Good, wholesome Canadian violence

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/08/2018 (2779 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A day that began with a presidential tweet urging protesting football players to “be cool” ended 12 hours later on a sweltering night in Winnipeg with a field full of football players doing exactly that.

Let the record show that the Winnipeg Blue Bombers and Hamilton Tiger-Cats couldn’t possibly have been more cool on a night the mercury was still touching 29 C when the teams lined up for the anthem at Investors Group Field Friday.

Because we now live in times when covering sporting events means also covering the anthems, let it be recorded: both the Bombers and Ticats were present on the field and fully accounted for as the anthem played. And while it’d be hard to say every player was standing at attention exactly, they were at least all standing as far as I could tell.

It was a scene that Donald Trump would have loved, if it had anything to do with him, which of course it didn’t.

The whole anthem-protest thing that returned with a vengeance this week with the first pre-season games of the 2018 NFL season never really caught on up here.

We can debate why that might be and I will leave it to someone better suited than a 50-year-old white guy to make any definitive pronouncements.

But I do offer two items for your consideration: a black former Bombers player who spent his entire life in the U.S. South once told me that the first time he truly felt at home was the first time he came to Canada; and black people don’t tend to end up dead up during routine encounters with the police in Canada, or at least not nearly at the same rate as in the U.S. So there’s that.

Indeed, it says a lot about how different the temperature in our two countries is right now that in a week NFL players were once again on their knees during the anthem and renewing a protest that was, at least originally, about police mistreatment of blacks in the U.S., our players up here were sharing the field with local cops Friday night during what the Bombers billed as “Law Enforcement Appreciation Night.”

There was a moment of silence for the two police officers killed in the line of duty in Fredericton Friday morning. There was a half-time performance by the Winnipeg Police Pipe Band. And there were on-field presentations by Bombers CEO Wade Miller to representatives of both city police and the Mounties.

All in all, it was a group hug for our boys and girls in blue at a time their counterparts in the U.S. are increasingly under fire, no small amount of it self-inflicted.

It is what we do best in Canada, a country founded on the principal of “peace, order and good government” whose citizenry have always preferred the quiet desperation of deference to the unseemliness of revolt.

Ask your average Canadian and he will give you some variation of “there’s nothing too good for our boys in blue.”

Which is fair enough, I suppose, and especially so on a day when two of them went to work in New Brunswick and never returned home.

Of course, if you follow that carte blanche to its logical conclusion, you have a city in Winnipeg where six of the seven highest earners on civic payroll last year were cops and one constable made thirty grand more — $214,928 — than the mayor of the city — $185,870.

But I digress.

The point here is the Bombers gave the fans Friday night exactly what they wanted — and what NFL owners only wish they could give their fans: good, wholesome violence, sprinkled with blind acceptance of authority and, most importantly, no distractions from the real world.

It was, to be sure, a thoroughly satisfying show, but then it usually is these days down at Investors Group Field, where the club is winning on the field — a 29-23 victory over Hamilton was the Bombers’ third win in a row — and are holding their own off of it.

That might sound like faint praise, but it’s no small accomplishment to hold your own in football these days.

It needs to be said: pro football is not the licence to print money it once was. TV ratings for the NFL were down double digits for a long stretch of last season and attendance in the CFL is down five per cent this year to an average of just 23,474 per game, a drop of 1,170 per game over last season, with over a third of the season now in the books.

What’s that number mean? Well, among other things, it means the CFL has played to 73 per cent capacity this season, with better than one of out every four seats in CFL stadiums empty this summer.

Now, some of this, Trump would probably tell you, is a visceral reaction to the anthem protests down south and a desire among many fans to keep their football and politics separate.

Some of the decline is also, no doubt, a reaction to the increasingly sobering concussion science that makes clear football has made football players very sick in the past and — who’s kidding who — is continuing to do so today.

Then there’s the usual catchall excuse that blames millennials, shortened attention spans and the late Steve Jobs for every dying industry, from taxis to newspapers to, now, maybe, pro football.

Attendance in Winnipeg is also down through four home dates this season — six per cent to an average of 26,123 — but there are a few factors unique to the Bombers’ situation.

There is, for sure, still a Jets hangover in this town. A lot of disposable dollars got plowed into that long playoff run last spring and any number of local businesses will tell you they’re still feeling it.

There is also probably still a bit of a Joe Mack hangover. For all the good things the Bombers have done over the last few years — winning football and a genuine hometown hero in Andrew Harris on the field and a major commitment to minor football off of it — there are longtime fans who were driven away by the Bombers’ sheer futility over years who still haven’t returned.

It also needs to be said that there were a lot discounted tickets floating around towards the end of last season that probably artificially inflated that 2017 attendance figure; last year was the first season in four years that attendance at IGF went up instead of down and those cheap tickets were at least part of the reason.

Still, in a season in which the CFL is labouring to put people in the seats and the NFL is labouring to get players to their feet, the Bombers have the third-highest average attendance in the CFL behind only Edmonton and, of course, Saskatchewan.

“Be happy, be cool!,” Trump tweeted Friday morning in response to Thursday night’s anthem protests. “A football game, that fans are paying soooo much money to watch and enjoy, is no place to protest.”

Trump doesn’t like much that isn’t himself. But he’d love the CFL.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @PaulWiecek