A FAN’S NOTES

A Big Day Out, a Big Game

The area around the box office at Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium was deserted. A kissing booth at a covid fair. I’d missed the opening kickoff by half an hour. I requested a single ticket, the cheapest aisle seat available. A baker’s dozen years had passed since I’d last attended a Canadian Football League game.

Football was my favourite sport when I was young; the one I was best at. I was good enough to be co-captain and third-string quarterback on my high school’s worst-ever bantam team. Players in grades above and below me were so much better. The perks of a double-sized locker and early dismissal on game days mattered as much as the prize of an embroidered school letter for extramural sports. I believe I sustained just one concussion. Having your brain folded like an omelette back then was just having your bell rung. Once the field see-sawed back to level you got up and a whistle blew, play resumed.

As a kid I collected CFL player cards. I knew all the poses. I had a Coleco CFL electric football game. I painted the plastic players to make them appear more authentic: black or white cleats, white socks and various skin tones. I saved up to buy a set of plastic team helmets, smaller than a golf ball, at the local stationery, a one-man operation with half an aisle devoted to toys. I arranged them by division atop the cardboard grandstand. I rearranged them on Mondays after reviewing league standings in the morning newspaper’s sports section. All very professional.

In Montreal we had the Alouettes and later the Concordes. The francophone media dismissed football as an “English” sport, perhaps because of its rugby roots. Failed franchises. Baltimore’s Stallions, ridden hard and put away wet, the lone surviving club of the CFL’s audacious and disastrous US expansion scheme, relocated to Montreal and revived the Skylarks’ French nickname. Whoever was charged with operating the “expansion” franchise grasped grassroots engagement. Two of Quebec’s premier francophone universities are now U Sports (similar to America’s NCAA except for the cash and the graft) football powerhouses. I was well established in Alberta when the Second Coming of the Als was made manifest by the launch of an on-trend cartoony logo – sort of Woody Woodpecker raging on expired Soviet Olympic drugs.

Culture shock in Canada is a lot like a board game. You roll the dice. Should you move one province over you’ll find yourself in a milieu you’re accustomed to and yet something inexplicable is awry; it may be the streetcars and skyscrapers, but no, that’s not it. If you hop a string of provinces, you may wonder if you’ve landed in a different country. I migrated from Quebec to Alberta in 1990. The hardcore passion for Canadian football I encountered on the Canadian prairies stunned me.

The Edmonton Eskimos (now Elks) and Calgary Stampeders entertained fanbases whose cores had coalesced around VE Day. Broadsheets, tabloids, AM radio and television stations treated football as hockey’s equal: experts, analysts, talking heads, beat reporters and columnists. Those types of people now toil for the football team’s social media feed, an information source as reliable as Pravda or The People’s Daily. Cutesy nicknames and sports jargon, very in-crowd yet very necessary. A casual Edmonton Journal reader would never know the Elks exist, let alone the baseball Riverhawks, thoroughbred racing and university athletics. This is the state of the aptly named Postmedia newspaper chain. And there is little else beyond traditional print. Local legacy electronic media outlets are dimming or already dark. Static and snow. 

Genuine word of mouth will trump an orchestrated marketing campaign every time. And there is no better sports marketing tool than a winning record. The Elks were at home on a recent Saturday. An early game hosting Toronto’s Argonauts. That’s when football should be played, in the afternoon. And the morning promised the first nice Saturday we’d had in Edmonton since the summer equinox. No rain. No nighttime prime time TV ad rate grab and no American cable football competition this time of year.

We were sitting on the backyard patio. The al fresco Saturday crossword’s ass had been collectively kicked. I was feeling frisky. I said to Ann, “I’m tempted to go to the football game this afternoon.” Ann said her interest was Elvis Costello, less than zero. Who would I call for company? “Nobody we know cares.” Check that. My friend Glenn would, but he lives in Burnaby. Glenn and his wife Margaret are certified and genuine football fans. The BC Lions should shower them with team swag – provided they keep their season ticket account current. I met Glenn in CEGEP, Quebec’s corral between high school and university. He was the sports editor of our college paper. I drew a comic strip and reviewed albums. We got to know each other at bedtime – pasting up the tabloid for the printer: hot wax, rollers, X-Acto knives and ruby tape. The four of us had dinner together on a Saturday in 2018, a Grey Cup eve. Glenn and Margaret were in Edmonton to attend something like their twenty-fourth CFL championship game. And more power to them for the extremity strangling excitement of freezing in the November dark at Commonwealth. That was the last time we hung out. There was no point calling long distance to float an inconvenient commute when I was already running late.

I caught the train from the Crooked 9’s neighbourhood station to the stadium. One direct line, just like the shopping channel. I was neither molested nor murdered or otherwise accosted. I was the only rider absorbed by a real window. Human desperation and architectural crimes. A grotesque tableau. Framed cinema verite. Despair and Brutalism: not so incongruous. The Edmonton Elks game played out as something of an impromptu shot of vitamin EE.

The concrete desert surrounding the stadium proved misleading. The lower bowl and the interior concourse teemed with modern life as I view it through a jaundiced lens: unfortunate fashion choices and tattoos. An engaged Elks executive must have been ecstatic over the crowd’s diversity and demographic. My impression was that CFL football had become something akin to YouTube episodes of The Rat Patrol, a fleeting distraction for old and hopelessly sentimental white guys like me. A family can afford a big day out at an Elks game. Better days are right here right now even if Woodward’s Knothole Gang barely qualifies as a wisp of memory.

My seat was in section FF. I never sat in it. I watched perhaps a half-hour of football from various vantage points. Had Glenn made the trip, he’d have been annoyed with me. I am my mother’s son: “Mary Riley, Mary Riley.” People watching and private investigations were infinitely more interesting. Mom lost her filter toward the end and I wonder about the integrity of my own. I lapped the stadium. I lapped up the highlights of the scenery. I try to remember that life is like a men’s toilet, you best just stare straight ahead at nothing. But, man, this innate need of mine to know. Mary Riley, Mary Riley.

The monopolistic premium atop concession prices for stuff you can buy cheaper almost everywhere else was modest in the way a $9 can of Heineken registers as reasonable. Do I add a tip at a concession stand? Am I a miser? Or am I just fed up with post-covid nickel and diming? The correct action which may or may not be proper these days eludes me. Take ten points. Is that enough? God, shut up and walk on.

I wondered on my wandering whether I’d encounter a green and gold bleeder, a football fanatic from nearly four decades ago; a former acquaintance, a friend and colleague I used to know. Would I recognize them? They would be wearing a faded green home jersey harkening back to the club’s original nickname. It won’t fit quite as comfortably as it once did and the brand of that season’s Official Supplier of the CFL will be defunct or tragically unhip: Starter or Puma. I can’t speak for other people, but me? I haven’t changed a bit.

Most sports venues have a no re-entry policy. Smokers are required to enjoy their entertainment in a mild state of agitation. Housefires, wildfires, cancer – smokers are the usual suspects. And fair enough in a wilfully blind and sniffy way. I look down on other people for other reasons, mainly zealots and other self-righteous types. And idiots. Especially idiots with power. We’re all a bit uppity, I suppose, a level above our natural grade and incapable of accepting our cosmic angle of repose.

Gates 7 and 8 at Commonwealth are directly behind the north end zone. Heavy duty fencing restricts access from the street and parking lot. This was the pariah pen. The surprisingly large space was some sort of torii beckening a benign and benevolent state of Zen emission bliss. I could smell reefer. The private security guards in their snazzy black uniforms looked smart and looked and sniffed the other way. A beer hawker made her rounds through the high mass. She was diligent restocking her tray.

Back in 2018 Glenn presented me with a custom Grey Cup badge since pinned to the bulletin board above my writing table. Its main purpose is printed on it: ALWAYS SOCIABLE. It served as a goodwill token for his travelling circus of BC Lions fans upon their arrival in Edmonton. A cheery souvenir freely handed out to fellow visitors, fans of rival teams (God bless the rapidly depleting core of Baltimore Stallions fans and the Atlantic Schooner fantasists). I view professional spectator sports in the way I’ve listened to Foreign Tongues; it’s no Let It Bleed although I remain enamoured by the very idea of the Rolling Stones. I am glad they still exist in some form. I enjoyed my football Saturday afternoon even if the full four quarters and the score (the Elks ran it up, way up, in the second half) didn’t matter. I felt at home in Commonwealth, comfortable in the company of strangers. Mary Riley, Mary Riley.

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com to buy my last couple of books. You can also listen to songs I’ve co-written with The Muster Point Project before scooting over to its YouTube channel.