You might have noticed I have been absent these past few days. Or maybe you didn’t, or maybe you did and didn’t care. Whatever. In case you were curious, I was on a spring break trip up to Toronto, Canada.
Visiting the Hockey Hall of Fame and taking in a Maple Leafs game is something that my father, brother and I have talked about for years without it ever coming into fruition. My mother coordinated with my brother and I to plan a trip and present it to my father as a Christmas gift.
We ventured up and spent four days north of the border, visiting touristy hot-spots like the Hall, Niagra Falls and of course, the Air Canada Centre. This was my first time leaving the United States, and although Toronto is a predominantly English-speaking metropolis that could aesthetically very easily be American, the culture shift is still amusing.
I’ve compiled a list of the biggest takeaways I have from our trek to the Great White North and our patronage at Monday’s Leafs-Flames game.
1) One-team cities are SO much cooler.
Everything I observed in Toronto is contrasted with growing up in New York. Speaking as an uneducated American, the two seem similar in that they are arguably the sporting capital of their respective home nations. Toronto is home to the Original Six Maple Leafs (celebrating their centennial season next year), the Hockey Hall of Fame and Canada’s lone representatives in the NBA and MLB. It’s one of the more densely populated cities in North America, up there with New York. The correlation seems there.
But Toronto has just one team per sport. One hockey team, one baseball team, one soccer team, one CFL team. New York has two teams per sport, which makes building a unified city-wide identity impossible. Sure, there are more Yankee than Met fans, more Giants than Jets, and so on. But the built-in conflict means there will never truly be unity. There’s no split decision- every hat on the street was a Jays hat. Everyone knew how the Raptors did last night. When we attended The Second City Comedy Club’s nightly show, there were Leafs and Jays in-jokes galore. It’s just part of the culture. I love that. I envy that.
2) The Air Canada Centre is pretty nice.
Again, I’m spoiled being from New York- the renovations to Madison Square Garden are gorgeous. The hallways are wide and pristine, there’s memorabilia wall to wall. You can’t turn around without being reminded who plays there and who has visited there. The neighborhood outside the Garden is not all that pretty, but inside is quite nice.
The square outside the Air Canada Centre is cool. It’s an open space where fans can gather in their multitudes. There are shops with Raptors, Jays and Leafs gear surrounding the square, boxed in by the ACC and the nearby Rogers Centre where the Jays play. There are statues outside of Leafs greats. The pre-game show is filmed right where fans enter the building. Inside the halls are a bit cramped, and while there are plaques and pictures galore, it almost feels like it isn’t enough. That’s a weird complaint, and maybe they are saving more decoration for their Centennial season, but I almost feel like one of the league’s most storied franchises should be going all-out with that sort of thing.
3) That being said, the pre-game festivities were awesome.
I had never heard this in a sports venue before- five minutes prior to the start of the game, the public address announcer said, “please take your seats for the pre-game ceremonies, the game will be starting soon.” Please take your seats? Is this a Broadway show? I had never heard that at a sporting event before. But sure enough, the stadium filled out and the lights went down. Most teams have a pre-game pump-up video before the team comes out. For the Rangers, it’s about two minutes long. This video was five minutes. It was a comprehensive history lesson of everything Toronto Maple Leafs. Maybe that’s why there is not much in the halls- they want fans to be in their seats and soak in the history right where they watch the game.
I’m so glad that on-ice laser shows have caught on. Montreal’s “torch lighting” got a lot of publicity during the 2014 playoffs, and since then several teams (including the Rangers, Devils and Lightning) have added them to their pre-game festivities. The Leafs’ one is incredible.
4) There was only one bad seat in the house.
We sat in section 310 row 15, which at the time of purchase I feared would be too high up. Even at such a height, the seats are sloped so that fans are still very close to the ice and the row in front of you does not obscure your vision.
There was only one seat that was undesirable: the one right next to us. About five minutes into the first period, the guy sitting next to us leans over and says, “you need to get up, someone’s sick behind us.” Now, someone being sick in the infamous “Blueseats” at Madison Square Garden more than likely means that they had a few too many. This was some little kid, though. And this poor man next to us had remnants of this poor kid’s lunch all over him.
When I say all over him, I mean all over him. One seat over and that kid ruins my prized Montreal Expos Randy Johnson jersey, which I decided to wear because I own literally nothing else vaguely Canadian.
Unbelievably, the man took it in stride. We never saw him, the kid or the kid’s dad for the rest of the game, but he was very understanding and handled it much more diplomatically than I would have. Perhaps he took it as a commentary on the way the Leafs were playing this year. Typical polite Canadians.
5) The fans are different.
We were sitting high up in the stadium, and I feel comfortable sharing that they were the cheapest seats we could get on StubHub. But for a “cheap seats” section, the fans were not only pretty tame, they were incredibly smart.
At the Garden, you get a lot of people yelling “SHOOOOOOT” even when the team is in no position to do so. They could be on the other end of the ice. They could be shorthanded. They could be in a stoppage of play. Doesn’t matter. Shoooooooot.
Here, the fans around us were analytical. They implored their players to “cycle!”, “find a lane boys, move that puck!”, etc. It wasn’t just simple stuff. They were very specific with their demands.
The folks around us were longtime fans. They knew their history, they reminisced about the days of old. One man had not been to a game since 1999 and was waxing poetic about watching Doug Gilmour. Another cited his childhood favorite player as goaltender Johnny Bower, who played his last game in 1969-1970. The people around us were die-hards.
I’ve read that a knock on the Air Canada Centre is that the lower-bowl is filled with suits and not fans in jerseys, indicting the fanbase on being more corporate nowadays fueling rising ticket prices. And I did notice it to be a bit true. The crowd was 60-40 Leaf-to-Flame fans and there were a good number of people without jerseys. While the corporate atmosphere very well could be coming into play (it certainly does in New York), even people in the cheap seats were without sweaters. My theory is this: hockey is a lifestyle in of itself in Toronto. It just is, the people are crazy for it. Perhaps there is less of a need to wear a sweater to a game to overtly show your fandom because it is already assumed that you are a real fan. In the US, you need to wear your sweater to validate your devotion to the sport and the team. Perhaps in Canada, it’s an expectation that you’re already at that point and there’s less of a need to flaunt it. Just a theory.
The sweaters that were being worn there were awesome. I love the Leafs’ colors. They’re classic. In total I counted 27 different players that were represented on the backs of Leaf fans’ jerseys. There was quite the dichotomy from the good (Gilmour, Mats Sundin, Gary Roberts) to the bad (Jonas Gustavsson, James Reimer, Tyler Bozak) to the perplexing yet intriguing (Eric Lindros, Kyle Wellwood, Alexander Mogilny). The most common ones were of Sundin and Darcy Tucker. There was a smattering of William Nylander jerseys already.
Speaking of Nylander…
6) No one stands up when the Leafs score.
Not a single person. Toronto scored the first goal of the game off a one-timer beautifully set up by William Nylander. It was a nice play that was the result of Toronto dominating possession. Wanting to show support as impartial spectators, we stood up when they scored and applauded. We looked around.
No one else stood.
We stood there bewildered. The horn sounded, the song played, and play resumed. We sheepishly sat back down, dumbfounded. It was so confusing that when the Leafs scored a second time, we made a joke of holding each other down in our seats.
Is it a Canadian thing that you don’t stand when your team scores? I didn’t think it was. When Calgary scored, their fans stood. Is it a Toronto thing? Is it an “our team is so bad so who cares” thing? I doubt that’s it because the place was still nearly sold out. Someone please explain this to me.
The Maple Leafs won 5-2. The most people stood for goal number four, an empty netter after which fans proceeded to the exit.
7) Lack of standing notwithstanding (ha), the people of Canada are very nice.
It’s true what they say about Canadians. Everyone at the game, around the city and the various places we stopped were incredibly polite, courteous and friendly. Even the staff at the game was engaging. There were no security guards to frisk us at the entrance to our section to make sure we were in the right place. After the game, the staff let fans linger to take pictures next to the ice and stroll around the shops which were kept open long after the game. A few employees even gave kudos for my Expos jersey.
We encountered a lot of people that made our stay more pleasant. The employees at the Hall of Fame were all adults who knew how to both respect the history and help make it fun for little kids. We took a bus tour of Niagra Falls and Niagra by the Lake, and the guide was not only incredibly smart, he was just an average small-farm older gentleman from somewhere near Edmonton. Even the bellhop at the hotel that helped us with our bags made pleasant conversation about the Raptors and the time he helped Muggsy Bogues to his car.
One minute thing- in New York, people cross busy streets whenever they damn well feel like it, but more often than not they’ll jump the gun on the walk sign. Standing on various corners for four days, not once did I see anyone walk before given the signal. No one other than us, the jerk New Yorkers.
8) Above all else, Toronto is beautiful.
Go see the Hall of Fame. It’s sleek, fun and you can drown in the history and the memorabilia. Go see Niagra Falls, it’s a true wonder. Go take a helicopter tour of the city as we did, the views are unforgettable. Go to a game, fans are smart and passionate for all three major teams. Go drown in maple syrup and gorge yourself on bacon and pancakes.
As a hockey fan, it is the ultimate pilgrimage.
