Back from the brink
When Keith Pelley took the tiller of a sinking Argo ship, he knew he had to put bums in the seats But even the CFL club’s president couldn’t have foreseen how successful he’d be, says Chris Zelkovich
Keith Pelley remembers the Toronto Argonauts’ darkest days quite vividly. The new Argo president, who admits he had no idea what he was doing, was operating out of CFL headquarters because the team had no offices. It also had no staff, no coaches, one sponsor and 3,200 disaffected season ticket holders.
‘‘ The Argonauts were such a damaged brand,” he says. ‘‘ We had an awful lot of calls not returned and a lot of doors shut on us.”
Recalling those days maybe require some stomach, but it doesn’t require much of a memory. We’re talking about the winter of 2003.
Yet here the Argos sit less than two years later, a team reborn. A team, some might say, that’s become trendy in a trendy town.
‘‘ Things have gone a little quicker than we anticipated,” Pelley says in one of the greatest understatements in recent memory.
They’ve improved so quickly, in fact, that the Argos have invested about $ 400,000 in getting the rights to Sunday’s CFL East final instead of taking the risk-free route of letting the league run the show.
It was a move made knowing that the team had to sell 35,000 tickets to break even, something it wouldn’t have dreamed of a year ago.
Further exercising their newfound muscle, the Argos will announce this week that they will host the 2007 Grey Cup, as the Star reported last month.
Considering what a dud the big game was the last time it was held here, that’s quite a statement.
That’s the same year, by the way, the team expects to turn a modest profit after losing $50 million since 1991. The rebirth of the Argos has been a dizzying one. The roster of season ticket holders has more than tripled to 10,000, a feat accomplished without cutting prices. After last year’s startling success, the team sold 15 sponsorships worth about $ 1 million this season.
Average attendance, a paltry 11,600 under the peripatetic ownership of Sherwood Schwartz, is now 30,196. The team has sold that many seats already for Sunday’s game and expects to top 40,000. The story of how the Argos have come so far in such a short time is in many ways the story of committed ownership, hard work, clever management and a bit of luck.
After developers Howard Sokolowski and David Cynamon defied logic by paying $5 million for a team in tatters, one of their first moves was to hire Pelley to run the show. As president of TSN, Pelley had a secure, high-paying job but was instantly bowled over by the team’s new owners after CFL commissioner Tom Wright set up a meeting with Sokolowski.
‘‘ I came home and told ( wife) Joan I had met the warmest, nicest, most impressive man I’d ever met and he talked to me about being president and CEO of the Argonauts,” Pelley recalls.
‘‘ She was reading a book, put it down, looked at me and said, ‘ The Toronto Argonauts? Yeah, right.’ ”
That was the kind of reaction Pelley got everywhere. Why leave the captain’s job on a big ship to paddle a sinking canoe? But he went with his gut and took the job, knowing full well what he faced.
‘‘ I’ll never have another challenge like this,” he says. The first challenge, besides hiring a staff and some coaches, was to find out where the Argos fit in the Toronto marketplace.
It was a crowded place, dominated by the Leafs, Blue Jays and Raptors.
‘‘ Howard, David and I looked for our advantage and it became crystal clear: the accessibility of our players,” Pelley says. ‘‘ Our goal is to be the No. 1 community team.
“We’ll do more appearances with our coaches, players and cheerleaders than all other teams combined.” A full event team was brought in to manage appearances. Argo players, led by coach Pinball Clemons, were everywhere. There were breakfasts with Pinball, lunches with Pinball. There was an Argo presence at every community event imaginable.
Last week, the Argo logo was prominently displayed at a dentist’s convention.
Suddenly the team had a presence.
Getting sponsors on board was the next goal. It wasn’t easy, but slowly people started to believe.
‘‘ We were a major league team in a major league city,” says Pelley.
‘‘ We had to do everything firstclass. The sponsors saw that, saw how committed Howard and David were, and came on board.” Then came what Pelley calls ‘‘fixing the game-day experience.” The team invested $ 250,000 in dressing up the Rogers Centre to make it look like the Argos were more than itinerant tenants. But the big challenge: putting more fans in the seats.
‘‘ The first four months I was on the job I was out every single night, talking about the Argos and selling tickets,” says Pelley, whose ticket- pushing made him a bit of a pariah among his old TV buddies. ‘‘When we talked to season ticket holders, they all said the same thing,” Pelley recalls. ‘‘ They wanted more people in the stadium.” A staff of a dozen was hired to sell tickets, with the commitment of the new owners as their main selling point. It worked, especially when corporations bought blocks of discounted upperlevel seats. Once that got rolling, fans realized they could no longer show up at game time and get a good seat.
That spurred advanced sales. But getting bums in the seats wasn’t enough to keep them coming back. ‘‘ We knew we had to sell a football atmosphere,” says Pelley.
‘‘ Ostentatious half- time shows weren’t going to do it,” he says. ‘‘ We had to sell football.” Longtime season ticket- holder Glenn Stevenson says they accomplished that.
‘‘There’s a lot more fanfare now,” says the Oakville public school teacher. ‘‘ They’ve really created a great football atmosphere that wasn’t there before.”
Helping that was a winning team and a surprise victory in last year’s Grey Cup.
Pelley admits mistakes were made along the way. The biggest was the new stadium fiasco, which had the Argos first as the University of Toronto, then at York University and finally back at the Rogers Centre. But they weathered that storm, thanks mainly to the goodwill the team had built in its brief reincarnation.
“ Pinball is the greatest asset you can have,” says Pelley, “ but the players have really embraced the community. I don’t think Damon Allen has the word no in his vocabulary.”
Pelley says the real proof that the Argos have arrived took place this spring.
‘‘ We had just sold season tickets to one guy and I asked him why,” Pelley says. ‘‘ He said, one, you called. Two, everybody I know is doing it.
‘‘It struck me then that we were fashionable. I couldn’t have heard a better word.”