Blue, gold, forever

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This article was published 27/12/2019 (2254 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Stephan Sawchuk won’t forget the night the Winnipeg Blue Bombers won their first Grey Cup since 1990. He won’t have much of a choice.

On Nov. 24, he watched Winnipeg handily defeat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats 33-12 at McMahon Stadium in Calgary, from section K, row 9, seat 3, giving him a front-row vantage point to team history.

Soon, he’ll have inked-in evidence of the drought-busting win on his right forearm, a tattoo proudly declaring the Bombers are Grey Cup champions; that the down-on-its-luck club has finally reversed its fortunes; that the unlikely has become likely and the once impossible, possible.

Not every fan will get a memento such as Sawchuk’s, but the Bombers victory will forever be etched into Winnipeg’s collective urban narrative, despite the fact most denizens never broke any tackles or nailed a punt to the coffin-corner: we were once and seemingly always losers, and now, for one shining off-season, we aren’t. It’s that emotional connection that likely spurred Free Press readers to vote for the Grey Cup victory as the local news story of the year.

In a 365-day stretch that saw a marathon provincial election campaign, an avowed neo-Nazi ousted from the military reserves after a Free Press investigation, and a Thanksgiving snowstorm that bent trees earthward like they were practising yoga in a citywide studio, it was the Blue Bombers win that garnered a commanding 56 per cent of reader votes.

Why? A sporting event is just a sporting event. But in the grand scheme of one life — whether it belongs to a lone fan or a single collective — a sporting event can have a huge impact: the game is no longer just a game.

“This is everything,” screamed Dan LeBlanc, a Bomber super-fan known as Lieutenant Dan, as reality began to set in at McMahon in November.

LeBlanc moved to the province in 1991, a year after Winnipeg won the Grey Cup, and had been tailgating his heart out for nearly three decades, anticipating the moment that Winnipeg won again.

Through tears, LeBlanc hugged strangers, though it would be easy to mistake them for lifelong friends.

In a way, they were. Fandom of any kind comes with a sense of universality. Two people who’ve never met see they’re wearing the same colours, singing the same songs, clapping at the same moments, and soon, they’re crying the same tears. It’s sports as religion, with Andrew Harris and Chris Streveler as the prophets, and fans as the faithful congregation.

At McMahon, and then at Portage and Main for the victory parade, the congregation was indeed joyous. Thousands watched with glee as Streveler — a quarterback-fullback hybrid in a cowboy hat and furs — chugged cheap beer and chomped on a cigar in his caravan through downtown Winnipeg, a folk hero from Illinois born in real-time in the shadow of Portage Place.

Sociologist Emile Durkheim famously theorized that religion occurs as the result of what he called a “collective effervescence,” wherein a group of individuals comes together to perform a ritual, and an inexplicable force leads them to experience emotional excitement, and in some cases, delirium.

While that positive emotional force was undoubtedly on display during the victory parade, the negative version had long gripped Bomber fans. For 29 years, the collective emotion was disappointment and sadness; the unmistakable feeling of being brought to the brink of victory only to have it snatched away, or perhaps worse, enjoyed by your arch-rival.

But now, for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, there’s reason to celebrate. For Sawchuk, 23, that’s not even hyperbole.

When he goes into the parlour on Jan. 11, and the tattoo artist colours in the blue and gold, Sawchuk will get a permanent reminder that it actually happened: Harris scampered, Streveler chugged, and the Bombers won.

Rejoice.

ben.waldman@freepress.mb.ca