By the end of World War II, the WIFU had upgraded its quality of play to a level almost equal to that of the strongest Eastern union, the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union (Big Four). From 1945 onward, the WIFU champion regularly faced the Big Four champion for the Grey Cup. An important turning point came during the 1948 Grey Cup in which fans of the Western and eventual Grey Cup champion Stampeders brought pageantry to the event for the first time, with pancake breakfasts at Toronto City Hall, riding a horse through the lobby of the Royal York Hotel, and the first Grey Cup parade. This development proved decisive in turning the national football championship into big business, and the Big Four and WIFU quickly dropped all pretense of amateurism. Still, well into the 1950s, long after the Big Four champion got an automatic berth to the Grey Cup, the Western champion was often obliged to play the champion of the Ontario Rugby Football Union — the only purely amateur union still playing for the title — in a Grey Cup semi-final. However, as the 1950s wore on, the ORFU was eventually proven to be a much weaker league, and stopped challenging for the Grey Cup after the 1954 season. The Western champion has always been guaranteed a berth in the Grey Cup since that time. Although the amateurs would not be formally locked out of Grey Cup play for another four years, 1954 is usually viewed as the start of the modern era of Canadian football.