Taxpayers, fans kicked in; now it’s Blue’s turn

By: Paul Wiecek Posted: 1:00 AM CDT Thursday, Jun. 30, 2011

HAMILTON -- The taxpayers stepped up. Good Lord have the taxpayers stepped up for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, dropping $190 million into a shiny new stadium going into the ground at the University of Manitoba as you read this.

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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 30/06/2011 (5247 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

HAMILTON — The taxpayers stepped up. Good Lord have the taxpayers stepped up for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers, dropping $190 million into a shiny new stadium going into the ground at the University of Manitoba as you read this.

And the fans stepped up, too. First, they averted their eyes at the 4-14 train wreck that was the 2010 Bombers season, giving first-year GM Joe Mack and head coach Paul LaPolice a pass based on their promise of better things to come.

And those same fans went out and bought Bombers season tickets this year in numbers never before witnessed in this city — and did so while being subjected to an unprecedented cash call brought on by the abrupt return of the Winnipeg Jets.

And so on the eve of the start of the 2011 CFL regular season — with the Bombers set to open their season at Ivor Wynne Stadium on Friday against the Tiger-Cats — the question is whether the Winnipeg Blue Bombers will also now, finally, step up.

There’s no longer any question about what we can do for our football team; clearly, we have done everything — maybe even too much, some critics would suggest — that has been asked of us.

Rather, the question is what is our football team going to do for us?

Because it has been a while since they’d done much at all. It’s been three full seasons since this franchise has even put up a winning record in the regular season. And two seasons in a row without a playoff appearance. Oh, and 21 years since this Bombers franchise has won a Grey Cup.

Twenty-one years without a championship. In an eight-team league.

In their second year at the Bombers helm, the Pottery Barn rule is officially in effect for Mack and LaPolice — you broke it, you own it. There can no longer be any question that this Bombers team is Mack’s team and LaPolice’s team. The Mike Kelly debacle is just a bad memory and what will appear on the field Friday night is exactly — minus a couple injuries — what Mack and LaPolice have chosen it to be.

And two of the choices they made during the off-season were bold indeed. The first was deciding to stay the course after a 4-14 season in 2010, returning 20 of 24 starters to the field on Friday and trusting in incrementalism rather than blowing up the 2010 team and making big off-season moves.

And the other bold choice they made, of course, was to put the keys to the team’s season in the hands of a quarterback in Buck Pierce who is beloved by fans, a ferociously hard worker and a tremendous story of perseverance — but who has also finished only 10 of the last 27 games he has played in the CFL.

It’s hard not to admire the decisiveness of those two moves and Mack and LaPolice have earned the right to see how their choices play out over the course of another season. But the people of this province — the taxpayers and the fans — also have some emboldened rights of their own, especially if this little experiment goes sour again.

“The fans absolutely want to see winning football,” Mack said Wednesday. “And it’s also absolutely time we started to do that.

“Our goal is to win the Grey Cup.”

The Bombers, of course, have always been, at least nominally, a community-owned team. But it was always a hands-off ownership by our community, an ambiguous social contract that saw us all put our team — and our trust — in the hands of successive volunteer boards and paid executives. Even when, sometimes, there was not much cause to bestow that gift.

But that ambiguity is gone. One hundred and ninety-million dollars in taxpayer money and 21,165 season tickets gives the people of this province the right to ask a lot of hard questions and demand some accountability of a team from whom little has been asked — and even less delivered — in the last two decades.

The taxpayers have stepped up. So too have the fans. The statement we have all sent in support of this team has been unambiguous — a loud and clear message that we are willing to pay a high price, make a great sacrifice and put our heart and soul into the pursuit of excellence for our community-owned football team.

It’s time that this football team did likewise for our community.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.ca