Perry Moss on Alouette owner Ted Workman

Perry Moss - disaster in Mtl

Ted Workman, who owned the Montreal Alouettes for 13 disastrous years along with Joe Atwell was spectacularly incompetent. He was Montreal's Harold Ballard. When Workman sold the team to Sam Berger in 1969 he became interim commissioner of the CFL, but tellingly, he was never even inducted into the CFL Hall of Fame. Among Workman's bad ideas: he tried to get the players involved in a religious cult he was involved with. Here's a description of Workman from Perry Moss the hotshot Workman managed to hire to run the operation.
"I suppose the most famous trade ever made in the CFL was the one where (Sam) Etcheverry and Hal Patterson went from our club to Hamilton for (Bernie) Faloney and a young kid named Don Paquette. Workman made that trade, though I got the rap for it. You see, Workman and Jake Gaudaur, the GM at Hamilton, made the deal in the Mount Royal Hotel. When it was settled, Workman took off for New York. He phoned me from there, telling me to announce it. I was thunderstruck. What Workman didn't know was that I had signed Sam to a no-trade contract. Trading him made him a free agent. He joined St. Louis Cardinals. So Faloney stayed in Hamilton, we lost Sam to St. Louis, and young Paquette came to us in a straight trade for the super pass-catcher Patterson." Also, the owner Workman had become involved in a movement called Moral Rearmament, presenting Moss with internal problems. "One day I arrived at my office to find Workman at my desk surrounded by at least 10,000 magazines on moral rearmament. He had the entire office staff wrapping and stamping them. He had the players involved in this crusade of his, too, taking them to the movement's headquarters in Michigan. I kept objecting and, in the end, I was fired. For years, I had a terrible time getting a job in football."