By Sarah Elizabeth Brown
American NFL football games have pushed Sunday’s Grey Cup to second-tier status for Ottawa’s football fans.
Pub owners and managers are hoping food and drink specials, huge wide-screen TVs, and poster and T-shirt giveaways will entice football fans to come watch the championship game in their pubs.
But they all agree interest in Canadian professional football is waning and it’s only die-hard CFL fans who will be coming to watch Sunday’s battle for the Grey Cup in Vancouver.
And they all agree the fading interest is directly connected to the loss of the CFL Ottawa Rough Riders in 1996. Ottawa had a football team to call its own since 1876, until the Rough Riders folded.
“It’s not big for us,” says James Street Feed Co. owner and manager Todd Blair about the Grey Cup.
“The Super Bowl is bigger for us. Since Ottawa’s team isn’t in the league any more, the interest just isn’t there all season long.”
Enthusiasm for the CFL has waned a bit, says Blair, particularly since Rough Riders collapsed.
“The year, the Rough Riders were in the Grey Cup was a phenomenal day for us,” says Blair.
“It’s certainly not the event it used to be,” says Ed Mitchell, owner of the Duke of Somerset Pub.
“People still like (the CFL), but probably less than the NFL.”
Jeff Marriner, the Duke of Somerset’s assistant manager in charge of special events, says more people come to watch NFL games.
“I think it (Grey Cup) still is important to hard-core CFL fans,” he says.
“But to the general population not as much, only to a fringe.”
The Royal Oak’s general manager, Scott Heffernan, says he expects about 15 to 20 people coming specifically to see the game.
Heffernan says interest in Canadian professional football is declining because the NFL is promoted more in sports gambling and television highlights.
“We’ll make an issue out of it though,” says Heffernan. He plans to have the game running and special events and contests in both the downtown and Glebe Royal Oak pubs.
Former Ottawa mayor and Rough Riders president Jim Durrell agrees that not having a CFL team in Ottawa does affect enthusiasm for events like the Grey Cup, but he says he thinks Canadian football is alive and well in Ottawa.
“From everything I see and the comments I get every day, the city would embrace the return of the Rough Riders,” he says.