2 weeks Ago By [email protected] (Edward Keenan)
So if you’re a Toronto sports fan with complaints, you now pretty much have one guy to take them to: . This doesn’t apply to the PWHL’s , and won’t to the forthcoming . But beyond that, it’s one-stop-shopping for your pro sports owner-bashing: the , the , the , , the , the Marlies.
All of them now majority owned by Rogers Communications, which is controlled by executive chairman Edward Rogers. Oh, and they also own the Rogers Centre, Scotiabank Arena, have the lease on Coca-Cola Coliseum and BMO Field, and own the broadcast rights for the and . For a sports fan, there’s something satisfying about that.
For years with the Leafs in particular, the owner was a pension plan, and it was hard to tell if its controlling executives (never mind the teachers whose money they were spending) cared about hockey one way or the other. And whether they did or not, how could you figure out who was responsible for what they did as a result? Then we entered the age of multiple competing telecoms sharing ownership, which kept the faceless corporate Borg impression in place. Better to have a person you can identify as being responsible.
The years in Maple Leafs history were an unending nightmare in the sports pages and a clownshow in the news pages, but at least we all knew who to blame. In New York, Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was a larger-than-life character (even fictionally portrayed on Seinfeld). In Dallas, former Mavericks owner Mark Cuban acted as a stand-in for fans.
In Los Angeles, one-time Lakers owner Jerry Buss became the lead character in the HBO TV series about the Showtime-era championship team and the arrival of the NBA as a prime-time sport. has become a source of entertainment in itself even for non-soccer fans. Edward Rogers now has control of the Leafs, the Raptors, the Jays, Toronto FC, the Argonauts, plus Rogers Sportsnet, Scotiabank Arena and Rogers Sports is all drama and storylines.
It needs characters we can root for. And characters we can blame. Conveniently, Edward Rogers already has a bit of a head start on the blame front.
Not only is there inexplicably a statue of his dad outside the Blue Jays’ home stadium — yet no statues of franchise greats Joe Carter, Dave Stieb or Jose Bautista — but he would often already emerge as the apparent bad guy when the reporting of backroom drama over big MLSE decisions got done. In the jockeying among board members, who wanted to shove local basketball-management sainthood candidate Masai Ujiri out of town? . When MLSE was considering bidding on a WNBA team, who was foolish enough to veto the idea? .
Not that the guy is what you’d call larger than life. At this point, he’s about as anonymous as a billionaire owner of one of the country’s larges companies and most of its biggest city’s sports franchises can be. You get occasional and glimpses into the swirl of drama and backstabbing that seems to surround his family.
But he could probably walk down Yonge St. without being recognized. This isn’t like Jay-Z owning a piece of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and being the automatic face of the franchise.
And granted, the stuff we do know about him isn’t likely to get fans excited. But here’s the other thing: mostly, for fans, who owns the majority of the company that owns our teams is not something to care much about. What’s happening with the general manager, the coach, the players is likely more consequential from a fan’s point of view than the changes in the boardroom structure.
The biggest way owners actually become something to care about is when they refuse to spend money, or when they insist on micromanaging the team like it’s their own fantasy league project. Ballard was guilty of both of those things. Edward Rogers has so far shown no signs of wanting to do either.
If its $4.7-billion deal to snap up Bell Canada’s 37.5 per cent stake in MLSE is completed, Rogers will control 75 per cent of the Maple Leafs’ And so the main role an owner plays is as the personification of the team as an entity.
Someone to shake a finger at while angrily demanding the firing of the general manager, or to point the finger at when the team loses for decades on end. War, the Colin Powell doctrine says, is like a china shop: “you break it, you bought it.” Sports ownership is a bit different: you buy it, you get blamed for it being broken.
After a few decades of boardroom blankdom, we have Edward Rogers to kick around now..
