NFL comes calling and the old Sask. answers

Two months ago, a friend and usually unimpeachable source tipped me that Toronto-based sports promoter John Graham was working on a Prairie football fan’s dream: an NFL pre-season game at Mosaic Stadium this summer between the Oakland Raiders and Green Bay Packers.

As someone who’s had Rider and Packers’ green in his DNA since the 1966 Riders’ first Grey Cup win and Green Bay’s victory six weeks later in the first Super Bowl, this NFL plan was exciting.

I reached out to Graham for confirmation and he declined definitive comment.

After finding a second source, who confirmed more details, I reported in early February on my radio show that the game was in the works.

On March 5, I learned that the teams had signed off and would come to Regina to play their third pre-season game, on or around Aug. 22 or 23, but complicated financial details were still to be worked out.

The Riders don’t play at Mosaic until the evening of Aug. 24 and the draw of a third pre-season NFL game is that many starting players dress, unlike the earlier two games which test-run rookies and the final fourth game which often has starters resting.

In any event — and it wasn’t going to be cheap (likely $200 a seat for starters) — the NFL was proposing to come to Canada’s most football-obsessed market.

Then the predictable carping started: the NFL haters; those who don’t like pre-season games; the experts don’t pay over 50 bucks a game — most of it from people who wouldn’t go to a game anyway. The beauty of a free country is that if you don’t want to attend an entertainment event no one is forcing you.

But in recent days, there was too much silence. So, last weekend, reaching out to both my sources, they confirmed that the deal was on its death bed.

Its impending death was due mainly to the Saskatchewan Roughriders intervening to prevent the game because it would compete with their Aug. 24 home game and might harm their revenue.

At the highest echelon of Riderville the comment was made: this market is too small; there’s not enough money around, with a busy summer of nine regular Rider games, Garth Brooks reportedly playing three concerts at Mosaic, and this fall’s NHL Outdoor Hockey Classic, how could people afford the NFL?

I admit to living in a fantasy world, where the taxpayer-built Mosaic Stadium is actually owned by the City of Regina and operated by the Regina Exhibition Association Limited (REAL).

It is the same fantasy world where Mosaic would attract world-class events that don’t have to be approved by the Riders.

This fantasy world also includes the thought that the Riders — while an important catalyst for the great new stadium in the first place — are actually tenants of Mosaic, and it is none of their bloody business what goes on in a facility they do not own and control.

This is all a fantasy. The last time the Riders threw their weight around, when they bullied craft beer brewers, REAL washed its hands of the matter, answering my questions with “we don’t know — ask the Riders.”

People associated with the NFL proposal now say the game was scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 22, not the following day, which was the excuse for the Riders vetoing the game because — unlike other world-class venues that can host two events in two days — Mosaic/real/riders and even the CFL said they could not.

Graham should have been more open, public and aggressive earlier.

But now the NFL game may be played elsewhere. Hope it’s not, but if Rider fans who are also cheeseheads have to plan a road trip we will. And our money will be spent outside Regina.

But we will also be left with pity for a small-thinking Saskatchewan Roughriders organization that couldn’t put its self-interest and entitlement beneath a great opportunity to celebrate the sport of football.

Gormley is a broadcaster, lawyer, author and former Progressive Conservative MP whose radio talk show is heard weekdays from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. on 980 CJME Regina and 650 CKOM Saskatoon.