VANCOUVER - You go to Maple Leafs games from as early an age as you can remember, and never get to know the players beyond reading the stock answers they give reporters. You try to support your city's baseball and basketball teams, but learn never to get too attached to their stars, because when their contracts expire they're likely to be on the first flight to somewhere bigger, or warmer, or just less Canadian. You watch NFL games every Sunday, then spend the week cringing at the antics of Terrell Owens and other million-dollar stars who've lost any sense of reality.
Then you go to the Grey Cup, and at the first party you get to, your favourite player spots you wearing his jersey, races across the room, gives you a hug and insists on buying you a drink. And the thing is, it doesn't come as much of a surprise. It's the sort of thing that happens with great frequency in the CFL, and it's what makes it much bigger than just another sports league.
It's been suggested that with a shift away from churches, neighbourhood groups and other traditional centres for social interaction, professional sports provide us with as much a sense of community as anything else. But in most sports, those communities are unhealthily classist. Torontonians may live and die with the Leafs, but most of them do so only from sports bars or their living rooms, while the well-heeled and well-connected actually go to the games, and even they don’t have much connection with the players at the top of the pyramid.
The CFL is the rare exception. Each year, thousands of Canadians with little in common but their love for the game flock to the host city to spend the better part of a week wearing their teams' colours, drinking beers and chatting each other up - about football, about their hometowns, about anything else that comes to mind. Strangers become friends, at least for a few days, and those friendships are renewed the next year. And rather than being limited to the ticket-buying public, everyone connected with the sport takes part.
Not everyone is quite as enthusiastic as Clifford Ivory, the Toronto Argonaut whose jersey I wear. And then there's the other extreme - the guys in full costumes who seem just a little too into their teams, or the gentleman fondly recalling a billy-clubbing from security in his youth at Toronto's Exhibition Stadium. But as awkward as those encounters would be in any other setting, they somehow just add to the charm of this one.
Trying to duplicate this sort of spirit year-round would be exhausting. But even in its toned-down regular-season form, the CFL is remarkably successful at bringing together folks who wouldn't have two words to say to each other if they collided on the street.
A friend of mine, also present on this Vancouver jaunt, has had season's tickets for the Toronto Blue Jays for the past couple of years. In all that time sitting in the Rogers Centre, he has yet to build much of a relationship with anyone around him. As Torontonians typically do, Jays fans mind their own business - and would view it as an intrusion if anyone expected them to do otherwise.
The same friend has sat next to me at Argos games for the past few seasons. Same city. Same stadium. Fewer games. And yet, even though we don't actually know many of their names, we've come to actually looking forward to catching up with the cast of characters who sit around us. When the Argos' season came to a halt last weekend, I was genuinely sorry that I wouldn't be seeing these people until next season.
They're a funny thing, communities. You're the sort of person who, in keeping with modern methods of social interaction, makes no active effort to seek them out - the sort with little interest in getting to know the neighbours, because you'd rather choose your friends carefully than have them randomly selected by geography. Then you go to a few football games and find yourself a part of one. And before long, you can't imagine yourself outside it.
