Vanya Tucherov
Special to CFL.ca
Growing up, I didn’t have any particular connection with the Canadian Football League. That wouldn’t come until much later, ironically enough, while I was living in the United States.
Yes, I’m one of the few pieces of evidence to demonstrate that the experiment with expansion outside the ‘Home and Native Land’ wasn’t a complete failure.
My ties are in Atlantic Canada – more specifically, in the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, and I think I grew up in a fairly typical manner for the late ’60s and early ’70s – I was a hockey player, always enthusiastic, if not particularly talented, and on the rink as often as possible, playing ball hockey with friends much of the rest of the time.
Like Montreal Alouettes’ slotback Danny Desriveaux, I was fortunate enough to attend the University of Richmond (although a few years earlier – Danny would have been seven when I graduated), emerging with a degree in English and History – and a job offer, working with a weekly newspaper.
A few years later, I’d moved on to the sports desk at a daily paper just south of the Tampa Bay area, when Lightning struck. The NHL expanded to Tampa, and the new team started play in October, 1992. At that point, the only people who understood hockey in southwest Florida were Canadian retirees who wintered in the area, a handful of ex-pats, and the scattered handfuls of people who had migrated from other places where ice was something other than what kept drinks chilled. A new team required press coverage, and who better than an overgrown kid who used to play the game?
By default, as the hockey reporter, I also became the de facto choice to cover all things sporting and Canadian, and wrote CFL game capsules and bits of coverage of the more prominent curling bonspiels.
In 1993, the birth of the Sacramento Gold Miners brought a bit more interest in the U.S., but little more in Tampa Bay. By 1994, expansion brought the States Anthony Calvillo and the Las Vegas Posse, the Shreveport Pirates, and a nameless team in Baltimore. Calvillo is one of the last active player who got his start in the league from a non-Canadian CFL team.
That Baltimore team caught my interest, especially with their improbable run to the Grey Cup and lack of a formalized team name, and really became the reason I became an active fan. I was both excited and somewhat ironically amused to see the Stallions win the Grey Cup in 1995. After that victory, the League returned where it belonged, north of the border, and many of the Stallions became Alouettes, but the
League had won a fan.
Fourteen years later, I’m still an Als fan, but more of a fan of the CFL as a whole. Staying informed about the League is a bit of an ongoing challenge, but between the CFL website, the team websites, and various fan sites, it’s possible. I’m no longer in Tampa Bay, having left in early 1996 for Seattle; and no longer a reporter, having migrated to the software industry.
That doesn’t mean I don’t write about the game anymore. The BC Lions are my de facto ‘home’ team, and I’m an active enough fan to be write columns for BCLionsDen.ca. We have enough ex-pats in the Seattle area that local cable TV outlets carry games here and there – usually one or two a week, and between LivePlay and various other feeds, it’s possible to watch or otherwise stay informed about most of the games.
Even though I identify as an Alouettes and Lions fan, it’s tough to limit it right there.
I have friends here transplanted from Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, about an hour outside Winnipeg, the Greater Toronto area, southern Ontario and my neighbour is a transplanted Montréalais. Often the question of “which team to cheer for” comes down to what company has dropped in to watch. My two boys are growing up as fans as well, but their loyalties lie elsewhere from mine The eldest is a Blue Bombers fan, the younger a Roughriders one. At least this way there’s a fair chance one of us will have our team represented in Calgary!
Cheers and thanks for all the work you do connecting the fans with the game, Vanya.
Vanya Tucherov is a CFL fan living in Seattle. He posts on Twitter as @vtucherov.
