During Toronto winters, you don’t need short days, snow, and the freezing cold to get depressed. Turning on the T.V., radio, or Internet to any professional Toronto sports team will do the trick.
Yes Toronto, your teams blow—big time. And this story isn’t the first to report it. The Globe and Mail’s Jeff Blair recently broke down Toronto’s perennial sports futility in terms of combined winning percentage for the 14 cities in North America with professional teams in each of continent’s four major sports: hockey, baseball, basketball, and football (this of course assumes that the Argos, not the Bills, are Toronto’s football team).
The percentages may have changed slightly since Blair’s article, but at the time, Toronto was sitting second-last with Washington, D.C., the only city with a worse combined percentage. However, being a Washington sports fan right now wouldn’t be such a bad thing. True, the Wizards are destined for the worst record in the NBA, and the Nationals are just plain bad. But Washington does boast one of the most exciting athletes in sports today, Alex Ovechkin, who single-handedly made being seen at the Verizon Centre during a hockey game cool again. Plus, fans don’t have to worry about him skipping town any time soon having signed that massive 13-year, $124-million contract extension last year. And let’s not forgot Washington’s most recent acquisition of Barack Obama.
Unlike Toronto, Washington has its own NFL team. No home games are shared or given away to other cities—they get them all! Even that dud of an overhyped first-ever NFL regular season game in Canada just stunk of that losing Toronto karma. Hell, even the Canadian national anthem singer, Kreesha Turner, choked.
The party line now for Toronto sport teams is the long term plan. The Leafs are destined to miss the playoffs for the fourth straight year. General Manager Brian Burke tells the fans to stay patient as the team’s going to be lousy for a little while longer. Blue Jays GM J.P Ricciardi has changed the makeup of the Jays so many times during his seven-plus years that he’s a shoo-in to be hired by Maybelline if this baseball thing doesn’t work out. True, he’s in the toughest and highest spending division in baseball, but that excuse terminated when the Tampa Bay Rays reached the World Series last year.
Blair also mentioned the plethora of personnel changes: every head coach (or manager) fired in only seven months; horrible contracts and trades handcuffing incoming GMs like Burke and Brian Coangelo; internal strife in Argoland at the executive level dominating the headlines and airwaves after the Grey Cup in Montreal last year.
Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Considering things have gotten so bad for teams like the Leafs and Blue Jays to the point where winning a championship isn’t even talked about, Toronto fans will be stumbling around in the darkness like a scene from a zombie movie. The only solution appears to be three- and four-year plans that eventually evolve into brand new three- and four-year plans.
But at least some people are taking advantage of the crappy hands they’ve been dealt. Take Leafs head coach Ron Wilson. Has there ever been a coach that so enjoyed calling out his players game after game? Remember the good old days when head coaches, team captains, and general managers took turns going on the record saying that they believed their team had a legitimate shot at going all the way, probably thinking at the same time they had no shot?
Ironically, the hardest part of handling all of this is remembering the back-to-back championships by the Blue Jays in ’92 and ’93. Those too young to have experienced those championships can never fully appreciate how great it would be to be one of those lucky fans who poured onto Yonge Street with tens of thousands of others or honk your car’s horn into oblivion while high-fiving strangers on the street. It gave a taste of the sweet, sweet nectar only a major sports championship can give. Even the Leafs were pretty good and the Argos were also winning championships of their own. The early ’90s weren’t a bad time to be a Toronto sports fan.
And now, those great Toronto teams of the early ’90s simply teased the young fans. They made them believe that if they were patient, they would one day celebrate a world championship, and they too could enjoy the ecstasy of a city erupting as one.
So enjoy it Boston, enjoy it Philadelphia, and enjoy it Chicago. Your sports teams may rock now, but soon they could be rolling to rock bottom. Unless they simply do the opposite of everything Toronto does.
