Bruce Smith of Ottawa has turned his basement into the fan cave of his dreams.Blair Gable
Bruce Smith grew up going to Ottawa Senators hockey games with his father, and calls himself a “long-suffering” fan. “I’m not somebody who quits on anything easily, because I’ve been a Sens fan my whole life. I love them as much today as when I was six years old.”
Now with a young family, Smith doesn’t attend games as much as he used to. Not every sports fan can make it to the arena or stadium, but that doesn’t mean they can’t recreate the excitement at home.
“I told my wife I wanted to set up the basement as my ‘man cave’,” says Smith.
His boasts a 75-inch screen, with LED lights strung up around the perimeter of the room that he flashes when the Senators score. The walls are decorated with Senators memorabilia, including a Daniel Alfredsson jersey, as well as framed hockey programs from over the years and a record from the 1960s featuring the Hockey Night in Canada theme song.
“I joke that it’s a recreation of my bedroom from when I was 10 years old, except I have a little bit of money and a nice big TV.”
Like Smith, many Canadians are channelling their love of sports into fan zones that capture the excitement of live games. While Smith has done so with technology, fans of other sports have shown how they manage that with a little creativity and weekly bonding.
Jackie Tompalski grew up in an Edmonton household where she says “Christmas was the biggest holiday, but the second biggest, no questions asked, was the Super Bowl.”
It’s a tradition that she continues today in her Ottawa home. For the Super Bowl, Tompalski and her family decorate the whole house, and prepare food that lasts for a week afterward. But she has applied her ingenuity to enhance the more regular viewing experience of Formula 1 racing.
She and her partner watch the races together, and track the drivers by using a printed grid attached to metal filing cabinets in the living room. Tompalski made laminated images of the cars, with the faces of the F1 drivers, and sticks them to the grid with magnets. The couple move the magnets around to predict the grid before qualifying, then update them for the starting grid and the race results.
“It’s silly, but that’s a big thing we do,” Tompalski says.
For other fans, the excitement comes from turning games into a viewing party. At a live sports venue, the roars of the crowd and chatter with your seatmate amplify every moment. “The people always add to the experience,” says Zoël Labelle of Ottawa.
On many Sundays, Labelle mimics that by having 4-6 friends over to watch the NFL RedZone channel, which shows scoring plays and other highlights from all football games in progress. One survey found that 31 per cent of Canadians have a favourite NFL team. Labelle and his buddies often choose who to root for based on their fantasy football teams, with loyalties switching depending on the day’s outcomes. “There’s lots of trash talk.”
If someone’s team loses, a friend might “scream at the TV, and hurl a bag of chips or something,” Labelle says. But mostly the weekly get-together is like an in-home day of tailgating, with chicken wings, chips and salsa, pizza and camaraderie. “We just sit down for eight hours and digest all the football that’s being thrown at us.”