As the 2024 class of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame prepare to be inducted on Friday night in Hamilton, the final two inductees of this year’s class are in Vancouver, watching from afar.
Steve Daniel and Farhan Lalji — this year’s media entrants to the Hall — will officially be inducted in their hometown in November, as part of the Football Reporters of Canada annual meeting on Nov. 17, the morning of the 111th Grey Cup.
While the former players and builders are inducted in Hamilton tonight, it feels necessary to give Daniel and Lalji a moment in the sun, as they’re both woven deeply into the fabric of the CFL.
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Lalji has been with TSN for 27 years and is a fixture in the football scene in Vancouver and across Canada (Photo supplied by Farhan Lalji)
Daniel is the league’s associate vice president of football analytics. He worked with the BC Lions in 2005 and joined the league in a full-time capacity in 2007. The Vancouver native came to the league after an 11-year run in the NBA with the Vancouver and Memphis Grizzlies as their stats person. He has taken the CFL’s stat-keeping into the future, first digitizing the league’s enormous history, then steering the league into deep statistical analysis.
Lalji, also from Vancouver, joined TSN in 1997. As the Vancouver bureau reporter, he has reported on the Lions and Canucks, while also frequenting NFL stadiums throughout their season, among other assignments. CFL fans will know him as the face of the Lions and a fixture in CFL coverage, whether he’s hosting on the panel, working sidelines in a game or breaking news throughout the year. Lalji has also coached at the high school level for over 30 years and is passionate about growing the game across Canada and specifically in B.C..
That the two of them, both backbones to the game in their own ways, are going into the Hall together is perfectly appropriate. They recently just saw each other for the first time since they’d learned in the spring that they would be inducted together.
“I came over him and shook his hand and I said to him, ‘It’s just a total honour to go in with you, because your football experience is wholly different than mine but we care just as much in our own ways about the game and affecting the game and how it’s viewed by other people. You tell them things, I tell them things,’” Daniel said.
“I said to him, ‘I think we’ve been about as successful as one another. And he turned to me and he said, ‘Steve, to go in with you makes it all the better.’”
“It means a ton, because Steve and I have known each other since the mid ’90s when he was working with the Grizzlies,” Lalji said. “That’s when we first met.
“I loved covering the Grizzlies. Steve and I probably spent 250 days, game nights for six years, sitting 50 feet from each other.
“I had a total appreciation for what he was doing, and just the difficulty of that job and the passion he has for the stats and being able to tell the stories that way through numbers. As we’ve completely evolved into an era of analytics, Steve was ahead of the curve. He would come up with numbers that are now being thought of as the norm; Steve was doing that 15 years ago. The league was benefiting by it and we can tell stories because of it.
“Steve and I have known each other for a long time. We’re good friends. I have a lot of respect for him. He’s such a good guy, so to go in with him is really cool.”
Daniel created the league’s first comprehensive database to provide media members and the CFL with real-time, in-game access to analytics. As the source of statistical information for such a long time, Daniel is often the go-to for players, coaches and CFL front office types, who have no hesitation in reaching out to him personally for additional info. Phone calls at home from CFL types of all kinds have become the norm for him and for his endlessly patient wife, Carol.
A non-voting member of the CFHOF’s selection committee, Daniel was surprised to see his name on the list when the group met this year. It cemented a key tenet of his work in the game: acceptance. Former Lions’ head coach and general manager Wally Buono told him the group wanted him in the hall because of his impact on the game. Daniel thought of the line from Tracy Chapman’s song, Fast Car: I felt like I belong.
“I started to cry,” he said. “That’s what this has done for me. They care and make you feel like you’re part of them. That’s my point in that song. For me, it’s really personal.”
Lalji learned of his induction by accident, when HOF committee member Darrell Davis called him up, assuming that he already knew. It was an inauspicious way to get the news, but Lalji felt he was owed that. He actually had done the same to longtime Montreal Gazette reporter Herb Zurkowsky when he was inducted in 2008.
Lalji runs through a long list of giants in Vancouver media and across the country when he thinks about what it means to be inducted. There’s Zurkowsky, J.P. McConnell. He remembers his first Lions’ press conference and seeing Al Davidson, “guys that you thought were larger than life figures and now you’re in there,” he said.
“You think about those people first of all and the league itself. It’s just so full of great people. I find that covering football is an entirely different experience these days than covering hockey. Covering football, especially the CFL, doesn’t even feel like work because there’s such an appreciation still for what we do. People want to be covered and they’re just so easy to deal with. There are a lot of things you think about, but this league has so many great stories, right? So it’s pretty cool to be a part of that storytelling.”
Like Daniel, Lalji also thanked his wife, Mary, who has supported him through the demands and odd hours of reporting. She “was a massive help” when he launched a new football program in New Westminster in 2003.
Both thought it would be nice to be in Hamilton this weekend at the Hall of Fame with the rest of the inductees, but a hometown induction — complete with friends and family readily able to attend — awaits via the Football Reporters of Canada in two months’ time.