Calabria told Feeney that he was particularly sore over Islander Insider spreading the rumor that Gorton’s was suing the team claiming trademark infringement over the fisherman logo. Feeney claimed the rumor had been circulating online for months and asked Calabria if he had ever published a rumor in his many years as a sports reporter. According to Feeney, Calabria said that he printed rumors only if he confirmed their veracity. “After hearing that, I expected Pat to tell me he had a bridge he wanted to sell me,” Feeney wrote sarcastically. “He didn’t, maybe next time.”87
With the rhetoric ramping up, Islanders chief financial officer Art McCarthy and general counsel Bill Skehan met privately with Feeney and Croke and agreed to speak at a STIC meeting on February 28.
Two hundred fans attended, and most of the crowd grew hostile when McCarthy and Skehan defended the fisherman jerseys. “McCarthy tried to tell us that some people like the new uniform,” complained one fan, Sandy Kreple of Patchogue. “Some guy had to tell him that the point is not to have some people like it, but most people. You can find kids in kindergarten who know more about marketing than these guys.” In an effort to gauge the fan base’s opinion on the jerseys eight months after they were unveiled, Feeney polled 108 people at the meeting. Only 21 said they liked the new uniform, and a mere 12 came out in favor of the fisherman logo. There was a general feeling that management was out of touch. “This bunch changed the uniform 130
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without even considering the fans,” said one man from Long Beach.
A fan from Bellmore remarked incredulously, “Now they are having focus groups to see if the uniform should be changed again. They need a focus group for that?” Eighty- four percent of those polled suggested that STIC should demonstrate publicly. In the next issue of Islander Insider the group announced plans to hold a rally outside Nassau Coliseum on April 6.88
As their fans complained about team management in newsletters, the Islanders used their own mouthpiece, the Blade, as a channel to vent their frustrations over the failure of the rebrand. The franchise was surprisingly unrestrained in employing its official program to attack its critics. One item pleaded with New York Post columnist Larry Brooks to stop defending Kirk Muller for wanting off Long Island.89 When Wayne Gretzky ridiculed the selection of one player from every team for the All- Star Game, which gave Mathieu Schneider a spot despite the Islanders’ last- place record, the Blade charged the league’s greatest player with “egotistical grandstanding.”90 In another issue the Islanders knocked one of their own players for his “gutless, very- unIslander-like move” of granting two anonymous newspaper interviews that were apparently critical of the team.91 Not surprisingly, the Islanders took most exception to any backlash against the fisherman jerseys.
At one point the Blade expressed disappointment in former Islander Ray Ferraro, then playing for the Rangers, for criticizing his former team’s uniforms in a television interview.92 Another time the organization called out MSG Network anchor Bob Page merely for asking Islanders dynasty winger John Tonelli about the new jerseys on air.93
In retrospect the Islanders’ constant protestations seem unbecoming for a professional sports franchise.
Meanwhile, the team continued its poor play into the spring, drawing even more volatility from Milbury. During a loss to the Devils on March 1 Milbury was so angry over a questionable penalty call against the Islanders that he threw two sticks and two water bottles on the ice, cursed at the referee, and was ejected. Afterward, the irate coach and general manager ignored the risk of a fine or suspension for criticizing the officials, treating the postgame interview more like the outspoken 131
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television analyst that he once was. Milbury let loose on referees in general for calling more penalties at key times against the Islanders because the team had a losing record and less at stake than their opponents. “I’ve said it since the beginning of the year,” the coach said.
“We’re easy targets.”94 Milbury was just as short- tempered with his own players. Once, according to Dean Chynoweth, Milbury called out Scott Lachance in front of his teammates.95 Lachance suffered a groin injury in training camp and rushed back to play in the regular-season opener, but his body had not healed, the injury grew worse, and he missed twenty- seven games in a row.96 Despite Lachance’s well-advised caution in rushing back a second time, Milbury questioned the heart of one of his top defensemen. “He more or less said he was faking his injuries and challenged him: ‘Do you even want to play? Are you even hurt?’” Chynoweth recalled. “Then he came unglued and they were at one another.” Milbury apparently thought that Lachance would be motivated to prove his coach wrong, but instead the locker room bordered on mutiny. “There were just so many things at that time that were starting to unravel,” said Mick Vukota.97
Milbury’s skewed approach to player relations found its next target in Wendel Clark. Toward the end of his career Clark resorted to daily medical treatments for his cranky back. “I haven’t had a day since my third year [in 1987– 88] when I haven’t been sore,” he confided to a reporter, “and I will be for the rest of my life.”98 Teammates respected the twenty- nine- year- old Clark for sacrificing his body with bruising body checks and viewed his daily routine of acupuncture, stretching, and massages as a sign of his commitment. Milbury was unconvinced.
Players recalled a tense confrontation between the coach and Clark at the team’s practice facility. Milbury questioned whether Clark wanted to play hockey anymore, noting that he sat at the end of the bench instead of the middle. When Clark defended his dedication to the Islanders, Milbury questioned it again, and Vukota thought that Clark was about to punch Milbury in the face. “Wendel stood up, and Wendel goes, ‘You think you’re God? ’Cause you’re not.’ And then a couple guys stood up and intercepted Wendel.” At a team party later that day Milbury stunned Clark by pulling him aside and making 132
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light of the incident, as if it was just another act intended to spark the team. “Mike’s there and everybody’s having a few beers,” Chynoweth recalled. “He grabs Wendel and was like, ‘Well, we got a real rise out of them today, didn’t we?’” The incident forewarned the departure of the most accomplished player left on the roster. On March 13 Milbury cut a deal with Toronto to ship out Clark, who had twenty- four goals, and Mathieu Schneider, the team’s top defenseman and lone all- star.
In return the Islanders received a package that included twenty- one-year- old defense prospect Kenny Jonsson.99
While the trade made some sense for the future, the short- term effects on the Islanders brand were devastating. The partings of Clark and Schneider deprived the team of its two best players, aside from Žiggy Pálffy, and continued the revolving door of athletes in fisherman jerseys. It also gave the impression that the Islanders were dumping the salaries of promising players at a time when the franchise desperately needed to win to sell its fans on the rebrand. By trading away Clark and Schneider and putting Martin Straka on waivers, the already low payroll dipped from $17.8 million to $15.03 million in a matter of three days.100 Soon after, the Islanders saved another $70,000 by sending center Bob Sweeney to the Flames in exchange for journeyman left wing Pat Conacher and a draft pick.101 For the thirty- six- year- old Conacher, the fisherman jersey was his seventh uniform in thirteen years and his third of a season that had previously included stints in Los Angeles and Calgary. It was also his last jersey in the NHL. “I didn’t like it ’cause I’m a traditionalist,” Conacher said. “Just like, why would you ever change the Montreal Canadiens jersey? It’s one of the most beautiful jerseys in the league. It was like the Islander jersey to me.
Why would you change it with all the winning they’ve done behind it and the people that played in those jerseys?”102
As expected the change in personnel damaged the on- ice performance. In two and a half weeks after trading Clark and Schneider the Islanders did not win a single contest. Mired
in an eight- game losing streak, they faced the Rangers at Nassau Coliseum on the last day of March. The disparity between the rival brands was apparent even before puck drop. Fox prefaced its broadcast of the Saturday-133
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afternoon game with footage of a world- famous scene from the Rangers’ backyard, Times Square at night, with taxis zooming past bright lights. An unseen narrator sang the first few bars of “New York, New York,” but stopped abruptly, recognizing the game would take place in unglamorous Nassau County. “Aw, forget it,” he said with exaspera-tion. “This scramble’s not in the Apple.” Lacking obvious imagery for Long Island, Fox settled for slang that evoked an altogether different type of island— “It’s out on the Island, mon”— accentuated with an image of a hand stirring a tropical drink.103 In the game the Islanders, trying to market a team of the future, used fifteen players between ages twenty and twenty- five, while the Rangers, selling a playoff- bound team of the present, had thirteen players at least thirty. Fichaud and Söderström, two young, inexperienced goalies, manned the Islanders’
net; the Rangers had Mike Richter, already a two- time all- star and Stanley Cup champion. Not surprisingly the Islanders dropped the game 4– 1, cementing their ninth straight loss, thirteenth in their last fifteen, and fifth in six tries against the Rangers that season. Adding injury to insult, Kenny Jonsson left the game with a concussion due to an errant Mark Messier elbow to the jaw.104
The Rangers brand was built around superstars such as Richter, who notched his twenty- second win of the season, and Messier, who scored his forty- sixth goal. The Islanders brand could not compete with that star power, especially in the absence of Clark and Schneider. Bertuzzi, hyped as a scorer who might sell tickets someday, may have actually damaged the team’s image during the Rangers game. Two months after Milbury spat at Ulf Samuelsson, and later called for Bertuzzi to engage in “some sort of physical activity that might include a fight,”
Bertuzzi sucker- punched Samuelsson late in the game, exchanged punches with another Rangers player, and wrestled with a linesman trying to pull him away from attacking Samuelsson again.105 With an opportunity to raise his national profile on the Fox broadcast, Bertuzzi instead came across as reckless. Rangers coach Colin Campbell said,
“It’s on national television. It’s disgraceful.” Even Milbury criticized the behavior. “Todd showed some fire, but I think he may have crossed the line there a little bit. There’s no place for frustration, as much as 134
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that would be a natural reaction. It’s an emotion that serves no good purpose.” The unrepentant Bertuzzi was suspended three games.106
As the calendar turned to April, the merciful final month of the season, the Islanders’ losing streak reached eleven games, one shy of the franchise record, and they had dropped an astonishing sixteen of their last eighteen. Management was resigned to finishing in the NHL cellar in the first season of the fisherman jerseys. As the April 6
rally against the new logo approached, perhaps the Islanders’ most prominent alumnus, Stanley Cup captain Denis Potvin, was quoted saying, “It’s unbelievable how much I don’t like those uniforms.”107
The team had to choose between sticking with a widely criticized logo and sacking the signature element of a brand that was supposed to endure for years to come.
The mounting pressure from fans, media, and former players proved too difficult to ignore. On April 4 Newsday reported that the Islanders were seeking permission from the league to ditch the fisherman logo for the upcoming 1996– 97 season, which marked the team’s twenty-fifth anniversary. As a compromise the Islanders proposed retaining most of the elements of the new jerseys, including the color scheme, the lighthouse shoulder patches, and the waves, while replacing the fisherman with the old Long Island map logo. The timing suggested that the team wanted to defuse the fast- approaching rally led by the Save the Islanders Coalition, which was urging fans to wear apparel with the old logo.108 Fans flooded the Islanders’ offices with phone calls supporting the change.109 However, the switch seemed uncertain the next day when word came out that the league was reluctant to leave merchandisers with racks of fisherman jerseys that were about to become obsolete. The abandonment of the fisherman logo would require the unlikely four- month extension of the December deadline for teams to notify the league about a uniform change.110 Amid the uncertainty, Feeney said the rally would go ahead as scheduled.111
Unable to announce the desertion of the fisherman logo before the rally, the Islanders tried to appease the fan base by making their first public acknowledgments that dumping the traditional uniform was a 135
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mistake. Appearing on SportsChannel, chief operating officer Ralph Palleschi called the logo change “a bad decision” and placed blame on the NHL, saying the league “prompted” the Islanders to make the switch because of their low merchandise sales.112 The explanation came too late to prevent more bad press. Two hours before the Islanders skated against the Sabres at Nassau Coliseum on April 6, three hundred people marched from the Long Island Marriott to Hempstead Turnpike, carrying signs scrawled with resentful messages such as “Restore the Original Uniform” and “Give Gorton’s Back Their Logo and Give Us Ours Back.”113 Most fans wore the original Islanders uniform. One was dressed as the Grim Reaper. A boy held up a sign for the cameras with a hand- drawn fisherman logo and the common observation “It’s Stan Fischler.” The antagonistic atmosphere brought out reporters from two newspapers and three television stations, more media than the last- place Islanders were used to receiving.114 “We’re just ordinary people,” one fan from Farmingdale told a Newsday reporter. “And those jerseys— the old jerseys— mean a lot to us.” In an interview with the Daily News a season- ticket holder from Malverne insisted, “The entire jersey has to come back.”115
For the designers at SME, the scene was humiliating. Never before had a jersey created by the agency resulted in such an outpouring of dis-dain. “They had riots in the street over the damn thing,” remembered illustrator Pat McDarby, laughing in disbelief. “People protesting over a logo that we did was pretty funny and embarrassing.” The company’s cofounder Ed O’Hara thought the mockery of the logo overshadowed how carefully SME had analyzed industry trends when developing the new jerseys, even if the firm had misjudged the affection for the original Islanders crest. “It’s really easy to look back and say that was ridiculous. Everybody involved and I think the entire industry has learned something from that, but I think you’ve got to be sensitive to what was going on. What were the trends? What were the objectives?” Islanders management, meanwhile, viewed the protests as a lack of gratitude for ownership’s efforts to keep the Islanders on Long Island. Brett Pickett, the son of the Islanders majority owner, said he understood the fans’
desire for different jerseys and better players but thought they did 136
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not appreciate the existential threat facing the club. “I knew at that point in time that the franchise on Long Island itself was a dubious proposition,” Pickett said. “You could see the new markets and the new ownership coming into the league, and it just had substantially better buildings, deeper pockets, more glam than the Islanders did.
The creeping suspicion started to grow that this franchise is really in a struggle to make it on Long Island. Those protests, from my vantage point, I thought, Gosh, if these people could see what I see.”116
The contentious crowd continued to express itself inside the arena.
In the second period the fans began chanting, “No more fish sticks!”
Soon after, the Islanders took a 1– 0 lead. They added another goal in the third. Then Travis Green iced the game with an empty- netter.117
The clinching of the Islanders’ twenty- first victory of the season and the conclusion of an eleven- game losing streak brought a roar from the crowd of 13,225, cheering the players wearing the uniforms they had
protested a few hours earlier. “I think the question we got to ask is, Were they making fun of the jersey because we had a bad team, you know what I mean?” said goaltender Éric Fichaud, who earned the first shutout of his NHL career in the game. “It usually goes with it. If you’re winning, you can play with pink jerseys. It wouldn’t matter because you’re winning games.”118
On April 12 the Islanders called a much- anticipated press conference led by cochairman Robert Rosenthal. “We realize we made a mistake and we’re here to admit it,” he said. “Our fans and alumni have been heard.” To the fan base’s chagrin, Rosenthal announced that the NHL
had rejected the request to discard the fisherman logo for the following season. However, the league granted the Islanders permission to wear their original logo for as many as fifteen home games in 1996– 97
and eliminate the fisherman entirely starting in 1997– 98. In response to fans’ complaints about the team turning its back on tradition, the Islanders promised to raise banners to the rafters in honor of Al Arbour and Clark Gillies and named Gillies, Bob Nystrom, John Tonelli, and Ed Westfall as special ambassadors in the twenty- fifth anniversary season.119 “There’s a sense of frustration on the part of the fans, and the logo is part of that,” Nystrom said at the time. “It would appear 137
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