Players’ strike stalls start of Ticats’ training camp
CFL players on strike after negotiations with league break off
Players were there on Sunday coaching themselves, working up a sweat, helping each other with technique, controlling the only things that are within their control.
Their head coach, Orlondo Steinauer, and team CEO Scott Mitchell even dropped by for brief bro hugs. The embraces seemed warm and real but the overall scene rang hollow, a faint echo of what should be but is not.
When the CFL and the CFL Players Association broke off collective bargaining agreement talks late Friday a day before the old contract expired Saturday at midnight, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats’ first official practice of training camp on Sunday morning at McMaster University was cancelled because, well, the players are now on strike.
But 85 of them were in town, bivouacked in the new campus residence where they have been told they can stay until further notice. They are being fed by the team as if times were normal instead of surreal. It all feels so wrong, so unnecessary and — as in all two-sided brinkmanship — so late in the day.
So after training camp was cancelled two years ago and postponed before a late opening last year, this is a third straight spring that the CFL’s metaphoric middle finger to winter has been amputated at the first knuckle. There is likely to be a period of at least two or three days of “cooling off” before any further negotiations occur, which jeopardizes the first exhibition games set for next Monday. The Ticats don’t play until they host Montreal, May 28.
Players, coaches, and even individual owners aren’t talking publicly about the negotiations or work stoppage, with the Ticats’ Mitchell deferring all questions to commissioner Randy Ambrosie, and veteran tackle Chris Van Zeyl, the Ticats’
sole union rep, saying that only CFLPA executive-director Brian Ramsay will speak for the union.
There are two sides to every contract story but for a cultural institution like the CFL there is a third side: the fans. It’s one thing when the roadblock was an invisible, mutating enemy like COVID, entirely another when the roadblocks are human beings who did guarantee that training camp would have no chance of being delayed or, unthinkably, cancelled.
Without doubt, the owners and players have lost a lot during the pandemic, financially and emotionally, but the fans have suffered too and, if social media is any indicator — and we know that’s often unreliable — some chunk of them will turn their backs on the league.
And neither players nor owners can want that.
Oddly, the sides don’t seem all that afar apart and it doesn’t appear to be completely about money because the league’s weekend proposal included a gradual salary-cap increase and two minimum-salary increases over seven years, and what Ambrosie vaguely referred to in an open letter as “an opportunity for 25 per cent of all revenue growth over an agreed-upon threshold.”
But there are sticking points on a number of issues, including the ratio of Canadian players, specific income figures, accurate reporting of football revenue, the number of practices in which players wear pads, and other forms of compensation.
Sunday, Ticats players were permitted to use the university’s gym facilities and train on the soccer field a few metres from the main football field, as long as, said the union, no coaches were present. About two dozen Ticats, dressed in team-issued shorts, shirts, shoes and helmets and using team footballs, put themselves through hard paces on the field: almost the entire starting defensive backfield, as well as several offensive linemen, and a few others.
But, the helmets were collected afterward, and now when the players want to practice or do weight work on their own it will have to be somewhere other than at McMaster, where the Ticats are the official tenants.
Van Zeyl has been meeting every player during morning breakfasts and inside the residence to offer support and advice and to make sure the union’s message is being properly communicated.
“At the end of the day this is about getting a fair deal,” Van Zeyl told The Spectator Sunday morning. “I’ve been impressed with our team’s players and how ready they are for this.
“I don’t know how long it’ll go on, but I do know our guys are ready to go the distance if need be.”
Van Zeyl shook hands and talked briefly on the field Sunday with both Mitchell and Steinauer, and said he “was absolutely satisfied with the way the team is taking care of the players (at McMaster).”
Meanwhile, Mac’s main football field has been prepared for a CFL training camp, including the new, narrower, hash marks painted onto the turf.
Those hash marks are designed to open up more passing space but Sunday all they did was mockingly remind us that once again, unbelievably, we have no CFL football.
‘‘ I don’t know how long it’ll go on, but I do know our guys are ready to go the distance if need be.
CHRIS VAN ZEYL TIGER-CATS UNION REPRESENTATIVE