SIMMONS: Why TSN's Stewart Johnston is almost the perfect choice as CFL commissioner

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There is a lot to like about Stewart Johnston on his first day as commissioner of the Canadian Football League.

He looks right. He sounds right. He has a natural sense of confidence and authority and leadership, and he has the honest belief that this is the greatest challenge of his professional life.

Being commissioner of the CFL isn’t in any way easy. The truth is that nobody has done the job particularly well over the years. Some have done it rather badly, in fact.

Everybody starts with noise and belief and promises, but then the reality kicks in and the problems pile up and the forever unsolvable becomes more unsolvable.

The good thing is that Johnston isn’t a newbie around the CFL. He will not be shocked by anything he finds in front of him. He is not new to the league and certainly not new to professional sports. He has spent much of his adult life running a highly successful sports network, TSN, which just happens to be home for all CFL football.

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Johnston knows the game. He knows the people. He knows the league. He knows where some bodies are buried. He knows that being commissioner of the CFL is not unlike being Prime Minister of Canada and trying to operate with a minority government.

You can’t be too strong or too forceful or too weak. You have to work with everybody, even when everybody doesn’t get along or doesn’t have similar vision. You have to find new fans for an old business and establish new ways to get people excited about football across this country.

This is an incredible football-watching nation — and no one knows that better than Johnston. TSN, under his leadership, wasn’t just the CFL rights-holder, but the NFL rights-holder as well. If you want to watch football in Canada, you have to watch TSN and, by extension, CTV.

If you do the math and assume that the United States is 10 times larger than Canada in population, the truth is more Canadians per capita watch football, CFL and NFL, in Canada than do in the U.S.

What Johnston needs to do now is find more viewers who want to buy tickets, who want to leave their homes for a football experience and, along the way, find younger, more engaged people to do so.

Johnston wants more people to love the game the way he has for most of his life.

He grew up in Ottawa, where his next-door neighbour happened to be Gerry Organ, the well-known place-kicker with the Rough Riders. From as young a time as he can remember, he was outside throwing the football around, playing with his friends, talking about Organ’s fake kick in the Grey Cup that led to a famous run.

He wants more Canadians with footballs in their hands. He wants more Canadians playing flag football, especially now that it is an Olympic sport starting in Los Angeles at the 2028 Summer Games.

“Growing the game of football is critical,” Johnston said. “For me, it starts with getting footballs in people’s hands, letting them taste it, enjoy it, fall in love with it.”

There is an enormous challenge the CFL has faced and has yet to find any real solution for. The fans in the ballparks don’t look much like the people who live in most Canadian cities. The fans skew too white and too old in a country that is now neither of those things. Outgoing commissioner Randy Ambrosie talked often about this and just never came up with anything to do about it.

Once upon a time, the CFL had nine teams and the NHL has six. And here we are, all these years later, and the CFL is still nine teams and the NHL now is 32. Over time, the big-league CFL became a small league, a league too often fighting for mere existence or respect.

A league that hasn’t necessarily grown but, against all odds, has managed to more than stay alive.

But Johnston doesn’t want to hear about any of this on his first day on the job. He sees a place for growth, both economically, entertainment-wise and football-wise.

He knows the best thing the CFL has going for it is the game. The game, whether you like the rules or not, is terrific. The last three minutes of every game the best three minutes in sports.

A whole generation of kids who will tune in Thursday night to the NFL draft won’t know that because they haven’t watched enough to grasp all that is Canadian football nuance.

And nuance matters in this country, especially now at a time when patriotism is peaking and all the franchises are all Canadian, even when so many of the better players are not.

“The great strength of this league is the feeling of community,” Johnston said.

And with that, I couldn’t agree louder.

“We have to respect the traditions,” he added. I mention Grey Cup. One of my favourite experiences in all of sport is walking down the street in a Grey Cup host city.”

It remains the best sporting week in Canada and maybe there’s nothing to compare it with. The challenge for every new commissioner — Johnston is my 14th — is making the rest of the season as much fun and entertaining as Grey Cup Week.

Johnston isn’t about to tamper with rules. The rouge, he says, is here forever. Even the dumb extra point on missed field goals isn’t going anywhere. And the dumber rule, the fumble recovery turned into a first down, will stay for now.

You can’t fix everything in one day.

Johnston plans to meet with staff and CFL minds across the country and ask two questions:. One, what are we doing wonderfully well? And two, what are the two things we need to improve upon?

“It’s important to ask the first question before you ask the second one.”

His style of management at TSN was direct and communicative and impressive. He didn’t hide from problems, he solved them. He was forceful yet available.

He looks be the perfect choice for this impossible job. Then again, on Day 1, so many do.

ssimmons@postmedia.com

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