Is This The Answer? Finally?

Author: Scott Taylor

January 25, 2010

Scott Taylor's E-Take is sponsored by Biotech Laser, who utilize a low intensity laser that stimulates the natural healing of tissue. www.biotech-laser.com  

There was a certain aura of déjà vu this past week when Joe Mack was introduced as the Winnipeg Blue Bombers latest general manager and vice-president of football operations.

Mack, who had been with the club as the director of player personnel during the glory days of the 1980s, returned to Winnipeg as the answer to the team’s prayers (the 14th “answer” since 1990, I think).  Hired by a search committee created by the club’s board of directors, the two dominant members on the committee were Joe Poplawski and Paul Robson, a star receiver and the team’s general manager during the glory days of the 1980s.

But that really wasn’t the déjà vu part.

The déjà vu came rushing into my head, causing, I think, some kind of hallucination, when I heard Mack, a really solid football guy from Philadelphia, open his news conference with the following:

“I have experience in Winnipeg and I know the passion the city has for this football team,” Mack said.  “And I’ve been reacquainted with the passion the board has for this football club.  I’m passionate about this job and this opportunity.”

Hmmm.  Experience in Winnipeg.  Passionate.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.  I think I remember the day another guy from Philadelphia said pretty much the same thing, way back on Dec. 2, 2008...

“I'm excited. " Mike Kelly said that day.  "I always said the best five years my life were the five years I spent in Winnipeg.  I have a passion for this community and a passion for this football club.  "And I know the fans in this city are passionate about this team.  I really do understand the passion in this city.  It's good to be back around people you know and trust and can be comfortable with.”

Boy that didn’t work out very well, did it?

Passion can be a very unforgiving master.  Especially when that passion is coming from people who sit in their mothers’ basements and scream insults into the telephone, who troll message boards hurling vulgar insults at anyone who disagrees with their looniness and who talk about being die-hard fans and yet seldom buy tickets to the games.  Meanwhile, when the local media is the biggest cheerleader of the bunch, committing almost all of their sports department budgets and, in the case of the two local newspapers, the business model of their entire sports sections on the success of the team, you get the sense that passion isn’t enough.  Suddenly, when the future of large, failing businesses are involved in the team’s success, passion can morph into life and death.

The Winnipeg Blue Bombers have not won a Grey Cup for the past two decades for many, many reasons.  Bad luck, bad management, bad coaching, bad players, all has contributed.

But a big reason for the team’s failure has been an almost insane fear that the corporate media will stop fawning over them, stop giving them half a dozen pages of free advertising a day and, in essence, will stop operating the team for them.  The marketing of the Blue Bombers has been turned over to the city’s traditional media and as a result, the board and even the previous CEO Lyle Bauer, has always done exactly what the local media demanded they do.  Sadly, you won’t win many football games when you turn the operation of your franchise over to people who have never taken a snap.

If that changes, there is no telling how far the Bombers could go.

In the meantime, the last “passionate” guy to run the Bombers was Mike Kelly, another 50-something lifelong football man from Pennsylvania with a nasty sense of humour and little regard for fools.  Kelly was run out in just one year by a local media that simply didn’t like him and wanted him gone.

The media’s hypocrisy was sickening but they got their wish.  Ironically, they got pretty much the same guy in return: A great guy, a great football man and a gentleman who has never suggested to anyone that he wasn’t going to do things his way.

It will be interesting to watch the dynamic if the Bombers don’t immediately go 18-0 and win the Grey Cup by three touchdowns.

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