The recent announcement that McMahon Stadium will be home to a February hockey game is an excellent example of sports loyalties in most CFL cities. The tickets will be sold to season ticket holders on a priority basis. Then a lottery system will award lucky winners the right to pay huge money to sit outside in February and watch a hockey game.
February temperature ranges in Calgary may vary between borderline T-shirt weather to a deep freeze that scares the liver and other body parts out of brass monkeys. No matter, this game is a guaranteed sell-out with a tremendous upside for the most ruthless of scalpers.
Contrast the hockey interest with any Calgary Stampeders game that doesn’t include the much despised Roughriders and their fans. Or takes place on Labor Day Monday with the Eskimos. But a football sellout with the appeal of either usually occurs only a few days before the actual game. The hockey sellout should take about 10 minutes- tops.
There is a lot of blame to throw around for the CFL’s ugly stepsister role in Canadian sports. Most CFL teams are generally a quaint after thought, even on a carrier network like TSN. The strange reality is that CFL games consistently outgun regular season NHL games in viewer numbers on TSN, yet the network continues its inexplicable obsession with hockey-even in summer.
The CFL pays its players less money and charges its customers a fraction of the ticket cost for a game. CFL teams play only nine regular season games and hope to host one playoff game during their schedule. So the demand on a sports fan’s wallet is significantly less for a CFL game than an NHL game. In a you-don’t-have-to-sell-your-first-born-to-go-kind of way.
The difference in ticket cost and player salaries has shaped the perception of fans toward the two sports. The CFL has been shuffled out of the limelight and into the shadows because sports fans equate dollars to prestige. The issue of actual athletic talent is never factored into the equation.
So the net result is a tier system that will coax huge bucks out of NHL fans to watch a yawn-fest between the Oilers and Flames over and over during a season. That is the top tier of the equation. Way down the ladder is a CFL game between Calgary and Montreal that will pit two enormously talented teams against one another in each other’s parks once during a regular season. That will be a highly unlikely sell-out at McMahon.
The only way that Calgary will sell out McMahon for a playoff football game is another game with Saskatchewan; the team with the evil hillbilly fans that have become far less loveable with a winning team.
Stamp fans will whine about ‘Rider fans’ behavior, but the Stampeder team won’t turn down ’Rider fan cash for a ticket when the weather gets cold and fair-weather Stamp fans head indoors.
Maybe some of these one-dimensional Calgary sports fans should acclimatize themselves to an outdoor winter hockey game by actually attending a late fall football game. It may not be an elite sports moment, but it would be a much-needed character builder for these fans.
More of Jim Sutherland at mystarcollectorcar.com