OTD: Hamilton Tiger-Cats def. Buffalo Bills 38-21

ON THIS DAY – August 8

1961, 65 years ago today, saw the Canadian Football League (CFL) Hamilton Tiger-Cats take on the American Football League (AFL) Buffalo Bills with a score of 38-21.

What does that matter? What’s the significance of this game?

In 1941, the CFL saw their Winnipeg Blue Bombers take on a previous, unrelated American Football League (the retroactively named AFL III) Columbus Bullies. This would be the first time the CFL saw their team take on a professional football team from a United States based league.

Of their three matchups that year, the Blue Bombers won the first matchup before dropping the final two.

This would be the final time in nearly twenty years that a professional Canadian football team would defeat a professional American football team.

Seven years later, the Montreal Alouettes would lose to the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) Brooklyn Dodgers (named after but otherwise unrelated to the baseball team) 27-1.

The CFL would return to a Pan-American football exhibition game series for one game during both the 1950 and 1951 CFL & NFL seasons, which saw the NFL’s New York Giants twice defeat the Ottawa Rough Riders.

Finally, over a three season stretch, the Canadian/American football Pan-American exhibition games would take place from 1959-1961, with the Toronto Argonauts facing the Chicago Cardinals, Pittsburgh Steelers and the Cardinals again (now in St. Louis) and losing each game.

Days after the final Argonauts game, the NFL’s Chicago Bears would defeat the CFL’s Montreal Alouettes before the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats would face AFL’s Buffalo Bill.

It was the final game that saw the team from Canada finally get a win over the team from the USA, and it would be the last time in recent history that the CFL and NFL held any type of Pan-American exhibition game.

Why bring up any of this? How could this possibly be relevant to the United States Pirate Party?

Sport and camaraderie are not things people should outright dismiss as “bread and circus,” nor are they something only meant to be enjoyed by the athletes or the athletically gifted.

Sport offers a unique chance to bring people closer together. Some might view sports as simple escapism, but that is not the case; sports allow you to build a shared sense of community and togetherness.

Athletes competing together grow that bond in shared experience on the field. Fans cheering on the same team hold a shared, unified objective that will either end with them riding the high of victory together or feel that disappointment of a loss. The whole mixture lends to a culture of belonging and togetherness, as you can’t have a team without fans and vice versa.

Sports diplomacy is a real thing, and it’s something people don’t always appreciate. Coming off of the World Cup, it’s easy to think feelings of national unity or excitement can only come during big events such as this or say the Olympics, but that’s the grandest example, not the lone one.

We here in the USPP recognize the importance of Pan-Americanism in our platform, and coupled with the point of this ultimately being “sports and camaraderie are important,” then you might be able to see exactly where this is heading.

The MLB, NBA and NHL all have teams Canadian teams, making the idea of watching two teams from the USA and Canada compete a less novel idea.

But the NFL and CFL are specifically and exclusively leagues in their countries, with no international team. The NFL doesn’t have a team in Toronto, and the CFL doesn’t have teams in the USA (aside from a brief experiment in the 1990s).

The Pan-American exhibition games are important pieces of sport history. We haven’t seen a Canadian football team and an American football team compete in an exhibition game in over 60 years, and I for one believe we are long overdue.

The Toronto Blue Jays can play the New York Yankees and nothing would be out of the ordinary. Those games don’t rally Canadians vs US citizens behind their teams the way a more novel game might.

The NFL, an institution here in the USA, having a team face a CFL team would be one that could rally Americans, if only for a game, in a game that means nothing besides bragging rights.

For the sake of Pan-American relationship building, I think it’s important to remember how effective sports can be at building up that relationship.

So not only do we remember the final game played between a currently active CFL team and a currently active NFL team, but we hope to see more Pan-American exhibition games in the future.

Beyond the NFL and CFL, there are leagues like the Liga de Fútbol Americano Profesional (LFA) in Mexico and Superliga Nacional de Futebol Americano in Brazil.

The Pan-American interleague exhibition games don’t need to be limited to the NFL and CFL.

In the spirit of Pan-Americanism, and in the spirit of sports diplomacy, we not only celebrate what today means to the spirit of both those things, but we also call for their return.

Of course, it doesn’t need to be a gridiron code; any interleague international play between otherwise domestic leagues would be exciting for all involved. But let’s call for the precedent that we have to return, because we have to start somewhere.

I eagerly await rematch between the Chicago Bears and the Montreal Alouettes. I am already picturing how a Caudillos de Chihuahua vs Saskatchewan Roughriders game might play out.

If I close my eyes, I can see the Coritiba Crocodiles facing the Cleveland Browns, and I think that’s beautiful.