Ticats' owner offers prize in bid to get fans to drop anti-Argo chant

By DAVID NAYLOR

Thursday, November 11, 2004 - Page S1

Bob Young has changed a lot about the Hamilton Tiger-Cats since he purchased the Canadian Football League team more than a year ago.

He hired a new head coach, installed a new scoreboard and cleaned up Ivor Wynne Stadium. Now, however, he wants to do away with a Ticats tradition some hardcore fans consider sacred: He wants the Hamilton faithful to drop the oft-heard chant "Argos suck!"

"First, it is just crude bathroom humour," Young wrote on the team's official website. "Tiger-Cats football is about aspiring to bring out the best in all of us, that chant does not pass this test.

"But secondly, and my primary beef, is that it is just dumb. As instead of saying anything good about the Ticats, it implies our team must be really bad if we've got a 13-game winless streak going against such a team. We can do better."

Young has even gone so far as to offer a $1,000 prize to be shared by Ticats fans who can come up with a better cheer or insult to use when the Toronto Argonauts come to town.

"[We want] to communicate to the moms and dads that taking your kids to Ivor Wynne is a safe and positive family outing," Young said yesterday. "And we want cheering for the Tiger-Cats to stand for something more important and more positive than just winning or losing football games."
That, however, does not include the group of fans behind argos-suck.com, a website dedicated to displaying various people and places photographed alongside the words "Argos suck!"

The site includes everyone from Toronto Mayor David Miller to rock stars and includes settings from the Berlin Wall to Mount Rushmore.
"Even Bob can make mistakes once in a while," the website's introduction stated yesterday.

" 'Argos suck!' is a single truism," said Jack O'Neill, who manages the website from his home in Calgary, "a glue that bonds together Canadian football fans from every corner of the nation and every walk of life."

O'Neill, an environmental consultant originally from Ancaster, Ont., said his group will be offering $1,001 in non-legal tender to anyone who comes up with an improved Ticats cheer and is willing to pay for a new website domain for his group. But he didn't sound confident that would happen.

"I have tremendous admiration and respect for Bob Young and what he stands for," O'Neill said. "But I think he may have a fundamental misunderstanding of the mentality of the average Hamilton Tiger-Cats fan. 'Argos suck!' has been a cheer that's been used for the better part of 30 years in Hamilton. And I suspect its use will continue for another 30 years."

Young said he's sympathetic to the hardcore fan who wants to continue using the chant.

"Many fans in the last two decades have grown up with it and consider it as much a part of cheering for the Ticats as 'Oskee Wee Wee' is to me," he said. "But there were only 11,000 of those fans left by the end of last year. The 16,000 new fans who came this year did not come in earlier years because of their concerns over the rough atmosphere at the stadium."