Every once in a while, I think about switching internet providers or swapping my magazine subscriptions.
I don’t end up doing it because it’s too much hassle. But I enjoy cogitating my power as a consumer. I may not have a ton of stuff, but I can choose what I do have, and who I get it from.
If you are a fan of major-league sports in Toronto, you just lost that power.
By next year, if you want to watch something other than a Rogers-owned-and-operated team in Toronto, you have two alternatives – the Professional Women’s Hockey League or a two-hour drive to Buffalo. That’s a winter-only choice. In summer, you’re out of luck.
Other cities around the world must be in this situation, though the only one I can come up with is – weirdly – Buffalo, where the Pegula family owns the Bills and Sabres.
Toronto and Buffalo – it doesn’t exactly ring out like Constantinople and Rome. I’m not sure who dreamt of belonging to that axis of civic power, but we’re in it now.
There will be some sort of transformative business aspect to Rogers’s incipient sports monopoly. There may even be some sort of performance effect.
But the difference that will be most keenly felt is the lack of difference. Toronto just got more homogeneous, less interesting and less important.
We’re the city of five million so rinky-dink that the same guy owns the hair salon, the hardware store, the grocery and the only bar.
It’s hard to say what makes a great city great, but it’s got something to do with variety.
You want museums? A great city doesn’t just have a few of them. It has a bunch and they are in competition with each other. The MOMA vs. the Met vs. the Frick vs. the Whitney isn’t just an aesthetic choice. It’s the sort of marketplace that creates artists and art fans. If you’ve only got one spare afternoon, which era are you rooting for?
Toronto isn’t New York, but would like to be thought of as in the same league. We don’t have as many museums, and, yes, ours aren’t that great, and, sure, we don’t do much that’s original in them, but we’re trying. Theoretically.
For half a century, the story of this city is the burg that dreams of becoming a metropolis.
Sports has been the centrepiece of that effort. We don’t have great architecture, or produce schools of thought, or make entertainment that captures global attention. But we won a World Series.
My core memory of that 1992 Blue Jays’ win is Sean McDonough’s line after the final out – “For the first time in history, the world championship banner will fly north of the border.”
If in that moment you were young and from Toronto, it felt like you had just been made a citizen of the world.
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It’s possible to exaggerate the importance of sports to a city because the people who own the teams are in your living room doing that 24/7. But the result of that brainwashing is real. If the teams are good and people elsewhere rate them, then you matter.
In every public square in the world, you will pass someone wearing a Yankees cap. New York isn’t on top because it produces such-and-such a percentage of U.S. GDP. It is up there because it has mastered the symbology of sports and entertainment.
Toronto was (fitfully) headed in that direction. After the Toronto Raptors won a title, club president Masai Ujiri talked about turning the team into the Liverpool FC of global basketball. The team people from elsewhere rooted for.
It was a compelling vision – the sort only a person who isn’t from Toronto could come up with. It would mean massive growth and outreach, but first it would require an enemy.
Liverpool isn’t Liverpool without Everton – a team just over the road that hates it, and is hated back equally. That animus has created two of the world’s most recognizable sports brands in a city with half the population of Ottawa.
Everton is currently for sale. Liverpool’s owner, John Henry, could probably afford to buy it. It would be great for business. I get tingly thinking of the synergies.
Aside from various insurmountable administrative reasons, Henry would not consider doing that. Because if he did, his own fans would come to the stadium and burn it down and they’d be right.
Liverpool isn’t a city. It’s two soccer clubs with a town hall where John Lennon was born. When someone who isn’t from there thinks of that place, a host of impressions – most of them to do with being working class and unbendable – spring to mind. Most of them have their roots in things that happened on a soccer pitch.
Rightly or wrongly, everybody has feelings about Liverpool (and Manchester, and Barcelona, and Glasgow, and on and on).
That’s why cities have teams. Owners have them for status and money. The city has them so they can illustrate something fundamental about the place. Great American cities – Philadelphia, Boston, L.A., New York – have mastered this language.
Based on its teams, what will people know about Toronto now?
That it’s a company town. That there isn’t any pressure as long as the cash register is ringing. That everybody makes out in the end. That losing is okay.
(In fairness, losing’s always been okay in Toronto, but moving forward, it will seem like part of the business plan.)
Locally, sports consolidation will deepen an impression that this is a place where nothing ever gets done. The sort of city where building a single light-rail train is an accomplishment on the same scale and timeline as erecting the pyramids at Giza. A place where a few people make the calls and the rest of us nod along.
Toronto talks a good game, but we can’t close. We’re not original thinkers, or problem solvers, or people with complicated loyalties. We can’t even figure out how to make a good enemy.
Think about that when you’re watching the second-period intermission and the hockey crew is previewing the baseball team showing up at the basketball game.
We’ll think it’s normal, and the rest of the world won’t be thinking about us at all.