Game Boys — The Argo owners

By Trevor Cole
Originally published in Toronto Life magazine, 2004



Here comes Pinball.

Watch out, here he comes—Mike “Pinball” Clemons, the fireplug ex-running back and head-coach of the Toronto Argonauts, charging off the SkyDome field with his players after the pre-game warm-up. Look out, he’s got a big smile on his face, his arms are open wide...here he comes…

Bam! He plows into David Cynamon with a huge bear hug. Bam! He crashes into Howard Sokolowski with another. Then he spins off toward the dressing room, leaving a churn of joy in his wake, and the team’s two co-owners checking their body parts. Says Sokolowski, with a kind of bewildered glee, “He breaks a rib every time he does that.”

You want a quick signal that things have changed in Argo land? Imagine that happening when New York’s Sherwood Schwartz owned the team. Or TSN Enterprises. Or Harry Ornest. Yes, things are very different for the Argonauts these days. For the first time in three decades, the team has local owners. And Pinball Clemons has decided they’re huggable.

With all that had befallen the Argos in the last few years, slipping from one clumsy set of hands into another, and finally from Schwartz’s loose grip into ignominious bankruptcy, it was possible to hear last November’s announcement that two new owners had emerged and merely shrug, as if this latest stage was simply a postponement of the end. One of these guys owned a company that made no-name cleaning products, the other one built pretty houses. Sure they were rich, but what did they know about restoring a 131-year-old football franchise to respectability?

And then a series of strange things occurred. These two unknown factors spent a bit of money and laid new turf onto the SkyDome field, with earnest talk about players’ safety. They beefed up the team’s medical staff. They found, in TSN’s president Keith Pelley, someone knowledgeable and savvy enough to be the team’s president and CEO, then hired him. They devised and announced plans for a new open-air stadium on the U of T’s Varsity site, using the Montreal Alouettes’ success at McGill University’s old stadium (51 consecutive sell-outs and counting) as their model. Argo fans began to return to their seats—an average of about 22,000 a game. The team itself started to play with something like…hope. And these two guys most people had never heard of a year ago suddenly became worthy of a closer look.

So now here I am to take in game seven of their season, which has the 4-2 Argos trying to solidify their hold on second place against the 3-3 Edmonton Eskimos. I’ll be spending the first half with Sokolowski, the second with Cynamon, and I’ll tell you this—it’s not the game I’ll be watching.


Pre-Game

Eighteen months ago, these two men had never met. But, as a Globe and Mail story noticed, their fates seemed to be linked: They lived in the same Forest Hill neighbourhood; their 10-year-old sons were in the same class at Upper Canada College. The Globe reported too that they once “went after the same cottage.” In fact, it was a bit eerier than that.

In the summer of 2003, David Cynamon, who’s married to Stacey Pencer, daughter of the late Gerry Pencer, and sits on the board of the Gerry and Nancy Pencer Brain Trust, was visiting his in-laws at their spread on Lake Joseph. Tooling around the lake on a JetSki, he noticed a For Sale sign marking a large cottage with an indoor pool. He liked the look of it, so he quickly splashed back to the Pencer place, grabbed some clothes and his interior designer, who was fortuitously visiting (the very rich like to keep their designers handy), and returned within the hour. While they were touring the property, the designer snapped a few pictures, one of which happened to show, down on the dock, another couple who’d come to view the same listing at the same moment. Only later, when the two men were first getting to know each other, did Cynamon come to realize that the man in the picture, standing on the dock in a linen blazer (“Who wears a blazer when it’s 80 degrees?” Cynamon had wondered), was Howard Sokolowski.

At about the same time that they were in the market for vacation properties, the two men were both, separately, negotiating with Sherwood Schwartz to become investors in the Argos. Cynamon, for instance, was prepared to take on 51 per cent of the team. But in truth Schwartz wanted out completely, and who could blame him—he had no idea what he was doing. The previous year, under his ownership, the team had generated all of $3 million, barely a third of what was needed to break even. When CFL commissioner Tom Wright was finally forced to, as he says, “terminate the franchise,” as if he were shooting a lame horse, he began approaching a list of nine possible new owners who would be “local, committed and connected”—everything, in other words, that Schwartz had never been. Of these nine, Wright remembers, Sokolowski and Cynamon stood out. “They had tremendous business credentials,” he says. “They were passionate about the CFL and the Argonauts, and they were really just genuine guys.”

During an April 2003 breakfast meeting at the Four Seasons, Wright and the property developer, Sokolowski, who are roughly the same age, spent an hour comparing vivid memories of past Argo teams. No doubt at some point Sokolowski mentioned his fervent support of Jewish charities like Mount Sinai Hospital and the United Jewish Appeal (for which he’d co-chaired a committee that raised $65 million for the Israel Emergency Fund) and may even have confided that he once yanked a Tribute Communities ad out of the Toronto Star to protest news coverage that he considered “pro-Palestinian.” Whatever the range of their conversation, Wright must have gotten a sense of Sokolowski’s willingness to commit to a cause because he was left “instantly impressed.”

He had similar high regard for Cynamon, a long-time CFL follower and an entrepreneur who’d had success with the internet stock-ticker company NHC Communications in the early nineties before being drafted in 1995 by his father-in-law, Gerry Pencer, founder of the huge bottling company Cott Corp., to save a failing cleaning products division. Cynamon bought 66 percent of the business and within five years had increased revenues sevenfold.

In these two men, in other words, Wright had exactly the combination of football passion and turnaround talent he needed, and when it became clear that neither man was willing to take on the entire burden of saving the league’s most important team, the lynchpin of its television viewership and ad revenue, it came down to getting the two men together.

As Sokolowski remembers it, his first meeting with Cynamon went this way: “I called him up, I said ‘you got a half an hour?’ He said, ‘Sure come on over.’ I came over. We spent the next five hours together. We got along really well; there seemed to be a chemistry.” As a 51-year-old man on his third marriage, Sokolowski is obviously someone who puts a lot of stock in chemistry, and given that his first meeting with his third present wife, Linda Frum, was a blind date, he clearly doesn’t mind making the odd leap on of faith.

After that initial encounter, the 40-year-old Cynamon had equally warm feelings for Sokolowski. “If he’d been a woman, I would have fallen in love with him,” says Cynamon. “Whatever doubts I’d had, they were gone.”

[LINEBREAK]

A few minutes before the start of the game, David Cynamon stands in clogs with his shirttail flapping, happily chatting with players and coaches near the sidelines of the SkyDome field, while Sokolowski’s 10-year-old step-son Sammy, through his marriage to Frum, buzzes around, living a kid’s dream of hanging out with pro athletes. Of these three, Sokolowski seems the least at ease.

Partly it’s nerves. “This is when I start to freak,” he says. “I haven’t quite learned to lose yet.” It also has to do with a certain old-world propriety. When Clemons signals for him to come close to the field to greet the players as they come off, this tall, shy man does so reluctantly, as if it really isn’t his place. Players and owners, in Sokolowski’s view, are a bit like church and state. In contrast to Cynamon, who played football for York University and likes to have team members over for dinner, Sokolowski tells me, “I don’t spend much time with the players. Only because, it’s not appropriate.” And there’s a third issue involved: me. Howard Sokolowski isn’t happy getting too much attention. A public profile, he says, “is not something I feel very comfortable with.”

It’s not as if Sokolowski hasn’t had connections to the very public world of pro sport before. He was fleetingly part of an American-led consortium that bought the SkyDome in 1999, and he teamed up with a group of people that included current Ontario finance minister Greg Sorbara to purchase the St. Catherines Blue Jays, then the class-A farm team of the big league club. But there, as with Tribute Communities, the company he owns with partner Al Libfeld, which has built over more than 20,000 homes in and around Toronto, he kept to the background. Right now, frankly, though he’s willing to talk about plans for the new stadium, and about his decision to team up with Cynamon to preserve the Argo legacy, he’d much rather be up in the stands, watching the game like any fan.

The First Half — Edmonton’s Sean Fleming kicks off 52 yards to Toronto’s Chris Cunningham, who brings it back 14 yards to the Toronto 37.

Sokolowski, it seems, is a bit of a worrier. “David is very much an optimist,” he says when I ask him, up in the owners’ box, how he and his new partner differ. “David tends to be a little more aggressive and I tend to be a little more cautious. I tend to say ‘okay, but what happens if it rains.’ We’re a good mix that way.”

The fact is, when you’re the fledgling owner of a troubled sports franchise, there are all kinds of reasons for to worry. Can the Argos, for example, consistently attract the 20,000 fans a game and generate the $8 to $10 million dollars a year necessary to break even, when the team hasn’t managed it in years? Sokolowski is optimistic enough to think he and Cynamon have that one covered. “We’ll lose money in the SkyDome,” he readily admits. But once in the new $80-million venue ($35 million of that covered by federal and provincial funding, $30 million by Argonaut debt, and $15 million by private fundraising already secured by the University of Toronto), he insists they’ll be fine. “We believe we have a business model that will support 22 to 25 thousand people coming to the new Varsity stadium.”

But sometimes there are worries that can’t be fixed with business plans. Sokolowski had an example of those his very first game.

The Argos’ new turf—made with blades of synthetic grass poking through a base of ground-up rubber—had just been unveiled the day before, but because of time constraints, it had to be installed over the existing worn AstroTurf, rather than on the SkyDome’s concrete floor. That made the field extra bouncy and, in the view of the Argo’s opponents, the Saskatchewan Roughriders, unsafe. Twenty minutes before the game, a member of the Roughriders senior management approached Sokolowski, who’d just finished a radio interview, and told him they were sorry, but they weren’t going to play. Sokolowski, as he relates this story, clutches his chest. “What do you mean you’re not playing?” he said. After about 20 minutes of argument, which apparently included Sokolowski’s threat of a lawsuit, the Roughriders relented. And Following the pre-game ceremony, Sokolowski took the elevator to the box level. In the time it took him to get from the field to his seat, Saskatchewan’s star quarterback, Nealon Greene, broke his leg. “I see the quarterback lying there, and I think, okay, my CFL career is about 10 minutes, and then we’re gonna be served.”

The injury was deemed non-turf related, and he can laugh about it now, but you get the sense that Sokolowski is always thinking ahead to the next plausible catastrophe. Expressions like “uh oh” spring readily to his lips. He manages that tendency, as well as he can, by focusing on the concrete. As a builder, Sokolowski is known as a detail man. And having been talked into the Varsity site by Cynamon, who was adamant, he now spends much of his time worrying over the fine points of zoning, planning and politics. “Any successful business is always a question of detail, there isn’t a detail too small,” he says, anxiously riveted to the action on the field. “I guess that sounds like a cliché, but it’s absolutely true. Oh, geez!” He squirms in his seat after a nifty seven-yard run by Edmonton’s Mike Pringle. “The detail there was he should have been tackled five yards earlier!”

Watching Sokolowski watch his team play a football game, or at least trying to have a conversation with him as he does, is itself a nerve-fraying experience. Here’s Sokolowski on his love of building relationships out of business opportunities. “By far that’s the nicest thing I’ve found in business. That and looking after—Run! Run! Run! Run! Run!”

On his developing comfort with Cynamon: “It’s very important to me that the personal relationships I develop—Oh! What a catch! What a catch! Whooo!”

On his extensive philanthropic efforts: “Another thing is Linda’s and my involvement in the Jewish—Oh yes! Yesssss! Yeeessss!”

If the Argo ownership used to lack a certain passion or conviction, they seem to have that problem licked.

Now if only they could do something about John Avery. Two years ago the best running back in the CFL, Avery jumped at the chance to play for the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings last year. After tearing up his knee, he underwent surgery and became a free agent, and the Argos picked him up, making him one of the highest paid players in the league. He hasn’t been playing like it, though, and throughout the first half of this game he’s been having trouble hanging on to the ball.

“We listened to our people,” says Sokolowski, after Avery’s third dropped pass. “On their recommendation we signed him.” He pauses with a Catskill comic’s timing. “They’ve all been fired now.”

As the first half draws to a close, with his team ahead 15 to 10 after a safety, two Noel Prefontaine field goals, and an 11-yard touchdown pass to 2003 all-star Tony Miles, Sokolowski has time to worry about one more detail. Cynamon, having spent the first half down on the sidelines, makes a brief appearance in the owner’s box before heading off to do a radio interview. As Cynamon starts down the corridor, Sokolowski pushes through the owner’s box crowd, which at half-time includes a grinning Mike Bullard, an always-talking ex-NFL slot-back Johnnie Mitchell, father-in-law developer Murray Frum and, somewhere in the obscuring midst, ex-White House insider David Frum. He makes it to the door and shouts after his partner, “David! David! Remember, it’s Sokolowski! Okay? Sokolowski!”

The Second Half — Toronto’s Noel Prefontaine launches the ball 58 yards to the Edmonton 17. Winston October brings it back 18 to the Edmonton 35.

David Cynamon knows how to pronounce his partner’s name—“He wants more of an ‘o’ and you look at it, it’s more of an ‘aw’,” he says. The problem, at the moment, is that he can’t find the press box. “Do you know where it is?”

When he finally decides on a direction, he moves faster than you’d expect a short man wearing clogs to be able to move. Where Sokolowski has a likeably slouchy, self-effacing air, Cynamon carries his small, athletic frame with absolute certainty. “If I’ve got my mind set on something,” he says, “I’m gonna get it done.” As a York University receiver, he was the smallest player on the team, and any success he had required overachievement. This may be why, although Sokolowski shows up in newspaper society pages throwing parties to toast David Frum’s Bush book or chairing fundraising events, Cynamon’s recorded history is pretty much all business, from starting a bicycle-cab company with a friend when he was 17, to launching and then selling NHC Communications, to co-founding Playdium Entertainment in 1994 and from there to cleaning up with KIK. Today he has the white teeth of a man who has made white teeth a priority, and he has attacked the business of resuscitating the Argos the same way.

“It was just a mess,” says Cynamon, of the state of the Argos’ front office when he first arrived. “There was no culture when you walked into these offices. None. There was no sense of urgency if a fan needed help or needed some support.” While Sokolowski has focused most of his attention on the new stadium, Cynamon, whose father owned the concession stands at Edmonton Eskimo games, has addressed the things he understands—the product on the field, and the buzz in the stands.

“It was silent in here, a big morgue,” he says of the old atmosphere during games in SkyDome. Now the stadium pulses incessantly with raucous, amplified life. He wants this to pull not only fans to the stadium, but viewers to the tube. “What are they saying on TV,” he shouts to his wife over the noise, his Blackberry pressed to his ear. “What are they saying on TV? Does it look good on TV?”

It’s all about eyeballs, insists Cynamon, and creating momentum for the team as it heads to the new stadium, scheduled to open in 2006. He rhymes off the changes he introduced in a characteristic burst of rapid-fire patter: “We have more cheerleaders; we have cheerleaders on the field and in the stands now; we have more people working on the Jumbotron and the creative around that; we have fireworks on all four posts that go off every time they score; we’ve got entertainment outside the stadium—we call it ‘from car to seat,’ where the buzz happens right from when you park your car; we have music; we have entertainers; we spend more on that, because we want the experience to be great...”

In the midst of this stream, Cynamon declares, “we gotta be victorious.” It’s a word he seems to like. “I managed to be victorious over my competition,” he says, in describing how, through a series of bold consolidation plays throughout the United States, he turned KIK Corporation from a single-plant operation into one of the world’s largest private label manufacturers in household cleaning products, delivering store brands to 85 of the top 100 retailers in North America, including Wal-Mart. Victorious teams, of course, are the surest path to a full stadium, and though no firm five-year plan has been established (“This year is a learning curve for all three of us,” says Keith Pelley), Cynamon at least has an ex-player’s sense of what not to do. “Oh, don’t hand-off on a play like that!” he shouts at the field, as Damon Allen fails to gain the necessary yard on a third-down play. “That’s where you quarterback-sneak!” He shakes his head and loudly mutters to himself. “That’s dumb. That’s really dumb. That’s really dumb.”

Not that Cynamon comes across, as it might seem, as militant and superior. He’s far too eager, too buoyant for that. But having an insider’s awareness of what’s happening on the field, he seems to accept that it’s his role to provide his new partner with an on-going education in the nuances of the Canadian game. “I think I bring another aspect to it than he brings as a fan,” he tells me. “I feel I know this game as well as most.”

So throughout the third and fourth quarters, Cynamon constantly checks in with Sokolowski, to make sure he’s seeing the things Cynamon wants him to see. He lobbied hard, for instance, to get the team’s brain trust to make wide receiver Marc Lester a starter, and when he makes a great catch, Cynamon’s thrilled. “Lester baby! I love that guy. See, Howard?”

In the dying minutes of the game, when John Avery finally cuts up the field in the manner of a running back with a healthy knee, Cynamon explodes, “Yeaaahhhh! That’s John Avery! That’s John Avery! See how he cut it up, Howard?”

There’s an easy collegiality between the two owners that suggests a friendship counted in years, not months. They speak of each other glowingly, and with a sense of humour. When Avery finally scores a touchdown, to put the Argos up 25 to 14, Sokolowski jumps from his seat screaming, “Yes! Johnny! Johnny!” Cynamon murmurs, “I always have 911 on my cell phone ready to go, in case he blows a gasket.” At one point in the second half, Sokolowski throws a peanut at Cynamon, just for the heck of it. And whenever they’re next to each other, the two men never seem far from an Abbott and Costello routine:

Sokolowski: “David, Linda was watching the game on TSN. She said they were so complimentary about the whole franchise.... She said it was very nice.”

Cynamon: “And you know they had a documentary on before the game? They had a documentary on [the Argos] called 49 days.”

Sokolowski: “I taped it.”

Cynamon: “I don’t remember them talking to us.”

Sokolowski: “They didn’t talk to us.”

Cynamon: “I know.”

Sokolowski: “How can it be a documentary?”

Six minutes before the end of the game, with the Argos up by 25 points, Sokolowski asks Cynamon a football question regarding their backup quarterback, Michael Bishop.

Sokolowski: “Would you put Bishop in now?”

Cynamon: “This game’s not over.”

Sokolowski: “Six minutes!”

Cynamon: “This is the CFL, Howard. In the CFL, six minutes is like the opening quarter.”

Sokolowski: “You wanna make like a five-dollar bet?”

Cynamon: “No, I’m on your side.”

But don’t go away thinking there aren’t any wrinkles in their relationship. “It’s really like a great marriage; there’s communication there,” Cynamon says. “There’s a few fights once in a while, but we’re always kissing and make up before bed.” They haven’t, though, communicated on everything. When I bring up the story of Roughrider management’s initial refusal to play on the new turf that first game, Cynamon says, “Nobody ever came to me and told me that. It was like a rumour going around. I personally don’t think it was true.”

And there seems to have been, at least initially, a marked difference in the way the two men first considered their investment. “I was looking at it as a tax deal,” Sokolowski told me during the first half. “David was also looking at it as a tax deal.”

Cynamon adamantly denies this. “No, I never looked at it [as that]. Never,” he says. “I was looking at it as a real purchase.”


Post game — Argos win, 39-14

Inside the locker room, amongst the contented, prayerful athletes, Sokolowski returns to his pre-game discomfort level. He moves around hunched and sheepish, his distress so apparent Cynamon asks him if he’s all right. And he tells me, “In some ways I feel, not like an interloper, but—we just started, and these guys have been around for three or four years as a team.”

Cynamon, meanwhile, wades into the throng of players like he’s one of them, shaking hands, trading congratulations. He goes up to Damon Allen, who started his career as an Eskimo, and reminisces about the early days when they were both back in Edmonton. “We didn’t foresee the future, that you’d be our owner,” laughs says Allen, laughing. “We’da hung out more!”

Half an hour after the game is over, Sokolowski and Cynamon are sitting in the stands, luxuriating in the glow of victoriousness and promise, and a momentary respite from worry, when a threesome of fans makes its way over to them. “It’s really nice,” says the woman in the group, “to have owners that we as fans feel want to make the team a winner, and haven’t bought it as a tax write-off.”

“Definitely,” says Cynamon.

“That’s very kind of you,” says Sokolowski. “We hope it’s not a tax write-off.”