it.”

Walker made it to four Grey Cup games during his eight Hamilton seasons before finishing with another two years in Edmonton and moving on to a long pro and college coaching career.

He played beside the equally-ferocious Grover Covington on a Hamilton defensive line that included the likes of Rod Skillman, Mitch Price and Dave Sauve. The unit eventually gelled into the stout group that was so important in one (1986) of the only two Cup wins the Ticats have enjoyed in the past 48 years. That season, Walker recorded 21 quarterback sacks, third-most in franchise history behind Joe Montford and Covington, who is still Walker’s best friend.

But, from February of 2018 to February, 2019, he was confined to a wheelchair, often in heavy pain, after three surgeries. He had been injured earlier in a car accident but doctors have also told him the constant football pounding he took probably added to his back problems. But the mental and physical discipline from football also helped him, they said, withstand the intense pain of postoperative effects and therapy better than most patients could.

“I couldn’t even move my legs at all,” he recalls. “The pain was pretty bad. Couldn’t dress myself.”

After a difficult year, he finally moved from a wheelchair — “I never even want to even see that wheelchair again”— to a walker and then hiking poles, which he still needs for support.

He’s aiming to take those few step to formally enter the Hall of Fame, “without the walking sticks, without any assistance,” and knows Hamilton football fans will recognize what that will take. Toughness.

“When I first got to Hamilton (in 1982) right off the bat they were telling me about Angelo Mosca and all the tough players of the past, so I knew that was what they expected,” says the 62-year-old, “Steeltown Tough they called it.”

Walker and his teammates had plenty of that. He made the CFL all-star team three times and played impactful roles in a trio of the most definitive games in Ticats lore: their massive comeback for a 59-56 victory over fierce rivals Toronto Argonauts in the 1986 two-game total-points East Final; the next week’s Grey Cup mauling (39-15) of prohibitively favoured Edmonton; the last-second loss to Saskatchewan in the 1989 Grey Cup, often called the greatest Cup game ever played.

“My favourite memory is winning the Grey Cup and the week before, against the Argos,” he said. “We lost by 14 at home and when they scored first and went up 26 points on us in Toronto. I thought, ‘Oh gee, they’ve put our backs right against the wall.’ But we played great in the last three quarters and (quarterback) Mike Kerrigan was fantastic. There’s no way we should have won, down that much, but it was our best performance ever.

“That momentum carried over to the Grey Cup and I remember looking around our room before the game and seeing that everyone had these stone faces. I said, ‘Wow, there’s no way we’re going to lose to Edmonton.’ It was amazing.”

Walker has been married to Kristen Walker for 34 years and two of their children were born at McMaster Children’s Hospital. The tough player looks forward to returning to a tough town this fall.

“All those years of playing football I could get myself up off the turf,” he says. “But after the surgeries I fell a couple of times and needed assistance from Kristen … and I still weigh 260 pounds.

“But I am doing everything I can to be able to walk to that podium.”

VIA: https://www.thespec.com/sports/hamilton-region/opinion/2021/04/16/canadian-football-hall-of-fame-ticat-mike-walker.html