Football, Canadian Style.
Once a Canadian sports tradition, the CFL, whose season is now through the fall, is struggling to survive intact as its biggest market teams lose popularity
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Happy Canada Day! On this date, July 1, our northern neighbors celebrate the day in 1867 that the dominion of Canada was created from the union of three separate British colonies.
Keeping with the Canadian theme, I am writing about the Canadian Football League, which was founded in 1958 and about which most Americans know nothing. Before I begin, I want to alert you once again that in about a month I will be offering monthly content behind a paywall, in addition to these Bulletin articles, which will remain available without charge. My concept for the paid content is that they will be travel pieces about off-the-beaten-path places in the U.S. and overseas that I have explored or will be visiting. But I am also open to whatever you are interested in. So I invite you to send your ideas and suggestions about what you would like to read. There are no boundaries. There are no bad ideas. Fire away, please!
It was a perfect early evening in mid-June in Toronto. The sun was out, the sky was clear, Lake Ontario glistened in the distance. The passengers poured out of the streetcar at Exhibition Loop and trekked the short distance to BMO Field. Many of them wore caps and shirts in the two shades of blue of the Toronto Argonauts football team. Two guys in their 50s who I overheard on the streetcar saying that they were brothers wore oversized green jerseys bearing the team insignia of the Saskatchewan Roughriders who the Argos were not playing. The brothers were drunk, but pleasantly drunk.
BMO Field (named after the Bank of Montreal) is an impressive stadium. It has two double decks of grandstands facing each other across the width of the football field. One end is open. The other end has a narrow grandstand and behind that opens onto a view of the lake a short distance away. It is bright and, like the drunks from Saskatchewan, cheerful.
At the open end by the entrance, there were snack stands dispensing beer, hot dogs, burgers and, because this is Canada, poutine. Business was good. A few feet away, a group of Argos cheerleaders danced to blaring hip-hop music and tossed tee shirts to the on-lookers. The atmosphere was fun and festive.
This was the Argonauts home opener -- their opponent , the Montreal Alouettes -- and there was that energetic vibe that every home opener in every sport has.
But at kickoff, the stadium was largely empty of fans. I was surprised. I shouldn't have been.
12,498 fans attend Argonauts' home opener 6/23/22
Canadian football is a different game than what we're used to in the U.S. The field is longer and wider. The end zone is twice as deep. There are 12 players on each side (vs. 11 in the NFL). There are many differences but the most notable one is that, in the CFL, the offense has just three downs to cover 10 yards, instead of the four downs in the NFL. That means the offenses tend to pass a lot. The result is a fast-paced game with a lot of scoring.
Photo credit: Getty Images
The Toronto Argonauts are the oldest football team in existence, tracing their origins back to 1873 when football was still more akin to rugby than the game we know today.
Today, American football is easily the most popular professional sport in the country. In Canada, it was hugely popular long before it was in the U.S. Partly because there wasn't much else.
"Football and hockey," Paul Woods, a CFL historian who has written two books about Canadian football, The Year of the Rocket and Bouncing Back: From National Joke to Grey Cup Champs, told me. "They were the only two sports you could follow in Canada."
By the late 1970s, the Argos were a very bad football team They were inept on a scale that almost defied belief. Yet they drew huge crowds, averaging close to 50,000 a game.
"The Argos were a national joke, " Woods said. "They didn't win the Grey Cup for 31 years, which is pretty hard to do with just nine teams in the league. People went partly because it was funny. They would lose in sad, depressing and funny ways."
Over the 1977 through 1981 seasons -- five years -- the Argos went 23-57.
The team was so awful, its futility so abject, it became a source of perverse pleasure.
"They would go into the last game of the season and they would make the playoffs as long as they didn't lose by more than 15 points, and they would lose by 16," Woods said. "The wide receiver would be wide open in the end zone in the game that would turn around the losing streak, and the ball would bounce off his hands. People would almost be reveling in the kicker missing a field goal. They almost wanted it to happen."
Then, starting in 1982, they got better. Attendance began to decline. From close to 40,000 in 1981 to under 25,000 in the late 80s.
In 1991, the Argonauts were purchased by a team that included hockey legend Wayne Gretzky and comedian John Candy. The new owners were determined to make the Argonauts a champion caliber team and to spend the money to make it happen.
They promptly splurged to lure the best American college player, Notre Dame's Raghib "Rocket" Ismail, paying him the unheard sum of $18 million (over four years -- more than any player in the NFL at the time) a year to lure him away from the bigger, richer NFL. Rocket was going to the face of the franchise. It was a disaster. Not because Rocket didn't measure up on the gridiron. He had a great year. But he was terrified of the media. Sometimes he was hidden in a cart full of laundry after the game so he could be spirited away unseen. The face of the Argonauts just couldn't face the media.
That season, the Argonauts won the Grey Cup. Average attendance spiked above 36,000 that championship season, then plunged 30% over the next two years and has never recovered. Ismail, meanwhile, lasted just two seasons before departing for the NFL.
In 1977, Toronto got a major league baseball franchise, the Blue Jays. In 1985, the Jays made it all the way to the American League Championship Series but lost. In 1992 and 1993, they won it all. Two years later, NBA basketball came to Toronto. Canadian spectator sports were no longer limited to football and hockey. People had other options. New ones. American sports with all of its hyperbolic hipness and grand spectacle had come to Canada. Younger football fans began to turn to American football.
The day after the Argos' opener, the Blue Jays drew 44,688 fans to their game against the Yankees
Football has remained popular in the smaller cities in the middle of Canada. The franchises in Regina, Edmonton and Winnipeg do well. But in the big cities of Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, attendance has been steadily sliding.
"Particularly among young people, the CFL is not considered cool," Woods said. "They haven't figured out how to get back their cool factor. There's a lot of football fans who think the NFL is a bigger, better spectacle."
Winnipeg Blue Bombers celebrate 2021 Grey Cup victory. Photo credit: Getty Images
The Grey Cup -- the CFL's championship game -- was once a huge event in Canada, similar to the Super Bowl in the U.S. People would throw big party to watch the game. It was a national cultural/social event. The game would sell out. Television ratings were great.
"Everybody had a Grey Cup party and invited their friends and watched the game," Woods said. "The Grey Cup was the biggest event in Canada every year. It's not now. It doesn't get the same ratings the Super Bowl gets in Canada. That's a sad state of affairs."
In 1996, the CFL had fallen on such hard times, it had to get the money to pay the Grey Cup teams' bonuses from Tim Hortons, the ubiquitous national coffee chain.
Last year, the Toronto Argonauts' average attendance was under 13,000 a game. During the off-season, they entered into talks with one of the owners of the spring minor league XFL, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who ironically was cut by the CFL when he tried out after college. The talks failed, but rumors persist that the Argos will eventually leave the CFL for the XFL or, worse, go out of business.
The game I attended had a thrilling ending with the visiting Alouettes missing an easy field goal with just seconds left. The attendance at BMO Field was just 12,498. Among them, Woods and his daughter. He's been an Argos season ticket holder for most of the last four decades.
"I love the thing that's part of its downfall," he said. "I love the smallness of it. I love the fact that when I was working I was making more money than most of the guys I was cheering for. I love the fact that I can stand outside the locker room after a game and they will stop and talk. It's Canada. It's small. It's friendly. It's intimate."
Hénoc Muamba
A few days earlier, I spoke to Hénoc Muamba, an Argo linebacker who is one of the greatest defensive players in Canada. Twice the Canadian-raised linebacker made the leap to the NFL. Twice he was cut and returned to the CFL. At 33, he intends to finish his career in Canada.
"I'm not stuck on if it's not the NFL, it's not football; if it's not the NFL, I can't enjoy it" he said. "Right now, I'm extremely happy where I am."
Right before kickoff at the Argonauts-Alouettes game, as I sat beside and bantered with the three older male fans sitting next to me, one of them said, almost to himself, "You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this day."
Argos have a loyal but older following
The next day, I played golf at a course in Caledon, about an hour north of Toronto. I was paired with two Canadian guys who looked to be around 30. We got to talking and I mentioned that I'd been to the Argonauts game the night before and was going to see the Toronto Blue Jays play the New York Yankees later that night. They told me they were going to the Blue Jays game too. They seemed slightly surprised, slightly amused but also a little curious that I had actually gone to an Argonauts game. I asked if they ever went to a CFL game. They exchanged a look. No, they said, never. They said they're NFL fans.
Cover photo credit: Getty Images