I just got back from Toronto, the first time I had been there in a really long time – certainly before all the fancy buildings went up. The city could easily have passed for the set of Tomorrowland. And that’s only a slight exaggeration.
All comments about overvalued real estate aside, I learned a lot on this trip, stuff that you don’t get from staring at Bloomberg all day.
So I went to see a ballgame at the SkyDome (now known as the Rogers Centre, but people still call it the SkyDome). It’s great having a ballpark downtown. I was just in San Diego a few months ago and caught a Padres game downtown. Baseball is meant to be played in a city.
The SkyDome is pretty old now, has to be one of the top five or six oldest parks in the league, even though it was only built in the late ’80s. It’s showing a little age – the seats are uncomfortable and meant for when people were smaller – but when you close the roof and get 47,000 people cheering, it’s an amazing place to watch a game.
So since I’m in Canada, and the Jays are playing the Yankees, we get to hear both national anthems. They bring out this big 100-person choir, and they sing the US national anthem, which gets warm applause from the Canadian crowd.
Then they start singing O, Canada. You can hear a pin drop in that place.
Then something incredible happens. About two-thirds of the way through, people start cheering. Then more people start cheering. Then there’s this huge crescendo, and it gets louder and louder, and by the end of it, people are going absolutely nuts. I mean, they are going crazy. For O, Canada!
I have never seen anything like it. Maybe in post-9/11 US. But nowhere else.
This post was published at Mauldin Economics on SEPTEMBER 29, 2016.
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