Hamilton owner can't get rid of famous chant
    'Argos suck!': Team's fans fail to come up with alternate cheer

  Sat 02 Jul 2005

  Byline: Sean Fitz-Gerald
 

  TORONTO - Bob Young is a self-made millionaire who saved his favourite
  football team from bankruptcy and did the impossible by making it
popular again. But the man who could buy almost anything still can't
  do one thing -- make fans of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats stop chanting
  "Argos Suck!"

  Calling the Ivor Wynne anthem "bathroom humour," the locally raised
  owner offered $1,000 to the fan who could come up with the best
  replacement.

  That was in November.

  Eight months later, no replacement has arrived.

  "It's not trivial, it's symbolic," Young said of his quest. "It's the
  same principle as cleaning up graffiti, it's the point that Rudy
  Giuliani proved in New York. If you allow graffiti all over your
  subway trains and all over your city, you create the appearance of
  lawlessness, which does two things: It scares the law-abiding people
  into believing that they're living in a lawless society, and it
  emboldens the rule-breakers.

  "So if 'Argos Suck!' is suddenly a banned and evil thing to say, then
  being a rebel -- in order to shock people -- you say 'Argos Suck!' But
  if 'Argos Suck!' becomes the mantra for the Ticats, in order to shock
  people, what do you say? 'Argos are f------ jerks'? You know, you just
  go down to the next level."

  Young said he has received a number of e-mails and messages from fans
  thanking him for trying to get rid of the chant.

  "All the opposition is very public opposition, all the support is very
  private support," he said. "Because it falls into the attitude of
  prudishness. People don't want to appear prude, so they don't want to
  fight ... and say, 'Look, 'Argos Suck!' is a trashy, lowbrow cheer.'
  Because it makes them sound like their grandmother, and they don't
  want to sound like their grandmother."

  The opposition has a clever Web site in its corner. Www.argos-suck.com
  has become home to a number of quirky, colourful, funny Hamilton fans.
  There are pictures of celebrities -- including Young -- being ambushed
  by fans holding "Argos Suck!" buttons over shoulders and behind heads.
  Toronto Mayor David Miller and Argos running back John Avery were
  victims. Mr. T and comedian Colin Mochrie posed willingly (though not
  together).

  "Absolutely, we're having fun," Argos-suck.com president Jack O'Neill
  told the Post this week. "We're feeding a need of a certain segment of
  Hamilton and national society. There's certain intrinsic value in
  continuing on with what we started with, that being a chant that
  started spontaneously and at a grassroots level. We think the fans in
  Hamilton and across the country are intelligent enough not to fall for
  a manufactured chant."

  Hamilton hosts Toronto only once this year, on Sept. 5. But when the
  Argos came to Ivor Wynne Stadium in the pre-season finale last month,
  the chant was very much alive. It was once even incited by the public
  address announcer.

  Young said he has no plans to try and shut the opposition down because,
  "it's not like I'm the ayatollah and [O'Neill] can't pass out his
  bumper stickers if he wants to."

  The second-year owner said the "whole thing amuses me," adding his
  daughter actually put an "Argos Suck!" sticker on one of her
  high-school textbooks in North Carolina last year. But that does not
  mean he will give up the fight to find another cheer for Ticat fans to
  use against their big-city rivals.

  "I can't say enough good things about [Young], because without him we
  wouldn't have a team, we wouldn't have a rivalry, we wouldn't have
  anything," O'Neill said. "I have the utmost respect for him and
  everything he stands for and everything he's done so far -- with the
  exception of trying to ban our beloved chant."