With great sadness, I left the world of Champions League football back in 2007. After an aimless year back home in Toronto after five years of living as a starving student/artist in Montreal, I finally got a full-time admin job at a major Canadian university in September 2006. Sadly, the 9-5 ‘Bankers’ hours meant that I was no longer able to plunk myself down cappuccino in hand at my local café on a Spring afternoon and witness a gang of eleven millionaires lose dejectedly every other week. This had been one few privileges enjoyed during my five-year, cheque-to-cheque life in Montreal, a city where no one would look at you sideways for spending your afternoons watching football instead of wasting away in the sort of inhuman office environments more native to my hometown Toronto. I may have been malnourished and in rags, still recovering from my McGill degree and confused about what sort of direction life was supposed to take after some eighteen years of formal schooling, but I was certain about football and the beautiful tension of those European nights enjoyed while the Montreal sun worked its way down Boulevard St. Laurent.
While league football has a comforting predictability welcome on a hung-over Saturday morning, Champions League football is an altogether more chaotic brand of kick-about perfectly suited to cure the mid-week, end-of-Winter blahs suffered by even the most hardened Montrealers. Sure, life has its problems, bills piled up, snow drifts everywhere, endless darkness. Yet all these seemed insignificant when faced with an away leg against Juventus, the ‘Old Lady’ capable of reducing the boys that played her to tears, or the prospect of playing Barcelona at Stamford Bridge buoyed only by a measly away goal. Football at its best helped put things into perspective.
I had a place I went -- most of us Montreal football types did, who couldn’t afford heat, never mind cable. Mine was Euro-Deli, a hole-in-the-wall café at the edge of Plateau Mont-Royal. By night, it was a Montreal-hipster staple where cheap slices could be enjoyed alongside a cold Americano. By day though, and there were far too many, it was the hangout of choice for us neighbourhood football nerds clamouring to take-in whatever TSN had on offer on a Champions League afternoon. In some desperate moments, like when a mouth-watering tie emerged from the fog of a group of sixteen first-leg matches but had escaped the attentions of the cable network programming staff, we might have to pay the illegal cover at the dingy sports bar up the street to watch games on absurd Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Asian satellite channels. But for the most part, Euro-Deli was our home away from home; no cover charge, service with a smile, and football served up on the big ‘small-screen’ TV up on the corner ledge (after some minor pleading with the cooler-than-thou cashier to change it from MuchMoreMusic).
We made up a motley crew of ne’er do wells, some of us half- or even one quarter-employed, each from different national and ethnic backgrounds and not always harmonious in support or opinions but in complete agreement on one thing: it was better back in the eighties when it was the European Cup and men were men and each league champion played each other in a straight two leg knockout with none of this group stage baloney it’s a money-grab but yeah I’m gonna watch anyway in November so what is it to you? A lot of talkers in both official languages. We had a French-speaking Tunisian, an aristocrat and a true neutral but with a slight inclination to the Italian sides who smoked weird French cigarettes and looked like character straight out of a Joseph Conrad novel. We had an Italian-Montrealer who did tiling at some point in the day, when exactly no one could tell, and had a hard inclination to the Italian sides, mostly Roma with a tinge of disgust leveled toward those ‘bastardos’ Internazionale. We had a piano-playing, womanizing St. Laurent drifter named Chuck, a guy you could spot a mile-away with his enormous disordered dollop of white hair who shouted ‘Go Leafs!’ when the play was less than exciting which varied depending on a number of factors, mostly the number of German clubs involved. We had a Benfica-maniac that worked behind the counter who would leave the queued-up Quebecois clientele in a tizzy when he’d leave the cash to revel in Porto’s inevitable (except that one year) knockout. And we had a rotating cast of guys off the street, regulars for two weeks who would disappear into the Montreal winter and re-appear without warning five months later for a semi-final, only to disappear for four more months. We were loved and hated by the staff, with a lot of the latter and smidgens of the former, especially on -30 degree days when no one else would have been stupid enough to go outside. But we would be there rain or shine on a Tuesday or a Wednesday to remind everyone that football was here to cut through even the most pretentious of pretentious neighbourhoods.
Those days are behind me now but I know that yesterday the same cast and crew would have been in attendance with their pizza slices and their lattes, probably with more than a few new faces, happy to see Roma knockout those overachievers Real Madrid in the second leg of the round of sixteen. It’s a phenomenon that is out of reach in cities like Toronto, cities where young men, until they get their priorities in order, are going to be forever condemned to watch reruns of the Champions League in the dull domestic silence of the living room, never knowing the fleeting joy of an afternoon on the edge of Spring savoured in a café in the dubious company of other football-loving Peter Pans.
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