Fans stand in Scotiabank Arena during the first round of the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs between the Boston Bruins and Toronto Maple Leafs, on April 24.John E. Sokolowski/Reuters
Long after the Toronto Maple Leafs had given in on Wednesday night, their play-by-play radio man, Joe Bowen, continued to fight.
Bowen didn’t appreciate the home crowd’s performance. He tweeted his displeasure like so:
“The idea of going
To any sporting event
To support the home team is to
Be PRO ACTIVE!!!”
I don’t know if he intended to metrically channel Dionne Brand here, but I like it.
Bowen announced himself “VERY DISAPPOINTED” in Toronto fans. On behalf of the players, he urged them to be better.
No one was offended because no one is dumb enough to publicly admit they paid for tickets to a Leafs game. Everyone you know who’s ever gone to a hockey game in Toronto got their ticket from a guy they know. Which guy? Uh, you’ve never met him. Or heard me talk about him. He’s in … mining.
As someone who was sitting directly in front of Bowen’s booth all night, I’ll tell you what – he did his part.
Whenever a Leafs game is at its loudest and I can’t hear what the guy beside me is saying, I can hear Bowen. I can hear him like he’s sitting in my lap and we’re touching noses. The man even Tweets loud.
He’s also the proof of his own point. When it’s coming down to it on deadline and you’re staring at your screen rather than the ice or the field, you depend on crowd noise to alert you to major developments. It’s not the roar. That’s too late. What you’re listening for is a collective intake of breath that precedes the roar.
That rule does not hold during Leafs game. Sometimes the horn will go off without any change in ambient sound in the lead up. So you learn to use Bowen instead. When his voice leaps from contralto to soprano, something’s happening.
One man, however lungularly gifted, should not be able to outshout a sold out arena. But here we are.
So what is the problem in Toronto? I don’t see one. I see something more telling.
The primary duty of a sports crowd isn’t to cheer on the home team. If you need someone standing behind you going woo hoo every time you open your laptop or flip the ‘Closed’ sign to ‘Open’, you’re probably not good at your work. Athletes who complain about the crowd are really complaining about themselves.
The player who says, ‘The crowd was great tonight’ will never say it wasn’t. It’s like someone saying you’ve got a beautiful baby. What else is she going to say – ‘That baby could go either way. Ask me again in 10 years.’
It’s also not the crowd’s job to get on the other team.
Pitcher Roy Halladay was once asked if it was tough going from the funereal atmosphere in Toronto to the gladiator pit in Philadelphia. Halladay said he found it easier to focus in Philadelphia, where the noise was an indistinguishable wall of sound. In the silence of Toronto, he could be distracted by a single voice.
All the yelling or not yelling probably isn’t making the difference you hope it is. It worked in football, and then they put microphones in the helmets. Now it’s people screaming to amuse themselves.
A sports crowd has one useful function. It advertises the character and quirks of the city in which it lives to the rest of the world.
You may never go to Columbus, or Anaheim, or Sacramento (seriously, don’t go there). Unless they are represented in popular film or television, you won’t have any sense of what the people in those places are like. Until you watch their sports.
All crowds are basically the same, but there are small, telling differences. Philadelphia crowds have a reputation for brusqueness – I once saw the crowd at a Phillies game boo a teenage ball girl because she allowed a hot-shot foul to get through her legs.
So you go to Philadelphia expecting brusqueness all around, and you will find it. Do not dawdle on a Philadelphia sidewalk. Someone will say something. If you brush up against someone, you, a Canadian, will say, ‘Sorry’, and they, a Philadelphian, will say, ‘Watch where you’re going.’
New York crowds are right up in your face and yes, New York is like that. Boston crowds hate their enemies more than they love their friends, and again, yes.
Montreal crowds are fickle. Miami crowds are lascivious. They cheer the dance team louder than they cheer the Heat.
The San Francisco crowd is too cool to bother watching the game – they are loud, but it is the loudness of 20,000 conversations.
What is Toronto’s crowd like? Bored. Not quite sure why it’s there. Thinking about how much they have to drink in the hospitality suite to make the insane cost of this seat a value proposition for their ‘friend,’ the mining impresario.
Toronto is terrified of missing out, so it will show up, but it’s not going to act excited once it’s there. Toronto goes to sports the way people on vacation go to museums – so that they can say they did.
The Leafs crowd is not demographically representative of the city. I’m as downtown as it gets and I couldn’t afford to buy tickets to these games. Not even as a splurge. I know very few people who can, and fewer still who choose to.
But in terms of temperament, the Leafs crowd is Toronto par excellence. Helpful, but not friendly. Nosy, but not curious. Up on the latest thing, but not daring.
The Toronto sports crowd is Toronto – a bunch of front runners. They’d have been plenty loud if the Leafs were winning 10-0.
The fact that half the city showed up to celebrate the Raptors championship win – not exactly a too-cool-for-school move – also says something profound about us. This was a team few felt strongly about a month earlier. But once they’d won? Fans for life.
So how would you describe Toronto to someone who has never been and never will?
We have no idea how to stage one, and no faith that we will ever see one again, but we do love a parade.