What Is a Real Fan?

Author: Scott Taylor

October 23, 2009

Scott Taylor's E-Take is sponsored every Friday by Manitoba Harvest, the global leader in hemp foods & oils, and your online source for natural, sustainable and certified organic hemp food products. www.manitobaharvest.com.

What Is a Real Fan?  The One Who Cheers Through Thick and Thin or the One Who Only Attends When the Team is Winning?

It’s the mantra I love hearing from professional sports executives, coaches and players.  It never gets old.  It’s the one that never fails to make me giggle.

“Man, we have the best fans in the game!”  Ahem.  Excuse me, while I clear my throat.  Every time some high-priced wide receiver or left-winger throws that one out, I know his team is having trouble selling tickets.  Whenever a marketing guru uses that on the front page of the team’s website, I know that he’s about to offer me $200 seats for twenty bucks.

Best fans in the game?  I thought the Winnipeg Blue Bombers had the best fans in the game?  That’s what I’ve heard for years.  That’s why the two local newspapers have all but abandoned coverage of every other local sporting event so they can commit to filling two or three pages a day with Bomber stories.  Even ones that have been on message boards for weeks.

You’d think Winnipeg is all-Bombers-all-the-time and yet, as of Thursday, Oct. 22, barely 19,000 tickets had been sold for Saturday’s (Oct. 24) gigantic test with the Montreal Alouettes.  Now, I’m not going to suggest that the Bombers fan base is tenuous at best... OK, so I am. 

This week the Bombers are facing the best team in the CFL.  If you just like football, the 13-2 Montreal Alouettes are a pleasure to watch.  They have a great No. 1 quarterback and a No. 2 QB who could start for five of the other seven CFL teams.  They have an outstanding backfield, great receivers and a monster defence.  The Als alone are worth the price of admission.

So even if you don’t care that the Bombers are 6-9 and absolutely, positively must win on Saturday in order to make the playoffs, if you are just a guy who calls himself “an average football fan,” then the Alouettes’ presence in your hometown should be enough to entice you to buy a ticket.  But evidently it’s not.  Fans are angry at the Bombers.  They’re angry because the team doesn’t win every week.  They’re angry because the coach is a smart guy from Philly who doesn’t put up with crap.  They’re angry because players who didn’t want to play in Winnipeg were let go. They’re angry because the stadium’s a dump.

“And what the heck,” say others.  “I have an HD package so I can watch the game on TV and don’t have to worry about the parking, and the broken down bathrooms and the lousy team.”  Right now, Blue Bomber fans have a laundry list of reasons why they don’t want to buy a ticket.  Sorry, let’s not use the word “reasons.”  Let’s use the word, “excuses” ‘cause that’s all they are.

If you are a real Blue Bomber fan, you will go to this football game.  If you’re a real Bomber fan, you care about your team -- win or lose.  If you’re a real Bomber fan, you will do what you do to help YOUR team win. 

“We need our fans to be at the game, cheering as loudly as they can,” said Bomber O-lineman Obby Khan this week.  “Maybe fans don’t understand this, but if the building is full and they’re loud, they can intimidate a visiting team.  They really can be our 13th man.  We need them behind us.  That’s how homefield advantage works."

He’s right, of course, but I must admit, that’s why I get a little tired of the all-Bombers-all-the-time media position in this town.  Boys, the Bombers will draw fewer than 250,000 fans to dumpy old Canad Inns Stadium this season.  Heck, even in down seasons, the Goldeyes draw 300,000 to Canwest Park – and neither newspaper covers the Goldeyes on the road.

Real fans fill buildings.  They don’t get petulant just because the local mainstream media continues to tell them that the coach is a jerk and the team is terrible.  This year, Bomber fans are acting like Ottawa Rough Riders’ fans and we know where that got the Rough Riders.

Look, Winnipeg isn’t the only city in North America where the fan-base fails to reflect the media interest in the product.  I was in Tampa last week and Jacksonville a couple of weeks ago.  There were 25,000 empty seats in Tampa for the Bucs-Carolina and 20,000 empty seats in Jacksonville for the Jags-Tennessee.  Those fans have a load of excuses, too.  But at some point, doesn’t the real fan base just say, “I don’t care what the media says about my team, I’m going to support the guys who play.  I’m not paying to watch the coach or the club president anyway, I’m paying money to watch the players.”

Maybe that doesn’t happen here in Winnipeg.  Maybe in Winnipeg, a coach who is a lovable loser like ol’ Jeff Reinebold was back in the late-90s is the actual reason people pay money to watch football games.  Who really knows?  What I do know is that for the past three home games (two of them were victories), the Bombers have played in front of announced crowds of 22,446, 21,965 and 24,048.

Maybe Winnipeg has more excuses than I thought.  Regardless, when it’s the biggest game of the year against the most entertaining team in the league and yet only 19,000 tickets (in a 29,500-seat stadium) have been pre-sold, it’s quite apparent that Bomber fans aren’t as committed to their football team as we’ve all been led to believe.

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