Nov 23, 2016
Hard to imagine Grey Cup game returning to Toronto anytime soon
As Dave Naylor writes, bringing Canada's biggest football party back to Toronto for the third time in 10 years seemed like a risky play from the outset and has proven every bit so.
By Dave Naylor
There was a time when you could be as sure to have a successful Grey Cup in Toronto as anywhere else in Canada.
In fact, the Grey Cup was a virtual staple of the city’s sporting culture for a very long time, with nearly half of the previous 103 editions of the game played right here.
But there’s been an enormous about of change across the Canadian sports landscape over the past three decades and it’s been a while since you could plunk Canadian football’s big showcase down in the Big Smoke with any real degree of certainty that it would sell itself.
Which is why bringing the game back for the third time in 10 years seemed like a risky play from the outset and has proven every bit so.
A lot of this is circumstantial, although when you’re talking about selling Canadian football in Canada’s largest city, it should be understood that the circumstances probably need to be in your favour.
Nine years ago the 2007 Grey Cup game in Toronto was in danger of being a non-sellout until the Saskatchewan Roughriders won the West Division Final and a good part of that province up-and-arrived in Toronto, buying up all remaining tickets and injecting their unique spirit into the party.
Five years later, you had the attraction of it being the 100th Grey Cup game, the Argonauts playing in it and the National Hockey League conveniently shutting itself down in a labour dispute, thus giving allowing the CFL to own more of the spotlight than it would otherwise have garnered.
It would have been a mistake to conclude based on those two events that the Grey Cup in Toronto was something that should be revisited every few years. Although you can certainly understand why the Argos move to BMO Field might have seemed like a perfect opportunity to showcase their new home and drive interest that might help rejuvenate the team.
However, the Argos had a horrendous year on the field and the response to their playing at BMO Field wasn’t near as strong as the team had hoped. Throw in a late start at selling tickets and you had a formula where local enthusiasm for the run-up to the game has been hard to find. There is also the fact that Toronto seems to be going through a degree of big-event fatigue, after back-to-back playoff appearances by the Blue Jays and an extended run to the Eastern Conference finals by the Raptors. The World Cup of Hockey was met with mild enthusiasm and even the World Junior tournament and Maple Leafs centennial outdoor game have been harder sells than expected.
There was of course, a reason the CFL went without staging the game in Toronto between 1992 and 2007. And that was that the 1992 event, featuring a game between Calgary and Winnipeg, did little to excite the local populace and was considered a disappointment.
Like this year, the Argos of 1992 had a dreadful season on the field, while local sports fans turned their attention to other things, such as the Maple Leafs and Blue Jays which were about to embark on their most successful seasons in a generation.
As a result, the 1992 Grey Cup festival went largely unnoticed by the people who live here and the CFL responded, appropriately so, by staying away for a decade-and-a-half.
Thanks to some creative marketing and a late push of ticket-buyers from Ottawa – suddenly the CFL’s most enthusiastic and youngest fan base – this year’s game will be saved the embarrassment of having empty seats on Sunday night.
And the festival of events, frequented by a mass of CFL fans who travel to the game each and every year, will probably be just fine, especially when the folks from the Nation’s Capital hit town this weekend.
But here’s guessing that when all is said and done this week, there’s also going to be a sense that we won’t see the Grey Cup back here anytime soon. That an event that is largely failure-proof in much of the country probably belongs where it is wanted and where it’s going to be celebrated by the local populace just as much as those who hit town for the party.
It has been recognized by everyone that reviving the Argonauts in this city is not going to be an overnight phenomenon, that it’s going to take lots of hard work and commitment to fill their stadium and bring them up to par with support elsewhere around the league.
Hard to think that Canada’s largest party should be back here again before that happens.