We Want Fish Sticks

by Nicholas Hirshon

  Others did not see the need for an overhaul. Although the Rangers 6

  BIRTH OF A BRAND

  series was demoralizing, the Islanders could find some solace in making the playoffs for a second straight season and falling to a worthy opponent that was steamrolling the rest of the league. Besides, the Islanders were only a season removed from their magical playoff run in 1993, when they improbably defeated the Washington Capitals, who had nine twenty- goal scorers, and Lemieux’s Penguins, who had an NHL- record seventeen- game winning streak in the regular season.

  “That memory was so fresh in the minds of Islander fans,” said Islanders radio broadcaster Chris King. “It was certainly a disappointing ’93–

  ’94 season coming off that great run to the conference final the year before. But to say that four straight Stanley Cups in the early eighties and nineteen straight playoff series wins and all those Hall of Famers who wore that crest proudly would cast it aside based on one tough playoff loss, no, I would not agree with that at all.”27

  Like King, Howie Rose, the Rangers’ play- by- play television broadcaster in 1994, watched every cringe- worthy moment of the playoff series versus the Islanders. He saw Islanders defensemen Darius Kasparaitis and Uwe Krupp on the ice for four even- strength goals in Game One; saw Ron Hextall allow goals on the first two shots he faced in Game Three; saw the top line of Pierre Turgeon, Steve Thomas, and Derek King stymied by the Rangers’ checkers; and saw the power- play unit go one for seventeen.28 Still, in Rose’s mind, none of the ineptitude justified abandoning the Islanders logo. “I think that’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life. No, Islander fans have always associated that crest with the very best days in the franchise’s history. That’s sheer lunacy to suggest that even one fan would think that a logo that stood for so much was essentially desecrated by having lost a playoff series to their main rival. That’s just idiotic, moronic.”29

  But the opinions that mattered most were in the executive offices.

  Although the Islanders occupied a seemingly lucrative spot within the New York media market, they were in effect a small- market team because of the hour- long distance between Nassau Coliseum and Manhattan, with a paucity of major media outlets in Nassau County, a weak drawing potential for prospective fans, and a consistently low payroll that ranked them among franchises in the least populated NHL

  7

  BIRTH OF A BRAND

  locales.30 They were unable to turn around their fortunes quickly by throwing money at superstar players or arena renovations, so they looked elsewhere to revitalize their flagging brand. Sales of licensed products for sports teams and major colleges had eclipsed $9 billion in the early 1990s, with sales of licensed NHL products projected to jump from $600 million to $800 million in a year’s time.31 The Sharks and the Ducks proved that a flashy logo could generate more merchandising money than even a winning season. “They were in the top five of the league’s numbers ’cause, heck, people were buying these jerseys and their gear, not because they were Sharks fans or Ducks fans, but they were buying ’cause they thought that they looked cool,” Beach said.

  “The Kings switched over to black and silver. It wasn’t necessarily fans. At the time the NHL was certainly starting to push other teams to say, ‘Hey, you know what? You can enjoy this type of success as well if you’re willing to take the leap to design a new jersey.’”32

  The NHL approached rebranding on a case- by- case basis. The Sharks and the Ducks were expansion teams forging new identities, and the Kings had little to show in their twenty- year history besides a bunch of losing seasons and first- round playoff exits. Other teams had stronger brands. “There were certain franchises that we always felt you never messed with,” Scalera said. “We were never gonna say to the Montreal Canadiens or the Detroit Red Wings or the Toronto Maple Leafs or the Chicago Blackhawks or the Boston Bruins or the New York Rangers, your Original Six, ‘You guys should change.’ They were the Original Six. They were so steeped in tradition that it would have almost been sacrilegious to change those things.”33 The Islanders posed an interesting case: they were not a member of the Original Six, the teams that made up the NHL for twenty- five seasons between 1942 and 1967, but they had won four Stanley Cups, more than three- quarters of the league, and were the only NHL team in the United States to win four in a row. Nevertheless, the league did not place the Islanders in the do-not- touch category. Scalera doesn’t remember whether the Islanders approached him or he pitched them first, but both sides were receptive.

  Time became a factor, too. If the Islanders set the rebranding process into motion in 1994, the team could be wearing new jerseys, and 8

  BIRTH OF A BRAND

  reaping the financial benefits, by the 1995– 96 season. If they waited, they would have to either unveil the new jerseys in the twenty- fifth anniversary season in 1996– 97, making for an awkward departure from tradition at a time when most teams celebrated their past, or postpone the rebrand and the monetary rewards till 1997– 98, hoping that rebranding would not be passé by then. “The thinking was that, as the marketing consultant for the franchise at the time said, the franchise needed a rocket up its ass,” Calabria said. “Attendance was declining, the building was in poor shape, the team wasn’t performing, and something needed to be done, and they thought this would be a fresh coat of paint.”34

  More than anything the Islanders feared anonymity. The Rangers were reigning champions in 1994, and the third team in the market, the New Jersey Devils, had made the postseason for a fourth straight year and pushed the Rangers to the brink in the seven- game conference final. Both had franchise goaltenders, Mike Richter in New York and Martin Brodeur in New Jersey. And then there were the Islanders, first- round flops, with shaky goaltending, raw rookies, and aging veterans. “They weren’t drawing a lot of the next generation of fans,”

  Scalera said. “Those new owners came and said, ‘We’d like to have a new look.’”35

  The first step was finding a designer. Scalera pointed the Islanders to a Manhattan firm named Sean Michael Edwards Design, Inc., or SME, run by partners Ed O’Hara and Tom Duane. SME had developed uniforms and logos in all four major sports leagues in North America, for the NHL’s Florida Panthers, the National Basketball Association’s Denver Nuggets and Toronto Raptors, the National Football League’s Carolina Panthers and Philadelphia Eagles, and Major League Baseball’s California Angels, Cincinnati Reds, New York Mets, and Seattle Mariners.36 Like the Sharks and the Mighty Ducks, the Panthers were an expansion team entering a nontraditional warm- weather market, seeking a snazzy look to compensate for what figured to be a lean inaugural season. SME designed the original Florida jerseys with a primary logo that featured a pouncing panther extending its claws and a shoulder patch that showed a hockey stick crossed with a palm tree 9

  BIRTH OF A BRAND

  against a sunset, tying hockey to the Sunshine State.37 The jersey was a hit and cemented SME as the NHL’s go- to design firm. “We were at the forefront of it,” O’Hara said. “There was a whole set of criteria that we had helped, with our clients, develop and we were following.

  We wrote the book on it. It could have been an interesting book. How to Design Sports Logos for Dummies didn’t exist.”38

  Better yet from the Islanders’ perspective, SME understood Long Island. O’Hara had lived most of his life in Huntington, a twenty-minute drive from Nassau Coliseum, and watched the Islanders’ Stanley Cup dynasty unfold in the early 1980s. When he played hockey, he wore Bryan Trottier’s number 19 on his back. He admired Mike Bossy, calling him “the Rolls- Royce of that team.” O’Hara didn’t need to learn about the Islanders’ history, as other prospective designers might have.

  He had experienced the glory days firsthand. “I remember believing it would never end,” he told a reporter. “We didn’t know how lucky we had it. But times change, teams change, markets change.”39 SME

  also had experience working on a brand identity for another
sports concern on Long Island, Stony Brook University athletics, as their moniker changed from the Patriots to the Seawolves.

  Although O’Hara appeared to be the right man for the job, he was skeptical when he heard the Islanders wanted to rebrand. “Hey, when I first went into this, I had mixed feelings,” he told Long Island’s daily newspaper, Newsday, at the time. “As a fan, I was a little leery.” The departure from tradition was not the only element of the rebrand that worried O’Hara. After a wave of new looks from teams like the Kings, Sharks, Mighty Ducks, and Panthers, the novelty of unconventional color combinations and cartoonish logos was wearing off. “The party was ending,” O’Hara said. “The notion of all these teams that had rebranded— there were dozens of them that did this. By the time the Islanders got to it, it wasn’t as much the rage anymore.”40 Nevertheless, SME signed on. The rebranding of the Islanders had begun.

  As the NHL’s point person for rebranding, Scalera organized meetings between O’Hara and a contingent of Islanders executives at Nassau Coliseum and the league’s Manhattan offices. According to several 10

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  people with knowledge of the meetings, including participants, the Islanders were usually represented by Stephen Walsh, one of the four minority stakeholders running the team; Arthur McCarthy, the chief financial officer; Pat Calabria, the vice president of communications; and Don Maloney, the general manager. At times the group also expanded to include other minority owners and former Islanders player Bob Nystrom, then the director of amateur hockey development and alumni relations.41 An original Islander who spent his entire fourteen- season career with the franchise, Nystrom was best known for scoring the overtime goal that clinched the Islanders’ first Stanley Cup, in 1980. By virtue of his on- ice achievements and involvement with Long Island charities, Nystrom was nicknamed “Mr. Islander.”

  It made sense for Mr. Islander to help the group tackle a simple yet confounding question: What, exactly, is an Islander? The answer would not only influence the Islanders’ new jerseys. Branding meant accentuating the associations that both fans and nonfans already had with the Islanders and Long Island through logos, a mascot, game presentation, and events that would collectively sell tickets, garner media attention, and generate radio and television ratings. Scalera encouraged the Islanders to think about their brand holistically. “We tried to stress to them and say, ‘Look, there’s two places you have to fit.

  Yes, you want to fit within the greater hockey context, but don’t forget that there’s a bigger world out there.’ And then we would stress to them that it’s a branding identity, not just a logo that goes on your uniform.”42

  The Long Island identity proved hard to pin down. Known by Native Americans as “Paumanok,” or “island that pays tribute,” Long Island consists of four counties, including two boroughs of New York City, Brooklyn and Queens. But Long Island is much more commonly associated with its two easternmost counties, Nassau and Suffolk, which are more affluent and less racially diverse than New York City. Earning power and ethnicity were only two factors that separated Long Island from New York City. In Nassau and Suffolk the subways do not run, few buildings scrape the sky, and geese are more common than pigeons.

  The Islanders played in Nassau County, whose 285 square miles include the most frequented beach on the East Coast, Jones Beach, and one 11

  BIRTH OF A BRAND

  of the nation’s busiest malls, Roosevelt Field. To the east of Nassau is Suffolk County, at 2,373 square miles, most of it water, best known for the lavish homes of the Hamptons.

  Long Island had other claims to fame: it was the birthplace of Walt Whitman, the father of free- verse poetry; the longtime home of President Theodore Roosevelt, whose residence is a national landmark; and the site of the gold- coast mansions that inspired The Great Gatsby.

  What made branding difficult, though, was Long Island’s reputation as an assortment of impressive pieces that did not make a cohesive puzzle. Other sports markets were synonymous with particular scenery or world- famous attractions. As the New York Times wrote, “Miami: you think palm trees. San Francisco: the Golden Gate Bridge. Philadelphia: the Liberty Bell. But what universally recognized symbol could Long Island possibly boast? A traffic jam? A shopping mall?” Calabria jokingly proposed the Islanders build their brand around a woman with a Bloomingdale’s bag stepping into a Lexus.43

  Joking aside, the group reflected on the imagery associated with islands. “One of the first ones we talked about, when you think of an Islander, most people go tropical,” Scalera said. “An Islander is tropical, somebody who lives on an island, and there’s water and beaches and boats and sunsets and sunrises and all this kind of stuff. But we all said, ‘That’s not Long Island.’ If it was a team from Jamaica or Bermuda, yes, we’ve got something.” Besides, sunrises and sunsets were hardly unique to Long Island and would be difficult to convey in a mascot. Recognizing SME’s success in developing the logo for the NBA’s Raptors, the group also entertained the dubious argument that dinosaurs were native to Long Island millions of years ago.44 That, too, was quickly dismissed.

  The best candidate for the mascot was also the riskiest. Before the Islanders were formed in 1972, Long Island rallied around a semipro hockey team named the Long Island Ducks, who played from 1959

  to 1973 in a rough- and- tumble league that inspired the movie Slap Shot. By adopting a duck mascot, the Islanders would be honoring their hockey forebears, a beloved team that attracted four thousand people to the Long Island Arena in Commack, a half hour from Nassau 12

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  Coliseum, for its lone championship celebration in 1965.45 The choice made sense to the Islanders’ radio broadcaster, Barry Landers, who had done play- by- play for the Ducks. “I don’t think they ever really paid any kind of public tribute to the Long Island Ducks, which gave many Long Islanders their real first taste of hockey, especially people who lived further away from the city out in Suffolk County, where the Ducks played.”46

  The duck mascot would also evoke a unique roadside attraction, the Big Duck, a twenty- foot- tall, thirty- foot- long souvenir shop built in the shape of an American Pekin duck in Flanders, an hour east of Uniondale. The Big Duck symbolized the duck farms that put Long Island on the menu, if not the map. “Long Island is known nationally in terms of food for the duck itself,” Landers said.47 One of the most famous sports figures living on Long Island, former shortstop Bud Harrelson of the 1969 world champion New York Mets, liked to describe how he ordered the Long Island duck on his first big- league road trip in Chicago and became a fan for life.48 The Islanders wanted to appeal to East Enders who would not travel into the city to see the Rangers, so honoring a former hockey team and a prominent landmark in Suffolk County seemed perfect. The problem was the very team responsible for the NHL rebranding craze. A duck mascot could create brand confusion with the Mighty Ducks. “We would have had an issue because rightfully the Ducks would have complained, ‘Why are you letting another team do something that is our main entity?’” Scalera said.49

  The Islanders moved on. They tossed around more maritime

  images to typify Long Island, from ships and lighthouses to lobsters and seagulls. Then they began talking about Billy Joel, the singer-songwriter who grew up in Hicksville, only six miles from Uniondale.

  Joel personified local boy makes good. Unlike other celebrities who eschewed their roots and moved away, Joel embraced them. As the New York Times wrote, “There are Long Islanders who have become famous, and there are the famous who have become Long Islanders.

  Mr. Joel is one of the few Long Islanders who became famous and remained a Long Islander.” Even with fame and fortune, Joel never left Long Island, living in Cold Spring Harbor, Cove Neck, Dix Hills, 13

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  East Marion, Hampton Bays, and Oyster Bay. He raised a family with his then wife, model Christie Brinkley, in East Hampton. He owned a twenty- eight- foot lobster boat built on Shelter Isla
nd. His band members hailed from Long Beach, Oceanside, and Seaford. By the time the Islanders were rebranding in 1995, Joel had performed eighteen concerts over two decades at Nassau Coliseum, drawing sellout crowds for every tour. “I’ve been all around the world,” he once said. “There is no place like Long Island.”50

  The Islanders were drawn to Joel’s status as the quintessential Long Islander. After dropping out of Hicksville High School to pursue a singing career, he had worked on an oyster boat in Oyster Bay and clammed in Bayville, engaging in a rite of passage familiar to many young men from the region. Then a string of hits made him a household name— “Piano Man” in 1973, “Just the Way You Are” and “Only the Good Die Young” in 1977, “My Life” in 1978, and “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” in 1980. Joel’s empathy for the fishermen on the East End of Long Island did not wane with time and money. In the late 1980s he was touched by the book Men’s Lives, which somberly portrayed the decline of Long Island’s formerly mighty seafaring industry, illustrated with a mix of historical and contemporary photographs. The author, Peter Matthiessen, described how sportsmen’s organizations were seeking to limit the commercial harvest of striped bass, a species that represented “the difference between bare survival and a decent living”

  for the baymen. Despite mounting obstacles, the prideful baymen refused to pull up their nets and leave Long Island. “They are tough, resourceful, self- respecting, and also (some say) hidebound and cranky, too independent to organize for their own survival,” Matthiessen wrote.

  “Yet even their critics must acknowledge a gritty spirit that was once more highly valued in this country than it is today.”51

  The baymen’s tenacity appealed to Joel. They were fading hallmarks of the Long Island where he grew up, a Long Island he wanted to preserve for his daughter. In 1989 Joel released his eleventh album, Storm Front, including the song “Downeaster Alexa,” which conveyed the baymen’s plight. The single, which rose to number 57 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, was sung from the perspective of a struggling bay-14