A Sunday ‘Blue Out’ just might do the trick

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/10/2009 (5806 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They’ve been exposed to some spectacularly bad football, seen their team reduced this summer to a laughingstock. Heck, even the head coach took a shot at them, saying he didn’t understand their rabid, face-painting ways.

They are Winnipeg Blue Bombers fanatics; not to be confused with the 7,000 or 8,000 part-timers who are ultimately the difference between whether the home team bleeds red or black on the financial bottom line. They’re not the fringe constituency who decide whether or not to attend games based on such mundane factors as the team’s record or entertainment value.

No, these are the believers who bleed only Blue and Gold, and their zealousness for the Bombers — while at times confoundingly blind — is absolute and unwavering.

They don’t get critics (hello, me) who sometimes have the audacity to question their beloved squad’s deficiencies. Why would anybody criticize the team? They will spend countless hours on message boards professing their devotion, rail against any trollers lurking in their cyber-midst, and defend their boys to the last whistle.

Boisterous

And come game time, they are the most boisterous, Bomber-garbed populace in the crowd.

It’s what they do.

Look, we spend a lot of time and space — and rightfully so — dissecting the troubling drop in attendance at Canad Inns Stadium, which bottomed out last Saturday with just over 21,000 paying customers bothering to hand over their hard-earned coin for a critical clash with the all-powerful Montreal Alouettes. That was a sombre box office, considering it’s more important that the Bombers make money than make the playoffs, although both results might be mutually inclusive.

But what about the dwindling faithful who still come? These are Bombers fans, at the core, who despite the trend to shy away from games, seem even more resolved to come to the club’s rescue. And now perhaps, out of sheer devotion, they may have struck a chord among the masses.

It’s a simple notion and not very original at that. But its organic birth — one short suggestion on a Bombers message board — and subsequent traction are at worst admirable and at best a life preserver for a Bombers organization currently desperate for anything to stem the tide of plummeting ticket sales.

It’s being called a “Blue Out,” and it began not in a marketing department or media promotion, but just a few fans batting around ideas in cyberspace to try and inject some enthusiasm back into what was not long ago considered a lost season. You see, the diehards never bailed. They continued to show up while so many others, royally turned off by what they considered insults from Mike Kelly — “Are you calling from your mother’s basement?” — vowed to never darken the stadium doors again until Mr. Doesn’t Understand Painting Yourself Blue was gone.

In fact, I still get an endless string of emails, along with every other media outlet in the city, from disgruntled fans/customers who feel betrayed by team management. That the Bombers have turned their season on its head, going 4-1 in their last five, thereby ensuring a showdown for second place in the East with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats Nov. 8, hasn’t yet seemed to allay their anger.

Yet the hard-core faithful soldier on, and now they’re trying to not only generate a sellout for the monstrously important date with the Tiger-Cats, there is a movement fully afoot to convince all in attendance to wear blue. Of course, this is trading on the Jets’ White Outs, or the Calgary Flames’ Sea of Red but, hey, at least it’s something.

After all, the Bombers’ marketing slogan this season was about a Blue Revolution. Instead, following a nasty, un-entertaining (on the field), comical 3-8 start, they got more of a revolt.

In fairness, those Bombers are dead. They were buried without ceremony around mid-September. Their epitaph read: “Riders 55, Bombers 10.”

Granted, the team that emerged from the summer ashes, now 7-9, is not without issues. It’s only as good as the game-day performance of their quarterback Michael Bishop, who has good days and bad. But the fact remains that the Bombers, who now have beaten every other CFL rival save their arch-nemisis Roughriders, could be a dangerous foe. You know, if they make the playoffs at all.

But then that’s the 2009 season in a nutshell, isn’t it? Always riding the razor’s edge, always one misstep from disaster. But still kicking.

Yet through it all those same unshakable followers — the exact people the head coach said he never understood — are not only still standing by their team, but trying to gamely rally others to the cause.

Will it catch on? The Bombers, now fully on board, announced Tuesday they will be handing out blue rally towels to fans who show up early. (Like nobody has blue towel in the laundry basket, right?) Even the big, bad media look like they may play along, too, but these movements are always more genuine when they come from the grassroots up.

A Sea of Blue. Sink or swim. Yeah, that could work.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your towels.

randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca

Randy Turner
Reporter

Randy Turner spent much of his journalistic career on the road. A lot of roads. Dirt roads, snow-packed roads, U.S. interstates and foreign highways. In other words, he got a lot of kilometres on the odometer, if you know what we mean.

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