Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
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Cheering for nothing
Shortly before I came to Ontario in 1995, I found myself night after night in a Whitehorse watering hole, eagerly, no wildly, cheering on a Toronto sports team.
It was, of course, the Toronto Blue Jays, who actually won the championship of Major League Baseball for two years running, 1992 and 1993. Shortly after that, baseball went on strike and the Jays would never recover.
I could hardly have known that, however, when I emigrated from the West to the East. The Jays gave me hope that should I ultimately settle down in Ontario, I would enjoy rooting for Toronto teams.
Had I only known.
One of the reasons I looked forward to being a Toronto fan was that there were more teams to cheer for. After all, my home town of Edmonton had no big league baseball team, no basketball team. We had a football team that won a few Grey Cups under Jackie Parker (when I was just a kid), and another bunch under Warren Moon a couple of decades later. We also had a hockey team that won a Stanley Cup or four under a fellow named Gretzky, but hadn’t done much for us lately.
But I had experience as a child cheering for the Leafs, since they were closer to Edmonton than the Canadiens (and spoke English, too).
So when I landed in southern Ontario, I was quite prepared to root for the Jays, the Leafs, the Raptors and even the Argos if necessary. Maybe even the Rock or whatever the soccer team’s name was back then, although I knew precious little about lacrosse or soccer. I would just cheer on principle.
Not that I would ever go to the games, of course, or hardly ever. I quickly realized that sporting events in Toronto were not for the average fan. You had to be pretty upper middle class to regularly attend games at the Skydome or the Gardens, and that’s a social stratum in which I will never circulate. Instead, I would faithfully follow my new teams in the sports pages and, whenever possible, plunk myself down in front of the tube to holler from afar.
So it’s been 14 years now. I’m come to enjoy Ontario for many reasons: my wife, my town, my friends, the history, the culture.
But my enjoyment of Ontario has been despite my experience as a fan of the aforementioned sports teams.
Cheering for these ever-changing conglomerations of over-paid, under-achieving “athletes” has gotten steadily more depressing over the years.
The Raptors have shown glimmers of promise, but have never gotten farther than the second round of the playoffs, and that only once. They have a remarkable propensity for paying huge sums to players at the end of their careers.
As they’ve done this year, the Jays occasionally start out well, but inevitably tail off to finish in third place, or even fourth now that Tampa Bay is no longer a laughing stock. The only team they ever finish ahead of these days is the Orioles, and even in the avian world, a Blue Jay can pretty reliably beat up an Oriole most days. Big deal.
The Leafs, of course, have won nothing since I was in high school, well in the misty past. They’ve hired a new manager this year, one with a good reputation for building champions, but Toronto teams often do that, and the fellows become excessively stupid as soon as they enter the city. This one is no exception.
He seems to have decided that in order to compete, the Leafs have to get bigger and badder. As a casual fan, I kind of thought the key to hockey lay in doing two things: scoring goals and/or stopping them. What do I know?
So it seems the Jays, Raptors and Leafs will continue to be mediocre until I no longer care, and that time is fast approaching. They may occasionally have win streaks that tantalize, but then there’ll be injuries, or the GM will trade away the key to the franchise. It’s predictable, but not pleasant.
The Argos, I thought, were a group to hold on to. They had this Pinball guy, who was fast and funny and, it seemed, smart. Then he fired himself as coach. The other day, the Argos went into a game with a quarterback who’d won the Grey Cup only a couple of years before and lost to the Alouettes (that’s French for lark, a bird even an oriole can beat) 25-0.
That’s right, 25 to nothing. Zilch. Rien. How do you score nothing in a football game, particularly a Canadian one (where single points are possible)? You can maybe get shut out in baseball or hockey, with regularity in soccer (where a scoreless tie is considered exciting), but football? What kinda bunch of losers plays 60 minutes of football and fails to register a single, solitary point?
A Toronto team, of course.
At least I can claim, when someone sees me sneaking a cheer for the Eskimos or the Oilers, that I’m not really from here.
