Riders part of provincial fabric
When Brendon LaBatte first tried football, he was in Grade 9, and he wanted to quit. When he was done playing three more years of high school football, he was ready to quit, too. He was a boy from Weyburn, Sask., but neither he nor his family were raised in the faith of Roughriders football. They loved hockey, baseball and stock-car racing. His football-loving grandfather kept him going, and after playing at the University of Regina, LaBatte was drafted by the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, and his parents were proud. Which was, in a way, a problem.
“I mean, my mom would wear a Blue Bomber coat around town, and she would get all sorts of — not really hurtful (stuff), but there were always jokes and there were always shots being thrown at ’em,” says LaBatte, who will start at left guard for the Saskatchewan Roughriders against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the 101st Grey Cup on Sunday. “It’s part of it. If you’re in on Rider Nation, that’s great, but if you’re not, you see just how powerful Rider Nation is.
“My mom would get jabs from the 16-year-old kid all the way up to the 70-year-old grandma. I mean, that’s one of the things about it — they’re all the same in their passion for the team.” LaBatte’s parents, Laurie and Dale, owned the only Tim Hortons in Weyburn, so, as LaBatte puts it, “they got a lot of people through the doors with something to say.” It wasn’t malicious; it wasn’t nasty. It was just there, everywhere, all the time. When someone calls him the most powerful man in the province, Jim Hopson chuckles and says, “Well, maybe behind the premier,” and you can tell he’s used the line before. He is the president and CEO of the Saskatchewan Roughriders, a sort of secular pope, so he’s not wrong. And the more you listen to him detail the history of the team you realize the Roughriders are like the farm, rising and falling with the times.
“You’ve got to remember, we’re the smallest market with a professional sports team in North America, and the history of this province has been boom and bust,” says Hopson, a former Roughriders offensive lineman, who was hired to give the team a more businesslike approach in 2005. “We had a good thing going in the ’70s with the team and the province, but we were so tied to agriculture in those days, and the team went down, the province kind of went down, people were leaving the province.
“We had a big upswing in ’89, of course, with the Grey Cup, and then it went down again, in the doldrums, and the province again was struggling. So we struggled. And really, in the late ’90s, we were close to cashing in, because we had no operating revenue and we were borrowing money. We had the big telethons and we were able to save the team.
In 2000, “the team started to get better ... and the province started to get better, and we shifted from agriculture to resources. Potash, oil, natural gas ... And then we hit the motherlode, so to speak, with the Grey Cup in ’07. That also coincided with the province taking off. And now we’ve been able to sell more tickets, sell more merchandise, better and better. It’s the perfect storm — I think we still would have been successful in a normal economy, but we wouldn’t have seen the hypergrowth — because people have money and they’re moving here.”
The history of Saskatchewan used to be a history of people leaving, and of the people that stayed. This will only be the third Grey Cup ever held in Regina and the previous two didn’t sell out. This one will. Times have changed.
“I remember growing up it wasn’t uncommon to have friends and families move to Calgary, because that was just the way things were,” says Roughriders offensive lineman Ben Heenan, who was raised on a farm near Grand Coulee, Sask. “That was just the times, you know? That’s just the way it was. Alberta kind of hit their boom, and it was good money to go there, and there were lots of jobs available. And now the tables are turned a little bit.” The Roughriders have become a monster. They are the biggest franchise in the CFL, the most profitable, the beating green heart of the league. Not coincidentally, the province is booming and is not quiet about it. Approximately 100,000 people have moved to Saskatchewan in the last half-dozen years, which is about a 10 per cent increase in population; the potash and oil and natural gas have created boom towns, with all the problems and opportunities that brings. The Roughriders are booming, too, and are trying to manage the transition.
“As we grow, we’re trying to maintain that (connection to our fans),” Hopson says. “It’s harder to be that way. But that’s why we have our players and our coaches and myself in the community so much, to show that we’re not distancing ourselves from our fan base, we’re trying to stay close to it.”
The rest of Canada views Rider Nation as this adorable thing, this church-going earnest green tribe, this Canada that used to be, and some wish still was. It’s not that simple, of course, or always that cuddly. Still, the natural resources of this franchise are wide and deep, and the love suffuses this province. When you ask former Roughrider Andy Fantuz about his welcome- to-the-Riders moment, he tells you about the thousands of fans who would greet them at the airport after playoff games, win or lose, filling the reception area at the bottom of the Regina airport escalators and spilling out into the freezing cold. “I became jealous of Rider Nation, really,” LaBatte says, “I mean, with how crazy and passionate their fans were.” When he signed with the Riders, his parents were a part of the decision. Suddenly they were busy arranging for him to sign things and life at the Tim Hortons was far more congenial, even if it’s hard keeping employees when they can make more money in the oilfields. His parents and grandparents were here to see him accept the trophy as lineman of the year Thursday night. Life is better, all around.
“My dad’s so excited to come up this week and be a part of Rider Nation, and he wants to celebrate with the rest of the province,” LaBatte says. “It’s great when your family gets to share in the joy and be one of the many, instead of one of the outcasts.”