Nanaimo businessman, Hadi Abassi, president and owner of the Vancouver Island Raiders football team in Nanaimo, BC, watches his players warm-up and practise on the field at Elaine Hamilton Park in Nanaimo Wednesday. The VI Raiders are two-time national champions.
Hadi Abassi is a successful Iranian immigrant, a citizen of the year in Nanaimo, B.C., and a mile-a-minute sportsman who honks and waves from his limited edition silver Mercedes while driving the rolling hills of this Vancouver Island city.
But Abassi, 54, is also the George Steinbrenner of Canadian junior football, a polarizing figure who's invested about $1-million in the Vancouver Island Raiders. On one hand, his benevolence raises the lives and spirits of his players and community, while on the other, his relentlessness spurs resentment within the sport.
The Raiders have won the last two Canadian Junior Football League national championships, three in their five-year existence, and are considered the "Laval of junior" - a reference to the well-heeled Laval Rouge et Or university program in Quebec City.
The Raiders have won 24 consecutive games, and haven't lost at Caledonia Park, their ramshackle home field, in five years. Last season, behind superstar running back Andrew Harris, who now plays for the B.C. Lions in the CFL, they beat opponents by an average of 38 points.
Harris says he considers Abassi like a father, and with that sentiment, he's not alone among alumni. Critics, though, have accused Abassi of everything from paying players illicitly to conducting organized crime, he says.
He denies wrongdoing and says if that's what it takes to shake up the junior football establishment in Canada, he is happy to wear the black hat.
"I look at it like business," Abassi says. "I've taken businesses from $0 to $100-million a year."
Stigmatized as "drop-in football," junior football is played by 17- to 22-year-olds, generally by players with clubs in their home area; in contrast, Abassi recruits players from across the country. The level attracts those who are not university-inclined or cannot afford to attend university. Rare talents such as Harris use it as a springboard to the pros, while most just want to play tackle football after high school.
With most teams, the game works around players' lives. In Nanaimo, life works around football.
"We do it like a professional program - we won't allow casual commitment," says Abassi, whose roof truss and window businesses do $15-million in annual sales and employs 100 people, and who is also the managing partner of the Nanaimo Timbermen senior-A lacrosse team.
The Raiders prepare year-round. Forty players stayed in town last winter, training at a gym established by an Abassi associate. The British Columbia Football Conference team practises four times per week, and plays during the season on Saturdays. Some work in Abassi's businesses, some live together in the Vancouver Island University dorms, and the team provides academic counsellors. Nanaimo's bars are off-limits.
When asked if Abassi is good or bad for the sport, one high-school coach who has sent players to Nanaimo said: "What Hadi has done is unfair, but it's not wrong."
Requesting anonymity, the coach explained that Abassi's team has created a nationally unbalanced playing field. On the other hand, it provides players with unique opportunities thanks to a formal partnership with VIU. (VIU does not have a football program.)
Induced by a bursting scholarship fund, as many as 32 Raiders will enroll in the school this autumn, many to learn trades. Abassi, who raises funds for the scholarship program, estimates more than half his players come from underprivileged backgrounds, and argues they wouldn't be able to afford postsecondary school without annual stipends of up to $5,000.
"I tell my coaches: 'Go get me the kids who want to be plumbers or electricians, or whose marks are just not good enough for university,' " Abassi said. "Then, we set up the kids to win."
Critics say Abassi flaunts junior football's ambiguous rules, which only stipulate that players must retain amateur status, and cannot be paid. He is "not Mr. Popularity" at the CJFL's annual general meeting, according to Roger Wade, president of the arch-rival Victoria Rebels.
"The type of talent that he brings there is not there because Nanaimo is a great place to live," Wade says. "I'm not saying he's paying players off, what I'm saying is that he spends a lot of money in recruiting."
Ron Dias, president of All Star Football scouting service and an authority on Canadian amateur gridiron, said the Raiders have five key components - financing, location, academics, employment, competitiveness - that could force the junior game into tiers. One division would be for clubs with individual owners, such as Abassi, the other for community programs that aren't so well-funded.
The Raiders have created a structure that most coaches yearn for, and supporters trumpet how young men can learn responsibility under watchful father figures. After five years, former Raiders players are entering the community with work credentials, rewarding the 30 volunteers and 50 sponsors who provide for the team's operations and $200,000 annual cost.
Raiders coaches traverse the country luring players to B.C.'s Harbour City. Abassi travels, too, because "he wants to look every mother in the eyes," according to his son, Dominic.
Twenty-two players hail from out of province, including a quartet from Halifax. The Raiders pull players from Saskatchewan, where most junior footballers stay home, Alberta and Manitoba.
Abassi acknowledges helping players find jobs and homes, covering a few months rent and making sure "no one goes hungry."
Education and recruiting programs throughout Vancouver Island have set junior trends by forming partnerships with postsecondary institutions while expanding their bird-dogging, according to BCFC president Frank Naso.
Abassi, willing to share best practices, has created instructional DVDs but no one asks for them, he says, because opponents resent the Raiders success.
"If they all ran programs like ourselves and the [Saskatoon]Hilltops, we'd have the best league," he said. "The CFL would be stronger, and we'd create leaders. I can't help it if other coaches and players are not as committed."
Abassi's methods are not without drawbacks.
When Abassi relocated the team from Victoria to Nanaimo in 2005, he left hard feelings. "People here aren't going to forget how he left," Wade says.
Dominic Abassi played for the Rebels, and when his father could no longer hold his tongue around management, he bought the equipment. Afterwards, a deal was struck so that the City of Victoria could keep a team in the BCFC and the name Rebels, and Hadi Abassi shepherded the players 90 minutes up island.
"It was a personal, ugly and emotional fight," he says. "If I could turn back the clock, I'd do it differently. I'm not proud of it."
In moving to Nanaimo, the team was renamed Raiders because Abassi and head coach Matthew (Snoop) Blokker were both fans of Oakland's NFL team. Like their namesakes, the Raiders perform like outlaws, racking up penalties, running up scores, and taunting from the sidelines.
That's where Abassi watches games, right over Blokker's shoulder. In 2007, he fired the coach midway through the season after an ego clash, only to rehire him after the season.
"We all learned a lot from that," Abassi says.
Last season, Raiders attracted only 900 fans per game, some 500 lower than in Victoria. Ironically, Abassi says his audience no longer has an appetite for 71-0 results. The 2010 Raiders are younger, and could lose Saturday against the Okanagan Sun, but as they demolished Chilliwack last weekend, Abassi says he began to consider life from the opposing sidelines.
"First, you want to conquer the world," he says. "Then, you want a better world."
In junior football, that may mean finding means of ensuring competitive balance.
Wade predicts that if the Raiders-driven arms race continues, BCFC could be reduced to two teams from six. That would force junior football to exist across a wider swath of Western Canada, which would result in higher travel costs and possibly hurt participation.
Yet, Dias has never seen a junior football dynasty with Vancouver Island's model, or prospects for sustainability.
"I believe that's the goal of different programs in other leagues," Dias says. "It's going to take people who own the teams, not community-run programs."