Results tagged “torontoargonauts”

"The way I've approached it, to make it right in my head, is you start a series off at 2nd-and-10," Bart Andrus, the former NFL assistant hired in January to coach the Toronto Argonauts, told the National Post. "That's my thought process." It might just be a throwaway comment, but it might reveal deeper implications that the fifty-one-year-old California native is approaching the season with assumptions that are fundamentally at odds with the Canadian game. Argos fans have heard it before.

Anticipating the arrival of the NFL's Chicago Cardinals for a pre-season exhibition game against the CFL's Toronto Argonauts on August 5, 1959, The Star's Jim Hunt asked the obvious question: "Argos against the Chicago Cardinals—the mismatch of the century or a football game?" The Argos, who'd dominated the CFL for most of the early twentieth century, were now in the early years of what became known as The Dark Ages. The league's perennial bottom-feeders between 1953 and 1983, the Argos went nineteen years between Grey Cup appearances and thirty-one years between Grey Cup victories. As if to make up for their on-field futility, according to Jay Teitel's The Argo Bounce (T.H. Best Printing Co. Ltd., 1982), the franchise simply tried to play with big league style by signing one big-money player after another. In this, the team seemed to reflect Toronto's post-war insecurity and its ambition to prove itself a world class city. With the huge success of the 1959 exhibition game—with 27,770 fans in attendance, it was the largest crowd to watch football in Canada at that time—the Argos hosted similar exhibition games in 1960 and 1961.

WORDS: Breaking Dawn, the final installment of author Stephenie Meyer's vampire/romance book series Twilight, is being released at midnight. A masquerade-themed party at Indigo this evening celebrates the book launch, with Breaking Dawn-inspired activities, music, and prizes for the best costume. Plus, you get to buy the book—which will certainly suck—as soon as it goes on sale at 12:01 a.m. Indigo Books (55 Bloor Street West), 8:00 p.m., FREE.

Photo by John Griffiths.

Many of us were looking forward to welcoming the Buffalo Bills to Toronto. The eight games they'll play here over the next five years could've been the perfect complement to our existing football diet of live Argonauts games and televised NFL matches. Now that the details have been announced, more than a few of us have been priced out of attending. The majority of tickets average into the $350 per game range, and are only available if you ante up for all eight games at once. As Dave Perkins laments in The Star, the arrangements clearly lay the groundwork for Ted Rogers and Larry Tanenbaum to bring the NFL to Toronto full-time. Granted, there's the unlikely possibility that Bills owner Ralph Wilson is using the games as leverage to extort further concessions from the taxpayers of Buffalo, but he's not exactly denying the possibility of eventual relocation. This is simply the latest chapter in Toronto's long-running soap opera love affair with "big league" American football. A couple past episodes in this drama are indicative of how this pursuit has evolved from quiet self-confidence to the fervent desire to be validated as a "big league" city.

Almost half of all Toronto-area residents are foreign-born. This is the first little tidbit released from the 2006 census, which the government is doling out as if it were a movie trailer or something. (Will Smith versus zombies: probably more entertaining.)

The Toronto Argonauts can turn this Sunday’s Eastern Final into the perfect kickoff for the upcoming Grey Cup festival. If the Argos beat the Winnipeg Blue Bombers to reach the championship game, it'll give a huge boost to the week-long party, also known as “Canada’s national drunk.” Brad Watters, general manager of this year's Grey Cup, says that the team winning the 95th Grey Cup at home "would really turn the town on its...

The NFL is coming, sort of, to Toronto—and already, rumours of the CFL’s imminent demise are being greatly exaggerated.

After Monday’s victory in the annual Labour Day Classic, the Toronto Argonauts (3-6) host the Hamilton Tiger-Cats (1-8) in the second half of the home-and-home series on Saturday at the Rogers Centre. It might not seem like the greatest match-up, with both teams fighting it out for last place in the league, and the abysmal Ti-Cats having beaten the Argos only once in their last seventeen regular season encounters. But the two teams, who first faced off in 1873, represent one of the oldest rivalries in pro sports, and one that mimics an existing inter-city feud.

Photo by Flickr user captiveight from her Rider Nation album.

Two things you may not know: The Toronto Argonauts won the Grey Cup last year (go team!), and a select group of coaches and players (the Argos are a diverse group, counting disgraced NFLers, tireless vets and All Canadian sports studs among their roster) are offering sports-dumb women a unique service: a crash course in the rules of the game and initiation into the eternal mysteries of the CFL.

At first, it seemed a little odd that Toronto Argonauts' coach Mike "Pinball" Clemons was left off the CBC's "Greatest Canadian" search. This man has devoted his entire playing career to the CFL's Toronto Argonauts, and now has led the team to the Grey Cup final as a head coach. The case for Clemons as the "Greatest Canadian," however, is quickly derailed by the fact that he's from Florida. Still, Clemons has taken the underdog Boatmen all the way to the final against the B.C. Lions this Sunday in Ottawa, the first time since 1997.