Terry Greer is grateful to the country which provided him with a much-welcomed "culture shock."

Friday night the former Toronto Argonauts wide receiver returns to Hamilton where he spent his final two CFL seasons — as a coach — to be inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame along with fellow receivers "Swervin" Mervyn Fernandez and David Williams, the late two-way star Ernie Pitts and ratio-changing impact running back Jon Cornish, plus builders Frank Smith and Jim Hopson.

Greer was the first professional football player, anywhere, to record a 2,000-yard receiving season (1983) and is still the only one, anywhere, to have done it over a 16-game, not an 18-game, schedule. He averaged over 1,100 yards for each of his six CFL seasons and was the first player to win both a Grey Cup and Super Bowl. After leaving Toronto in 1985 he was with San Francisco for two NFL championships.

He was born in Memphis in 1957 and you don't need to know much history to understand what that suggests.

"Segregation in the South? I went through that," he said over the phone from his home in Cleveland this week. "When I was growing up my parents would take us downtown by bus to go shopping on a Saturday and we'd have to go in the front door and pay our 10 cents to the bus driver, then he'd make us get back off, walk to the side door, and sit in the back of the bus.

"But when I came to Toronto (for the 1980 season) I'd see mixed couples coming down the street together. I'd be staring at them, and I'm wondering why no one else was staring at them too. It was a real culture shock to me.

"People in Canada are totally different. It's more about who you are than the colour of your skin. If you're a jerk, they'll treat you like a jerk, but if you're a good person, they'll treat you like a good person. That's why I love Canada."

Greer played at Alabama State and was selected by the Los Angeles Rams in the 11th round of the 1980 NFL draft — much lower than he probably would have gone because he'd already signed a four-year deal with Toronto. His CFL career began slowly: at outside receiver he didn't see many passes in his first year and in his second, when quarterback Condredge Holloway, another Hall of Famer, came to town, he missed most of the season with a knee injury.

But starting in 1982 when offensive coordinator Mouse Davis came in to initiate the legendary run-and-shoot era, he tore off four 1,000-yard seasons in a row, including those staggering 2,003 yards in 1983, as the Argos finally broke their unspeakable 31-year Grey Cup title drought.

"The great season meant more because we also won a championship and it had been so long for the Argos," he recalls. "I had never been in anything before like that victory parade; so many people came out for it.

"We had Mouse Davis with the run-and-shoot, we had Bob O'Billovich coaching, so now I've got a quarterback and coaches who believed in me. Before Condredge came it had been so frustrating because they didn't throw a pass in my direction. The quarterback has to be pretty accurate with a wide receiver. With the inside guys he doesn't have to throw it as far, so most of the guys with the CFL's bigger reception numbers played as inside guys.

"But Mervyn Fernandez and David Williams were both outside guys so this is a class of outside receivers."

Williams played for five CFL teams from 1988 to 1995, won the 1991 Grey Cup with the Argos, and was the CFL's outstanding player in 1988 with the B.C. Lions. His 18 TD receptions that year is the sixth highest total in league history.

The dynamic Fernandez played all of his six CFL seasons with B.C. and was the league's top player in 1985. He then played for six years with the NFL's Los Angeles Raiders before returning to finish his career with the Lions.

Pitts played 204 games, most of them with Winnipeg, and was in six Grey Cups — every one of them against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats — winning four times. He played receiver and defensive back, scoring 16 touchdowns as a receiver in 1959 and making seven interceptions in 1968. He was fatally shot during a 1970 domestic dispute.

Cornish, of New Westminster, B.C., who rushed for nearly 7,000 yards in an astounding nine-year career with Calgary, was a two-time Grey Cup champion, was the CFL's top offensive player in 2013 when he also won the Lou Marsh Award as Canada's athlete of the year and was the CFL's leading rusher three times.

Smith coached UBC Thunderbirds to two national titles during his 21-year career and sent 47 players to the CFL. He was also a CFL assistant coach for six years.

Hopson was an offensive lineman for the Saskatchewan Roughriders in the mid-1970s, and later served as the franchise's president and CEO for a dozen years, which included two Grey Cup championships, record profits and the start of the team's centrepiece new stadium.

Friday's induction ceremony will be held on a temporary raised stage on the fourth level of Tim Hortons Field in front of the club seats outside the Canadian Football Hall of Fame room. The inductees will also be honoured at halftime of Saturday night's Ticat game against the B.C. Lions.

The weekend celebrations mark Greer's first visit to Tim Hortons Field, but he's got lots of memories of that same patch of land. He ran a kickoff back 109 yards for a touchdown at Ivor Wynne Stadium in 1981 and played in numerous rancorous Argo-Ticat rivalry games. He also worked as an assistant coach under Don Sutherin with the 1996 Ticats, and again in 1997 — the year current head coach Orlondo Steinauer was voted the Ticats' most outstanding player — before Sutherin was fired and replaced by Urban Bowman in the midst of a disastrous 2-16 record, the second-worst in franchise history. He then left to work in the manufacturing sector in Cleveland.

"It was my first real experience at coaching and I enjoyed working with Sudsie, Urban Bowman, Dennis McPhee," he said. "I wish things had been better in that second year, but it just fell apart somehow. I enjoyed it but after a while I realized that coaching wasn't for me. All that coaches go through and how much time they put it in, as a player you just don't realize that."

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- Canadian Football Hall of Fame inductees