Perhaps they should just start calling him Le Roi de Montreal.
Since he first arrived in Canada, Toronto Argonauts receiver Damonte Coxie has made Percival Molson Stadium his personal playground.
In 2023 he made a remarkable, one-handed, game-winning, 25-yard touchdown catch on a pass from Chad Kelly that was chosen as TSN’s CFL Play of the Year. Later that season he caught a 41-yard pass from Kelly late in the fourth quarter to tie a game that the Argos would eventually win.
He’d team up with Kelly yet again in last year’s Eastern Final on back-to-back passes at the end of the first half; one for 44 yards, the next for an acrobatic touchdown from 20 yards out on the final play – in the same spot on the field that he made the 2023 play of the year – to give the Boatmen a lead at the break.
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It’s like every game in Montreal is Mardi Gras for the Reserve, Louisiana native.
“I feel like it’s the intensity in the stadium,” he told Argonauts.ca when asked why he seems to excel in that building. “We all feel it when we’re walking in, pulling up to the stadium. Montreal fans do a great job of supporting (the Alouettes).”
The teams have met in the last three Eastern Finals, with the victor in the game winning the Grey Cup each year; the Argos in 2022 and 2024, the Alouettes the year in between. It’s switched Toronto’s rivalry to an extent, with more people circling Alouette games than the ones against the team from down the QEW, at least in terms of the standings.
“Montreal more so, just because we’ve ended up playing them in the playoffs more,” said Coxie. “It’s drifted over there more these last couple of years. But when we go to Hamilton it’s all bets off. Hamilton does not play (laughs).”
It’s not unusual for a player to have a team that they seem to dominate. There may be no rhyme or reason, it just kind of happens. For Coxie’s fellow receiver DaVaris Daniels, he has another Eastern foe in mind, but surprisingly it’s not Hamilton, a team he’s made some big plays against.
“For me it’s always been Ottawa,” Daniels told Argonauts.ca. “I’ve had some pretty good games against them. Ever since I’ve been in the league, I’ve always had a good outing against them. Coxie’s have always been against Montreal.”
Daniels last game against the Redblacks back up his claim, a four-catch, 88-yard, two-touchdown performance in last year’s Eastern Semi-Final.
Now in his ninth CFL season, Daniels has seen a lot of receivers come and go. The Chicago native has become a good judge of talent and gave his scouting report on Coxie and what makes him so good.
“The ability to go up and get the ball, get 50/50 balls,” said the Notre Dame product. “Just being able to high point, his concentration in clutch moments. He’s a big-time player; he lives for those moments.”
But a football game isn’t only about those big plays. It’s the ones when the spotlight isn’t on Coxie that the 27-year-old is most happy with, summed up by one word.
“Effort,” said Coxie, matter-of-factly. “Trying to give effort on the plays when it’s not coming to me and sharpening my details when it’s not coming to me.”
The Alouettes have bounced back from a rough era in their history where from 2015-21 they didn’t make the Eastern Final, a desert like drought when you consider their considerable success over the previous two decades.
It gave Alouette supporters ample opportunity to blow their distinctive air horns, unique to Percival Molson (thankfully) and (thankfully) banned by the league this season, although the receiver isn’t in the vast majority of fans celebrating the impending silence.
“I actually did kind of like them,” Coxie confessed, making him perhaps the only non Als fan to have that opinion, though his reason why makes sense. “Especially when they’d blow them and then we’d catch a pass, or we’d get a first down and then you don’t hear them anymore.”
Appropriate words from a man who has silenced those horns more than any player in the CFL.