There are two things a reader can expect from good non-fiction. The first is fine, or at least entertaining, writing. The words should flow and there should be an occasional turn of phrase to share with a friend. Readers should also expect to learn something new, to broaden their knowledge of a subject. Sadly, neither expectation is satisfied by Stephen Thiele’s history of the Grey Cup football championships.

It’s not surprising to learn that Thiele is a research lawyer. He uses his research skills to offer a précis of newspaper accounts of the Grey Cup going back to the inaugural contest in 1909. Thiele also went to considerable effort to compile a statistical addendum with rosters, scoring summaries, and statistics from all the games.

The problem is that his narrative is as dry as the addendum. Each game is presented as a chronological report: First, the Argos did that, then the Eskimos did this. There is no sense, for example, of the deep chill that marked the 1975 Calgary game. Or in another case, when Thiele did do his research on the harsh conditions that so often mark Canadian Football League championships, he found a weather report that Montreal was engulfed by a snowstorm for the 1977 Cup. But he missed the more interesting story about the transit strike that forced many of the record crowd of 68,318 to walk the 11 kilometres from downtown to the new Olympic Stadium.

The account of that 1977 game also represents one of the few times Thiele engages in a flight of fancy. The Alouettes reportedly gained an advantage on the icy artificial turf by shooting construction staples into the soles of their shoes. Thiele suggests the players recalled similar conditions in the 1931 game, a highly unlikely theory even for a team that had historian Marv Levy as a coach.

The lawyer in Thiele comes to the fore on numerous occasions as he distracts the reader by citing the rulebook to explain events. One example is his description of the 1971 game between Toronto and Calgary. The standard history is that Toronto lost because Leon McQuay fumbled the ball with little more than three minutes to play. But the Argos had one more chance to score, a chance which disappeared when Harry Abofs kicked a loose ball out of bounds. Thiele quotes the rule that awarded the ball to the Stampeders on this play, but again neglects the story behind the story. Abofs was a Canadian, but he played his college football in the U.S. where the rules on a kicked ball would have allowed Toronto to keep possession.

Still, there hasn’t been a comprehensive history of the Grey Cup since Jack Sullivan’s 1971 The Grey Cup Story. There is a place for this book on the reference shelf but it falls short of being recommended for actual reading.