Globe columnist Adam Radwanski, right, and his son Alec Radwanski at the Toronto Argonauts’ Grey Cup victory celebration last November.Adam Radwanski/The Globe and Mail
I didn’t think the Toronto Argonauts would ever mean as much to me again as when I was younger.
They’d been there as a bond with my father, a semi-ironic shared passion with my friends, an opportunity to connect with Canadians from outside my Toronto bubble while drinking unhealthy amounts of beer at Grey Cups around the country.
But my dad died, and life got too busy for my friends and I to get to every game together, and family responsibilities and financial pressures and fear of worse hangovers meant the Grey Cup trips pretty much stopped.
And yet here we are, and I don’t know if I’ve ever been more excited for an Argos home opener.
Fitting that it falls on Father’s Day weekend. Because what’s reignited my passion for the CFL is the football journey onto which it’s sent my nine-year-old, and what that’s unlocked in me, and the idyllically old-fashioned little slice of father-son bonding it’s giving us.
When I first took Alec to see the Argos at BMO Field, a couple of years ago, my expectations were not sky high. The only sport he’d really embraced was basketball. Football is not an intuitive game that’s easily graspable for kids, especially in an era of constant digital competition for their attention. I figured if we stayed much past halftime, without resorting to excessive bribery via stadium snacks, we’d be doing well.
Instead, we made it through the whole game. And another one. Then another.
He didn’t get every nuance of the sport immediately, which was more than fine by me, because it meant I could give fatherly explanations that flexed my knowledge of something he was interested in. But he knew a big play when he saw one, and to make noise when the Argos were on defence, and even during blowouts he insisted on staying in our seats to the end, because that was what real fans did.
For my part, I saw anew the singular appeal of CFL football that had drawn me in decades before. Here was a game sufficiently big-time that Alec could watch elite athletes make highlight-reel plays in front of tens of thousands of people, and sufficiently small-time that he could go down to the players’ tunnel and jostle with other kids for autographs. Less corporate, more boisterous and chaotic than a Leafs or Raptors or Jays game, out in the open air, it was pretty magical through a boy’s eyes. And it was cheap enough that I could take him often.
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When the Argos ended their 2023 season by losing a playoff game they were expected to win, he was the right level of disappointed. When they won the 2024 Grey Cup, he was so eager to go to the championship celebration downtown that I couldn’t resist pulling him from school.
It was, I know, to some extent a product of my own steering. I wouldn’t have pushed him to embrace Canadian football if he hadn’t warmed to it initially. But once he did, I wasn’t above letting him stay up way past his bedtime to go to the odd evening game or saying yes to buying Argos merchandise more often than I should have. And I didn’t go out of my way to disabuse him of the notion that they were as beloved a team as any in this city.
But if I was the one who’d led us to that point in our shared football experience, Alec took us into the next phase of it, if not entirely intentionally.
Over the winter, he got wind from a couple of friends at school that the Toronto Flag Football League, sponsored by the Argos, had a recreational division in our part of town for kids his age. He was eager to give it a try, and with some manoeuvering we got him into the spring season last-minute. (For the uninitiated, flag football is basically touch football, but with defenders needing to pull pieces of Velcro off ball-carriers to end plays.)
Despite losing 63-0 in his first game in the Toronto Flag Football League, Alec Radwanski has shown some ‘nascent leadership skills’ in his first season.Adam Radwanski/The Globe and Mail
When I brought him to the field, two things quickly became apparent.
One was that the league, which takes over high-school football fields and has kids play width-wise across them, is more organized than I expected. It not only has referees and sideline spotters, but staff tracking stats for each player – receiving yards, interceptions, defensive metrics like deflected passes – updated on its website. Somehow this adds up to both a dream come true for kids who’ve watched pro football, and a welcoming environment for newbies.
The other was that Alec had landed on the one team with confusion about who was coaching it, which was a possible explanation for losing their first game 63-0.
Although he still said he’d had fun, a whole season of that threatened to put a damper on the experience for him and a bunch of other eager kids. So I took a deep breath and offered to help coach the rest of the way.
It’s hard for me to fully explain how far outside my comfort zone this was, despite my CFL love.
It’s not just that, with very limited experience playing organized football myself, my play-calling abilities were limited. (Fortunately, I wound up coaching alongside another dad who’d played university football.)
The bigger obstacle was that, while I like to think I’m a pretty fun dad to my own kids, I’m not naturally one of those extroverts to whom other people’s kids gravitate. Trying to direct nearly a dozen nine- and 10-year-olds to play a complicated team sport in front of their parents would’ve sounded to me, until this spring, like a nightmare.
This is not where I tell a heroic tale of how, together, we turned it all around and triumphantly marched toward the championship. The team finished the regular season last week with three wins, seven losses, and a tie. (And the rival team that walloped us the first week, a juggernaut that never lost, subsequently beat us 56-0 and 49-7.)
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But Alec and his teammates visibly improved. A player who initially looked uncertain on the field scored a game-winning touchdown; another whose first couple of attempts at quarterbacking went poorly started to figure it out. They all appear to enjoy football as much or more than when the season started, they seem to like each other, and maybe they’ve discovered a few things about themselves.
I sure have, about myself, which is a gift when you’re well into your 40s.
It turns out that, compensating for my limited technical expertise with decent communication skills and a possible excess of positive reinforcement, I might actually be decent at helping kids – even those who aren’t my own – manage their emotional highs and lows and grow together.
From the sidelines, I’ve done my best to treat Alec like every other kid, even as I’ve seen some nascent leadership skills in his combination of competitiveness and sportsmanship. But I’ve relished our conversations about each game’s highlights, what worked and what didn’t, on the drive home and for days after. Between games, in the long daylight of late-spring evenings, we’ve found ourselves tossing the ball around outside, playing mini-games with other local kids who join in.
To the slight amusement of my wife, and possibly a few other parents who know me well, I’ve become a Neighbourhood Football Dad.
All of this may reach its pinnacle this weekend, when Saturday morning’s flag-football playoffs – which every team makes, and where we might be able to pull off one more win before running into the juggernaut – will give way to the Argos’ opener in the afternoon.
I’m very aware that it may not last.
Tastes change, as our kids like to say when we prod them to eat something they purportedly liked previously, and the younger you are the faster it can happen.
Alec’s Argos enthusiasm could wane if they have a bad season or two, or if kids at school convince him the NFL is what counts. His on-field career could come to a crashing halt anytime, too, if he decides another sport (or no sport) is for him; a flag-football craze that’s swept through his friend group for reasons I don’t fully understand could easily be replaced by something else. At a certain point, as he approaches teen-hood, his dad’s involvement could become a bug rather than a feature.
Adam Radwanski says he wouldn’t have pushed his son Alec to embrace Canadian football if he hadn’t initially warmed to it.Adam Radwanski/The Globe and Mail
I’m also not going to pressure Alec’s brother, five-year-old Felix, to follow in his football footsteps – even if there were early signs of enthusiasm at his first Argos game last fall.
But living in the moment is something I’m always trying to encourage my kids to do, and it’s probably time to practise what I preach.
No matter how close and loving your relationship with your children, it can feel like a constant struggle to stay connected. I do my best to understand and embrace Alec’s tastes in anime or Roblox video games or memes he’s heard about from his friends, even as I try to police them. But particularly when it involves mediums that didn’t exist when I was his age, there can be a distance.
Then something comes along that fits how you vaguely pictured parenthood before the kids were born. Something more analogue, maybe, more transferable between generations, that you can nurture and share.
You know it’s giving you memories you’ll keep the rest of your life, and your kids will too, but first you try to savour it and make it last as long as possible.
So I’m signing up to coach again when flag football resumes in the fall.
And I’ll be buying tickets for all the Argos games we can go to this season.
I’ll be quietly thanking them, every time I’m in the stadium, for what they’ve helped us share.
Alec won’t be thinking about the game that way now; it’s not how kids work. But one day, he just might.
