If it’s true that losers’ tales make for the best sports stories, Green Grit, Graham Kelly’s history of the floundering fortunes of the CFL’s Saskatchewan Roughriders, ought to have provided readers with a very dramatic narrative. The team’s two Grey Cups have been marred by 27 losing seasons – the longest drought in CFL history – two world wars, and the Depression.

Kelly has penned a weekly column on the CFL for the Medicine Hat News for nearly 30 years. Though he has one other book to his credit – a history of the Grey Cup – it is clear Kelly has had little experience with “the literature of fact,” the interweaving of data with extended storytelling techniques. As a consequence, Green Grit suffers from a dry decade-by-decade linear approach to its subject’s history. The detail that Kelly brings to virtually every game the Roughriders have played (or so it feels!) becomes overwhelming.

This is a shame because Kelly has the sports credentials to tell this story. He grew up in Regina, playing football and following the city’s team. Indeed, his first job at 15 was as waterboy for the Green and White. This is a man who saw Jackie Parker, Johnny Bright, Rollie Miles, Normie Kwong, and Ron Lancaster (“the best comeback quarterback in CFL history”) up close. There are few of us oldtimers left.

Green Grit does have its share of kernels ripe for narrative development. After all, the Roughriders are a team that once traded tickets for wheat, and one coach, referring to the downward spiral of the team, was quoted as saying: “You’ve got to spread the fertilizer before you can get good crops.”

Kelly provides an excellent chapter on the early years of the home city, and the role rugby played in creating a base for the Roughriders. But such kernels are suffocated beneath the mind-numbing details of individual games and players. As it stands, you’ve got to have a player’s “unyielding courage” to get through Green Grit.