Don’t fret about traffic. Victory parades don’t happen every day
TFC and the Argos have won in recent years. But it’s been a while for the Jays. And let’s not talk about the you-know-whos . . .
Winter was set to blow its first, full fury across the city that Monday afternoon, just two days after its heroes had triumphed — in T-shirts and shorts — over at Exhibition Place.
That’s the same place the NBA champion Toronto Raptors will begin their journey to Nathan Phillips Square on Monday in a joyful but achingly rare Hogtown tradition — the victory parade.
The last time the city’s downtown streets were so gleefully gridlocked was on Dec.11, 2017, when Toronto FC — the above-mentioned shorts and T-shirts crew — celebrated their first Major League Soccer championship after claiming the Philip F. Anschutz Trophy at BMO Field two days earlier.
The 18-month gap between the Reds’ and Raptors’ processions is a brief one for a city that hadn’t previously seen a championship parade since the Canadian Football League’s Toronto Argonauts claimed the centennial-edition Grey Cup back in 2012. (The Argos’ 2017 championship team was dropped off by bus directly in front of city hall.)
You’d have to go back to the Grey Cup-winning Argos of 2004 for the last parade before that. And the Double Blue claimed the previous pair as well with back-to-back, open-convertible cavalcades in 1996 and 1997.
The Raptors victory parade, which some predict will draw a million or more people, is scheduled to begin at10 a.m. Monday by the Princes’ Gates and work its way east across Lake Shore Blvd. W. to York St. It will then move up York onto University Ave. and travel east on Queen St. W.
It will end with a rally in Nathan Phillips Square.
While crowd sizes and routes have varied for Toronto’s episodic parades, the Nathan Phillips terminus has been a nearconstant since the square opened in 1965. Prior to that, the adjacent intersection of Bay and Queen Sts. in front of Old City Hall was the standard gathering point.
Back then, however, parades were commonplace in a city where the Toronto Maple Leafs won Stanley Cups with pistonlike regularity.
The Leafs claimed four cups in six years between the 1962 and 1967 seasons. And the victories were so metronomic that the team’s legendary captain of the time, George Armstrong, recalled crowd sizes dwindling with each passing parade.
“The fan turnouts for the parades were getting smaller every year,” Armstrong, now 88, told the Star in 2013.
“I guess they were getting used to it.”
But Frank Mahovlich, the Leafs’ top star during that run of cups, did not recall the parades shedding spectators.
“It seemed to me like the whole city came out every time we won a cup,” the former Canadian senator, now 81, told the Star for the 2013 ebook Maple Leafs: Catching Up With the Past.
“Going up Bay St., there were a lot of fans out there, no matter when we won it.”
While the crowds may or may not have stayed constant, the city’s mayors changed for each parade, Mahovlich recalled, with a different one — Nathan Phillips, Donald Summerville, Philip Givens and William Dennison — greeting them each time upon their arrival at city hall.
Bucking that city hall tradition, the back-to-back World Series champion Toronto Blue Jays of 1992 and 1993 chose their SkyDome digs as the parade destination.
Those closed-roof October love-fests — which began after short parades from a Royal York Hotel marshalling point — culminated with the team unfurling their two (and so far only) World Series banners over the outfield bleachers.
Those Jays celebrations paraded up York St., across Wellington St. and down Peter St. to the dome, featuring the team members in open convertibles — with just one exception.
In 1993, truculent pitching ace Jack Morris hopped out of his car to borrow a police motorcycle, which he drove into the stadium to thunderous cheers.