During his tenure as mayor, Royce Pollard got a lot of mileage out of the occasional confusion between this city and its namesake municipality in British Columbia.
Pollard enjoyed referring to himself as “mayor of America’s Vancouver.”
Turns out that the two cities don’t represent the only shared name that the former mayor might be interested in.
Diehard football fans — the ones who stay tuned through the final minutes of a televised NFL preseason game — might have heard a familiar name pop up this summer: Royce Pollard.
No, our former mayor has not made a career transition into wide receiver from America’s Vancouver.
That other Royce Pollard was an undrafted rookie playing for the New York Jets during the exhibition season, before he was cut in August.
Actually, our Royce Pollard had already heard about that other Royce Pollard, who was the top wide receiver for the University of Hawaii in 2011.
“I was getting emails from people, asking me if I had a son in Hawaii,” Pollard said recently.
The Jets recently brought the rookie receiver back to New York, signing him to their player development squad.
It would have been really interesting if the pigskin Pollard had instead signed with the Canadian Football League’s franchise in British Columbia.
The B.C. Lions, of course, play their home games in Vancouver.
— Tom Vogt
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
