The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Who Is Canadian Football's 'Caretaker'?

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

If you add up the number of professional sports franchises in North America -- that's men and women's pro hockey and basketball, baseball, soccer, the NFL, and CFL -- you'll find we have 180 teams. The person who signs the cheques is called "the owner" for all except one of those teams. Ever since he bought Canadian football's Hamilton Tiger-Cats two decades ago, Bob Young has insisted on being called the "caretaker" and he joins Steve Paikin to discuss that journey. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you add up the number of professional sports franchises in North America, that's men's and women's pro hockey and basketball, baseball, soccer, the NFL, and the CFL, you'll find we have 180 teams. The person who signs the checks is called the owner for all except one of those teams. Ever since he bought football's Hamilton Tigercats two decades ago, Bob Young has insisted on being called the caretaker. As we count down to the 111th Grey Cup game

on November 17th, let's talk football and caretakership with Bob Young, who joins us now from Greenwich, Connecticut. Bob, it's great to see you. How you doing? Steve, a pleasure to be on your show. I'm doing very well, thank you. Excellent.

Well, let's start with the title. Why did you decide to forego the title of owner and decide to be called the caretaker? Because I got involved with the Tycats because I'm a fan first and foremost. And I come from a family of Tycat fans. In my family, three boys, my older brother, Michael, had learning disabilities.

David and I went to university, did very well for ourselves. But we always worried about Michael. On the other hand, like many people with learning disabilities, the finest human being you'd ever met and the biggest tiger cat fan that you've ever met. Michael made a little bit of money on my Red Hat project and very sadly died from melanoma cancer and I was casting about to do something to honour Michael's memory, the Thai cats go bankrupt, and I couldn't let Michael's favourite football's and my extended family's favorite team, be more successful than we had been was an opportunity that I felt I had an obligation to take on.

I never as a kid cheered for the owner. In fact, I never had any interest in the owner. This was my team. And so when we started thinking about how are we going to get, refresh the energy and the enthusiasm for the tiger cats, the one thing I could not be was the owner. So you think about this one, you go, well, the Thai cats have been around for 150 years. My mission, if I had one, because I'm not an athlete, but I am a business guy.

So my contribution was to make the team more financially stable so that it could survive for another 150 years after I was no longer able to help. And therefore, all I actually am is the caretaker of the team for some number of years in the middle between this long history and this long future that we're going to ensure happens. It's such an interesting choice because, of course, a lot of people who buy professional sports franchises, and I'm thinking of Harold Ballot of the Old Maple Leafs

or Jerry Jones of the current Dallas Cowboys, George Steinbrenner of the New York Yankees, they buy these teams because they've got massive egos. And these teams feed their egos. Do you really have that little ego, Bob Young? So the people I enjoy, Steve, and probably you as well, are people who have low ego and high self-esteem. In other words, they know they're good at what they do,

but it's not about them. It's about making the world a better place in some way. And yeah, that's my contribution to the Tiger Cats. I am a fan first and foremost. So no, it's absolutely not about me. And if I ever for a moment start to think it's about me my wife Nancy will slap me up the side of the head and straighten me out. Well the story I heard from back in now this is going back 20 years now the

story I heard was that you sort of were doing your due diligence you asked around town and what you found was not apathy about the situation the Thai cats were in but anger that they had been so bad on the field and so bad at the box office. And you thought, apathy I can't do anything about, but anger I like. Can you explain that thinking? Yeah, yeah.

So it's one of the cute things about my always wearing my yellow tiger cat hat when I'm playing the role of caretaker such as on your show because when I'm in Hamilton all I have to do is take my hat off and no one knows who I am. So when I was first getting involved I did exactly this. I went to Tim Horton's, I went to the gas station, I went to Longo's grocery store, Denninger's deli. And I would just engage people in conversation. I just asked them, Hey, you know, what do you know about the Thai cats? I just asked them, hey, what do you know about the Thai cats? And yeah, either the anger or the disappointment

that the Thai cats were not the team that they grew up cheering for, that the experience going to the game just wasn't as much fun. But no one said, who are the Tiger Cats? And I go, hey, I can work with that. If people had asked me who are the Tiger Cats, I might have hesitated.

But they were all like me. They were all Tiger Cat fans who wanted the Tiger Cats to do better than they had been doing. Fair to say though that financially this has been one of the worst decisions you've ever made in your business life? You have done your homework, Steve. Yes, unequivocally, but I don't make investments. I was very fortunate in my career.

I did a technology open source software company called Red Hat. It did extremely well. The open source software movement that we were part of continues to go from strength to strength. But I made so much money with the Red Hat project that I no longer have to get a return on my investments. I want to get a return on my investments, don't get me wrong. But I don't have to, which means I get to invest in things that I care about, things that I think are important, not necessarily things with the highest return on investment.

And getting involved in my brother Michael's football team was one of those that, you know, goes back several generations in my family. I know it meant so much to all of my friends who I grew up with in Hamilton. And it's just one of those projects that has been a great pleasure to me and my immediate family personally. Yeah, financial disaster, sure. But value creation, it's been a big success. Well, you're going to forgive me because I'm a very nosy guy.

But I mean, I suspect you've lost tens of millions of dollars on this franchise since you've been the caretaker. Do you want to clarify how many tens of millions? No. Unquivocally not, Steve. But I will tell you, the good news is this was our ambition when we sent it to Scott Mitchell and Doug Rye and Matti Afnick and the rest

of the organization. Our mission, yeah, was to win Grey Cups. And we've come this close. But our other equally important mission, possibly more important mission, was to achieve financial stability for the team. In other words, make sure the team was paying its bills and then something, because we can't rely on naive, wealthy people bankrupting themselves to keep the team going if we want the team to continue for another 150 years after we are no longer able to help.

And that's the greatest satisfaction that, as I say, the team of really smart people we've brought to bear on this operation have achieved. So no, I have not lost nearly as much money as I thought I was going to lose in, I don't know, 2008 after four years of a disappointing team on the field and trying to make money playing out of old Ivor Wind with wooden benches without backs to them. And thanks to the visionary investment of the city and the province in the new Tim Horton Stadium, we are now financially stable and we're making money

and it's not only not costing me money, arguably the Tiger Cats are going up in value every year. As a guy who went to his first Thai Cat game in 1968, I am thrilled to hear that. But since you brought the other side of the coin into the equation just a moment ago, I am going to ask you about the fact that you have yet as a owner slash caretaker been able to drink champagne out of the Grey Cup because in 20 years the Thai cats have never won it and I wonder how much that does in fact matter to you. Okay so for

the first four years I didn't know what I was doing in professional sports and and we were I inherited a very bad team and I didn't make it much better for the first four years. At the end of four years, I had a pretty good idea of what makes a good football guy and it's not someone like me. So bringing in, as I say, Scott Mitchell and great guys like Orlando Steinhauer, we really have a very good football operation. We haven't done well the last couple of seasons but that's the up and down of our schedule and of injuries and all the rest of it. But if you don't count

those first four years, the team has actually been quite good on the field. We've been above average in our number of wins and of our playoff appearances. And we've been to the great cap four times. We haven't managed, on at least two of those occasions we should have won. I mean, we lost against Calgary on a stupid penalty on a block that had nothing to do with the play. And then we lost against Winnipeg at Tim Hortons Field.

Again, we just missed the play by two inches. I'm gonna show it here. I'm gonna show it here, Bob, because it was three years ago, almost three years ago, it was December, 2021. And the Ticats were in fact a fingernail away from winning the great cup in Hamilton at Timmy Hose field. I'm gonna ask our director Sheldon Osmond

to remind everybody about that moment. Here we go, Sheldon. I thought you were a nice guy. You're going to break my heart again. Well, let's see. Let's see how heartbroken we are. Sheldon, go for it. Big second down and goal.

Into the end zone for Ackland. Dietrich Nichols was there. It falls incomplete and it is third down. Into the end zone for Ackley. Dietrich Nichols was there. It falls incomplete, and it is third down. Now, not to be overly melodramatic here, but are you still haunted by that play? Because I know I am. I'm haunted by 20 years of not being able

to bring home the Grey Cup to our community here in Hamilton, because I know just how much it means to me, and it means to the hundreds of thousands of Tiger Cat fans in Hamilton, across Canada, and around the world. And yeah, so that's just one example. We had four shots at it. We haven't pulled it out. But as an example, Steve, these are fluky things. You go to a championship game, someone's going to win. It's almost like flipping a coin. As you know, we've launched a professional

soccer team, the Hamilton Forge. And in six years of the league's existence, we've been to the finals six times and we've won four of them. And we're about to win the fifth this weekend in Calgary. So you just never know. It's professional sports. Sports at all levels requires both talent, execution, skill, and this magic luck or fate or whatever you want to call it. Well, that's what I was going to ask because you've done everything that a good owner slash caretaker is supposed to do

to put your team in a position to win. And yet, for the reasons we've discussed, it hasn't happened yet. caretaker is supposed to do to put your team in a position to win and yet for the reasons we've discussed it hasn't happened yet. So the question is what have you done to tick off the football gods that they somehow just aren't smiling on you? Yeah I don't know those gods are they they're digging that knife in. But it's why we're so addicted to sports But it's why we're so addicted to sports, and it's why we're so addicted to the Tiger Cats. And this community that rides the ups and downs with me is what makes it all worthwhile. You know, I start getting caught up in my disappointment,

and then I realize, no, no, I've got several hundred thousand of my best buddies who are suffering along with me. So we can go out for a beer, we can tell the stories, we can remind each other of just how close we've been. And that's why professional sports are so addictive. Do you think about how much longer you would like to own the Tiger Cats for? So I don't own the Tiger Cats anymore.

I am a major investor in the Tiger Cats. And that was done as part of this vision of building an organization that is going to survive any one of us. So this organization is no longer dependent on Bob Young or Scott Mitchell or Alan Kestenbaum and Stelco. This organization will go on into the future. And again, that is the thing I'm most proud of in this whole project is my mission as caretaker was to set up the team for success for the next 150 years. How long I'm involved for Steve, you're gonna have to get out your Ouija ball and you can tell me the answer to that one. I have no idea. Okay, I also want to know since you and I are both from Hamilton and I know I was raised properly to hate the Toronto Argonauts and I wonder if

you were as well. Oh of course, but it goes beyond the Argonauts. As you know, Hamilton is this lovely, but very blue collar town. We let our work speak for ourselves. You know, Toronto is this damn white collar place full of sales and marketing guys, and it's all about the glitz. Whereas in Hamilton, there are so many people like you and me, Steve, who have achieved great success by being disciplined and by building skills. And you run into these organizations who are world-beating organizations out of Hamilton that you and I don't know exist. Because the founder or the owners

don't brag about their business, they go about making their customers more successful, whether those customers are in Hamilton, in Ontario or somewhere around the world. And that's what I just enjoy about the culture that I grew up in and that I am very much part of, part of. It is who I am. I'm not a self-made guy any more than anyone else is.

I've been blessed with great role models and growing up in a great community that has given me skills that have benefited me in many aspects of my life. Wonderful. Let me ask you one last question, and that is very delighted to hear that the Tiger Cats are on much more solid financial footing now.

I'm not sure that can be said about the rest of the league, and the CFL always seems to be sort of you know run with what's the expression on a hope and a prayer and I wonder if I Wonder if your involvement in the league has made it as an entire league more financially viable than before you got there So I'm not going to take credit for that, although I suspect our success does have something to do with it.

So because the Tiger Cats were successful, smart guys like Amar in British Columbia or PK in Montreal are attracted to owning teams who might have hesitated to own a team. First, you know, if the Tiger Cats were continuing to struggle from financial disaster to financial disaster. And so we've given the league a little bit of a model to follow as to how to make these teams successful. But more broadly, Steve, your observation is fair only historically. We're actually doing very well as a league right now. The ownership across the league has never been stronger.

And our understanding of where we need to go to next. Randy Ambrosi, for the last eight years has done just a great job improving every element of our league and he's left the league so much stronger. Randy just announced his retirement. As commissioner. Yeah, he's our commissioner. He's left the league in much, much better shape than he founded in. And the next commissioner, if we find the right person, is going to have an opportunity to really turn this into a world-class league and sell our content competitively in the same way that, you know, the NFL sells NFL games to Canadians, despite not having any teams in Canada, there's no reason we shouldn't be selling our content as enthusiastically

into the States as they do up here. Gotcha. Well, I want to thank you for being the caretaker of my favorite football team for the last 20 plus years. And what does one say at the end of an interview with the caretaker of my favorite football team for the last 20 plus years. And what does one say at the end of an interview with the caretaker of the Tiger Cats, but oskiwiwi. Thanks, Bob Young. Oskiwawa, Steve.

A great pleasure to talk to you today. Thanks so much.