Saving the Canadian Football League shouldn’t be about money
I spent about a decade covering one of the teams, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, for a daily newspaper, going to (almost) every practice, every game and attending a bunch of other stuff that had only a tangential relationship with the Canadian Football League. I watched an overweight lineman do pushups in front of school kids while talking about healthy eating and wrote about it without irony.
It was, for the most part, a blast.
My first road trip in 2009 was for a pre-season game in Winnipeg. I got up at some ungodly hour, flew halfway across the country and still had a full day’s work to do. I stepped into my hotel room, looked around and laughed my ass off: they were paying me to travel and watch football. All I had to do was write about it, something I loved anyway. I couldn’t believe this was my “job.”
Though I never saw those road trips as a vacation — I was there to work, first and foremost — they presented me with a tremendous opportunity to see and experience the country. On each trip, I tried to do something unique; go to an art gallery, climb a nearby mountain, check out a farmers’ market, eat in a restaurant considered to be a local favourite. As I made friends in cities around the league, those experiences got more nuanced, more personal.
Each year, I would go to the Grey Cup and the whole roadtrip experience would get put into a cultural accelerator that would leave me a scrambled, broken puddle of overworked and partied-out version of myself, my liver and my mind devolved into some Zen state of Canadiana bliss. They call Grey Cup the Grand National Drunk but it’s so much more than that, a transcendent cultural experience that, like most others, defies definitive description.
I’m out of the CFL game now, having given up my beat reporting job and charted a new path for my career. But it’s been difficult to watch CFL commissioner Randy Ambrosie’s recent ham-fisted plea for government money. Like other sports leagues, the CFL is in suspended animation because of COVID-19. Ambrosie’s focus on the league’s fiscal well-being — or lack thereof — in asking the federal government for an immediate $30 million and up to $150 million takes away from the central argument in favour of saving the CFL: its role in contributing to the social fabric of the communities it serves and therefore the country.
To be fair, lots of things do this. As I travelled around Canada, visiting every CFL city every year, a sense of each place established itself in my mind. Those concepts are ethereal, made up of components that become greater than the sum of their parts. It’s the parks and art galleries and restaurants and shops and people and all kinds of small, weird things that resonate differently with each of us.
I’m biased to see the CFL’s role as bigger than it is but I’m always painfully aware of its faults — and the patent ridiculousness in the idea of supporting a sports league in the face of chaos and death. But I do believe in these moments of terrible uncertainty and paralyzing isolation we need things that could, one day, just maybe, bring us back together. We need the hope.
So many of the things I saw in my CFL travels — things that impacted my sense of self, of community, of country — now need saving. The league itself may very well be one of them. So let’s make sure the arguments being made to rescue it are the right ones. Don’t start with dollars and cents. The real value lies so much deeper than that.
Drew Edwards played football in high school but not very well. He can be reached at drew@edwards.ca