We Want Fish Sticks
Page 8
Then came the horrifying story that pushed hockey onto everyone’s backburner. On the morning of April 20 newspapers landed on Long Island doorsteps with coverage of the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. Some fifteen hundred miles from Nassau Coliseum, a disillusioned army veteran named Timothy McVeigh parked a rental truck alongside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. As McVeigh walked away a bomb in the cargo hold exploded.
The blast destroyed one- third of the building. The floors collapsed.
Cars overturned. Debris buzzed through the air. The human toll was unimaginable: 168 deaths and more than 680 injuries, many of them severe. America’s sense of security had been shattered.99 On Long Island the killings were evocative. Only a month earlier a Jamaican immigrant named Colin Ferguson had been sentenced to two hundred years in prison for a shooting rampage on a Long Island Rail Road train that killed six people and wounded nineteen others.100 Ferguson fired as the train pulled into the station in Garden City, just ten minutes from Nassau Coliseum. The Islanders helped create a fund for the victims to start the healing process. Now McVeigh’s actions ripped open the wound.
The April 20 issue of the Daily News was dominated by coverage of the bombing. On page 84, however, the newspaper unveiled a sports scoop. A few days earlier an upstate New York newspaper, the Schenectady Daily Gazette, reported that the Islanders were “ready to make a fisherman in a boat their new logo” and change their colors to Atlantic 47
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blue with silver, bright orange, and navy blue trim. Schenectady was three hours from Long Island, so most Islanders fans had not seen the blurb. Besides, the Gazette did not publish a picture of the fisherman logo itself. Enter the Daily News, which branded itself “New York’s picture newspaper.” It had somehow obtained a copy of the logo and showed off its acquisition in a photo illustration spanning three columns. “Forget about Islander tradition,” the caption read. “Here’s what Denis Potvin would have looked like with the new ‘fish sticks’
logo on his sweater.” There was the Islanders’ Hall of Fame captain, his arms raised in celebration, with the fisherman logo superimposed over the original crest on his jersey. Two months before the Islanders planned to unveil the fisherman logo, it had been leaked to a tabloid with a penchant for sensationalism and puns.101
Alongside Potvin’s picture the Daily News ran a story with the boldface headline “Isles’ New Logo Would Be Sea Sick.” For nine unrelenting paragraphs beat writer Colin Stephenson characterized the logo change as a flagrant departure from tradition, “the one thing the Islanders have to be proud of in these dark days leading up to their elimination from playoff contention.” The article acknowledged the Islanders’ weak apparel sales, which ranked them twenty- fourth among the twenty- six NHL teams, lagging far behind the Kings, Ducks, Sharks, and Panthers. “But none of those teams has anything to offer their fans but snazzy uniforms,” Stephenson wrote.
“The Islanders have four Stanley Cups in their history, which isn’t that long. They would move as many replica jerseys next season by building a winning team as by coming out with a new uniform.” The story criticized the Islanders for “replacing one of the most distinctive logos in sports with some rip- off of a frozen- dinner symbol”
that was “embarrassingly reminiscent of the Gorton’s fisherman, the advertising logo used on boxes of Gorton’s frozen fish sticks.”
Stephenson concluded his rebuke of the rebrand by imagining the Islanders’ young stars, such as Brett Lindros, Žiggy Pálffy, and Éric Fichaud, trying to draw inspiration from the championship banners in the rafters at Nassau Coliseum. “They won’t see their proud logo hanging there reminding them of what is possible,” he wrote. “Instead, 48
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all they’ll see are museum pieces of a bygone era to which they have little or no connection.”102
For all its bluster, the Daily News story was deeply flawed. First, Stephenson overstated the Islanders’ abandonment of tradition by erroneously reporting that the team planned to ditch its blue- and- orange color scheme, which matched the official colors of Nassau County, in favor of blue and black. Second, Stephenson was naive to suggest the Islanders could sell just as many jerseys by winning instead of updating their uniforms, ignoring that turning a rebuilding team into a contender would cost many millions of dollars that small- market teams like the Islanders did not have. In addition, the photo illustration put only the fisherman logo on Potvin’s jersey, without the lighthouse shoulder patches and ocean waves that SME chose to complete the new look.
The Daily News did not even feign to uphold the journalistic standard of neutrality in a story that was at turns mocking and hypercritical.
Still, the comparison to the Gorton’s fisherman was undeniable. In ubiquitous television commercials, Gorton’s advertised its crunchy fish sticks and zesty garlic and herb fillets with the image of a seafarer almost identical to the man in the new Islanders logo. Both characters had gray beards. Both wore rain slickers and oilskin rain hats. In most printed iterations the Gorton’s fisherman was gripping a ship’s wheel with his hands in front of his chest in the same position in which the Islanders’ fisherman was holding a hockey stick. “I mean, it was a spitting image of the Gorton’s fisherman,” said Eric Mirlis, the Islanders’
assistant director of media relations. “Someone should have put two and two together and said, ‘Wait a second. This looks too much like something that is established and is out there.’” O’Hara admitted that fans probably would have pointed out the logo’s similarity to the Gorton’s fisherman if SME had run focus- group testing. “The lessons there are do more research,” he said. “If more research was done with consumers, the partners, and the media, it could have taken a different course.”103
For the Islanders the Daily News story worsened a suddenly bleak April. The day the article ran, the team was in Philadelphia for a game against the Flyers, needing to win its last seven games for the slight-49
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est hope at a playoff spot. The Post was reporting that Kirk Muller would demand a trade after the season and slammed the Islanders for dealing for “the right person at the wrong time,” insisting that Muller belonged on a playoff team and that the Islanders would not contend for at least three or four years. And now the Daily News was scoffing at the idea of a logo change that the team was not prepared to defend.
The Islanders lost that night 2– 1 to the Flyers, who clinched their first playoff berth since 1989. Islanders public relations executive Chris Botta, who was in charge of the team’s media guide and programs, had trouble concentrating on the action. He figured that Stephenson’s story would initiate a stream of negative coverage from other news outlets, putting the team on the defensive long before the official unveiling.
“I remember just sitting there during this game in Philadelphia and thinking, Oh my God, the shit’s gonna hit the fan,” he said. Botta was especially troubled by the photo illustration. By plastering the logo on a beloved former player, the Daily News framed the logo change as an abandonment of history, not the refreshing of a worn- out brand.
“They got Denis Potvin unwillingly, unknowingly, wearing it,” Botta said. “That logo didn’t have a chance anyway. It certainly didn’t have a chance after it was stuck on Denis Potvin.”104
Calabria, meanwhile, was angry the Daily News called the logo “sea sick” in its headline. “It’s an easy target,” he said. “As a movie critic, it’s like giving a bad review to a movie because you can make fun of the title in a cute way.” No matter the validity of the Islanders’ protests, the team had little recourse against the Daily News. Suing the newspaper for publishing a leaked copy of the logo would only call more attention to the leak and the critical coverage and further preempt the unveiling of the new jersey in two months. Besides, the Islanders figured they probably wouldn’t have prevailed in court anyway. Asked if the team ever consi
dered legal action against the Daily News, Calabria, a former journalist, recalled the landmark 1971 Supreme Court ruling in New York Times v. U.S. , better known as the Pentagon Papers case. How could a hockey team hope to win a lawsuit against a newspaper that published a leaked copy of a logo if the federal government could not stop a newspaper from printing leaked documents on the grounds 50
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that publication jeopardized national security? Calabria figured that legal precedent backed the Daily News. “They are not bound to keep secrets we want kept,” he said.105
Calabria was probably right about the Islanders’ poor chances in a lawsuit, although he was not citing the appropriate area of the law.
Despite the renown of the Pentagon Papers case, any litigation pitting the Islanders versus the Daily News probably would have operated within the less glamorous confines of sports trademark law. Working on the team’s behalf, an attorney named Anthony Fletcher filed paperwork to register the fisherman logo as a trademark on March 15, more than a month before the Daily News published the logo.106 However, the key event in a trademark squabble is not the filing of the application but the “first use in commerce,” or the first day the Islanders planned to sell merchandise featuring the logo, which was listed in the filing as July 1.107 Since the Daily News published the logo before its first use, the Islanders did not have a case. The team couldn’t cite common law, either, because they would have had to establish that they publicly used the logo before its publication in the Daily News.
Botta’s fears about negative copycat coverage were quickly confirmed. A few days after the Daily News article, the Toronto Star, among the highest- circulation newspapers in Canada, published an item on the fisherman logo that appeared to be based on Colin Stephenson’s report.
The Star cited the same statistic about apparel sales and repeated the same mistake about the team’s supposed switch to blue- and- black jerseys. Like Stephenson, the Star’s Bob McKenzie approached the logo with incredulity: “The orange- blue map of Long Island combo will give way to a blue- black motif with a bearded fisherman wearing a rain slicker and carrying a hockey stick in front of a net. Really.”108
The next day the Islanders published the season’s final issue of the
Blade, the official program and magazine. The last page carried a frank full- page column by Botta titled “The Great Logo Debate of 1995.” One particularly ruthless passage attacked the Daily News. Botta accused the newspaper of “disgraceful” and “more than shoddy tabloid journalism.” He called them out for failing to seek comment from the team. He mocked them for publishing a “cheesily- FAXed” copy of 51
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the logo. He criticized their erroneous reporting on the color scheme of the new uniforms. “Oh, well,” Botta snarkily concluded. “It was the first scoop the Daily News has had on the Islanders since the Ford administration.”109
But the Daily News was not the logo’s only detractor. One fan hung a banner at Nassau Coliseum reading, “Fish sticks are for dinner, not our logo.” Others likened the crest to the bearded character on boxes of Fisherman’s Friend cough drops. Many signed a petition to protest the new jerseys. In an open letter to the team that ran in the Islander Insider newsletter, a woman from Plainview wrote, “Now you want to change our proud logo; a logo that’s been worn by four Stanley Cup champions. At least put the present logo on the shoulder, tie the old in with new.”110
The team did not listen. In fact, they were about to abandon even more of “the old.”
The Islanders followed their April 20 loss to Philadelphia with an April 22 loss to Ottawa that officially eliminated them from playoff contention.111 A week later they finished the season in last place in the Atlantic Division at 15- 28- 5, the second- worst record in the NHL. The 1994– 95
season had begun with the debut of a new mascot and young stars such as Brett Lindros. It was supposed to mark the first stage of a grand rebrand that would help fans move past the playoff series sweep by the Rangers. Instead, the season ended with the Rangers squeaking into the playoffs, while the Islanders were out of the mix for the first time in three years.112
The scapegoat for the disappointing season was the coach. Two weeks after the Daily News announced the abandonment of the logo worn during the Stanley Cup dynasty, the team fired Lorne Henning, the center who assisted on the goal that won the Islanders their first title in 1980. The move was shocking. Henning, an original Islanders player who spent eighteen years in the organization, was granted only one lockout- shortened, injury- riddled campaign to prove himself as head coach, even though he still had one year left on his contract.
Apparently, the Islanders, who were about to unveil the fisherman logo, 52
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wanted a fresh face behind the bench, too. Asked about Henning’s replacement, general manager Don Maloney immediately ruled out former coach Al Arbour, another link to the Stanley Cup teams. “A new voice is necessary for us to go forward,” he said, advocating for a disciplinarian who would run the players through a grueling training camp in September. “You need a personality to strike fear in the players.
If they don’t perform, it’s going to be hell for them.”113
If the Islanders hired the sort of taskmaster that Maloney was describing, the next coach could become as much a part of the new brand identity as the fisherman jerseys in the 1995– 96 season. But it was only May 3, and the market for prime coaching candidates had not developed. As teams started dropping out of the playoffs in the next few weeks, their head coaches might be fired and their assistants might look to graduate to head- coaching jobs with other clubs. Then the Islanders could start interviewing.
In the interim the team turned to a more pressing problem. The controversy surrounding the fisherman logo threatened to squelch the rebrand before the new jerseys even made their on- ice debuts. The logo was being socked in the stands and battered by the media. After Henning’s firing the Daily News suggested the Islanders misdirected their ire at their coach, running the headline “Forget Lorne, Fire Logo.”
Columnist Frank Brown bristled that “some imbecile in Islanders management” had chosen “a guy in a raincoat” for the new jerseys. “The fact is, it’s appalling— the logo, that is,” he wrote. “It’s embarrassing, worse than the just- awful, makes- you- want- to- throw- up mascot.”114
If the Islanders wanted to salvage their brand identity, they had to hit back.
53
3
The Baymen and the Bruin
As the Stanley Cup playoffs began in the spring of 1995, the Islanders were in disarray. Lorne Henning, their ousted head coach, turned down another job in the organization, saying that he could not stay on Long Island “as long as Donnie Maloney is still around” as general manager. Pat Flatley, their captain, called Henning’s dismissal “unjust”
and “completely unfair.” Pierre Turgeon, the star they traded away, rejuvenated his career in Montreal, scoring eleven goals in fifteen games, while Kirk Muller, the player they received in return, had only three goals in twelve games and reportedly wanted out. The Islanders’
longtime play- by- play broadcaster, Jiggs McDonald, blamed the front office for the turmoil. “The top management has no hockey experience, none whatsoever,” he said in an interview with Newsday. “Somebody asked me if I thought the team was at a crossroads. Hell no. They’ve hit the wall.” A few weeks later McDonald hit a wall of his own in negotiations for a new contract. The familiar face of the Islanders telecasts was gone after fourteen years, yet another indication of the tumult surrounding the team.1
Writing in Newsday, columnist Mark Herrmann ran through the list of personnel changes in the Islanders’ recent history. “So in the space of six years, they have completely changed their identity three times,”
he wrote. “And still they don’t have one.”2
The revolving door of players spelled trouble for the Islande
rs brand.
With the fisherman jerseys about to debut, Muller was the closest the Islanders had to the type of marquee name that sold tickets and merchandise. However, as Herrmann pointed out, the team’s newest acquisition did not even want to be there. “Shame on Muller for balk-ing at reporting, and mumbling about a trade,” Herrmann wrote. “He 55
THE BAYMEN AND THE BRUIN
should be honored to wear the uniform once graced by Denis Potvin, Mike Bossy, and Bryan Trottier (at least it will be an honor, until the Islanders brain trust follows through on plans to replace the noble, title- evoking Islanders crest with a drawing of a hook, line, and sinker or some such gizmo).”3
Such potshots at the fisherman logo had become commonplace.
The Islanders planned to unveil the logo at a news conference during the Stanley Cup Final in late June, before the hockey press went into hibernation for the summer. But they needed a plan to reclaim their jerseys from the barrage of sniping about the Gorton’s fisherman.
Chris Botta’s column in the last program of the season offered six talking points to sell the logo. His first point, and probably the strongest, was that the logo was the work of “the best designers.” True to Botta’s claim, SME came highly recommended by the NHL after a string of branding successes. Botta vouched for the firm’s knowledge of which uniforms looked and sold best. As he put it, SME’s involvement should end speculation that “some honcho in the Islander office woke up one day, decided he didn’t like the current logo, broke out the crayons, and said, ‘This is it.’” Regardless of the negative reviews for the fisherman logo, critics could not fault the Islanders for selecting a well- respected design firm.4
The second point in Botta’s column was dubious. He claimed the Islanders received support for the jerseys from both longtime fans and the target audience of children and young adults. According to Botta, Islanders fans “wanted to hate the thing, broke down and admitted they actually liked it, offered a few ways to tinker with it, and have heartily endorsed it,” while younger shoppers “flat- out loved it.” On this point Botta was massaging the truth. His suggestion of a rigorous research process was not supported by oral history interviews with several people involved in the rebranding, and period media accounts do not suggest any widespread public excitement. In fact, the fan base had already started a petition for the original logo’s return. The only indication that anyone even tolerated the jersey change was when an editor of the Islander Insider newsletter responded to a negative letter 56