Best of this night was when a beer seller went by, stopped hawking his wares, leaned over the rail and yelled "Argos suck." Tough town. Never see that at the Rogers Centre.
From a pure football standpoint, being this close is heaven. The players suddenly grow six inches and put on 50 pounds, and you can hear the collisions a long way.
Along the bench you can catch one coach yelling, another explaining quietly what happened and how it should be fixed. You can, as a great old line said, smell the sweat.
This kind of closeness is disappearing from the CFL.
And those are only some of the stories he could tell. I'll bet there were a number of them that he could not repeat.
I had season ticket way up on the other side, and every once in a while during a break in the game, I would look over at the visitor's bench. You could see the players turning around to the crowd. Some would put their hands to their mouths to say something, some would gesture.
Being that far away, I couldn't hear what was said. Over the many years, I'll bet there were some classic exchanges. This league has had its share of great characters.
It would be worth the price of admission just to sit there and hear some of them. Don't think I would bring the children there though.
As he said in the article, the closeness will disappear in the new stadium. The new stadium will be the home for all the Pan Am soccer games and with a soccer field being 10 yards wider than a CFL field, the closeness will definately be gone and I am sure the new stands will be well back for safety reasons too.