Raise the Hammer

From 1869 to 2009, the identities of City of Hamilton and its football teams seemed inseparable. For 140 years, one of the main attractions for Hamiltonians in attending the HAAA Grounds or Civic Stadium or Ivor Wynne Stadium to watch the Tigers, Wildcats or Tiger-Cats was the cache of watching the football team, and vicariously the Hamilton community, as underdogs competing against the teams of larger, wealthier Canadian cities. Hamiltonians internalized the wins and losses of their home team.

Then two major events happened in 2010:

1. The Tiger-Cat organization backed away from Hamilton’s plan to build a multi-use Pan Am athletics, football and soccer stadium at the preferred west harbour site and demanded an NFL-sized parking lot and the removal of the athletics track;

2. The Tiger-Cat organization threatened to move the team out of Hamilton and entered into preliminary talks with other municipalities about relocating. Reported destinations included Oshawa, Milton, Moncton, Quebec City, Burlington and Ottawa.

Some Hamiltonians and Tiger-Cat fans are okay with this. For some Hamiltonians and Tiger-Cat fans, these two events in 2010 morphed the Tiger-Cat organization from being an inextricable part of the Hamilton community into being just a business with a business philosophy apparently not much different from that of Labatts or Siemens.

To some Hamiltonians and Tiger-Cat fans, January 31, 2011 will be characterized as a day that the city “joined hands”. To some Hamiltonians and Tiger-Cat fans, January 31, 2011 will be seen as the day that Hamilton city council folded its hand and gave all of its chips (i.e. municipal, provincial and federal funding) to rebuild Ivor Wynne Stadium for a business that had no hand (i.e. no private investors) and placed no chips of its own up front on the table.

Comment edited by RenaissanceWatcher on 2011-02-12 11:44:49