CALGARY — Normie Kwong used to refer to me as ‘The Voice of Doom.’ When his phone rang and it was your correspondent on the line, his reaction was usually ‘OK, who died?’

Kwong was my go-to-guy to call to talk about an Eskimos teammate who had passed away. He was brilliant with the way he captured the essence of every one of them, offering a treasure trove of anecdotes and memories to celebrate the life of the latest absent friend.

When Kwong died here Saturday at age 86, there were almost no survivors of the 1950s Edmonton Eskimos glory gang to call to offer tribute to him. And nobody deserved the kind of eulogy that Kwong used to deliver only seconds after he absorbed the news of the death of a teammate, as the China Clipper deserves today himself.

He was one of the greatest Canadians ever to play the game and one of the greatest guys — one of the greatest characters — ever to walk through a clubhouse door.

The man who broke into the league with Les Lear’s celebrated 1948 Grey Cup champion Calgary Stampeders team that turned the game into the national celebration it is today, used to be a popular emcee on the sportsman’s dinner circuit, trumpeting himself as ‘The Living Legend.’

He was always making fun of himself when he went into that routine. But when Kwong died here yesterday there was no question that he’d been just that — an actual living legend in far more ways than just a football player.

In Edmonton he was, along with Jackie Parker, Johnny Bright and Rollie Miles, one of the Mount Rushmore figures of the 1954-55-56 Grey Cup champions.

Of course, Kwong, the great commedian, always had fun with that.

For years Bright and Kwong were the stars of the twin fullback formation head coach Pop Ivy invented to accommodate the two talents.

The two carried on a running Vaudeville routine that lasted well into their retirement years.

“In 10 years, Normie scored seventy touchdowns, and if you looked it up, he only had seventy yards rushing. I’d lug it down to the one, and he’d carry it in,” Bright would say.

“If Johnny blocked for me like I blocked for him, I’d have won the rushing title every year,” Kwong would respond.

Kwong actually scored seventy-seven touchdowns and rushed for 8,769 yards, second in club history to Bright’s 9,966. And Kwong’s totals come with an asterisk. The statistics from the first few years of Kwong’s career were never recorded. There were no statistics kept prior to 1952.

Few teams loved life more than the Edmonton Eskimos glory gang of the 1950s.

“Rollie Miles thought of it as a game. Johnny Bright thought of it as a war. Normie Kwong thought of it as a way to promote his laundry business. Jackie Parker thought of it as something to get out of the way so he could get on with the rest of his evening,” said Don Getty, when he inducted them to the Eskimos Wall of Honour years later.

We lost Getty, who went on to become Premier of the province of Alberta, earlier this year.

Kwong had an entire routine he worked up along those lines for sportsmen’s dinners, and always included this bit:

“Rollie Miles asked me one day what it felt like to play in the backfield between Bright and himself. He said ‘You must feel like the lemon icing in a chocolate cookie.’ ”

Kwong always seemed to be in the centre of everything.

“He practical-joked everybody,” said Bright.

Training camp was one of Kwong’s favourite times of the year. Being a Canadian, and one so obviously safe from competition, Kwong would tiptoe around the nervous Americans and have his fun.

“He knew he wasn’t getting cut, and he knew who was edgy,” said Morris. “He’d go to any length. He’d get road maps from every corner of North American, and he’d draw the best routes for the rookie to get home. He didn’t do anything halfway. He even gave rookies a list of three-star motels to stay at along the routes. Then he left the package in the player’s locker.

“He was at his best when Pop Ivy was coach. Pop didn’t like to call guys in to tell them they were cut. He’d just clean out their lockers. Normie loved that. He’d come to the locker room a few hours early and clean out a locker himself. He’d usually pick out a guy who was looking pretty good. I’ll never forget the time John Goff came into the dressing room. He was a good friend of Kwong, and he had the locker next to him. It was empty. He chased Kwong around the dressing room for half an hour trying to get him to confess where he hid his stuff. It really looked like Normie was playing this one to the hilt, and everyone was enjoying it. It turned out Ivy cleaned out the locker. Goff had really been cut.”

Frankie Anderson loved the time Kwong did it to Bob Heidenfelt.

“He was a pretty nice guy, and a pretty religious kid. He came into the room and saw his locker, and his face just dropped. It was the ultimate expression. He just couldn’t believe it. He trudged into Ivy’s office and said ‘Coach, I thought I was doing pretty good …’

“ ‘Kwong, you stupid …’ ” Ivy yelled instantly.

“One thing about Normie, he didn’t play a practical joke on somebody he didn’t like.”

You can’t spin stories about that team without mentioning gambling and drinking.

“I couldn’t believe some of those card games. The money just piled up. On a dead day, Jackie and Normie would play gin as long as they thought they could keep the bus waiting. I never saw two gamblers like them. They’d be standing by the elevators waiting for one to arrive at their floor, and would have a $20 bet on which one was going to stop for them.”

Bob Dean had one of the best stories along those lines.

“I remember one day it was so miserable outside that there just wasn’t anything to do. Nobody else was around. Normie and Jackie sat there and stared out the window. All of a sudden one of them says, ‘Ten dollars on the raindrops and I got this one.’ They sat there betting on which raindrop would get to the bottom of the windowpane first,” said Dean.

Jim Quondamatteo didn’t become one of the legendary names from that team, but in the fun and games department, Bugsy was big.

“Kwong called him ‘Bugsy’ because he looked like one of Al Capone’s boys,” said Frankie Anderson. “I was one of the losers in most of those card games. Kwong, Parker and Bugsy were usually the winners.”

“One day Quondamatteo confessed to me he was really worried he was going deaf,” remembered Kwong. “We were going on a road trip on one of those really noisy North Star planes, so I spread the word. Everybody went up to him and moved their lips as if they were talking to him. ‘Normie, I know I’m going deaf,’ he kept telling me. The topper was when Ivy came up to him and did it, too. Even the stewardess. Even better was the team meeting in Regina. We actually had a guy get up and mouth the whole talk. We had a signal for when to pretend to clap. It was beautiful.”

Bright, a player Kwong had nicknamed ‘Owl Brows’, in his first few years, had a problem of being easy to knock out.

“I’d go up to him and touch him on the head and say ‘Goodnight, John.’ The problem began at Drake University with a fellow named Wilbank Smith, who broke Johnny’s jaw in a famous incident in which the picture made Life magazine. I’d go up behind Johnny and just yell ‘Wilbank’ real loud sometimes.”

Kwong, make no mistake, enjoyed life like few who ever played the game. And, boy, could he play the game.

The Schenley Award winner as most outstanding Canadian in 1955 and 1956, Kwong was the son of immigrants from Canton, China, who was named Canadian athlete of the year in 1955. The following year, Kwong set the CFL record for most yards rushing by a Canadian, with 1,437 yards, the ultimate of the 30 records he established in his career. The record lasted 56 years until Jon Cornish broke it in 18 games, three more than Kwong played to set it.

During his 14-year career, Kwong was a CFL All-Star five times, and a West All-Star eight times. He’s a three-time inductee to the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame, once with the 1948 Calgary Stampeders, once with the 1954-55-56 Eskimos, and once on his own.

Kwong was inducted into the Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1975, but he wasn’t finished his career in sports.

It was, perhaps, fitting that he should die on Labour Day weekend and the traditional Edmonton-Calgary game.

Calgary has an equal reason to celebrate the life of Kwong today, too.

He became a part owner of the Calgary Flames of the NHL, one of the original six businessmen who bought the Atlanta Flames, and moved it to Calgary.

When the Flames won the Stanley Cup in 1989, the man who had his name on the Grey Cup in 1948, 1954, 1955 and 1956, became one of a very short list of people who had their names on both trophies.

Kwong was made president and general manager of the Stampeders in 1988 after a SOS (Save Our Stamps) crisis, promising he’d bring Edmonton Eskimos stability to the organization, and hiring Wally Buono as his head coach. They had Calgary in the Grey Cup game by 1991.

And his life is to be celebrated by all Albertans as well.

Receiving the Order of Canada in 1998, Kwong became the first person of Chinese heritage to be accorded the honour when he was named the 16th Lieutenant Governor of Alberta in 2005. He finished his term in 2010.

Few people in the entire history of Alberta were ever loved by so many as Norman Lim Kwong.

terry.jones@sunmedia.ca

@sunterryjones