VANCOUVER - They spend more money than any other team. They've had more on-field success, as well. Their oversized fan base is satisfied with nothing less than a championship at season's end. And boosters of other teams hate them for all of it.
The New York Yankees? Er, not exactly.
"Are you kidding?" a woman shot back this weekend at Riderville, the Saskatchewan Roughriders' annual party at the Grey Cup, when I asked her if she'd be cheering for the West's representative in the big game. "I'd rather cheer for Osama bin Laden than friggin' Edmonton!"
That seemed to sum up the general sentiment here this weekend. Fans wearing Toronto jerseys to Grey Cups can expect to be greeted with a hearty "Argos' suck!", but unless it's coming from Hamiltonians it's generally half-hearted. But to fans of other Western teams in particular, the Edmonton Eskimos are the CFL's answer to the Yankees - the evil empire they love to hate.
The numbers help explain it. The last time the Eskimos missed the playoffs, astoundingly, was 1971. In that 34-year run, they've been to the Grey Cup 17 times, and were playing for their tenth set of championship rings over that period in last night’s showdown with the Montreal Alouettes. Never have they been more dominant than during the Warren Moon-led era of the late 1970s and early 1980s - but whenever you start to count them out, as many did this year, they get hot at just the right time.
It’s not just on the field that the Eskies and their fans flex their muscles. As every year, most of the CFL's teams threw parties at Grey Cup week. And as always, it was the Spirit of Edmonton that was the place to be each night - with players, broadcasters, cheerleaders and fans all flocking to the Sheraton Hotel's ballroom. If the CFL has beautiful people (these things are relative), this is where they were.
Every league has its stronger and weaker links. But what makes the Eskimos' evil empire-status unique is that - with all respect to the City of Champions - they play in Edmonton.
It's a nice city. But New York, it ain't. We're talking about the northernmost city in a Canadian league, with a greater metropolitan population that barely exceeds one million. It's not even the biggest fish in its own provincial pond, with Calgary larger and a whole lot richer. Even with all those Stanley Cups the Gretzky-led Oilers brought home in the '80s, it's the sort of town that that should produce underdogs.
To make the whole thing even weirder, the Eskimos - like the Roughriders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers - are community-owned. There's no George Steinbrenner figure cutting the cheques; it's the fans themselves who are financing the Eskies as they run roughshod over the CFL's unenforced salary cap.
Nothing speaks to the distance between Canadian football and other North American sports leagues quite like the success of the team with the anachronistic name and the harmless looking polar-bear mascot. It's the way sports should be - the team with the best management and strongest community support rewarding the faithful.
That was small consolation, though, to the folks at Riderville, where a young man was holding forth about how the Eskimos must secretly be financing their team with prostitution and other underworld activities. It was an entertaining conversation, but we had to break it off. It was time to go party at the Spirit of Edmonton.
