BIRTH OF A BRAND
man faced with depleted fish stocks and burdensome environmental regulations on a boat bearing the same name as Joel’s daughter. The concluding line referenced the dying breed of “Islander.”
For a hockey team seeking to brand itself around Long Island, the song struck a chord. Joel, who drew the sorts of crowds and media attention to Nassau Coliseum that the Islanders longed for, was singing passionately about tangible figures in the region’s heritage.52 Mirroring the images in Men’s Lives, the music video for “Downeaster Alexa”
depicted older, gruff, bearded fishermen in rain slickers navigating choppy waters off Long Island, providing a masculine tone befitting a hockey team. According to O’Hara, Islanders executives cited the song as a model for the new brand. “They definitely led us towards the maritime,” he said. “They had an idea. Billy Joel’s song ‘Downeaster Alexa’ really personified the Long Island coastal experience. And that was told to us. It was a direction that we pursued.”53
Branding around a cause championed by Billy Joel presented a tempting scenario of pairing sports with celebrity. Spike Lee was a regular at New York Knicks games. Jack Nicholson sat courtside to cheer the Los Angeles Lakers. Perhaps Long Island’s best- known singer would show his appreciation for the Islanders’ homage to the baymen by attending their games and elevating their brand. According to Tim Beach, the Islanders’ director of game events, the team had tried to capitalize on Joel’s popularity before. “I think the Islanders invited Billy Joel to every event for twenty years. If he was invited to one event [every year] for twenty years, the Islanders went zero for twenty with Billy Joel.” But circumstances had changed, and now the team had a reason for Joel to listen. A year after “Downeaster Alexa”
was released, Joel organized benefit concerts that raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the baymen and environmental groups dedicated to preserving the bay. He even lobbied New York governor Mario Cuomo to ease the state regulations that threatened the baymen’s way of life.54 Honoring the baymen seemed to be the Islanders’ way to the heart of Long Island’s favorite son. “When you mention Billy Joel, his association with Long Island is very strong,” Scalera said.
“He’s a natural kind of guy for the team to reach out to. And if he’s 15
BIRTH OF A BRAND
willing, if he’s an Islanders fan, he’s a great guy to build awareness of it and publicity for it.”55
Of course, the Islanders knew they could not bank on Joel’s support.
“I don’t think you would put your eggs in that basket and say, ‘We should do this hoping that Billy Joel shows up at the event,’” Calabria said. But even if Joel never set foot at a hockey game, branding around the baymen would mesh with the depiction of the Long Island identity that his music had circulated across the country. Designers often try to match and build on a region’s self- image to appeal not only to local fans but also to customers in other markets. O’Hara imagined visitors to Long Island wanting a souvenir related to the baymen. “I still think if you come to the airport from another city and you see something regional, you’re going to want it,” O’Hara said. “It’s kind of an ‘I was there’ versus some generic thing that’s trying to please everybody.”56
Besides, the Islanders were desperate to stand out in the New York hockey scene, and they couldn’t afford costly arena upgrades or player acquisitions to energize the fan base. Maybe departing from the only logo they had ever known would encourage fans to move on from the failures of recent seasons. As other NHL teams had proved, a new brand meant new merchandise that would probably fly off the shelves even if the team kept struggling. “They wanted to broaden what they could market from,” O’Hara said. “They can’t guarantee winning, but a platform like maritime or a platform like the bayman is expandable, and there’s things you can do when you’re not winning to keep fans entertained.” He added, “Only one team in a league is going to be a champion. What do the other teams do in their markets to stay relevant?”57
With the baymen as inspiration, O’Hara and the Islanders spent the rest of the summer of 1994 determining how to integrate Long Island’s seafaring heritage into the brand. At the crux of any team’s brand is the logo on its uniforms. Designers began imagining a new symbol for the Islanders, but the lengthy process for NHL approval of new jerseys would not be resolved in time for the looming 1994–
95 season. The Islanders did not want to wait a year to roll out their new image. “They wanted to be able to personify it on their mascot,”
16
BIRTH OF A BRAND
O’Hara said. “They wanted to appeal to kids. A lot of these teams, the culture of the time was, Let’s appeal to children. So everything became animated with teeth and mouths and these in- your- face looks. That’s kind of what drove it.” According to Beach, Islanders ownership specifically suggested that SME model the dimensions of the costume on the big- headed mascot for George Washington University, which had just played at Nassau Coliseum in the regionals for the 1994 NCAA men’s basketball tournament.58
To create the mascot O’Hara relied on a freelance designer named Pat McDarby. A graduate of Manhattan’s High School of Art and Design, McDarby had spent a decade working for advertising agencies and supplying designs to magazines such as Fortune, Life, and Sports Illustrated. McDarby, who grew up in the Bronx rooting for the Rangers, was summoned to rejuvenate the brand of their rivals.59 He never hesitated. “I have a lot of pride in what I do, and I think everybody at SME did too,” he said.60 McDarby scribbled sketches during his long railroad trips from his home in Connecticut to meet clients in New York City. O’Hara thought the early designs for the mascot looked either “too Disneyesque” or too complex, with crabs tangled in his beard or fish at the end of his hockey stick.61
Eventually, McDarby sketched a figure that resembled a caricature of the gruff fishermen in Men’s Lives and the “Downeaster Alexa” music video. The seven- foot mascot, brought to life by a costume designer in Jersey City, had a fifteen- pound head, bushy eyebrows, a bulbous nose, and a full beard that often covered the logo on his Islanders jersey.
He wore suspenders and hockey gloves, and a red light atop his white helmet flashed when the Islanders scored a goal. The jersey, gloves, and helmet gave the fisherman a hockey element that had been toned down or absent in McDarby’s initial sketches. “Before he meant a little bit more to the region,” O’Hara said at the time. “Now he means more to the Islanders. I think that’s okay.” O’Hara believed the cartoonish mascot would resonate with the next generation of Islanders fans, citing studies showing that children directly or indirectly represented $160 billion in buying power in the United States. “I think marketers now have an understanding of the importance of children,” he said.62
17
BIRTH OF A BRAND
Beach and Calabria interviewed candidates to become the Islanders’
new mascot. The most impressive was Rob Di Fiore, a twenty- nine- year-old graduate of St. John’s University in Queens, where he spent three years playing the school’s mascot, Johnny the Beast, at basketball games.
It was not easy work: St. John’s fans were resistant to Johnny the Beast, a replacement for the Red Man, the longtime mascot who was shelved due to perceived racism toward Native Americans. Di Fiore had endured the worst of New York sports fans, spitting, punching, and throwing beer at Johnny the Beast as if no one was inside the costume. It was the type of daunting experience that could be considered good preparation for the job navigating Nassau Coliseum as the Islanders’ new mascot.63
Thanks to Di Fiore’s hyper and hilarious antics, St. John’s fans eventually accepted Johnny the Beast. Then Di Fiore graduated and began searching for full- time mascot jobs. He applied to become one of the most recognizable mascots in sports, the Phillie Phanatic, the furry green mascot for Major League Baseball’s Philadelphia Phillies, but he didn’t get the gig. Instead, he went to work for Barneys, the high-end fashion
store in New York. He still longed to suit up again, so he sent his mascoting résumé to all the sports teams in the area. When the Islanders summoned him to Uniondale, they showed him artwork for the unnamed fisherman mascot. It did not strike Di Fiore as the sort of figure that children would run up to and hug. “Usually when I think of mascots, I think of a warm and fuzzy character like the Phillie Phanatic,” Di Fiore said. “It’s really not like a real animal. I see it’s this fisherman costume and I’m like, Okay.”64
Despite the problems with the costume, Di Fiore was enamored with a dream job as a mascot for a professional sports team. Still, he lacked a skill he feared was crucial to being hired. “Even though I was a jock and played sports,” he said, “I never really learned how to ice- skate really well.” He tried to convince the Islanders that hockey mascots didn’t spend much time on the ice anyway, since the Zamboni came out between periods. The Islanders agreed: they wanted their new mascot interacting with fans in the stands and on the concourse.
Charisma was required. Skating ability was secondary. Di Fiore was hired in September at the rate of seventy- five dollars per game.65
18
BIRTH OF A BRAND
The Islanders had the first component of their new brand. What they didn’t know, because Di Fiore had not told them, was that the man hired to represent the brand was recovering from alcoholism, cocaine addiction, and depression. What they did know, and had little power to prevent, was that the 1994– 95 NHL season, which they hoped would be a test run for the Islanders’ new identity, might never happen.
While the Islanders were shaping their new brand over the summer of 1994, the National Hockey League had been negotiating with its seven hundred players on a new collective bargaining agreement. A major sticking point was a proposal by the owners of the twenty- six NHL
teams for a wage structure based on team revenues. Players viewed it as an onerous salary cap that would reduce their earning potential.
Owners wanted to eliminate salary arbitration and cut insurance benefits, pension funds, expense money, and roster sizes. Players accused the league of negotiating in bad faith. Although the regular season was scheduled to start on October 1, tough rhetoric from both camps gave the impression that a lengthy lockout could ensue.66
The prospect of a work stoppage threatened the Islanders’ plans to rebrand. Work stoppages in professional sports leagues tend to anger fans who view the process as selfish bickering between billionaire owners and millionaire players. In August 1994 wealthy Major League Baseball players initiated a strike that canceled the rest of the season and alienated middle- class fans. Smatterings of discontent were also apparent at NHL exhibition games. Crowds booed when the unionized players from their home teams shook hands with opponents at center ice as a show of solidarity. Fans also didn’t buy the cries of poverty coming from owners who raked in revenues of $700 million in the 1993– 94 season and had just struck a $155 million television deal with Fox. As weeks passed without an agreement, the lockout had begun souring fans and making them less receptive to NHL hockey, let alone new jerseys and mascots.67
The postponement was especially painful for the Islanders, eager to refresh their brand after the humiliating playoff sweep by the Rangers six months earlier. Every day without new games left fans with the 19
BIRTH OF A BRAND
memory of the last one that counted, with the Rangers clinching their first Stanley Cup in fifty- four years. The arrival of October brought confirmation: the NHL would postpone the season pending a collective bargaining deal. Months passed without an agreement. On January 11
the owners narrowly rejected a deal for a shortened season that had been ratified by the players. “There was absolute disbelief that they turned down our proposal,” Islanders captain Pat Flatley said. “It’s beginning to look like they didn’t want a deal.”68 The next day, on the 103rd day of the lockout, the league and the players settled. The chance for a full eighty- four- game season had been lost. In its place would be a truncated forty- eight- game schedule starting in late January.69
Islanders fans were torn. They were happy their team would return to action, but they were also angry the owners and players let the lockout drag on for more than three months, canceling half the season.
One fan told Newsday, “I think it’s ridiculous for both the players and the owners to get into this situation.” Another wrote an angry letter to the editor: “As far as the players and owners go, we must be sure to welcome them back with what they truly deserve. For the owners: BOOOOOO! For the players: BOOOOOO!”70
Despite widespread reports of fan unrest, the Islanders chose to move ahead with the rebrand. The team took out ads in Newsday that put a positive spin on the shortened season. “With half as many games,” the ads pointed out, “each one counts twice as much.”71
20
2
A Frozen-
Dinner Franchise
As soon as the pact between the NHL owners and players was
announced, ending the lockout, hundreds of Islanders fans began calling the ticket office at Nassau Coliseum. The team would begin the shortened season, and take their first public step toward rebranding, at home against the Florida Panthers on January 21, 1995. If anything, the absence of hockey seemed to make fans grow fonder for the Islanders, and the Islanders grow fonder for playing again.
“It’s such a plus in our lives,” raved one fan. “We went crazy without hockey,” said another.1 There was reason for optimism. Behind the bench Al Arbour was replaced by his assistant Lorne Henning, a player on the Islanders’ first Stanley Cup team and a coach on the three others, providing continuity from the championship years. But the new brand would become most associated with the players, and the Islanders had a pair of exciting rookies to usher in the era of the fisherman mascot: right wing Brett Lindros, the Islanders’ first- round draft pick in 1994 and the brother of Philadelphia Flyers captain Eric Lindros, and left wing Žiggy Pálffy, a highly touted prospect from Slovakia who scored twenty- five goals for the Islanders’ minor league affiliate the previous year. Neither Lindros nor Pálffy had laced up in the disastrous 1994 postseason, so they did not bear the stain of the humiliating Rangers series. With the lockout over, the Islanders were upbeat. “Now we’re fighting for what we really like, jobs and a playoff spot,” said right wing Brad Dalgarno.2 Center Pierre Turgeon, a hero of the 1993 postseason run, suggested the Islanders could regain the momentum that took them to the conference finals: “There is a good feeling on this team. And down the line, it doesn’t matter what we have 21
A FROZEN-DINNER FRANCHISE
done in the past. Last year, the Rangers won the Stanley Cup and the year before, they didn’t make the playoffs.”3
More than any other player, Lindros was put forth as the centerpiece of the team’s new brand. By most reports the nineteen- year- old Lindros was not the same player as his older brother Eric, who had exceeded forty goals in each of his first two seasons with the Flyers.
In fact, the younger Lindros did not skate well enough to make the Canadian world junior team.4 Nevertheless, the Islanders sold him as the second coming. General manager Don Maloney raised expectations by trading respected defenseman Uwe Krupp for the right to draft Lindros ninth overall in 1994 and signing him to a five- year, $7.5
million deal that guaranteed a long- term presence on Long Island.
Teammate Ray Ferraro said that Lindros could “dominate” play. A newspaper columnist drew a generous comparison between Lindros and a mainstay of the Islanders’ Stanley Cup dynasty, calling him
“the new Clark Gillies.” The Blade, the Islanders’ official program and magazine, said he was the team’s most heralded prospect since Pat LaFontaine, a five- time all- star who twice scored more than fifty goals in a season.5 To some, Lindros even had the good looks to be the face of the franchise. “He can be the heartthrob of a generation of girls growing into women wearing his name across their shirts,”
News
day raved. “He is the great hope of a new generation of Islanders hoping to grow into their history. He is tall, dark, and handsome, and single.” The Islanders plastered Lindros’s image across full- page ads beneath the quote “I’ve waited eighteen years to play professional hockey. I’m through waiting.”6
The positivity boded well for rolling out the mascot at the home opener versus the Panthers. On a night the Islanders were crafting their new brand, they would very literally be fighting their past: the Panthers were built by Bill Torrey, the former Islanders general manager who assembled the players on the Stanley Cup teams, and their goaltender was Mark Fitzpatrick, who had played parts of five seasons on Long Island, including the 1993 playoff run. The Panthers had beaten the Islanders in all five meetings the previous season, almost costing the Islanders the final playoff spot. But this was the new postlockout era 22
A FROZEN-DINNER FRANCHISE
in Uniondale. Lindros, about to make his NHL debut, wolfed down his traditional pregame dinner of grilled chicken and linguini. A message board on Hempstead Turnpike exulted, “Welcome Back, Islander Fans!” An excited crowd of 14,106 filed into Nassau Coliseum and picked up free Pierre Turgeon cards at the turnstiles. Some fans had Islanders logos painted on their cheeks. Energy pulsed through an arena that had not seen hockey for the past nine months.7
At about seven o’clock Rob Di Fiore came onto the ice in the mascot outfit to rev up the fans. He was as nervous as the players, momentarily getting tangled up on the back of the net during his first skate around the rink but escaping unscathed. Then the public address system blared AC/DC’s hard- rock “For Those About to Rock,” starting a ten- minute display of lasers and fireworks to accompany player introductions. Out came the 1994– 95 New York Islanders, led by their new coach. The last players on the ice, by virtue of the numbers on their backs, were Lindros, number 75, and Turgeon, number 77.8
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