Ticats owner Bob Young.

With Ticats owner Bob Young thinking of taking the team out of Hamilton, the ball is in the hands of city council.

BY PERRY LEFKO
sportsnet.ca

While the Canadian Football League is hoping to replant a team in Ottawa for the third time and is preparing to play the first-ever regular-season game in the Maritimes, it is now faced with the sobering thought that the future of its franchise in Hamilton is uncertain.

It is proof yet again that as the league looks to move forward with grand plans of expansion -- one of the major platforms of fourth-year commissioner Mark Cohon -- it has been grounded back to reality by the perilous situation in southern Ontario. If it's not the Toronto Argonauts in a state of ownership chaos, it is the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

Can the CFL go forward without Hamilton? Yes. It has gone forward twice following separate collapses in Ottawa. But it would be a blight on the league and its ebullient commissioner, who has been selling renaissance, Canadiana, nostalgia and tradition. The slogan "This Is Our League" may not apply in Hamilton if Ticats owner Bob Young carries through with his promise that next season will be the final one for the team at venerable Ivor Wynne Stadium, it's home since 1950.

But so much can happen this week to prevent that. The ball is now squarely in the hands of Hamilton city council, which must decide where it wants to build a new 15,000-seat stadium for the 2015 Pan Am Games. Mayor Fred Eisenberger and his backers want a stadium near the downtown corridor, while Young and his backers want it near a mountain site just off the highway.

This has literally turned into a political football game that is being debated by Hamilton city council. It started on Tuesday and is expected to continue late into the evening and possibly carried over to Wednesday. A recommendation will be made and go to a vote.

Young pledged $15 million towards the building of the stadium, which would be expanded by 10,000-15,000 seats to make it usable for the Ticats. Young has claimed that if the stadium is built in the downtown core instead of off the highway, he will lose $7 million a year. He's already losing some $5 now without ancillary income from parking, which he has stated will be in short supply if the stadium is built downtown. He said 90 per cent of people who come to Ticats games do so by car, where parking sometimes is best served on somebody's lawn near Ivor Wynne. For $10 you can get a good spot, albeit with no parking receipt.

Young wants to make the team accessible to a greater number with expansive parking and is willing to put money into creating that. Young has pledged various goodies, including staging a Grey Cup in Hamilton, which last hosted the game in 1996.

Young, if nothing else, is a visionary, but he's also a businessman. On Monday, he said enough is enough and he's through negotiating with the city. But as sure as there will a game played on Labour Day in Hamilton, Young will unify with city council if it decides to choose his site. That's Business 101.

If city council sides against Young, it risks losing the only major professional team in its city -- the same city which has been denied the chance to become home of the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes. All of Jim Balsillie's money and influence mattered little when he tried to muscle the NHL into relocating the Coyotes to Steeltown.

Now Young is threatening to pull the plug on the Ticats' future in Hamilton. Where he will go is anyone's guess. He bought the team as a goodwill gesture after the 2003 season when no one in their right financial mind would touch the team because it is impossible to yield anything close to a break-even proposition. Losing $1 million a year would be considered a success. He came in with grand plans to parlay the Ticats brand, and while he has done some interesting things from a technology standpoint using his brilliant background in that field, he has been a failure as an owner. His team has never finished with better than a .500 record. Several times they've either been dead last in the league or close to it.

Through it all he has come across as the "idiot owner" -- words he has expressed more than once -- hoping to get it right by changing players, coaches, general managers and presidents. He has not been shy about spending money. Even as this stadium skirmish has gone from the sports pages to front-page news, the team has underperformed with a 2-4 record.

He has used the term “caretaker” to describe his title on the team. He hasn't done a good job taking care of the team on the football field and his public rating has fallen precipitously. But without him and his dogged determination, where would this franchise be? Not since 1999 under a previous ownership has the team enjoyed championship glory. By contrast, the Argos won the Grey Cup with new ownership in 2004. The Ticats under Young in his first term were 9-8-1 and made the playoffs. It wasn’t until last season that the Ticats made the playoffs again.

Now the caretaker is thinking of taking the team out of Hamilton. He may take it nearby to Burlington, Oakville or Mississauga. There's also been talk of Ottawa, Laval or maybe the Maritimes. Given all he's been through financially and emotionally since buying the team, he'd be wiser to simply say he's had enough -- that the city didn't appreciate all he's done. Anybody else would simply throw the keys in the CFL's lap and say, "Here's the team. Do what you will with it."

While team president Scott Mitchell has publicly declared the team is not for sale, the reality is no one wants it. It's a license to lose money. There are no buyers standing in line to buy the Ticats, just as there were no buyers standing in line to buy the Argos earlier this year. David Braley, who once owned the Ticats and now owns two of the eight franchises, will not be buying the Tabbies. He can only bail out the league so much.

This is a mess that will test the resolve of the city of Hamilton, its mayor, city council and Young. And watching it closely is Cohon, who has said if the Ticats leave Hamilton, the city will not be awarded another franchise.

That may be a moot point in the overall scheme of things.