Ticats owner Bob Young is pulling out a Hail Mary play with his new plan to renovate their stadium.
As it stands the Hamilton Tiger-Cats want to renovate Ivor Wynne Stadium, which has a seating capacity of some 30,000, and turn it into a 25,000-seat stadium.
Team owner Bob Young, who vehemently opposed the construction of a new stadium in the downtown core because it wasn’t easily accessible and lacked sufficient room for parking, is now content with staying at Ivor Wynne because renovating it will supposedly offer easy access and provide sufficient parking.
The Ticats are hoping to get buy-in from Hamilton City Council, which recently shot down a motion for a site proposed by the new mayor who is doing his best to work with Young unlike his predecessor, who was pushing for the downtown site. Even if city council approves the new plan, which had never been proposed in all of the planning and discussions put forward by Young for more than a year, it has to get approval from the Host Committee (HostCo) of the 2015 Pan Am Games that it is willing to give Hamilton $70 million toward building a 15,000-seat soccer stadium.
All this is supposed to happen before HostCo’s definitive deadline of February 1 to get all parties unified on this.
If it works for the City and the Ticats, it will be a win-win situation -- or, more precisely in this particular case, a Wynne-Wynne situation.
"This is the Boston College, Doug Flutie Hail Mary," said an individual, who has been watching this whole process unfold.
With Doug Flutie you can expect magic.
With Bob Young you have come to expect the equivalent of a magician throwing knives. "Pan-Am HostCo has been very clear all along: they need a stadium built on time and on budget, and that’s what building a stadium in this locale gives us the opportunity to do," Young said on Tuesday at a media conference to announce the surprisingly new plan. "We have all the zoning in place. It is not the best solution for us. As documented in the past our preference would be to have first-class access, a modern stadium (with) crowd access, whether they are downtown or further out of town…Ivor Wynne has some challenges, but working with the city we have confidence we will be able to improve the access to Ivor Wynne.
"Our corporate sponsors of the Ticats have stepped up in a significant way … towards keeping the Ticats in Hamilton and making this new stadium and the old civic stadium neighbourhood a possibility for us," he added. "We are very excited. We believe this will put the Tiger-Cats on firm financial footing going into the future. In effect it’s a new stadium where Ivor Wynne used to be when we’re done."
"I made a point of it in my campaign that wee have to live within our means, and I think this project allows us to do that" said mayor Bob Bratina, whose resume includes working some 30 years as the play-by-play for radio broadcasts of the Tiger-Cats and who is extremely passionate about the team.
"I think the Tiger-Cats will have to accept, if council agrees to move ahead with this as the site, we’ll make the best efforts to make everyone happy," Bratina said. "What I suppose council has to decide is how important it is to their residents and to the city to keep the Hamilton Tiger-Cats here, how important it is to do this project within an acceptable budget and how important it is to get this issue behind us because we’ve got very serious things on our plate. This should have been a fun thing over with a year ago and we’re still arguing about it. I would think council’s concern is to deal with it once and for all."
Bratina’s bluntly honest assessment harkens back to his days dissecting the Tiger-Cats’ on-field play and previous ownerships -- and he didn’t hold back then in his opinions.
"What gives us such confidence in the success of this stadium is the relationship between the team and the city, in particular the mayor and this office," Young said. "It’s just an organization that we know who respect the private sector and respect the difficulty of making money in sports and generally doing what is necessary in making sure the stadium is a success for the taxpayers of Hamilton … It doesn’t get us everything we would like, it gets us most of what we would like to have."
Young has tried a variety of things since taking ownership of the team at the end of 2003 season from the CFL for $2 million and he has fumbled some of those things badly and sometimes brutally. To this point, the Ticats haven’t made it beyond the first round of the playoffs and Young has forked over more than $30 million in collective losses. He’s a Hamilton native who bought the team as a civic gesture even though many close to him told him it was a terrible financial move. At least one individual advised him a month or so ago to sell the team or move it to Ottawa, which is poised to commence operations on an expansion franchise for the third time in the city’s existence.
The problem with this latest proposal is it has been cobbled together on the fly -- kind of like a play drawn up in the sand -- and already people in Hamilton are looking at it curiously and suspiciously. Some diehard Ticat fans are wondering if the team will have to play some games at -- egad -- the Rogers Centre in Toronto. Can you imagine how that will fly?
The laughable/affable Young said he would rather have his team play all games in Montreal, but then turned serious and said: "All options are on the table to make this happen on time and within budget."
Ticats’ general manager Scott Mitchell vehemently shot down suggestions of playing in Toronto when speaking to a Hamilton radio station shortly after the hastily-announced media conference. It was, at best, damage control coming from an individual who has repeatedly suggested the Ticats will never play at Ivor Wynne because the City Council has played hardball with the team.
The Ticats playing home games in Toronto would be like the Hatfields having lunch at the McCoys house, yet stranger things have happened in the CFL. But this would really be right up there among those only in the CFL moments.
The Ticats could play home games at McMaster University, which has a quaint stadium but it doesn’t have easy access or sufficient parking and would result in Young losing even more money playing there than he does at Ivor Wynne.
Or they could be a traveling team, playing their home games at neutral sites, such as in Moncton, which last year played host to a CFL regular-season game with seating of some 20,000, much of it temporary.
However you look at it, Young is banking on the Ticat fans supporting this idea -- and at this point Hamiltonians have a lukewarm interest in the team, some of it due to the economy, some of it due to the team’s poor performance on the field.
This Hail Mary move is, at best, an attempt to salvage what is left of a gift from the government after exhausting time and taxpayer money on something that should have -- and could have -- been resolved a long time ago but was blocked because of politics and business, and now it will come down to just that.
In the end, Young may be stuck playing at Ivor Wynne Stadium with no financial assistance from the federal or political governments.
