The lawyer and ex-professional football player reflects on a life juggling two very different careers
In 1985, Greg Peterson injured his leg on a run, so he decided to quit law school.
It was Peterson’s first month at the California Western School of Law, and he was unhappy alone in San Diego, away from his wife and children back in Calgary. Unlike most of his other classmates, he had delayed starting law school by a semester to accommodate his schedule as a defensive back for the Calgary Stampeders. Continuing to play through his studies meant doubling the years he would spend getting his law degree, since he could only be in San Diego during the winter semester; at the time, he had also received an offer to coach professional football, a prospect that seemed to guarantee a stable career after he retired from the Stampeders.
Peterson called his father, a lawyer, and told him about his decision. “Greg, if you quit now, you will regret it the rest of your life,” Peterson recalls his father telling him. “Just suck it up and keep going.”
Looking back, Peterson says, “It was the best advice I ever got.”
As it happens, Peterson never stopped balancing his two careers. Over the next few decades, he would go on to build a successful legal practice, currently serving as a senior partner at Gowling WLG and co-leading the firm’s governance, activism, and investigations group. He continued his sports pursuits, too, first taking on a role as a sideline reporter and later, as a radio colour commentator for the Stampeders shortly after retiring from playing in 1993. The latter is a role he holds to this day.
Peterson’s unusual trajectory makes him “unique” compared to many of his legal colleagues, he admits. In September, he will also be granted a distinction few lawyers can boast: being inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame’s media wing, which honours individuals who have helped the public better understand the sport through their coverage.
“It’s very rewarding to get the acknowledgement after 30 years of doing it,” Peterson says. “But when I think about it, I think about all the people and entities that helped me get to the point where I did do it for 30 years.”
He pointed to Mark Stephen, a play-by-play commentator who was inducted into the media wing himself in 2013 and who has formed, with Peterson, the longest-serving broadcast team in Canadian Football League history. He also pointed to the flexibility of his law school and firm, and repeatedly noted the support of his wife, who moved with Peterson and their children no less than a dozen times between Calgary and San Diego when he was obtaining his law degree.
“You can’t do any achievement like this in life without having people help you along the way,” he says. "And I had many people that did that."
Peterson has always been athletic. Growing up in Calgary, he played several sports, including hockey and basketball, but loved football the most. (His brother, Brent Peterson, was partial to hockey and would go on to play professionally for the Detroit Red Wings, Buffalo Sabres, Vancouver Canucks, and Hartford Whalers.)
After high school, he moved to Provo, Utah to attend Brigham Young University, which had offered him a scholarship. “I picked BYU because I’m a member of [the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints], but mostly because it was the best football school,” Peterson says. “All I wanted to do was play football.”
His father warned him, however, that education was more important. Peterson ended up both joining the Stampeders and applying for law school.
After six years at California Western School of Law, which he chose because it accommodated his schedule with the Stampeders – Peterson said the student body included actors and other athletes with unusual commitments – he continued balancing his football career with his burgeoning legal career, which required him to article for two years instead of one.
Peterson joined Calgary-based firm Ballem MacInnes in 1991, which merged with Gowling a decade later. From the time he began articling, he started building a client base: ex-professional athletes and ex-Olympians with business aspirations began reaching out to him for legal advice. “That’s really how I got into business law,” Peterson says. “And then I grew with them and they became big companies.”
Around the same time, he retired from professional football and was approached by a radio station to serve as their colour commentator.
“I thought, what the heck. I’ll try it for a year and see how it goes,” Peterson recalls. “It was very demanding. It was tough on me because at that time I had a wife, three kids… a growing law practice. And here I am 18 times a year going and doing football games and doing all the preparation you need to do.
“It was quite difficult, but I had a very understanding wife that just said, ‘Well, let’s try it for a year, and if it’s just too overwhelming, then it’s up to you.’ She kind of left it to me,” he says. “And I just loved it.”
Taking on two different careers over the course of decades involved a lot of sacrifice, Peterson acknowledges.
But looking back on his life now, would he have changed anything?
“I would do it all again,” he says.
