Today is the 110th anniversary of the Saskatchewan Roughriders first game, which took place in Moose Jaw.

But in 1910, green wasn't the colour and football wasn't quite the game it is now.

Matthew Gourlie with the Saskatchewan Sports Hall of Fame explains what game the Regina Rugby Club was playing here in Moose Jaw on Oct 1, 1910.

“It was called rugby football and it was a pretty apt name because it had one foot in both sports. It was really a transitional time for both rugby and football,” he said. “There were 14 players on the field still, and rugby has 15 and it was a process over the years of sports and leagues dropping numbers to add space. In the U.S. they had already reduced their numbers a little bit. But here in western Canada it was still 14 players.”

The Moose Jaw Tigers, a team and a franchise nearly forgotten in the history books, won 16-6 over the Regina Rugby Club in that inaugural game at the old Moose Jaw baseball grounds. But even back in 1910, there was some major interest in the game.

“In the lead-up to the game, the Regina newspaper, the Morning Leader had sort of a scouting report of Moose Jaw,” Gourlie said. “People had seen them practice and talked about what they looked like. There was a lot of interest even before the game happened.

About 750 people attended, including 150 from Regina. Those people from Regina paid $1.25 for a train ride to and from Moose Jaw, plus a ticket to the game.

The game they saw would be relatively close to the gridiron we see today, but you wouldn’t have seen that era’s version of Cody Fajardo dropping back to pass. In Canadian rugby football at that time, there were three downs and no forward pass. The American game at that time had a forward pass, but any ball that landed that wasn’t caught or intercepted was considered a turnover, which was a fairly big deterrent to passing the ball.

The Canadian rules developed from rugby but would eventually gain its own identity from its parent sport.

“For a while, the ball was just placed between the two teams, and the team that had possession sort of had the right to try and win it, but it was up for possession,” Gourlie said. “In rugby, when the ball gets put in, the hooker tries to kick it backwards to retain possession, but you can steal it. Really, once they had the snapback rule in place, and the team with the ball was the team that could possess it, and you had offence and defence, and that really started to make football different from rugby.”

Gourlie said the game of rugby football came from cadets with the Northwest Mounted Police, who would come from Eastern Canada with this newfangled game of rugby football that was gaining in popularity.

The Regina Rugby Club wore gold and purple to try to capitalize on their city’s regal heritage.

“Five teams were supposed to be in the Saskatchewan league in that first season,” he said. “They had a meeting in Saskatoon to create the league and in the end, only Regina and Moose Jaw were able to play in that first season...

“Even in the 1880s with the Mounties, they brought the game west and it gained in popularity pretty quickly.”

Still, what would arise from that game would have shocked the people in 1910.

‘I think there was a sense that this was a sport on the rise from the east, and it certainly was popular initially,” he said. “It’s sort of funny reading the reports that it was pretty clear the fans that were there weren’t always sure what was happening on the field. The Moose Jaw paper report said that the fans didn’t know what they were seeing, but they were pretty sure they should cheer when a Regina man got knocked over.”

They wore blue and gold for a few seasons before switching to red and black. They changed their name to the Regina Roughriders in 1924, changed the team name to the Saskatchewan Roughriders in 1946 as they became the first widely-known use of a province or state-branded franchise. They changed their colours in the late 1940s to green and white.

The next time the ‘Riders hoist the Grey Cup, that franchise’s journey began on the field over a century ago at the old Moose Jaw Baseball Grounds.