BU - Gaiters

Gaiters Home Page
Athletic Department
Intramurals
About Bishop's
Gaiter Club
RBC Wall of Distinction

Varsity Teams
Football
M Basketball
W Basketball
W Soccer
M Rugby
W Rugby
Golf

HEADLINES

Colon 'rose above all of us'
Ex-coach recalls converted hoopster's heroics

By Mike Beamish, Vancouver Sun
Sept. 20, 2006 - One of the purest examples that football players evolve through natural selection and intelligent design, not by the hand of Man, is B.C. Lions wide receiver Gilles Colon.

As Colon walked off the field Saturday at B.C. Place against the Montreal Alouettes, Tom Allen paused in Lennoxville, Que., to consider how far Colon had come from that first day of practice in the spring of 1999.

"He was a complete walk-on, not a recruit," explained Allen, the retired head football coach at Bishop's University who watched Saturday's 36-20 Lions win on TV. "It was quite obvious he was a remarkable athlete, but he didn't know anything about the game. I spent a lot of time yelling and screaming at him because he kept dropping the ball. Yet, lo and behold, three years later, Gilles made fools of all the coaches."

Colon, making his first start for the Lions as a replacement for injured Ryan Thelwell, had three catches for 25 yards against the Alouettes, one of them an acrobatic leap to haul in a high throw from quarterback Dave Dickenson. That catch had Bishop's basketball coach Eddie Pomykala thinking about the marvelous rebounding talent he let slip away.

Colon originally arrived at Bishop's to play basketball, but the Gaiters, who had won the CIS title the previous season, had 10 players returning and Pomykala told him there was no room.

"I'm the idiot who told him he couldn't play basketball," Pomykala says. "People kid me about it, but I'm the guy who turned him into a professional football player."

Nobody on the campus of Bishop's, which shares the distinction with Mount Allison of New Brunswick as Canada's smallest universities (enrolment: 2,100), can forget what a project Colon was in the beginning and how he evolved into one of the school's most honoured athletes. He was a first-team CIS all-star receiver in 2003 after leading the CIS in kick return yardage the previous year.

"He rose above all of us," Allen says. "Believe me, he was one of those kids that coaching didn't do a lot to develop. It was all so bloody natural."

Born in Haiti, Colon has a French name, grew up in Annandale, Va. and became a naturalized U.S. citizen at age 18. He is classified as a Canadian in the CFL, however, since he had no previous football background before arriving at Bishop's.

He enrolled at the university, an 11-hour drive north, because his mother worked for the World Bank and the organization was willing to pay his tuition, if he attended school outside the U.S. Colon played basketball and soccer at Bethlehem Baptist, a Christian prep school that didn't have a football team.

"My first football was at a Canadian university," he says. "I guess I'm a fake Canadian, but there are other guys -- Ben Cahoon, Kamau Peterson -- playing under the same loophole."

Saturday's game was Colon's first since hip surgery in March, so he passed a big test against the Alouettes, though he hasn't yet made a complete recovery from the injury.

"Usually, hip surgery [torn labrum] is career-ending," Allen says, "but nothing fazes him. Quite obviously, Gilles doesn't listen to what anybody says. Despite all of us, he just does it. He's that type of guy."