Not surprisingly, this Naylor article is garnering some discussion on the Argos board, where the above view seems to have some currency. Among the comments in their thread, this one from someone who goes by the handle "T-Bone" was one of the more notable to me:Hambone wrote:Bob McCown has been touting that concept for years.sj-roc wrote: I would say Toronto is NOT a hockey town. It's a Leafs town.
Cromartie mentioned how pretty much every Canadian city is a one sport town but if there were one market in this country that might come under his category of "durable" I would have to say it's Edmonton. They seem to support pretty much everything in that city. Not just the Esks or just the Oilers. The Eskimos are usually one of the top two CFL teams in attendance despite only being a median-sized market (I believe Ott, as well as Tor/Mtl/Van are larger), while last year the Oilers, according to attendance figures from ESPN, were at 99.9% for ticket sales on the whole season (and 100% for several years before this), in spite of years of poor play since their Cinderella 2006 run (missed playoffs 8 years in a row now, and counting(?)).When you have fans that love one team in the city and hate on the [city's] other teams you're not going to have a great sports town. ... [This is] why Toronto is not a great sports town. In my opinion it is the haters on all sides. Fans that support one or two teams in this city and actively hate on the others. Not everyone is going to like every sport but they don't need to hate on or wish other teams badly. In my opinion, in a good sports town fans rally behind any team in that city that is doing well as it is good for the city.
I don't get the sense that there's this fractious sort of hate thing going on in Edmonton that T-Bone ascribes to Toronto, or even much fan partitioning among the teams. They also seem to support other more one-off-type tournament sports in that city as well, stuff like the Brier and international track & field events at Commonwealth. Vancouver by contrast doesn't seem to host much in the way of international sports events aside from the 2010 Winter Olympics and World Junior Hockey, either of which would be supported anywhere in this country anyway.