a roaring good time

A roaring good time: Vancouver finally puts on a bash to remember

The Vancouver Sun
Mon Nov 28 2005
Page: A1 / Front
By Pete McMartin

From the vantage point of her 50th Grey Cup, Ethel Wilson of Hamilton looked down Beatty Street and saw that it was good.

The sun had come out, the music was loud and thousands of happy people clogged the street.

The improbable had happened.

No Fun City had finally thrown a good Grey Cup party.

"We've been here since Wednesday morning," Ethel said, "and we've had a great time. This was a good Grey Cup this year, unlike the last one here [in 1999]. Then you didn't even have a parade."

Ethel was the size of a canary, and with the same plumage. She was in Ticat colours, swaddled in a yellow wool ankle-length coat, black pants and shiny yellow boots.

With her was her buddy, Pat Schlegel, a 40-year Grey Cup veteran, who wore what looked like a cross between a tiger skin and a pimp's coat. She had accessorized her outfit with yellow sparkly sunglasses, circa Lucille Ball.

While we talked, people would stop and ask the two of them if they could take their picture.

"Party-wise," Schlegel said, "this year has been fabulous. Last time in '99, it was garbage. There was nothing, no parade, no excitement. People didn't even know or care there was a Grey Cup on. But this has been great."

Surprisingly, she was right. Even among the veterans, the consensus was, Vancouver had finally embraced Grey Cup Week as it should be.

The booster-club parties were jammed with thousands of revellers all week. The revived Grey Cup parade brought 100,000 people downtown, and Pamela Anderson. The Beatty Street Block Party in particular had been a success. When Vancouver last played host to the Grey Cup in 1999, organizers made the mistake of dispersing events throughout the city. The party had no focus. Closing off the two blocks of Beatty Street to traffic concentrated party-goers and gave the festivities real energy.

It was also a godsend for downtown hotels and eateries. On Friday night, my wife and I tried five restaurants in Yaletown before we found one with a table available, and all the nearby bars were jammed. The booster party we landed in was packed, with several hundred people waiting outside to get in. For all the partying, we didn't see one fight or drunk out of control.

"This," said Rick Bone, manager of the Beatty Street Bar & Grill, "has been the busiest weekend we have had since ... well, I don't know when. It may have been our busiest weekend ever."

There were long lines, too, at the CFL merchandise tent on Terry Fox Plaza in front of B.C. Place. The football-helmet chip-and-dip holders were going for $60, and the throwback-style B.C. Lions jerseys were hot sellers at $135. "Grey Cup Week is always busy," said Brent Rurka, the merchandise manager, "but this has been crazy."

It was an opportunity for the crazies to appear, too. There was Steve Shepherd, the Nanaimo school-bus driver dressed as the Cowardly Lion. ("I'm still looking for Kansas," he said.) There was the group of Edmonton Eskimo fans -- a dozen big Alberta guys wearing, of all things, Moroccan skullcaps -- walking down Beatty Street with each of them hanging onto a length of propylene rope because, one said, they didn't want to get separated from each other in case they were drunk. There was Trevor Stoddard, a Saskatchewan Roughrider fan from Saskatoon, in white and green face paint, carrying a Rider flag and a sign that read:

"Tickets: $150

"Trip to Vancouver: $450

"Being Rider/CFL Fan: Priceless."

Another crazy taking in the Beatty Street scene Sunday was Senator Larry Campbell. He looked pleased.

"I've been wandering around here talking to people," Campbell said, "and there's a great spirit. Last time in '99 ... I just couldn't get into it but last night, it was really rocking. The [2,500-square-foot-foot] party tent on Georgia] was jammed with people. Everybody I talked to said it was a great time.

"And thank gawd, the sun came out for the parade."

The success of the week was notable for two other reasons:

One, the crowds turned out despite the absence of the hometown Lions in the Grey Cup. (Note to Wally Buono: there were still Lions fans in the Beatty Street crowd Sunday who were angry with your handling of the quarterbacks).

Two, it was primarily a young crowd that I saw partying through the week.

In a hockey-mad town such as Vancouver, this bodes well for the CFL. There seemed to be an emerging appreciation of the unique cultural niche the Grey Cup celebration inhabits, because it was ours, it was a little funky and weird, and it was for the average fan.

Ironically, the best expression of that I heard on Sunday was from an American. Joe Short was from Baltimore, one of the dozen or so die-hard fans who come for every Grey Cup to honour the memory of the defunct Baltimore Stallions. This was Short's 12th Grey Cup.

"This has been a lot of fun," Short said. He was a beefy guy dressed in a white stetson and a blue Stallions jacket. "Of the three Grey Cups I've been to here, this has been the best. In '99, too many people were dressed like empty seats."

Short and his Stallion colleagues walked in Saturday's parade, and the welcome they received, he said, brought a few of them to tears.

"You see," he said, "the average fan is somebody up here. At a Super Bowl, you couldn't do this. The Super Bowl is a corporate affair: here, this is a family reunion, a place to meet old friends. I mean, this is the kind of event where sometimes, even the players are buying the fans drinks, and they don't make anywhere near the kind of money the guys in the States make. Down there, if you want to talk to a player, it's 'See my agent.'

"Here, it's a whole different ball game."

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