A FAN’S NOTES
A Love Letter to Canadian Football
It must’ve been 1973 or ‘74 because I can
remember my friend Tim and me positively skipping with joy down the alley
behind my grandparents’ apartment building - which means my mother hadn’t yet
remarried and hauled my ass downtown to live with her new husband and three of
his daughters. Tim and I, using our own money and the procurement aid of his
mom, had scored tickets for that season’s (whichever one it was) Canadian
Football League all star game to be played in a tiered concrete wreck on the
shore of the mighty St. Lawrence River known as the Autostade. An unsupervised
sporting adventure to watch the greatest football players ever awaited us -
until the game was cancelled. Perhaps the organizers had sold just our two
tickets. This was one of the earliest soul-crushing moments in my life as a
sports fan, or maybe just in my life, period; a few had already passed and
many, many more were to come.
As the Montreal Canadiens don’t win the
Stanley Cup every year and the Montreal Expos no longer exist, there is a gap
in my sporting calendar until the CFL begins official league play around Canada
Day, July 1. Our game resembles our country in that it’s almost as old; its
urban teams are separated mostly by big empty spaces; the loop knows nadirs and
glory days; from time to time the entire operation has somehow hung together by
the merest thread.
Football was my best sport growing up. I
hung up the pads upon my high school graduation. In the early days my brother
was my coach. A first cousin of ours was killed playing high school football;
my parents allowed me to play on. Tim suited up back then though our lifelong
friendship was still in its early, formal stages: ‘Hey, Moore.’ I remember sustaining one minor concussion
as a teen: ‘Geoff! Where are you!’ Uh, look at all these staring, intent faces
and the fluffy clouds in the sky? Sometimes now I experience a scraping behind
my right knee cap, the result of a direct helmet to bone hit unabsorbed by a
flimsy foam pad; I remember the pain. Years after quitting I survived a
headlong bicycle crash relatively intact; the examining doctors found ancient
scar tissue in a few vertebrae in my neck. I attribute the damage to seven or
eight seasons of getting thrashed by bigger, stronger and better players.
I love the game and from a fan’s
perspective, it helps having played the sport because I can appreciate most its
nuances and increasingly refined skills even though these have evolved steadily
since the days of the I-Formation. My sister on the other hand, who is not a
fan, has reduced football to the level of a reading primer: ‘I run. I fall
down. I get up.’ I say something close about soccer: ‘I run. I fall down. I
writhe;’ I never played the game.
Tim and I have paid our dues to the CFL.
Individually or together we have owned or shared season tickets. We’ve paid to
see games played in various cities. We’ve traversed the country to attend Grey
Cup championships. We’ve bought the caps and the jerseys. We’ve bumped the television
viewer numbers. Through the seasons we’ve done everything a fan is tacitly
asked to do. The fusty dollars in our wallets aside, we are no longer an
attractive demographic for a league trying to grow its game in this new age of
social media and goldfish attention spans. Tim and I now qualify for the
seniors’ discounts at IHOP. In our time the ill-fated 1995 expansion Memphis
Mad Dogs were a travesty. That squad doesn’t even register on the scale
compared to last season’s marketing blitz of apocalyptic video game third
uniforms. Horrid fashion is the province of the young.
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