In November 1974, the City of Toronto unveiled its first official flag, which was designed by a 21-year-old college student who received a $500 Canada Savings Bond for his effort. Council approved it, but it was not unanimously adored.
“It looks like it ought to be on a package of wieners,” one alderman told the Toronto Star.
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“The design is terrible,” a department store worker told the paper.
“At least,” one young engineer said, “it’s got the right colours.”
The design featured two simple white lines to represent the towers at City Hall, with a red maple leaf in between to symbolize council chambers. It was the designer’s choice for the background, though, that seemed to cement one primary colour as the primary colour of Toronto: Blue.
All of the city’s major sports franchises wore blue. The Maple Leafs and the Argonauts were among the most visible flag-bearers, alongside the University of Toronto. Within a couple of years, the local Major League Baseball franchise would also adopt the colour as it took the field for the first time.
In time, a professional lacrosse team (Rock) and an elite women’s hockey franchise (Furies) would also adopt blue. Private schools, minor hockey programs, a triple-A baseball franchise (Maple Leafs) and an early professional basketball team (Huskies) have also embraced the colour.
So how did that happen?
“You’d like to think that, ‘Well, Toronto is blue, and blue is Toronto,’” said Andrew Holman, a professor of history and director of the Canadian studies program at Bridgewater State University, near Boston. “But everybody had their own reason for adopting those colours.”
Not many North American cities appear quite as colour co-ordinated. In Pittsburgh, the Steelers, Pirates and Penguins embrace black-and-gold. In Montreal, the Canadiens, Alouettes and the (dearly departed) Expos each developed their own version of the bleu, blanc et rouge.
For many years, Holman said, one of Toronto’s defining characteristics was that it stood as a buttoned-down, vaguely drab counterpoint to Montreal. The city was very white, very Protestant, and was ruled by a class of people devoted to the prescribed ways of life in the Victorian age.
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It would be tempting to say those conservative roots led the major local teams to land on blue, he said, but it would also be untrue: “It’s like a lot of those myths — when you dig into it, you find it’s a bit more complex.”
So how did so many of the city’s teams land on blue?
Varsity Blues
Founded in 1827, the University of Toronto became a suspected source of inspiration for at least one of the major teams that would follow in the city. Holman, who is from St. Catharines, Ont., suggested the school landed on blue as its main colour because of its roots in England.
“It’s modelled on the same college system as Oxford,” he said. “And that was done on purpose.”
The University of Oxford has its own official colour: Oxford Blue.
A football team arrived five decades after the university first opened its doors. It would be several more decades before the school’s teams were known as Blues — or Big Blue or, finally, Varsity Blues — but that was only ever going to be a matter of time.
The football team hosted the University of Michigan for a game in November 1880. According to The Globe, “the weather was execrable” and the lone grandstand was nearly empty. Players from Michigan were in their “white canvas jackets and knickerbockers.”
Toronto players wore dark blue sweaters.
Argonauts
Rowers created the oldest football team in Canada. The Argonaut Rowing Club was founded in 1872, and its colour scheme was adapted from two famed English university crews: Oxford (dark blue) and Cambridge (light blue).
Members started the football team a year later as a way to stay in shape during rowing’s off-season. It kept the name, as well as the colour scheme. (Newspapers were calling the rowing crews the “Double Blue” by 1910, and the nickname eventually transferred to the football team.)
The Argos made their first Grey Cup appearance in 1911 (losing to the University of Toronto) and won their first title three years later. By the mid-1970s, the team was averaging more than 45,000 fans to its home games at Exhibition Stadium.
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Maple Leafs
Conn Smythe was not born into wealth, but he attended two of the most prestigious schools in Toronto, including Upper Canada College. In “The Lives of Conn Smythe,” journalist Kelly McParland tells the story of how Smythe would pay his tuition in weekly installments, including once when he had to stack “coins in little piles on the registrar’s desk.”
Many years later, in 1927, Smythe would become part of a group that bought Toronto’s NHL franchise, then known as the St. Patricks. The ownership transfer was not treated as major news, earning a single column of space in The Globe, which reported “the new colours are said to be red and white.”
In the Toronto Daily Star, it was reported the new uniforms would be white, with a green maple leaf on the chest and look “something like the Canadian Olympic sweaters at Chamonix in 1924.”
Smythe did not follow either of those reports. He had been a student, player, captain and then coach at the University of Toronto. His university team, McParland notes, “dressed in the blue and white colours he would later appropriate for the Maple Leafs.”
Blue Jays
In 1976, the summer before Major League Baseball began play in Toronto, a contest was held to find a name for the new team. It generated more than 25,000 entries, with suggestions ranging from mammals (Beavers, Bears and Wildcats) to reptiles (Alligators) and typography (Dingbats).
Labatt Breweries owned the franchise, and since Blue was its signature brand, many entries focused on marketing potential. Those suggestions included the Blue Sox, Blue Shoes and Blue Bats. (According to the Star, the team was also advised to consider Beer Bellies as a name.)
Executives from Labatt, who were looking to sell more beer, settled on Blue Jays.
“I’m not sure it was as planned as everybody thinks it was,” said Howard Starkman, who was director of public relations for the team at the time. “It sort of fell in.”
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The owners did not have the name picked before someone dropped it in the mail, he said.
“Someone did suggest it,” Starkman said, “and then somebody realized, ‘Ooh, it’s a bird and it’s blue – that fits in pretty good with baseball and beer.’”
Furies
Top-level women’s hockey had gone by a series of names, with a series of colour schemes, for years around the city. Following the 2011 Clarkson Cup, the Furies were introduced as Toronto’s entry in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League.
Sami Jo Small, the Canadian Olympic goaltender who would become the team’s general manager, said the league made a deliberate choice when developing the colour scheme. They picked blue and white, with a logo and a design that aligned with the Maple Leafs. (Teams based in other NHL markets — such as Montreal, Boston and Calgary — did the same.)
The plan was to, one day, form a lasting partnership with the NHL. (The CWHL would fold in 2019.)
“We had preliminary discussions with (commissioner) Gary Bettman,” said Small. “And that just kind of seemed like the best way, not because of his suggestion, but for future negotiations, to be able to kind of come in line with what would be — for lack of a better word — the brother club.”
Rock
On May 6, 2000, in the final professional sports event ever held inside Maple Leaf Gardens, the home team’s logo featured a giant maple leaf … with a caricature of the CN Tower playing a guitar.
The Rock would become the most successful professional Toronto team of the decade, winning four National Lacrosse League championships. Their jerseys — at least the material around their unusual logo — were blue.
Brad Watters, who spent a decade as the team’s president and chief executive, said the choice was made due to the team’s home arena — the Leafs moved out in 1999 — and the legacy left within those walls.
“We wanted to have some tradition,” he said. “And I do think that, predominantly, Toronto colours are blue and white.”
(Top photo: Mark Blinch / NHLI via Getty Images)
