With a proposed new stadium being voted down by Hamilton council, what will Bob Young do next?
If 30 years of broadcasting Hamilton Tiger-Cats football games and a few seasons of serving on Hamilton municipal city council leading up to his election victory as the new mayor didn't give Bob Bratina enough understanding of the Steeltown resolve, then he certainly knows it now.
Bratina has inherited a mess that is the stadium issue in Hamilton for the 2015 Pan Am Games. On Wednesday, the council rejected his proposed site. And unlike tough-talking Toronto mayor Rob Ford, Bratina is not the kind of person who can bully these left-wing, pinko (as Don Cherry would call them) councilors.
Unless all sides can huddle together and approve the costs for a new stadium before the Host Committee's deadline of February 1, there will be no alternative to replace decrepit Ivor Wynne, nor possibly the Tiger-Cats, its major tenant since 1950.
HostCo has gone about as far as it can with this issue, though there are still five weeks or so for the Mayor of Moscaville to rally the players. After February 1, HostCo will look at some other place to build a stadium, one which doesn't need a capacity of any more than 15,000 for proposed soccer events.
For a stadium to be approved for official use as decreed by CFL commissioner Mark Cohon, it needs to be at least 25,000 and more likely 30,000. For it to have any reasonable chance to make money or realistically break even for the team's owner, Bob (Call Me Caretaker) Young, it would also need some decent luxury boxes.
The city council isn't interested in paying an additional $50 million and possibly $60 million that are needed to complete the project to double its size to 30,000. City Council is ready to dip into petty cash to commit $45 million. Young, the province and the feds have all chipped in, but there needs to be that extra infusion of cash for the new stadium.
Now the Ticats rarely come close to filling the stadium for home games, unless it's the Labour Day game in Hamilton, and making the team the primary tenant in a new facility amounts to only 11 games tops a year. What is to become of the remaining dates to pay back the added the cash the city is being asked to pay?
Young wants nothing more than to keep the team in Hamilton, the place he grew up before striking it rich in the U.S. in internet technology. He took over the team from the CFL after the 2003 season, during which the previous ownership was stripped of the franchise. He breathed money, life, energy and goodwill upon his introduction, which took place in a museum full of fighter jets and planes.
His team has been an abject failure on the field, including the 2010 season, when it was bounced at home in the semis by the rival Toronto Argonauts, whom the Ticats defeated in all three games during the regular season. Under the Young banner, the Ticats have never made it to the Eastern final, has lost more than they've won, and have gone through coaches, general managers, presidents and high-priced free agents as if it was standard operating procedure. Young has lost some $30 million, which is like a drop in the bucket for a billionaire.
You have to wonder if he's a dreamer or a masochist, because a saner man would surely say the "hell with this" and walk away or quit paying the bills and hoping for a handout. We use Sherwood Schwarz as exhibit No. 1.
But Young and his militant president Scott Mitchell, continue to put up a brave fight, despite the valiant efforts of the previous mayor and some of his re-elected councilors, who collectively have put a bigger stand than Angelo Mosca, John Barrow and the other members of the Tiger-Cats vaunted defensive line from years gone by.
"I think the meeting spoke for itself in terms of the dysfunctionality of this whole process," Mitchell was quoted Wednesday in the National Post. "I think the process has pretty much run its course. I'm going to talk with Bob and with the management team and look at what this means for the future of the Tiger-Cats."
Despite other municipalities such as Oshawa saying "it's open for business" and will be ready and able to house the Tiger-Cats, there is the item of an absence of a CFL-sized stadium.
Young will never be able to move the team that far away anyway. For the diehard Tiger-Cats fans, some of whom are perfectly content to watch the team at Ivor Wynne, pulling a Robert Irsay and moving the team in the dead of night (or even during the day) to another city would be tantamount to sacrilege.
While municipalities near Hamilton, such as Burlington and Oakville, may want to move the Ticats to their respective cities, the issue again is building a stadium.
Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion, in an interview earlier this month on The Sports Guys radio show, said she would not endorse the building of a 25,000-seat stadium in her municipality, saying it would be equivalent to a white elephant.
Do you think other municipalities without the same size and economic wherewithal as Mississauga would realistically have the capital to do this type of project?
All you have to do is look at what happened with the Winnipeg Football Club earlier this month. To guarantee the building of a new stadium, the club had to take on an $85 million loan, which it has 40 years to pay back. That's a serious whack of cash and the club will need to make upwards of $4 million a year to pay it back. Some people say there will come a time when the Bombers, who have had serious debt problems in the past, will fall under the same predicament at some point in the future.
So there is Young, a good Samaritan who hasn't done a very good job operating the team, but has a good heart nonetheless. What is he to do? He's done just about everything imaginable.
He has never threatened to move the team, but the lease is over after the 2011 season. Make what you will of that.
Remember only a few weeks ago Cohon said the league was in good shape and talked about the various CFL stadium projects underway.
Well, without a new stadium in Hamilton, Young will either stay in Ivor Wynne and continue to lose gobs of money annually, look for a relocation, which won't sit well with Tiger-Cat loyalists, sell the franchise or simply turn it over to the CFL.
It's not a healthy situation.
And if you're Bob Bratina, who bleeds black and gold and is as much a fabric of the Ticats' history as Pigskin Pete, you have to wonder if there's a Hail Mary (or another guy named Braley) to save the team.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, Bob - both Bratina and Young..
