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Very few things speak to Hamilton’s essence better than the Labour Day Classic
Zach Collaros remembers it like it was yesterday which — compared to the long history of the Labour Day Classic and the even longer history of Hamilton football — it essentially was.
This Sunday marks the fifth birthday of the first game played at Tim Hortons Field. And the following day? Well, it’s the first Monday in September, the bittersweet unofficial end of summer tempered by the most anticipated day on the Hamilton football calendar, other than the occasional November Sunday when they manage to reach the Grey Cup. The date doesn’t resonate because it always falls somewhere between Sept. 1 and 7, but the name sure does.
Labour Day, as in Classic.
For the 49th time since the Tigers and Wildcats amalgamated to become the Tiger-Cats in 1950, the start of modern CFL football, the Toronto Argonauts will provide the opposition for the Labour Day Classic. And nobody would have it any other way. It’s only a game without the Argos when there hasn’t been a game — which has happened a few times, too — it’s hardly even a Labour Day.
It doesn’t matter that the Ticats are 8-2 and rolling and that the Argos are 1-8 and have been rolled. Rivalry games like this — not that there’s many like this — are single entities and so often go against form, but most often in favour of Hamilton, where the game is always played. The Tiger-Cats hold a 34-13-1 (yes a tie) edge over the Argos, and although most of this has long since changed, Toronto is typecast as the polar opposite of both this city’s gritty reputation, and its team’s small-market roots.
Collaros, who quarterbacked the Tiger-Cats in the first Labour Day game — first game of any kind — at Tim Hortons Field (can it really be five years ago?) is an Argonaut again, although he’s on the six-game injury list for the second time this season. It will be a long time before anyone around the CFL forgets the first time: the Simoni Lawrence hit on the opening series of the opening game, while Collaros was still a Saskatchewan Roughrider, that cost the Ticat linebacker a two-game suspension and Collaros another concussion.
Five years ago this week, Collaros was returning from another concussion. After coming over as a free agent from Toronto, where he’d been Ricky Ray’s much-heralded backup, he played two games on the road, got hurt and missed the next five games, three of them played at McMaster. Two games had been scheduled there as the tortured construction of Hamilton’s new Pan Am Stadium was stunted by delay after delay, and a third was
added when it became clear that the deadline to open the new stadium for Aug. 16 against Calgary was a fantasy. Even two days before Labour Day, it wasn’t certain that the stadium would be approved to hold a game and even when it finally was, only 75 per cent of it was completed.
But when the Cloud of Maybe blew away, all that was left was its shiny silver lining. The Ticats, who’d gone 674 days without a stadium of their own, would play their very first game of their new era against the team which makes everyone in Hamilton throw up whenever they see two shades of blue. On Labour Day. Hamilton’s Day, no matter how white-collar the city might eventually become.
And the guy who made Henry Burris expendable would be able to start at quarterback for the first time before the home fans. Coming off a Grey Cup appearance in the still-underappreciated Guelph Year, the Tiger-Cats — with a series of close losses handcuffing them to a 1-6 record, and losers of three in a row — needed some positive signs.
And they got them. The Ticats won 13-12, went on to win their first 10 games at Tim Hortons Field, including exhibitions and playoffs, and came within a controversial penalty of winning the Grey Cup.
“It was my first game back, I’m with a new team and trying to prove myself to new teammates and it’s the first home game I played in Hamilton,” Collaros recalled this week. “I was able to make my contribution to the team and being the first day in the new stadium made it all the more special.
“What I remember best about that game was three or four beautiful kicks that Meddy (Justin Medlock) made, despite the really strong wind. We fumbled the ball late in the game and they had a chance to win and I was thinking at the time, ‘We’re snakebitten; we’re snake-bitten.’ But the defence held and we won. The crowd was really excited and really loud. I can remember that after the game a sense of relief because we won. Ted Laurent gave me a big hug because we finally got a win.”
Collaros takes pride in being the first winning quarterback in Tim Hortons Field and says, “That’ll be a cool trivia question one day. Bakari (Grant) and I joked about that, because he caught the pass for the first touchdown.”
Although that game was close, Collaros’s Ticats easily handled the Argos the next two Labour Day games, before his torn ACL ended a magical 2015 campaign in which he was headed to a Most Outstanding Player Award, and the Tim Hortons Field mojo went directly to the injury list with him. On Labour Day 2017, new coach June Jones replaced him with Jeremiah Masoli, who stayed there until his own knee season-ending injury five weeks ago. Collaros was traded to Saskatchewan in January 2018.
Drew Edwards, who was in the midst of his admirable decadelong run as The Spectator’s football writer, vividly recalls that debut week of Tim Hortons Field, when the team still dressed at the club offices on Jarvis Street and bused over for the first practice at their new digs, a mere five days before Labour Day. The only witnesses were team personnel and construction workers, some of whom had tears in their eyes as the players filed in. The media wasn’t allowed in until the next day’s practice
“I remember we had to take those metal stairs from the south concourse down to the field and we watched from the sidelines, on the opposite side from the press box, where we’d be watching later,” Edwards says. “I remember looking up and saying, ‘Wow, that’s an impressive structure.’
“It was a strange time in that there was a ton of excitement about the new stadium, but there was also that sense of frustration because it had taken so long. I think everyone was willing to live with the 2013 season because they knew about the Guelph thing and the Ticats did a great job in saying, ‘this isn’t going to affect us,’ and they built all these structures around it. But the second year, playing at Mac, it was a factor. It turned into something else. There was a lot of optimism around that team at the time: The stadium was opening, they had good players, it was peak Kent Austin when it felt that everything was pointed in the right direction.”
Monday’s game returns to an afternoon (1 p.m.) kickoff after three years of 6:30 p.m. starts. There have been a surprising number of evening (5:30 p.m. or later) starts in the past 40 years, because TV liked the early evening in the biggest market in the country. For a variety of reasons, mostly stupid ones, some years the game wasn’t played but of the 35 times it’s been held in the last 40 years, 19 were at night.
That was plain wrong if only because, as pointed out here before, kids couldn’t attend and would never learn the proper cadence and application of the “Argos suck!” chant.
“It’s a really special day,” Collaros says. “I like that it’s typically played earlier in the day, so it has kind of a college feel to it, and I think the fans like it like that, too. Driving to the stadium, you can see them tailgating heavy.”
The Argos have yet to win on Labour Day at Tim Hortons Field and maybe some kind of template was struck five years ago, when the construction-delay gods conspired to make sure the new stadium opened with the old rivals.
“The last game in Ivor Wynne was played in late October against Winnipeg and it rained cats and dogs,” Edwards says of the old stadium’s 2012 send-off. “And that season had been a huge disappointment, so it did not feel historically momentous.
“Starting the new beginning in that way: at Tim Hortons Field on Labour Day, against the Argos in the only game other than the Grey Cup that really matters . ... It felt right.”