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The Ottawa Redblacks took the field at their Lansdowne Park home for the first time on a cloudless Friday morning in late June to the sounds of bulldozers, dump trucks and jackhammers, as workers scrambled to finish building the stadium around them.
Players on the Canadian Football League’s newest team — this city’s third in less than two decades —marvelled at their surroundings, almost giddy as they stepped onto their home turf.
Sunlight beamed off the new red, black and white seats. The dark green turf was pristine. From the field, through the south stands, the players could see the stadium’s trademark cedar veil and the greenery along the Rideau Canal beyond.
“Quite the view, right?” exclaimed veteran quarterback Henry Burris, who remembers playing at the old, dilapidated Frank Clair Stadium, now a distant, demolished memory.
Patrolling the sidelines was Redblacks president Jeff Hunt, one of five partners in the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group, the team of local businessmen who have partnered with the city in a $400-million redevelopment of Lansdowne Park.
The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park on Friday, June 27, 2014.
The revitalized, newly-named TD Place at Lansdowne is the jewel in OSEG’s sports empire, which includes the Redblacks, North American Soccer League’s Fury and the OHL’s Ottawa 67′s.
It is also where, Friday night at the team’s home-opener, Hunt and his partners hope to banish the bitter memories of past football failures and begin a new era of gridiron glory in the capital.
They have been building toward this night for seven years. They have endured city council meetings, fought legal battles, gathered sponsors, sold season tickets, built a brand, hired a football operations staff and assembled a roster.
Expectations have also been building; when the Redblacks kick off against the Toronto Argonauts before a sold-out crowd, the players won’t be the only ones with something to prove.
“Right now there’s nobody in these stands, but can you imagine … how things are going to look when you put 24,000 people in the stands?” Burris said after that late June practice. “You’ll see a packed house, and people going crazy. It’s going to be loud. You’re truly going to feel the energy of just how excited people are to have football back in this city.”
Related
When the principals first came together to talk about resurrecting football, they knew that the stadium needed fixing, that the Renegades’ failure was still fresh in people’s minds, and that there would be naysayers convinced that, despite the sport’s hundred-year history in Ottawa, it would never work.
The CFL’s recent track record here gave those naysayers plenty of ammunition. The once-proud Rough Riders folded in 1996 amid declining attendance and lacklustre performances on the field. After the team’s Grey Cup win in 1976, there had been only two winning seasons, and none in the 1980s and 1990s. The Renegades, who brought the CFL back to Ottawa amid much fanfare in 2002, bled millions of dollars and managed to hang in for only four losing seasons before finally hanging it up.
Ottawa fans were disillusioned with out-of-town owners who seemed disengaged and unavailable. There was Horn Chen, the mysterious Chicago businessman who took the Rough Riders naming rights with him when they folded. Twice, there was Bernard Glieberman, the real estate mogul who installed his son Lonie to run the Rough Riders and, a decade later, the Renegades.
Only about 18 months after the Gliebermans packed up for good, Hunt, the longtime owner of the OHL’s Ottawa 67s, sat down for an informal lunch with developer John Ruddy to discuss ideas about how to bring CFL football back to Ottawa. Then-Argonauts owner Howard Sokolowski was also there.
Why, given the history, did Hunt think Ottawa was ready for a football team?
“I didn’t. That was kind of the point,” Hunt said. “I was probably there just to tell Howard and John that I thought football had its finest hour already in Ottawa and it just wasn’t meant to be anymore.
“The Renegade experience was still very fresh, and there was just too much scorched earth there and a facility that was way too subpar for anything to succeed here.”
However, Hunt said he started to come around when he and Ruddy began to discuss a business case for refurbishing the stadium and doing some development around it.
Soon after, Hunt and Ruddy sat down for lunch with Roger Greenberg, CEO of Minto, Ottawa’s largest developer.
“John’s words to me were: ‘I have an idea that’s going to take a little bit of time, a little bit money, and it’s going to be lots of fun,’” Greenberg said. “How can you say no to something like that?”
Ruddy went to Monaco to recruit real estate mogul Bill Shenkman, and the partnership was born. John Pugh later joined as the fifth partner when the group secured the NASL’s Fury.
What started as a relatively simple plan to secure a CFL franchise, then negotiate with the city for a lease at Frank Clair Stadium, became much more complicated when the stadium’s south-side stands were condemned in the fall of 2007.
“That changed the whole thing,” Greenberg said, recounting a meeting soon afterward with city manager Kent Kirkpatrick.
“Kent’s words were along the lines of: ‘Roger, with the south-side stands now being condemned, if you think that the city of Ottawa’s going to put $100 million into a stadium so that you can then go and play football 10 times a year, I’m as big a CFL fan as the next person, but the city’s not going to do that. You’ve got to come up with something a lot different than that.’”
That was the beginning of the public-private partnership to renovate Lansdowne, one that spawned several legal battles with various groups challenging OSEG’s partnership with the city and decrying the lack of a bidding process.
“We could have been shut down on any one of the legal cases that we had,” Greenberg said, “and that would have been it.”
Greenberg said he and his partners always believed their opponents were a vocal minority, but suggested he didn’t anticipate the process would take as long as it did.
“I think if we knew what we were in for, people would have questioned our sanity,” he said. “I don’t think we really understood at the time how difficult it was going to be. We just kept facing every challenge, and we just kept going step by step.”
The proposal cleared every legal hurdle, and city council approved the final Lansdowne Partnership Plan in October 2012. More than five years after Hunt first sat down with Ruddy to talk about bringing professional football back to Ottawa, the partners could finally run with the ball.
First down
OSEG chief executive Bernie Ashe understands there are people who are skeptical about the new team in town. He’s heard plenty of gloomy predictions since taking the job a year and a half ago.
“We completely respect that and understand that there are people waiting for us to trip,” he said. “There were several different ownership groups who kept saying … it’s going to be different this time. I’ve heard a lot of people say ‘I’ve heard that before.’ Fair enough. We have to gain their trust.”
But this time it is different: Everyone in Ottawa has skin in the game. The city poured $129 million into the revitalized stadium, and how the Redblacks do will be a large part of its success or failure.
“There’s a lot riding on this,” Mayor Jim Watson said. “The city’s actively involved, the private sector, the league, so it’s in our collective interests that we work very hard to make this work.”
“No one wants to see a third failure, because I’m not sure how much appetite there would be for a fourth attempt.”
Equally important to the league and to the city, the team has local, committed owners known for their philanthropic work whose understanding of the Ottawa market has been widely praised. The days of Chen and the Gliebermans are long gone.
“In the past we’ve had absentee owners,” CFL commissioner Mark Cohon said. “We’ve had owners who lived in Detroit, owners who lived in Toronto, owners who lived in Chicago. They’re not part of the community. They don’t have those deep relationships.”
Hunt’s deep ties to the community — he estimates he’s already met 80 per cent of the Redblacks nearly 17,000 season tickets holders and his partners have probably met the other 20 per cent — raise the stakes for him personally.
“I don’t mean to run down the Gliebermans, because I think they’re good people and they’re successful businesspeople, but it was very easy for them to just pack up and go home,” Hunt said. “Well, we’re already home. That’s not an option for us.”
Greenberg agrees.
“The most important brand is the one that attaches to each of us personally. We can’t afford to have this be seen as a failure, because it will absolutely spill over,” he said.
“This whole project is not going to make us a lot of money,” he added. “This is a gift by the five partners of OSEG back to the community.”
Two keys for the ownership group were that the CFL would enforce its salary cap better and, critically, that the rules of the expansion draft would ensure the franchise received better players.
That meant the team was in a position to sign Burris, 39, who is fourth all-time in CFL passing yards and passing touchdowns, and has won two Grey Cups with the Calgary Stampeders. The veteran quarterback is the face of the Redblacks, and the significance of bringing football back to Ottawa isn’t lost on him.
“It’s an honour to be a part of this. Not many guys get a chance to be a part of something so special,” he said. “You might have a chance to build up an organization that might have been in the dumps for a couple of years, but this is a totally different situation. This is bringing life back to a city that loves football, and we’re doing it from the ground up.”
The CFL is also in better shape than ever. The league’s television deal with TSN, reportedly worth $40 million annually through to 2018, provides some stability for teams. There’s also a new TV deal with ESPN, a new collective bargaining agreement and a number of new stadiums either being built or in the works.
“When I was mayor the first time and we were having all these problems with the Gliebermans and the Rough Riders, the league was, quite frankly, pretty bush league,” Watson said. “That’s all changed in the last five years.”
“The CFL is a very different league,” Hunt said. “There’s no save-the-team fundraisers going on anywhere in the CFL anymore.”
Second down
While some of the ownership group’s advantages this time around are because of plays the league has made, they’ve called other ones themselves.
Hunt, who bought the 67s in the 1990s and quintupled their attendance, says every single detail of the fan experience is crucial, including transportation to and from the game, the product on the field, concessions, cheerleaders and “things as benign as the washrooms.”
“It’s hard to say someone delivers a good washroom experience, but you can have a bad one,” he said. “We have to be great at a lot of things. Because if one thing is bad, that could destroy everything else.”
The new TD Place is not your parents’ Lansdowne Park. The 24,000-seat stadium will be, according to Cohon, “one of the best places in North America to watch football.”
The Redblacks are spending more than $5 million to outfit the entire venue with Wi-Fi access. The 40-by-60 foot scoreboard, installed at the west end zone, cost $1 million. And there will be 400 HD televisions throughout the stadium.
There will be smartphone apps Redblacks and Fury fans can access at the venue for unique features unavailable at home. Ashe said he’s “pretty confident” the Redblacks will launch their app in time for opening night.
“For those who are going to be comparing TD Place to what they remember of Lansdowne, I really believe (the home opener is) going to be a ‘wow’ event,” Hunt said.
But before they can impress fans, they have to get them there. That’s why Ashe, the Senators’ chief operating officer in the early years who joined OSEG’s as CEO in January 2013, says ticket sales were the No. 1 focus, with sponsorships a close second.
Ashe and his team worked hard to sign up fans for $50 priority registration numbers (season-ticket deposits), then built a flashy preview centre on Ogilvie Road where they brought prospective season-ticket holders in one by one last fall.
“I learned with the Senators that you have to do that extremely well,” Ashe said. “Establishing some credibility with our fans in the way we did ticketing was a big part of getting things launched.”
Their efforts have paid off. At the height of their success, the Renegades sold 12,000 season tickets. The Redblacks have sold almost 5,000 more than that. They have made huge gains in Quebec; the Renegades sold 20 season tickets in Gatineau, while the Redblacks are nearing 1,000, Hunt said.
“We have the biggest season-ticket base in the Eastern Conference right now, and we haven’t played a game,” he said last month. “We have earned the confidence of the fans of Ottawa, and now our challenge is to continue to build on that.”
On the sponsorship side, securing TD Bank as a naming sponsor for the stadium was “critical” for the franchise, Ashe said. That started when Greenberg secured a meeting with Ed Clark, the bank’s chairman.
“When you start with the chairman of TD in a meeting, you’re off to a good start,” Ashe said. “I think if Roger wasn’t there, it’s safe to say the TD name doesn’t happen.”
Ashe wouldn’t disclose the terms of the naming contract, but said it’s a “significant investment over a very long term.”
Third down
Ottawa has a storied football history, but some wonder if the market can support another pro team, and if fans will stick around if the Redblacks don’t become a winning squad quickly. Senators owner Eugene Melynk has referred to his team’s fan base as “finicky,” and Rough Riders games were sparsely attended as the team’s losses piled up.
One expert says Ottawa’s smaller market puts added pressure on team ownership to put a quality product on the field, but that the OSEG ownership group understands the market well enough to succeed.
Glen Hodgson, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada and co-author of Power Play: The Business Economics of Pro Sports, argues that Ottawa’s smaller corporate sector and relatively few head offices (only 18 of Canada’s 800 largest corporations in 2012) puts the onus more on individual ticket sales and less on corporate boxes.
“Ottawa’s a fairly fickle market,” Hodgson said. “I think because we have a lot of public servants who are risk-averters, having been one myself, they’re very careful about how they spend their money. And if they’re not getting quality, they’ll spend it on something else.”
Hunt, however, says he doesn’t view Ottawa fans as any different from fans in any major North American market: “They have the same wants and needs as anyone,” he said. “They’ve just got to have an experience they would want to repeat.”
The massive redevelopment of Lansdowne raises the stakes for the Redblacks, but it also means OSEG isn’t focusing on just football. The group will push for outdoor concerts at the stadium, as well as inside the refurbished hockey rink underneath the north-side stands. There’s the 350,000 square feet of retail space at Lansdowne, set to open in November. The condominiums just beyond the west end zone will open early next year.
“It’s not like everything is dependent on just Redblacks,” Greenberg said. “If we only owned the Redblacks, I might be more concerned. … It’s really having everything come together.”
However, for the football team to be successful, Greenberg says intelligent and capable ownership and management are essential, which he and Hunt believe they have in general manager Marcel Desjardins, head coach Rick Campbell and their staffs.
“If we hire a stupid general manager and we hire a stupid coach, and we go and draft a dead player, that’s not going to work,” he said, referencing the Rough Riders’ 1994 drafting of Derrell Robertson, who had died months earlier in a car crash.
“If we don’t have better day-to-day leadership, then the whole thing falls apart.”
There are, after all, no fourth downs in Canadian football.
mwoods@ottawacitizen.com
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Players on the Canadian Football League’s newest team — this city’s third in less than two decades —marvelled at their surroundings, almost giddy as they stepped onto their home turf.
Sunlight beamed off the new red, black and white seats. The dark green turf was pristine. From the field, through the south stands, the players could see the stadium’s trademark cedar veil and the greenery along the Rideau Canal beyond.
“Quite the view, right?” exclaimed veteran quarterback Henry Burris, who remembers playing at the old, dilapidated Frank Clair Stadium, now a distant, demolished memory.
Patrolling the sidelines was Redblacks president Jeff Hunt, one of five partners in the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group, the team of local businessmen who have partnered with the city in a $400-million redevelopment of Lansdowne Park.
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The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen 
The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
Local player Connor Williams might look mean, but he was thrilled to finally play on their new turf. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
Eric Fraser keeps his eye on an approaching tennis ball during a drill. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
The Redblacks hit the practice field in the midst of a heat wave.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
Jovon Johnson catches the ball high in the air during practice. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
Chevron Walker holds onto the ball during a tackling practice. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
Quarterback Henry Burris talks to the media after practice. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
A player carries a bag of sand back and forth across the field following practice for strength training. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
Jon Gott, left, strains to pick up the weight ball during some strength training with teammates after practice. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
Nate Menkin, right, takes a break with a teammate after hauling bags of sand back and forth across the field after practice for strength training. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
Nate Menkin, left, and other players hoist huge weights after practice for strength training. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
The Ottawa Redblacks are done practicing and are ready to play for real.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
Jovon Johnson (DB) chugs back some water during the long, hot practice. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
Jovon Johnson keeps the ball under a tight grip during a tackling practice at the new stadium. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
New turf for the Redblacks. The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park Friday, June 27, 2014.
Julie Oliver / Ottawa Citizen
The Ottawa Redblacks held their first practice ever at the new TD Place stadium at Lansdowne Park on Friday, June 27, 2014.
The revitalized, newly-named TD Place at Lansdowne is the jewel in OSEG’s sports empire, which includes the Redblacks, North American Soccer League’s Fury and the OHL’s Ottawa 67′s.
It is also where, Friday night at the team’s home-opener, Hunt and his partners hope to banish the bitter memories of past football failures and begin a new era of gridiron glory in the capital.
They have been building toward this night for seven years. They have endured city council meetings, fought legal battles, gathered sponsors, sold season tickets, built a brand, hired a football operations staff and assembled a roster.
Expectations have also been building; when the Redblacks kick off against the Toronto Argonauts before a sold-out crowd, the players won’t be the only ones with something to prove.
“Right now there’s nobody in these stands, but can you imagine … how things are going to look when you put 24,000 people in the stands?” Burris said after that late June practice. “You’ll see a packed house, and people going crazy. It’s going to be loud. You’re truly going to feel the energy of just how excited people are to have football back in this city.”
Related
- An interactive look at Lansdowne
- Timeline: A history of football in Ottawa
- Q&A with CFL Commissioner Mark Cohon
When the principals first came together to talk about resurrecting football, they knew that the stadium needed fixing, that the Renegades’ failure was still fresh in people’s minds, and that there would be naysayers convinced that, despite the sport’s hundred-year history in Ottawa, it would never work.
The CFL’s recent track record here gave those naysayers plenty of ammunition. The once-proud Rough Riders folded in 1996 amid declining attendance and lacklustre performances on the field. After the team’s Grey Cup win in 1976, there had been only two winning seasons, and none in the 1980s and 1990s. The Renegades, who brought the CFL back to Ottawa amid much fanfare in 2002, bled millions of dollars and managed to hang in for only four losing seasons before finally hanging it up.
Ottawa fans were disillusioned with out-of-town owners who seemed disengaged and unavailable. There was Horn Chen, the mysterious Chicago businessman who took the Rough Riders naming rights with him when they folded. Twice, there was Bernard Glieberman, the real estate mogul who installed his son Lonie to run the Rough Riders and, a decade later, the Renegades.
Only about 18 months after the Gliebermans packed up for good, Hunt, the longtime owner of the OHL’s Ottawa 67s, sat down for an informal lunch with developer John Ruddy to discuss ideas about how to bring CFL football back to Ottawa. Then-Argonauts owner Howard Sokolowski was also there.
Why, given the history, did Hunt think Ottawa was ready for a football team?
“I didn’t. That was kind of the point,” Hunt said. “I was probably there just to tell Howard and John that I thought football had its finest hour already in Ottawa and it just wasn’t meant to be anymore.
“The Renegade experience was still very fresh, and there was just too much scorched earth there and a facility that was way too subpar for anything to succeed here.”
However, Hunt said he started to come around when he and Ruddy began to discuss a business case for refurbishing the stadium and doing some development around it.
Soon after, Hunt and Ruddy sat down for lunch with Roger Greenberg, CEO of Minto, Ottawa’s largest developer.
“John’s words to me were: ‘I have an idea that’s going to take a little bit of time, a little bit money, and it’s going to be lots of fun,’” Greenberg said. “How can you say no to something like that?”
Ruddy went to Monaco to recruit real estate mogul Bill Shenkman, and the partnership was born. John Pugh later joined as the fifth partner when the group secured the NASL’s Fury.
What started as a relatively simple plan to secure a CFL franchise, then negotiate with the city for a lease at Frank Clair Stadium, became much more complicated when the stadium’s south-side stands were condemned in the fall of 2007.
“That changed the whole thing,” Greenberg said, recounting a meeting soon afterward with city manager Kent Kirkpatrick.
“Kent’s words were along the lines of: ‘Roger, with the south-side stands now being condemned, if you think that the city of Ottawa’s going to put $100 million into a stadium so that you can then go and play football 10 times a year, I’m as big a CFL fan as the next person, but the city’s not going to do that. You’ve got to come up with something a lot different than that.’”
That was the beginning of the public-private partnership to renovate Lansdowne, one that spawned several legal battles with various groups challenging OSEG’s partnership with the city and decrying the lack of a bidding process.
“We could have been shut down on any one of the legal cases that we had,” Greenberg said, “and that would have been it.”
Greenberg said he and his partners always believed their opponents were a vocal minority, but suggested he didn’t anticipate the process would take as long as it did.
“I think if we knew what we were in for, people would have questioned our sanity,” he said. “I don’t think we really understood at the time how difficult it was going to be. We just kept facing every challenge, and we just kept going step by step.”
The proposal cleared every legal hurdle, and city council approved the final Lansdowne Partnership Plan in October 2012. More than five years after Hunt first sat down with Ruddy to talk about bringing professional football back to Ottawa, the partners could finally run with the ball.
First down
OSEG chief executive Bernie Ashe understands there are people who are skeptical about the new team in town. He’s heard plenty of gloomy predictions since taking the job a year and a half ago.
“We completely respect that and understand that there are people waiting for us to trip,” he said. “There were several different ownership groups who kept saying … it’s going to be different this time. I’ve heard a lot of people say ‘I’ve heard that before.’ Fair enough. We have to gain their trust.”
But this time it is different: Everyone in Ottawa has skin in the game. The city poured $129 million into the revitalized stadium, and how the Redblacks do will be a large part of its success or failure.
“There’s a lot riding on this,” Mayor Jim Watson said. “The city’s actively involved, the private sector, the league, so it’s in our collective interests that we work very hard to make this work.”
“No one wants to see a third failure, because I’m not sure how much appetite there would be for a fourth attempt.”
Equally important to the league and to the city, the team has local, committed owners known for their philanthropic work whose understanding of the Ottawa market has been widely praised. The days of Chen and the Gliebermans are long gone.
“In the past we’ve had absentee owners,” CFL commissioner Mark Cohon said. “We’ve had owners who lived in Detroit, owners who lived in Toronto, owners who lived in Chicago. They’re not part of the community. They don’t have those deep relationships.”
Hunt’s deep ties to the community — he estimates he’s already met 80 per cent of the Redblacks nearly 17,000 season tickets holders and his partners have probably met the other 20 per cent — raise the stakes for him personally.
“I don’t mean to run down the Gliebermans, because I think they’re good people and they’re successful businesspeople, but it was very easy for them to just pack up and go home,” Hunt said. “Well, we’re already home. That’s not an option for us.”
Greenberg agrees.
“The most important brand is the one that attaches to each of us personally. We can’t afford to have this be seen as a failure, because it will absolutely spill over,” he said.
“This whole project is not going to make us a lot of money,” he added. “This is a gift by the five partners of OSEG back to the community.”
Two keys for the ownership group were that the CFL would enforce its salary cap better and, critically, that the rules of the expansion draft would ensure the franchise received better players.
That meant the team was in a position to sign Burris, 39, who is fourth all-time in CFL passing yards and passing touchdowns, and has won two Grey Cups with the Calgary Stampeders. The veteran quarterback is the face of the Redblacks, and the significance of bringing football back to Ottawa isn’t lost on him.
“It’s an honour to be a part of this. Not many guys get a chance to be a part of something so special,” he said. “You might have a chance to build up an organization that might have been in the dumps for a couple of years, but this is a totally different situation. This is bringing life back to a city that loves football, and we’re doing it from the ground up.”
The CFL is also in better shape than ever. The league’s television deal with TSN, reportedly worth $40 million annually through to 2018, provides some stability for teams. There’s also a new TV deal with ESPN, a new collective bargaining agreement and a number of new stadiums either being built or in the works.
“When I was mayor the first time and we were having all these problems with the Gliebermans and the Rough Riders, the league was, quite frankly, pretty bush league,” Watson said. “That’s all changed in the last five years.”
“The CFL is a very different league,” Hunt said. “There’s no save-the-team fundraisers going on anywhere in the CFL anymore.”
Second down
While some of the ownership group’s advantages this time around are because of plays the league has made, they’ve called other ones themselves.
Hunt, who bought the 67s in the 1990s and quintupled their attendance, says every single detail of the fan experience is crucial, including transportation to and from the game, the product on the field, concessions, cheerleaders and “things as benign as the washrooms.”
“It’s hard to say someone delivers a good washroom experience, but you can have a bad one,” he said. “We have to be great at a lot of things. Because if one thing is bad, that could destroy everything else.”
The new TD Place is not your parents’ Lansdowne Park. The 24,000-seat stadium will be, according to Cohon, “one of the best places in North America to watch football.”
The Redblacks are spending more than $5 million to outfit the entire venue with Wi-Fi access. The 40-by-60 foot scoreboard, installed at the west end zone, cost $1 million. And there will be 400 HD televisions throughout the stadium.
There will be smartphone apps Redblacks and Fury fans can access at the venue for unique features unavailable at home. Ashe said he’s “pretty confident” the Redblacks will launch their app in time for opening night.
“For those who are going to be comparing TD Place to what they remember of Lansdowne, I really believe (the home opener is) going to be a ‘wow’ event,” Hunt said.
But before they can impress fans, they have to get them there. That’s why Ashe, the Senators’ chief operating officer in the early years who joined OSEG’s as CEO in January 2013, says ticket sales were the No. 1 focus, with sponsorships a close second.
Ashe and his team worked hard to sign up fans for $50 priority registration numbers (season-ticket deposits), then built a flashy preview centre on Ogilvie Road where they brought prospective season-ticket holders in one by one last fall.
“I learned with the Senators that you have to do that extremely well,” Ashe said. “Establishing some credibility with our fans in the way we did ticketing was a big part of getting things launched.”
Their efforts have paid off. At the height of their success, the Renegades sold 12,000 season tickets. The Redblacks have sold almost 5,000 more than that. They have made huge gains in Quebec; the Renegades sold 20 season tickets in Gatineau, while the Redblacks are nearing 1,000, Hunt said.
“We have the biggest season-ticket base in the Eastern Conference right now, and we haven’t played a game,” he said last month. “We have earned the confidence of the fans of Ottawa, and now our challenge is to continue to build on that.”
On the sponsorship side, securing TD Bank as a naming sponsor for the stadium was “critical” for the franchise, Ashe said. That started when Greenberg secured a meeting with Ed Clark, the bank’s chairman.
“When you start with the chairman of TD in a meeting, you’re off to a good start,” Ashe said. “I think if Roger wasn’t there, it’s safe to say the TD name doesn’t happen.”
Ashe wouldn’t disclose the terms of the naming contract, but said it’s a “significant investment over a very long term.”
Third down
Ottawa has a storied football history, but some wonder if the market can support another pro team, and if fans will stick around if the Redblacks don’t become a winning squad quickly. Senators owner Eugene Melynk has referred to his team’s fan base as “finicky,” and Rough Riders games were sparsely attended as the team’s losses piled up.
One expert says Ottawa’s smaller market puts added pressure on team ownership to put a quality product on the field, but that the OSEG ownership group understands the market well enough to succeed.
Glen Hodgson, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada and co-author of Power Play: The Business Economics of Pro Sports, argues that Ottawa’s smaller corporate sector and relatively few head offices (only 18 of Canada’s 800 largest corporations in 2012) puts the onus more on individual ticket sales and less on corporate boxes.
“Ottawa’s a fairly fickle market,” Hodgson said. “I think because we have a lot of public servants who are risk-averters, having been one myself, they’re very careful about how they spend their money. And if they’re not getting quality, they’ll spend it on something else.”
Hunt, however, says he doesn’t view Ottawa fans as any different from fans in any major North American market: “They have the same wants and needs as anyone,” he said. “They’ve just got to have an experience they would want to repeat.”
The massive redevelopment of Lansdowne raises the stakes for the Redblacks, but it also means OSEG isn’t focusing on just football. The group will push for outdoor concerts at the stadium, as well as inside the refurbished hockey rink underneath the north-side stands. There’s the 350,000 square feet of retail space at Lansdowne, set to open in November. The condominiums just beyond the west end zone will open early next year.
“It’s not like everything is dependent on just Redblacks,” Greenberg said. “If we only owned the Redblacks, I might be more concerned. … It’s really having everything come together.”
However, for the football team to be successful, Greenberg says intelligent and capable ownership and management are essential, which he and Hunt believe they have in general manager Marcel Desjardins, head coach Rick Campbell and their staffs.
“If we hire a stupid general manager and we hire a stupid coach, and we go and draft a dead player, that’s not going to work,” he said, referencing the Rough Riders’ 1994 drafting of Derrell Robertson, who had died months earlier in a car crash.
“If we don’t have better day-to-day leadership, then the whole thing falls apart.”
There are, after all, no fourth downs in Canadian football.
mwoods@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/michaelrwoods
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