TORONTO — “Winter isn’t coming, winter is here,” Richard Ng enthusiastically proclaims after seeing Toronto knock off Houston at Real Sports Bar & Grill.
It’s a Friday night and like most typical Friday evenings at this posh downtown Toronto sports bar when a local team is in action, libations are flowing, chicken wings are being devoured and both floors are completely packed.
But if you were to listen a little closer and took a greater glance at the surroundings inside the bar you’d realize this isn’t just any other typical Friday night at Real Sports.
Snippets of conversation revealed discussion about “Envy’s D.Va” and what the team could look like “when Neko returns from suspension,” while on the walls hung an angularly-stylized ‘T’ and ‘D’ logo that also flanked the sides of Real Sports’ signature 39-foot high-definition screen.
On said screen, analysts were teeing up the Toronto-Houston matchup before a loud roar erupted through the venue. The first map was beginning, and every single person in the house couldn’t wait to be part of this historic moment.
The Toronto Defiant, and their fans, were taking their first steps.
Though the franchise was announced about five months back when it was revealed that Toronto was getting an Overwatch League (OWL) franchise, Friday was the Defiant’s first-ever match. It proved to be the realization of a dream not only for the executives in the room, seeing their investment finally take flight for the first time, but more importantly for the 500-plus fans in attendance who had reserved their spot to be part of this viewing party weeks ahead of time.
“What we saw tonight is that Toronto is through and through not only an Overwatch and Overwatch League city, it is an esports city,” Ng told Sportsnet Friday after the Defiant defeated the Outlaws. “And I think it represents a deep, underlying hunger and passion that we might not have recognized.”
Ng was on hand Friday night, along with 29 other members of his European-soccer style Defiant supporters’ club, Toronto Alpha Flight, A.K.A. ‘TorontoAF.’
During the day, Ng is the managing director of data solutions at public relations company Citizen Relations. But after work, he removes the corporate façade and becomes Great Root Bear, an Overwatch community advocate — and self-proclaimed “totally average Overwatch player.”
It’s under this A&W-referenced gamer tag alias that Ng came up with the idea of creating a supporters’ club while he was still living in New York.
Though he was originally a Toronto native, Ng moved to New York in late 2012 to pursue a tech career. Growing up a big gamer, when he picked up Overwatch in Sept. 2017 (more than a year after the game’s initial release) he noticed that a professional league for this new favourite game of his was going to begin play shortly after the new year, and that the city he was living in was going to be getting a team.
As such, he did some research about the league and noticed that while other teams had already organized launch events in their respective cities, there was nothing concrete within New York. So, in the absence of an official alternative, he decided to create something himself, and what started as a small get-together of Overwatch fans sitting in a bar watching the New York Excelsior play turned into the Five Deadly Venoms, the first supporters’ club in OWL history.
As a big soccer fan who grew up watching Aston Villa, and someone who instantly latched onto Toronto FC when they were first founded, Ng liked the idea of a more organized fandom around the team so he could not only share his passion for the game and the team with other like-minded people but also do good in the community while doing so.
“I love the approach because supporters’ clubs are largely based around community events, charity and love of your city,” said Ng in an interview after he came back to Toronto from New York. “Those are the three pillars of the Venoms: Community, charity and love of New York.”
Since creating the Five Deadly Venoms — which, for those unaware, is a reference to New York’s five boroughs and to the cult classic martial arts film Five Deadly Venoms, speaking to Ng’s own love of the film and martial arts in general — the entire league has seen an adoption of this method of fandom.
“One of my proudest, I don’t want to say achievements, but I’m happy that other folks found usefulness in this idea,” said Ng. “We were the first to kick it off using this European format because it’s great.”
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“Everyone’s saying, ‘Are you going to be like John Tavares?’”
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And now he’s brought it back home, so to speak, although it wasn’t an easy decision.
“When it comes to switching colours, I’ll always be a child of the city [Toronto], but I’m undecided,” Ng said at first of starting a club in Toronto. “New York will always have a special place for me and in the end the folks of Staten Island said it best. They said, ‘Rich listen, we know what it’s like to want to go home and rep your hometown team and we’ll never fault you for that, we’ll never hold it against you for this, but you’ve gotta resign your colours if you do that.’ …
“So they say things to me like, ‘Let me ask you something Root Bear, are you gonna go full Judas on us like J.T. when he went back to the Leafs? Because he went home and we know how that went.’ That’s come up multiple times. Everyone’s saying, ‘Are you going to be like John Tavares?’”
The prodigal sons returned, and both of their respective communities are better because of it.
With Ng as one of the leaders at the forefront of the Defiant’s fledgling steps, the young franchise is off to a much better start than it probably would’ve been otherwise.
Among the first questions Sportsnet had for Defiant ownership group OverActive Media when the announcement of Toronto getting an OWL franchise was first made was, “How do you expect to grow a fan base for a team that, from what we’ve seen, will be coming from almost nothing?”
The answer given at the time cited statistics and growth projections, but nothing concrete. Friday’s event, and other events leading up to it, however, have proven to provide far more tangible evidence that this thing just might work.
The Defiant didn’t have a proper nickname or logo until Oct. 24 of last year. On that date, OverActive Media hosted an unveiling party to share all of those details, which ended up selling out.
On Feb. 2 the team had its players introduced to Toronto for the first time at a small meet-and-greet event in advance of the season starting. More than 300 fans braved the cold and lined up around the block near Yonge and Dundas streets for hours ahead of time before the event was scheduled to start.
And then, finally, there was Friday’s viewing party, which had Real Sports filled to the brim with fans who had reserved spots just to be part of the action.
There’s most certainly an appetite for the Defiant outside of the investors who decided this hot new esports thing their kids have been telling them about is worth a few million.
“I was not expecting this, honestly,” said Marissa Roberto, a Toronto-native esports broadcaster who was at the event Friday on hosting duty. “I was not expecting the amount of people that did when they did the launch party, I was not expecting the amount of people that did when they did the fan meet-and-greet — there was a line-up around the freaking block to meet these guys whom they would have no reason to know, but they came out anyway to support them because they want to support this. …
“We have our sports teams and that’s amazing, but now we have our esports team here.”
And to OverActive Media’s credit, they had faith this fan base existed in Toronto all along, even if it wasn’t as visible.
“We’re very confident and that confidence emanates from incredible support,” said Chris Overholt, OverActive Media president and CEO, over the phone last week. “Effectively, we’ve only really launched three events in the city around Defiant: Our launch event in October, the meet-and-greet we did with the players and now our viewing party on Friday. All of this is in the context of not yet having spent, really, any time in the marketplace as a team and not having played a live event here, so I think it validates Activision Blizzard’s view of the marketplace in the Greater Toronto Area.
“They knew when we started talking to them they certainly had a perspective on how big and how strong the Toronto marketplace could be for an Overwatch League franchise team and I think some of the early signs point to really great success here.”
Of course, OverActive Media is still a business that will hope to become profitable, and to that point, outside of merchandise they’ve been selling, there’s been little in the way of actually selling products from the Defiant thus far. That will change eventually and when it does, OverActive Media believes they will have planted enough seeds of good will to make people want to pay for the Defiant.
“I think before you talk about monetizing you have to build the fan base and be authentic and speak to them in their language,” said Adam Adamou, OverActive Media’s senior vice president of strategy. “If we come up and are all corporate upfront these guys don’t relate well to that. We are esports first, we’re endemic, we’re fans, we play games ourselves and when it comes time to monetize it we will be able to do it because these guys want to support their team and not because we’re trying to sell them something.
“And that’s the difference. We are not selling them something, we have to make them want to spend their money and support their team. … From our perspective, what we’re thinking is, we are going to create a situation where they want to support us and our jersey, but also our sponsors as a thank you for supporting what they’re passionate about.”
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“We want to be to esports what Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment is to traditional sports.”
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This plan isn’t limited to just the Defiant, either. OverActive Media, through its acquisition of multi-esports organization Splyce, is also the owner of a variety of esports teams, including a League of Legends squad that competes in that game’s official European circuit.
Adamou speaks of a big future for OverActive Media, a future that sees it rivaling Toronto’s biggest sports and entertainment company.
“We want to be to esports what Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment is to traditional sports,” he said. “I see a world not that long from now where we’re going to have our own stadium, we’re going to have multiple teams that are Toronto-based in there and we’re going to have thousands of fans and maybe a bar like [Real Sports] of our own where our fans are going to be able to go.”
A lofty ambition, but one that has taken a positive step in the right direction following the Defiant’s first match.
The hard work starts now, though, when there won’t be a cool launch event to go at an upscale sports bar that houses an impossibly large screen.
But as Ng said, “winter is here.” And with it, comes the hope that this team will be flourishing come springtime.
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