BUTTERING UP YOUR ENEMIES
Ambrosie’s strategy from his playing days still works
You don’t become commissioner of the CFL without knowing how to talk to people.
Communication has always been key for the league’s head honcho, Randy Ambrosie, going back to when he was taking shots out on the football field instead of calling the shots from head office in Toronto.
Over the course of a nine-year career as an offensive lineman — with the Calgary Stampeders and Toronto Argonauts before hanging up his cleats as a Grey Cup champion with the Edmonton Eskimos in 1993 — a big part of his game included inter-play banter with opposing defensive linemen.
As a six-foot-four, 250-pound guard, the native of Winnipeg was in the trenches against faster, stronger, sometimes bigger and always meaner defensive linemen who came from the U.S. with one thing on their minds: steamrolling him on the way to demolishing the quarterback he was paid to protect.
But Ambrosie wasn’t talking trash. An entirely new term was coined for what he did: propaganda blocking.
“I was afraid of the guys that I was playing against, I didn’t antagonize them,” Ambrosie, 54, recalled. “In fact, I remember a few situations where one of my teammates would say something to someone that would get the guy fired up, and I go, ‘Really? Dude, seriously, look at him. Like, he will kill us.’
“So I would just chat with them, just talk to them: ‘How’s your family?’ and, ‘Looking good.’ I thought if he kind of liked me, by the third series of the game he thought, ‘You know, that Ambrosie’s not a bad guy.’ I figured maybe he’d cut me a break.”
It wasn’t that Ambrosie would physically shy away from conflict; rather, he was attempting to earn a competitive edge in an unusual way.
“I was smart enough to know if they were going full speed and I was going full speed, they were going to win more often than I was,” he said. “So if I could just get them to slow their motors down a little bit, I figured it was in my best interest.”
There is a reason it takes the largest athletes in the world to slow down a charging defensive lineman. You might as well be standing in the way of a blind rhinoceros.
Necessity wasn’t the only mother of this invention.
“Fear is a very strong motivator,” said Ambrosie, who dealt with knee injuries. “My theory was, and quite frankly, I’ve applied this to my corporate life, if I get to know somebody and I build a relationship with them, it’s much harder for them to be opposed to me.”
The idea sounded so crazy it just might work. Not all the time, mind you, but enough.
“Well, I played nine seasons,” said Ambrosie, who played 142 games after getting drafted second overall in 1985 out of Manitoba, where he earned his bachelor of economics. “I think I was physically good enough to play three seasons and I played nine. So, I don’t know, was it good luck or was it a strategy that really worked?
“Here’s a rule of thumb in any walk of life: Never antagonize somebody that is bigger, stronger and faster than you. And you can apply that to almost everything in the world; never antagonize somebody that could literally fold you in half and put you in their back pocket.”
The philosophy translated from the gridiron to the business world after serving as secretary of the CFL Players Association.
On July 4, he returned to the CFL as its 14th commissioner.
Instead of opposing linemen, Ambrosie is focused on representatives of the nine football operations in the league, but keeping channels of communication open is just as valuable.
“The universal truth is we’re almost never going to be aligned perfectly by the idea itself,” he said. “There’s an intangible in a relationship and it’s always driven by the benefit of the doubt or a feeling that I can trust somebody, so I figure it’s just a model to work by catching more flies with honey than you do with vinegar.”
I was afraid of the guys that I was playing against, I didn’t antagonize them.