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Until last night, I’d never watched a complete football game.  It always looked boring and confusing.  Every time I tried to watch a game (usually because the Simpsons was delayed by one) it always seemed like they spent more time talking than doing anything.  It could take half an hour for half a minute to go by on the clock.

What sort of fucking sport is this? I wondered.  They spend more time talking and planning than playing.

Seeing how my problem with football is that it’s boring, it’s strange that, for my first game, I attended Canadian Football.  That would just have to make it more boring.  For no matter what Canadians might tell themselves during the day, we all know, in the lonely dead of night, that this is one huge fucking borefest of a country. Just about the most exciting thing to do here is to go into the woods, try to catch a fish and look at some trees change colour.

pic nicked from here

And we’re safety obsessed.

So I didn’t just think the football game was going to be boring, I thought it was going to be Canadian Boring.  That’s a whole other level of boring.  It’s like Scandinavian clean, German efficient or Japanese crazy.  Canadian boring is like vanilla ice-cream without the vanilla, made from low-fat cream and with a huge warning sticker on it.

I didn’t even know what team I wanted to support.

Toronto was playing Hamilton.  I was aware of some sort of rivalry between these teams and I know that the good people of Hamilton, like the good people of everywhere else in Canada, hate Toronto.  And the good people of Toronto think about the good people of Hamilton about as much as they think about the good people everywhere else in Canada: That is, not at all.

Hamilton is a steel town and Toronto is for bankers.  In short, when people from Hamilton lose their jobs (and they’re always losing their jobs) we’re the ones who foreclose on them.  On top of that, we’re viewed as a bunch of fancy ladies.  Even Especially the men.  A bunch of latte sipping, nancy boys who own little dogs and are always on the news thinking we’re so cool while they’re at the bar, punching each other in the face.

If you made a movie about these two teams, Hamilton would be, without a doubt, the heroes while Toronto would be the evil city-slickers who try to buy victory and get their sweet comeuppance.

So my heart laid with Hamilton.

Or I thought it did.  Then the game began.

When The Hamilton TiCats took the field, and all their fans started cheering, I just felt territorial.  All these people coming into Toronto and cheering for Toronto’s defeat?   Sitting in our stadium and driving on our roads and mooching off our taxes?   Fuck that.  I might hate this city but I live here.  I’m allowed to hate this city.  These people don’t even know why they hate it.  They’ve got no right, I tell ya.  I don’t go to Hamilton and hate them.

I  don’t go to Hamilton at all.

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Who does?

So I switched sides (again) and decided that I was a Toronto Argonauts fan. A tepid one who knows nothing about the players or the game but a fan all the same. The lovely Shalome, whose American interest in football is the reason I attended the game, took the opposite opinion.  Seeing the rowdy Hamilton fans, she immediately decided that those were her people and the TiCats, her team.  I can’t blame her.  Had I been objective, I would have felt the same.

Not least because we had the good fortune of sitting directly in front of Pigskin Pete.

This fellow is the leader of the Hamilton fans and takes to his job with the dedication and energy of vintage Mussolini.  He rallies them to chant, harasses the Argo’s mascot and really gets the whole crowd going.  I quite like Pigskin Pete.

The Argo’s cheerleaders, I’m not so sure about.  While the Hamilton TiCat cheerleaders seem like some nasty, nasty, dirty girls, the Argo’s cheerleaders just seemed stuck-up.  The Hamilton ladies shook their asses until you wanted to give them money but the Toronto ones stood around in some sort of sixties-theme-night, go-go boot outfit, thinking they were better than everyone then wandering through the stands to try to sell their calendar.

I almost switched sides again just because Toronto’s girls seemed like, well, Toronto’s girls.

(No offence, ladies.  You know who I’m talking about.)

The game went on for quite a while and I spent most of my time watching the cheerleaders and getting in trouble from Shalome while learning how seriously Americans take football rivalries.  From the moment we chose different teams, we became enemies.  I took a passive approach, asking her to explain the rules to me.  For example:  If you’re supposed to move the ball forward, why do the TiCats keep going backwards and dropping the ball? She threatened to stab me and burn all my clothes.  In other words, it was a pretty typical evening out for us.

She also said that, in quality, Canadian football is something like you would find between high school and state college level in America.  I believe it.  She knows football.  I don’t. So I defer to her opinion on this.

In overtime, The Argos managed to win the game, thus imperiling my sex life.

It has recovered and is once again in good shape.  Unlike Hamilton.