The event was called Touchdown Atlantic, but it was really Touchdown Moncton.
The Canadian Football League temporarily moved to Moncton last week. The Toronto Argonauts and The Edmonton Eskimos played the first ever regular season CFL game in Atlantic Canada recently.
While Moncton was plastering advertisements and decorations everywhere, Halifax was silent. The Moncton newspaper ran three game-related stories game day, while the Halifax Chronicle Herald gave no mention of its existence.
Can you blame them?
The two cities have developed a rivalry over their mutual desire for a team.
Halifax hosted the original Touchdown Atlantic, a pre-season game in 2005. It had half the attendance and nowhere near the hype of the Moncton game. The second-annual Halifax game was cancelled after the Ottawa Renegades folded.
Halifax hasn’t come close to sampling the CFL since.
A prime opportunity for Moncton to step up. They secured the game last spring and tickets sold out in 32 hours.
More than 20,000 fans flocked to Moncton Stadium on a cold and windy September day. The stadium, built for the 2010 World Junior Track and Field Championships, is on the Universite de Moncton campus, a university that doesn’t even have a football team.
But you wouldn’t think these fans had limited exposure to high-level football. There was an aura of excitement and anticipation that’s not seen at an average regular season game. This was taking place on their turf. And Monctonians were excited.
This was the Hub City’s first audition. They did as well as they could have. No one I talked to – many who were involved in covering the game – had bad thing to say about their Maritime experience.
The CFL has made it clear they want to become a truly coast-to-coast league by expanding into the Maritimes. But it will take much more than a passionate city to secure a team.
The stadium, dedicated investors and owners, as well as corporate support, are all elements that need to be very strong before the CFL moves in. Not to mention a fan base that will fill the seats game in and game out.
The stadium is new, but still too small and “not CFL ready,” according to commissioner Mark Cohon.
Also, the business sector in Moncton is much smaller than all other CFL cities.
Poor ownership plagued the team in Ottawa.They’ve twice dropped out of the league. The national Capital Region is in a big market with a large population that should be able to support a CFL franchise.
Moncton’s central location is an advantage despite having a smaller population than Halifax. There are 1.3 million people within a two-and-a-half hour drive, including the 125,000 people in Moncton. With a maximum of 10 home games a year, the travel may be acceptable for a lot of Maritime football fans.
Now look at Halifax. Its population is more than 370,000. The business sector is bigger, but not big-market sized. Fans have been watching the success of the Saint Mary’s Huskies firsthand for years. However, Moncton has a stadium to work with; Halifax has, at best, rough plans. Moncton has many people actively championing the cause, Halifax doesn’t. That debate was in the back of everyones mind when the CFL was in town.
In the following day’s Moncton Times&Transcript – election day – the entire 16-page front section was devoted to game coverage and related festivities – all except a small story about the election and the obituaries.
You’d be hard pressed to find a paper more obsessed with coverage of a particular event then the Times&Transcript was. They even referred to the Toronto Argonauts as “The Moncton Argonauts.”
It’s as if they felt they couldn’t do enough to let people know that they, and only they, hosted this event. There were photo spreads of the game itself, the fans, and events that went along with the game including dinners, party’s and concerts. The cover story talked about Moncton’s “ability to host major sports events.”
The most telling piece in that section may have been the column on page two. Terry Parker wrote: “For years to come those who were there will tell the story of when ‘the little city that could’ hosted the Canadian Football League and in doing so helped do away with any nonsensical thinking, mostly based on false or uneducated preconceptions, about this city and the region it is a part of.”
As you can tell he’s quite passionate about his city. I can relate to that. But, this attitude may represent exactly what people think about the city. Moncton seems to feel they must prove to everyone that they’re a big-time city, but with a confidence that can appear to border on arrogance, they may be turning off football fans in Fredericton, Saint John and Halifax that will be necessary for a successful franchise.
I won’t knock them. They were excellent hosts. But Monctonians might be the only people right now that believe they can, without question, support a CFL team.
In the end, a Maritime CFL franchise can’t be all about Moncton.
