Hi My Name is John and I'm a Sports Fan

Well, the competing teams for the 2022 edition of the Canadian Football League Championship game have been revealed. This year’s Grey Cup game will be played in Regina, at Mosaic Stadium (the home of my favorite CFL team – the Saskatchewan Roughriders), on Sunday, November 20. The Roughriders unfortunately did not qualify to play in the game where they should have, in fact, been the hosts. They didn’t even qualify for the playoffs this season on the wings of a dismal season. I talked to Riders’ quarterback – Cody Fajardo, back in early June about the Championship game being held in Regina and the chances of the Roughriders actually being in that game. He seemed optimistic and relayed to me the idea that, “it would be a good year for us to win it all, I guess.” But alas, I guess that won’t be happening until maybe 2023 at the earliest. In fact, my favorite Canadian Football League team, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, have not won a championship game since 2013 – almost 10 years ago. The last time they won a Grey Cup game, I wasn’t yet a diabetic and I wasn’t receiving Old Age Security cheques yet. But that is not the worst of it – I am a huge sports fan and I cheer for at least one team in every major professional sports league in North America. My personal fan drought is not restricted to merely the Saskatchewan Roughriders of the CFL.

I sometimes wonder why I cheer at all for specific teams in professional baseball, or hockey or basketball. It seems to me to be a practice which only serves to put me in a foul mood at least once a week for months on end. If ‘my’ team wins, I can be a very pleasant and amiable individual, capable of lengthy and meaningful conversations with my friends, loved ones and other passers-by. When my team loses, however - look out!

As a teacher of 32 years, I more-than-once alerted my students to the dangers involved with wishing for or writing an exam on or around ‘game day’ when my favorite teams were playing. I once had a student who secretly kept track of class averages in a math class I taught during an NHL hockey season. Class averages were as much as five points higher when the exams were corrected on evenings when the Maple Leafs did not play than on evenings when the Leafs played and lost. Furthermore, the class averages were an additional six to seven points higher (than off-nights) for exams, quizzes and assignments corrected on evenings when the Leafs played and won. When this student presented me with the information at the end of the NHL season, I couldn’t believe my eyes while looking at the data. I realized at that point that I had become a slave to sports fandom. I contemplated getting professional help of some sort and promised my students that I would adjust their marks to offset my sports-influenced mood swings before final report cards came out in June. Unfortunately, the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team began their season in April and the whole thing started up again. Fortunately though, for the students, the year was 2016 and the Jays had a good season with a couple of 10-game winning streaks. Many of my students won Math awards that semester for their fine showing on tests and exams.

But even though the Blue Jays have had some winning seasons, they still haven’t won a World Series Championship since 1993. The world in 1993 was a much different place than it is today. In 1993 we had yet to see the changes that came about because of “9-11” terrorist actions. Nobody knew the ill-effects of Donald Trump or of the Covid pandemic. I was 41 years old and still able to play sports, run a marathon, swim across a lake, and do a full day’s work at school - complete with noon-hour intramural supervision and officiating, after-hours coaching, and a night full of marking and grading exam papers. And although the Blue Jays have not won a World Series since 1993, even more depressing, I also during that time period, cheered for the Montreal Expos who were incorporated as Canada’s first MLB team in 1969 and who ended their Major League Baseball days in 2004, when they became the Washington Nationals, having never won a World Series championship in their 36 seasons of existence.

So, the first of two consecutive years – 1992 – that the Blue Jays won a World Series was indeed a very good year, and 1993 (when they won their second) was even better. But, 1995-96 was the best. That year saw another one of my very favorite teams win a championship (for the third time in four years) – the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League. I had now won five major championships in five years (and six championships in seven years if you count the Roughriders Grey Cup win in 1989). I was truly in a Platinum Era of sports fandom.

Since 1965, my favorite NFL football team had been the Dallas Cowboys. They finished the 1995 season with a win in Super Bowl XXX against the Pittsburgh Steelers in January of 1996. I had followed the Dallas Cowboys since their early years after the 1964 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo when “Bullet” Bob Hayes won a gold medal for the USA in the 100-meter sprint final. He then went on to anchor the USA men’s 4 x 100m relay team to another gold medal as the American team went from third or fourth position to an unbelievable first because of Bob Hayes’s final leg. Our first black & white television still had the price tag on it as I, a 12-year-old, watched in disbelief at this American’s ability to run. His name became firmly embedded in my mind and my memory and I went to school that year pledging to myself that I would someday be a sprinter at some future Olympic Games.

The next fall however, I happened to watch an NFL Football game between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants, when who should appear on the field but that same Bob Hayes. I was gob-smacked. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Forget the Olympics, I wanted to play professional football with Bob Hayes. I started cheering for Dallas at that point and I have not been able to give up on them since. I have lived and died through the years with Don Meredith and Bob Hayes and Roger Staubach and Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin and Troy Aikman and Zeke and Micah Parsons and on and on. They have won for me (and the rest of the fans of “America’s Team”) a total of 5 world championships. The last Super Bowl victory however came in 1996 and they haven’t been back since.

In the middle of all this championship glory, in 1995, Canadian sports fans were gifted with yet another surprise. The National Basketball Association granted NBA franchises to both Vancouver (Grizzlies (1995-2001) and Toronto (Raptors) who are still going stronger than ever today. Although the Grizzlies moved to Memphis after six years in Canada without ever having won an NBA championship, the Toronto Raptors have enjoyed and are still enjoying some success in “The North,” much to the favor and excitement of basketball fans in this country. The pinnacle of this success, of course, came in the 2018-2019 season when the Raptors defeated the Golden State Warriors to become the NBA champions. Personally speaking, the 24 years that I cheered for the Raptors certainly had some ups and downs and the downs saw me actually focusing more on the Maple Leafs and less so on Canada’s basketball team. But I stuck with them and their NBA championship in 2019 ended a pretty big personal sports-fan drought. Thank heavens for the Raptors. It’s now been three years since that victory and I am looking forward to another such win sometime soon.

I guess the point of this article is to shed some light on just how long I have waited for a championship to come my way through one of my favorite teams. The longest drought, of course, is the sole property of my beloved Toronto Maple Leafs of the National Hockey League. The last time the Leafs won a Stanley Cup was in the spring of 1967 – the last season that the NHL had only six teams in its house. I was still a kid in grade 9. I couldn’t drive a car yet (legally anyway). I had never had a girlfriend at that point and I had no immediate plans for my future. I never thought that 56 seasons later, I would still be waiting for my Leafs to win another cup. If you add those 56 seasons to the 29 seasons that the Blue Jays have gone since their last World Series title and the 36 seasons that the Montreal Expos failed to even get to the World Series, and then combine that with the recent 27 fruitless seasons for the Dallas Cowboys, the 10 seasons the Saskatchewan Roughriders have missed winning a Grey Cup and the six seasons that the Grizzlies hibernated plus the three seasons that the Toronto Raptors have not been back to an NBA Final and won – then that means that I have gone collectively 167 seasons since my last championship. If my grandfather were alive today, he would be famous – mostly because of his age! But he would still only be 136 years old – a spring chicken in comparison to the accumulated years I have gone without sipping from the cup.

Why I even do this sports cheering thing, I will never know? Just when I am about to throw in the towel completely, then along comes a weekend where the Leafs and the Cowboys both win and the Blue Jays make a big trade that brings a promise of a sweeter eternal spring in my human breast. So, I guess I’m stuck with it. And, the rest of the world is stuck with me while I wait. Until I can come up with a better way to spend my waning years, this sports fan thing is going to continue to blow my hair back for some time to come. So, let’s all just, “Play Ball, because the puck drops here and, it’s up, it’s got the distance, and it’s good – for a triple double!!!”