A FAN’S NOTES

High Flying Birds

Sometimes the Canadian Football League thrives and sometimes it merely survives. More often than not it manages to do both at the same time. Montreal’s Alouettes are Exhibit A when trying to explain the league’s often goofy dynamic.

The club up until relatively recently was a CFL stalwart, a pillar with an operating model for the other eight franchises to learn from and perhaps copy. They won consistently in a cozy, sold-out stadium and were an integral part of the sports conversation in one of Canada’s largest markets, one dominated by the hockey Canadiens at that. As is the case with Alberta’s notorious boom-and-bust economic cycle, the wheel must turn; as losses mounted these past few seasons paying customers dwindled. The Alouettes are now ownerless, a ward of the league. The team fired its head coach before the start of the regular season and then fired its general manager two losses into 2019. Business as unusual in the CFL.

The only sports marketing strategy guaranteed to obtain positive results is winning games, lots of them, especially the important ones. Since victory is rarely a genie finger snap away, Plan B for the moribund usually involves changing the laundry, refreshing the official merchandise. Last February the Alouettes managed to drum up some media coverage for themselves by catwalking new uniforms and a new logo.

The colours of course are bleu, blanc et rouge. The jerseys and pants, home and away, are decorated with simple red stripes, over the shoulders up top and from hip to knee from the waist down. Classic old time football: mud, and leather headgear. The logo on the other hand is a stroke, or perhaps a continuous line, of avant-garde genius. In retrospect, this latest skylark was subtly grandfathered in during the 2018 season when the Als ditched their cartoony and overly elaborate angry bird helmet decals and instead rotated stylized and simplified reproductions of the emblems used and then discarded throughout their lengthy history in Montreal.

Upon first glance the 2019 red line drawing resembles the flattened, heraldic crest of some obscure 19^th century German duchy. A closer look suggests high flight and reveals that the bird’s wingspread forms the letter M. Add the head and tail feathers and suddenly the whole suggests a fleur-de-lis, Quebec’s national symbol. Fittingly, the logo adorns the top of the team’s helmets, not the traditional temple space above the ear holes. The design soars.

To these eyes, the Als’ new logo evokes the clean and clever graphics which marked Montreal’s two pirouettes on the world’s stage in the latter half of the 20^th century. The Expo 67 logo was based on a primitive glyph resembling a capital Y augmented by a middle ascender to form a trident, a stick person with their arms raised. Laid out in an overlapping circle the symbols created a multitude of subliminal hand-held upper case sans serif Ms.

Montreal then hosted the financial fiasco that was the 1976 Olympic summer games. But the official logo was brilliant. Arches were added to the uppermost three rings of the five-ring logo. They formed a French window lower case M but with a third hump in the middle of a now fantastical letter. The design alluded to Mount Royal, the island of Montreal’s main geographical feature, as well as the tiered steps of Olympic medal podia. Rules of reproduction were firm: simply solid red, black or knocked-out white on a red background. One slinky line connected all the curves.

Off the gridiron the Als are looking great, skylarking. The team is making an effort to reconnect with Montrealers and the province of Quebec on a subliminal level evocative of past glories which serves to accentuate the importance of thoughtful and meaningful design. Je me souviens – I remember. Arcane and arty aesthetics aside, what really matters is that this season Montreal is playing entertaining football and winning some games, three of six so far; they’re looking almost as good as their new logo.      

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