HAMILTON — It’s a situation you seldom see in professional sports.
That the one person whom the fans, the players, the coaches and everybody else involved would say they’d be happiest for if the team was to win the championship would be the owner.
Correction. The Caretaker.
Bob Young would insist he be listed as The Caretaker of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats if he was ever to get his name on the Grey Cup. Not owner.
“I think it’s a psychological transference sort of thing,” laughed Young in a one-on-one interview with your correspondent here leading into Sunday’s crossover Eastern final against the Edmonton Eskimos.
“I’m actually just one of the fans. One of the reasons I don’t call myself the owner is that I never cheered for the owner. I want our fans to think that they are the owners … because, in reality, they are.
“I’m just another Ticats fan and I’m as excited about this team as any 12-year-old. I remember being a 12-year-old in the backyard throwing the ball around with my cousin. He was (legendary Ticats QB) Joe Zuger. I was (legendary Ticats receiver) Garney Henley. Except I was probably the most pathetic replica of Garney Henley in history.”
The man who sold his computer software company for billions also doesn’t look much like a steelworker. But he relates.
“One thing that has never changed about Hamilton is that we’re a blue-collar community and very proud of being a blue-collar community. These are salt-of-the-earth people and I wanted the Tiger-Cats, as a brand, to be representative of them.
“I think l represent the typical Tiger-Cats fan. I’m constantly talking about the reason I got involved in this. But when they say want to win for Bob, lets not kid anybody. They want to win it for themselves. And that’s the right reason.”
The reason Young keeps talking about why he got involved was The Caretaker’s brother Michael. He was a huge Tiger-Cats fan. When he died from cancer in 2002, the day the estate was settled, Bob Young came into a sizeable sum of money as an heir of Michael’s estate from his shares in the company, Red Hat, they started.
The story has been told often. Every player who enters the Tiger-Cats dressing room can tell it within weeks of arriving.
“On the same day the estate was settled, I got sent a link to the story in the Hamilton Spectator about the Tiger-Cats going bankrupt, and I couldn’t let my older brother pass away and his favourite football team pass away at the same time,” he said.
“I don’t think of myself as the owner of the team. I know other people do. But the Hamilton Tiger-Cats existed for 100 years before I got involved and it’s my mission to insure that they exist for 100 years after I’m able to be involved any longer.”
If you used to visit here fairly frequently and spent time in old Ivor Wynne Stadium and the Tiger-Cats’ less-than-palatial dressing room, it’s now culture shock to come to Tim Hortons Field on the same property and talk to players in their state-of-the-art locker room.
When you talk to them about their all-time franchise-record 15-3 season and the only perfect 9-0 record at home the team has logged since the league went to 18 games, they’re not shy about talking about what it’s been like to be a Hamilton Tiger-Cat this year. But ask them about Bob Young and they absolutely light up.
“Bob is awesome. I’ve got to know Mr. Young awful well over the last eight years and not only is the city deserving, he understands the city, but he, as an owner — I mean caretaker — he is deserving of this,” said offensive lineman Mike Filer, the longest-serving Ticat.
“He just truly, truly cares about the community. He’s a real, real treasure to Hamilton. There’s only one thing missing, and that’s the Grey Cup. I hope we bring it to him now,” said seven-year receiver Luke Tasker.
“Bob Young is a very, very caring person. When I came here, he asked me about my kids. That was important to me. We definitely owe him a lot. We definitely owe a championship for him,” said seven-year Tiger-Cat Speedy Banks.
Rookie head coach Orlondo Steinhauer, who played for the Tiger-Cats the last time they won the Grey Cup in 1999 and worked here as defensive coordinator prior to getting the top job, said The Caretaker is an inspiration.
“It all starts from the top. It’s not a secret. When he called me, he made it very clear that he was very excited that I was going to be named the head coach. But he also made it very clear that my job was to win multiple Grey Cups. I told him we’d have to win one before we could do that.”
Young said having a team this year that some are waiting to declare the greatest Tiger-Cats squad of all-time if they can win the Grey Cup, has been a long time coming.
“It’s a journey, that’s for sure. If you remember 15 years ago, I started by acknowledging that I had no idea what I was doing.
“I called on our fans to help us on this journey.
“It’s not about being any good. It’s a commitment to being better. Commit to that, and magic happens.
“If you embrace the idea that you are not very good, if you embrace your flaws, it allows you to fix them. If you are in denial about your flaws you are not learning.
“What I don’t like about the last 15 years is that it’s taken so long. But if you chart those last 15 years it’s been a steady, upward chart. That team we inherited in 2003 was coming off a 1-17 season.
“I like to point out to people that I improved the team and immediately made it three times as good. We went 3-15 the next three years in a row.
“But we didn’t stop. And we did understand that where we started from, we had to build a culture. I hired four young people,” he said of CEO Scott Mitchell, COO Matt Afinec and the co-managers of football operations, co-general managers Shawn Burke and Drew Allemang.
Young said it wasn’t always the standings that were his measuring stick.
“What you have to do for your sanity is to have a very, very steady upward trending.
“My aspiration is to get to where the Edmonton Eskimos were in the late ’70s.”
Hamilton is now a team with a new stadium to compare with Regina and Winnipeg, Young was an inspiration in the formation of the new Canadian Premier League of professional soccer — his team, the Hamilton Forge, was its first champion. And after not playing host to a Grey Cup here since the disaster of 1996, it will host one in 2021.
“When we took over the team, there was not a chance the city and the citizens would have made the investment they made in 2012 to build the new stadium. It looks like good fortune. But this is 15 years in the making.”
Young’s bottom line has always been the same.
“I care about Hamilton. My job has been to find smart people and to get them excited about what they are capable of doing.”
And he’s thrilled for his city that Hamilton has finally been chosen to play host to a Grey Cup again.
“After what happened here in 1996, the league was skeptical whether Hamilton could host a Grey Cup properly. I’m extremely proud that they’ve now decided that we could.
“Hamilton is economically more prosperous. We want to show off our community. We want fans from around the country to come to Hamilton with an expectation that we’re going to put on a great event.”
BUILDING A LEAGUE FOR THE ‘OTHER’ FOOTBALL
It’s been 15 years now that Bob Young has headed up the Hamilton Tiger-Cats and he is still waiting to hoist a Grey Cup.
But one year into his ownership of the Hamilton Forge in the new Canadian Premier League of soccer and his team has already won the championship.
Considering that Young, for all purposes, invented the new league, that’s probably fair.
Young is basically the reason there’s pro soccer in Halifax, York Region, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton and Victoria. It was because he wanted to keep his word.
“The inspiration for the CPL was that in attempting to get our stadium was that it wouldn’t just be for the Tiger-Cats, but I promised I’d bring a pro soccer team here as well.
“We’d been in the stadium for a while when I remembered: ‘Oh, yeah. We’re supposed to bring a soccer team.’ ”
First, he went to New York to inquire about Major League Soccer. Then he checked out the North American Soccer League, where Tom Fath’s FC Edmonton was playing as the only Canadian team.
“I couldn’t find a league that I liked the economics of at all,” he said.”
One day, he called Tiger-Cats CEO Scott Mitchell into his office and informed him they were going to have to start a soccer league.
“Scott probably did as much as anybody to make it happen,” said Young.
“We did a lot of research on the old Canadian Soccer League and the lack of stability it had. We realized the first thing we had to do was find serious investors.”
Young said the first season of the Forge was more successful than he’d projected.
“We drew better than we were expecting for a first-year team in a first-year league,” he said.
“Of course, we kind of cheated. We had the people in the Tiger-Cats front office organizing it.”
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
