For more than a decade, any opponent fielding a punt or kickoff at The Brick Field at Commonwealth Stadium knew the only path to daylight meant staying out of the crosshairs of Jed Roberts.
Once the Edmonton Elks’ legend acquired his target, he brought it down with ruthless precision, amassing 163 special team tackles, nearly 50 more than anyone else to ever don the Green and Gold.
Likewise, any teammate within range knew they had to stay off Roberts’ radar, lest they become the subject of his latest masterpiece.
Over the latter half of his 13 seasons in Edmonton, Roberts took up drawing humorous caricatures of Elks players and coaches on the locker room whiteboard, conveniently located next to his stall.
It didn’t have to be April Fool’s Day for Roberts have a bit of good-natured fun at a colleague’s expense. Whenever inspiration struck, his was just as deft making a sketch in erasable marker as he was making outlines in field chalk.
“I guess one day I drew something, and the guys were like, ‘Hey man, can you do that again? So, I started doing it.” – Jed Roberts.
“I guess one day I drew something, and the guys were like, ‘Hey man, can you do that again? So, I started doing it,” recalls Roberts, who played for the Elks from 1990 to 2002 and won the Grey Cup in 1993. “I got to the point where I would do one or two a week.”
Roberts drew fellow linebacker Melvin Hunter with a giant head and gave him a chef’s hat. He imagined what six-foot-four, 280-pound tackle Bennie Goods looked like as a child, with food all over his face and shirt riding up over his stuffed belly. When he noticed Scott Fawcett bore a striking resemblance to a certain Dukes of Hazard villain, Roberts sketched the special teams coach wearing Boss Hogg’s trademark suit and Stetson.
“I would look at a guy and sometimes you would pick up things about their personality,” Roberts says. “The caricature might not actually look like them, but there’s certain things about it that people are like, ‘Oh, I know exactly who that is.’”
Sometimes Roberts’ illustrations would be a bit risqué. His artistic representation of teammate Chuck Assman was a rear end with eyes, but the closest Roberts came to a nude portrait was his caricature of Chris Hardy wearing nothing but a jock strap.
Silly as they were, Roberts’ doodles were part of the fun that helped break the tension during the grind of an 18-game season. At the heart of it wall was Roberts and his best buds, Canadian Football Hall of Fame members Leroy Blugh and Gizmo Williams.
“The three of us, we would always play pranks on each other. And one of the ways I used to do that was I would draw people,” Roberts says. “We would get new guys every year, and if somebody looked interesting, I’d put them up on the board and everybody would get a good laugh, so it was a good way to keep everybody loose.”
Roberts most liked sketching Gizmo. Conversely, no one disliked being sketched more than Blugh, particularly on the occasion that he and Roberts were involved in a car collision. The pair was thankfully ok, but Blugh’s vehicle was a write-off.
“The next day I drew a picture of us from head on, and we’re both yelling, ‘Ahhhh’, and he did not like that,” Roberts laughed. “He got really angry.”
One person who never got upset with Roberts’ artwork was his No. 1 fan, former Elks media relations director Dave Jamieson.
“Dave really liked it,” Roberts says. “He’d just come around the corner and lose his mind and start laughing as soon as he saw it. He’d turn around and walk away.”
Unfortunately, the day Roberts hung up his cleats was the day he put the marker back in the easel. He hasn’t done any doodling since retiring following the 2002 season. But like his spot atop the Elks’ all-time leaderboard for special team tackles is just about untouchable, he’ll long be the Elks’ king of caricatures.