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I’m not the biggest football fan but I certainly am one who loves Events, and I’m also a pretty big fan of the recently renovated Lansdowne Park and it’s flagship stadium, TD Place. So when I saw that tickets for the Big Game against the Tiger-Cats from Hamilton were available for as low as $25 I grabbed some.
Lansdowne Park was packed and buzzing with activity. All the shops and restaurants were enjoying brisk business on an equally brisk autumn day and the mood was buoyant. I took in the scene from a distance and avoided the bars, opting to join the crush of fans entering the stadium. My tickets were general admission which was fine with me. I really like the open-air mezzanine in the south stands and at past games I had spent most of my time standing there eating hot dogs and watching the game anyways, so who needed a seat?
Entering through the north side bleachers I stopped at the concession stands for a hot dog and a beer. Juggling these through the crowd as I headed for the south side I spied a seemingly perfect spot to stand and watch the game and stopped, staking out a few feet smack dab in the middle of the end zone. I was quite surprised and elated to have scored such a cool spot and I munched down my hot dog with an eye on the pre-show.
When the game started it soon became apparent that the end zone is actually a terrible place to watch a football game from; from that angle you really can’t see much of the action at all. Regardless, I stayed there for the first half of the game. At half-time I happily jostled around the busy mezzanine area and worked that into a half-decent spot near the thirty-metre line for the second half.
While I appreciate the game of football (and even played for a couple of years as a young lad) I’m not crazy about watching it. It’s just too much strategy and too little action for my tastes; it’s kind of like watching a chess match, another game I appreciate (and used to play) but would never sit and watch on television.
That said, if some force or another can cause me to pick a side I can convince myself to find almost any sort competition enticing, and blind civic pride managed to keep me engaged in the game despite the deep, deep cold that had descended on TD Place. Plus the game was actually pretty exciting, and not just because whoever won would be going to the Grey Cup.
In the 4th quarter Hamilton came back to tie the game. I stood freezing in the stands, my last beer of the afternoon getting colder by the minute. We had the ball just outside our own endzone with just a minute to go in the game, it was 2nd and 25.
And wouldn’t you know, Burris threw a bomb from one end of that stadium to the other, hitting Ellingson who caught the hail-Mary and ran it all the way into the end zone while I jumped up and down like an actual football fan, caring just enough for my beer to not spill it. It was so freakin’ exciting watching the home team execute a 93-yard touchdown completion for the win in the final moments of a semi-final game, what a moment! What an Event!
The rest of the game soon turned into one of those football formalities that had players hiking balls and going to one knee and the like causing the game to end while there is still time on the clock. It’s just that sort of thing that makes me lose respect for the sport but none of that mattered to me on November 22nd, 2015 when I joined 25,000 fellow frozen hometown fans for a celebratory stagger out of the chilly stadium and into the waiting mob that was still bustling in and out of the all the bars and restaurants outside.
Considering the tiny amount of football games I expect to attend in this little life of mine I’m sure that throw will be the play of a lifetime for me. It was almost hockey-exciting. The Redblacks lost the Grey Cup game to the Eskimos 26-20 the following week but I didn’t really care. I’m a fair-weather football fan if there ever was one and there’s no way the weather was ever going to be fairer than the frosty day I already had.
Todd Man Out 