Tim Beach, the Islanders’ director of game events in the fisherman era, ended up running game entertainment for the NFL’s Arizona Car-dinals. Asked for his reflections on the Islanders’ rebranding, Beach referred to the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, about a radio station with low ratings. In one 1978 episode a well- intentioned promotion on Thanksgiving goes horribly wrong when turkeys are thrown out of a helicopter and plunge to their deaths. Beach said the punch line, uttered by the station’s general manager, reminded him of the Islanders’ missteps in rolling out the fisherman logo. “A lot of times when there’s a bad idea that goes wrong in my life, I’ll look at someone and I’ll say,
‘As God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.’”30
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Interview with Graphic Designer Pat McDarby
On February 20, 2014, author Nicholas Hirshon conducted an hour-long interview with graphic designer Pat McDarby, whose sketches inspired the Islanders’ mascot during the fisherman era. A year later McDarby died on March 14, 2015, at age fifty- seven. This interview is included as an appendix because of McDarby’s high profile in the sports- branding business and his passing just one year after the discussion with the author, making this the final extensive interview he appears to have granted. His obituary in the New York Times credited him with designing more than two hundred logos in collegiate and professional sports, including designs for the NHL’s New York Rangers, the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, the Indianapolis 500, various Major League Soccer events, and what is now World Wrestling Entertainment. In the verbatim transcript of the interview that appears below, McDarby describes his role in the Islanders’ rebranding process and expresses frustration about the modern sports- branding industry.
HIRSHON: How did you come to work for Ed O’Hara and SME, or were you a private contractor at that point, or how was that working?
MCDARBY: I had known Ed when he worked at Colgate, and I had done some freelance work for them at that time. I had lost contact with him for a little while. And one day he calls me up, and he says, ‘Why don’t you come in and see if you can do some work for us?’ I was a finished illustrator. I did some designs at that time, but it was mostly illustration. He knew I had hands and I could sketch and do that kind of stuff, so he brought me in. They had just finished the Panthers off, the Florida Panthers, that was their first big job. And all of a sudden, it spread like wildfire. He had me work on the Maryland Terrapins. That 197
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was my first job with them, and that turned out great, and they chose my design. And from there on, I was full- time freelance with them for four years, doing designs like the Rangers and Madison Square Garden.
And then we did the Islanders, which was a very interesting project.
HIRSHON: Right. And you would have been working for them then those, I think you said, four years for freelance. That would have been in the mid- ’90s?
MCDARBY: It was from ’96 to 2000. I did over two hundred projects with them.
HIRSHON: With SME?
MCDARBY: What’s that?
HIRSHON: With SME?
MCDARBY: That’s Sean Michael Edwards. That’s the name of the partners who owned it.
HIRSHON: Okay. Do you remember the first time he contacted you about the Islanders project specifically?
MCDARBY: I was there. I was working pretty much full- time. I did full- time freelance for them. The Islander project came in, and we did our first round of sketches. It was mostly lighthouses. That was our initial approach, which I think should have been the logo. It was a beautiful, beautiful logo. It had hope, the light and the dark. The Islanders were trying to come out of that. They were in a bad couple of seasons they had there, so they needed some hope for the future.
So we proposed to come out with the lighthouse on the front, but somebody over there had got stuck on the fisherman. [He laughs.]
Some of the fishermen really came out good. They were very heroic, almost like a Neptune god. We did some of that, too. We did some Neptune approaches and stuff like that. There was a whole bucking wave– type design approach. That’s what we called buckets. There are different approaches we take on the logo. The fisherman, I thought, was pretty good. But then for some reason they got more cartoony with it in the future revisions. When I worked on the face, they wanted more attitude, and it got looking more like Popeye, and I was like, Eh.
It was actually my least favorite of the designs I’ve done for them. And it came to fruition, because they had riots in the street over the damn 198
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thing. [He laughs.] People protesting over a logo that we did was pretty funny and embarrassing.
HIRSHON: When you were first approached about the project, were you told to work with a maritime theme?
MCDARBY: They had buckets. What would depict the Islanders?
First we did what’s been called evolutionary logos that were just based off what they already had. We just dimensionalized it, made some of the outlines bolder and the type a little modern. There was a bunch of approaches like that. Then you had, What else is Islanders? Lighthouse.
Lighthouse is perfect. You have the radiating light, and we were going with this whole wave theme. The three- color wave thing on the bottom.
So we had that approach. And then the heroic fisherman. Those are the three that I remember that we went through.
HIRSHON: And you really thought that the lighthouse would be a better design?
MCDARBY: Absolutely.
HIRSHON: Why is that?
MCDARBY: I think we all did. Well, symbolically it’s just stronger, and it just meant more than a fisherman, you know?
HIRSHON: Although it seems like you thought that the fisherman could work, just not with the angle they eventually took with the cartoonish quality.
MCDARBY: It got too cartoony. Yeah. The one thing with SME at that time, they used to sell this whole in- your- face approach. That was kind of big. We always had one approach that was in your face, and that was the in- your- face approach. The lighthouse was not an in- your- face type of icon. So they wanted this in- your- face fisherman with a hockey stick.
HIRSHON: There were also different permutations of the fisherman himself, right?
MCDARBY: Yes.
HIRSHON: So what were some of the other ideas? I know you said at some points he was looking more heroic or like a god or something or like Neptune from the sea.
MCDARBY: You were looking up at him. I think some of the hockey 199
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sticks had a trident on the other end. I think it actually was like Neptune, if I remember correctly. Then it definitely morphed into the Gorton’s fisherman. We had concerns too that we might have some legal problems with Gorton’s. [He laughs.] But they approved the sketches, and that’s how we went forward. Like I said, the ones we did, it was definitely more looking up at a heroic angle, in kind of a Rockefeller Center, Deco- type style. And it worked. It worked. It was New York.
I liked a lot of those sketches.
HIRSHON: But eventually you thought that he got too much of an attitude also? Because I know he has the grimace on his face. People have brought that up.
MCDARBY: That’s the whole thing. They kept adding that. They kept adding the in- your- face attitude, and that’s what SME was all about at that time. That’s what made them sell, that whole style.
HIRSHON: All right. Were there other aspects of the way he was dressed or anything else that kind of changed over time?
MCDARBY: No. We might have had nets hanging off the stick and stuff like that, just little things, but he was pretty much in a slicker.
The type of slicker was changing from time to time. It was more about making it correct. Your sketch is usually not that right. Something’s come out of your head, and then you research it and you find out what it really looks like. That’s all I can remember as far as that’s concerned.
HIRSHON: All right. ’Cause part of the confusion tha
t I’m having here is since you were involved in both projects, both the mascot and then the logo, I know they happened at different times, ’cause it seems like the mascot was introduced in the ’94– ’95 season, and then the logo didn’t come until ’95– ’96.
MCDARBY: The mascot was definitely part of the final logo. We had the final logo first. It just wasn’t announced. I think his name was Salty or something like that. We developed that first ’cause it was a quick thing to do. They wanted to get some news out about what was gonna happen. They put that out. There’s some funny stories with that too, with the mascot. One of the meetings I had, I was actually thinking about creating fish sticks, like a hockey stick with a fish on the end of 200
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it. [He laughs.] I used to do stuff that like that, and they used to laugh at me. The other one was a hockey puck in the middle of a fish, and how are the pucking fish? [He laughs.]
HIRSHON: So this would have all been part of the mascot design or the logo?
MCDARBY: It was just ideas. We were just coming up with merchandising ideas and the mascot. It’s a whole marketing program that you come up with. Of course, that stuff was just lighthearted. It wasn’t really serious.
HIRSHON: Gotcha. Yeah, because with the article from the Times from 1995, it’s from January, and they do have a photo of the mascot skating around, but they also have these three sketches at the top, and I couldn’t tell if they’re sketches that you actually came up with or if they’re just things they’re throwing out there.
MCDARBY: Those are mine. Those are mine.
HIRSHON: Those are yours. Okay. Because it looks like in some of them he’s— there’s various ages. One of them kind of looks more like Santa Claus to me all the way at the end.
MCDARBY: [He laughs.] Yeah.
HIRSHON: Yeah. And I guess the one in the middle is kind of the one they adopted. I don’t know how well you remember it, but he has the light on top of his head and the helmet.
MCDARBY: Yeah. When he scored, the light would go off.
HIRSHON: Right. The goal light. Yeah. And then there’s others that kind of look, I don’t know, more like a Popeye kind of an image, or something else.
MCDARBY: Well, one of those sketches was somebody else’s. We usually had two to three guys working on it. Yeah, one was kind of real Santa Clausy. I think mine, he had crabs hanging onto his beard and stuff like that.
HIRSHON: Yeah. I’m looking at that one. That seems to be the one that they went with, although I guess they didn’t have the crabs.
MCDARBY: [He laughs.] No crabs, though.
HIRSHON: No crabs, but otherwise it looked pretty similar.
MCDARBY: [He laughs.] Yeah.
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HIRSHON: So what did you say? You originally nicknamed the mascot something?
MCDARBY: I think it was Salty.
HIRSHON: Salty, like the salt of the earth?
MCDARBY: Yeah. You know, saltwater.
HIRSHON: Oh, okay. Because I’ve heard the second season he got the name Nyisles. You know, NY Isles. And I know that was on the back of his jersey.
MCDARBY: Oh, yes. That’s what it was. That’s what it ended up being. Right.
HIRSHON: The Salty thing was just something that you guys in meetings were saying, or was he actually officially named . . .
MCDARBY: When you’re labeling things, you go, ‘Oh, what could his name be? Salty.’ One of my favorite ones, we did— there was a roller- blade team out on Long Island, and they had a shark. The Jawz.
It was the Long Island Jawz.
HIRSHON: Yeah, the Long Island Jawz. Yup.
MCDARBY: And I think their mascot was Chum. [He laughs.]
HIRSHON: Did you do that for them too?
MCDARBY: Yes. I did that for them.
HIRSHON: Oh, great. So the idea behind the mascot, was a lot of this marketing? I understand at that time they were trying to appeal to kids. Was that ever coming into it?
MCDARBY: Yeah. It was a more family- driven marketing plan, and that’s probably why they went with the fisherman too, to try to appeal to the kids. I loved the color palette. I thought the color palette was fantastic.
HIRSHON: What did you like about it?
MCDARBY: The teal was a different color. Otherwise you’re using New York colors like they always do. Teal just added that whole water approach to it, which I liked.
HIRSHON: Okay. Because part of the concern that Ed brought up is that teal was very popular at that time because of the Charlotte Hornets.
MCDARBY: Yes. Yes, it was. We did the Jaguars too. They happened to be part of the SME palette.
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HIRSHON: Right. But he said he was concerned that maybe teal was already on the way out, that it had already been tried and done at that point.
MCDARBY: It might have been. Well, it wasn’t in hockey, though.
It was in football. They had it for the Panthers, and they had it for the Jaguars. He might have been afraid that we might have been using it too much, and it was a hot color at the time.
HIRSHON: So when you’re coming up with these original designs, was there any thought ever given to other kinds of sea creatures like crabs and lobsters and all that kind of stuff?
MCDARBY: In the initial, when you’re creating the buckets, everything gets thrown out there. It can be everything from a shark to a striped bass or a bluefish. Anything that would say New York Islanders.
Even the map. But then they narrow it down before you start sketching.
They narrow it down to maybe three or four buckets, and then you do ideas for each of those, and then you present them.
HIRSHON: Okay. So by the time you were brought into the process, you were told specifically fisherman or bayman idea?
MCDARBY: Yes. Fisherman, lighthouse, an evolutionary approach, which is just dimensionalizing the type, making it nice, better, stronger.
HIRSHON: Were you sitting in on the meetings at Nassau Coliseum where officials from the NHL and the Islanders were there?
MCDARBY: No, I wasn’t there. I was in the office. They always had Ed and either one salesman would go there and do the face- to- face presentations with them. Now the actual guy whose logo was chosen was a guy named Andrew Blanco.
HIRSHON: Okay.
MCDARBY: He was the guy who did the actual drawing for the
fisherman.
HIRSHON: For the fisherman logo that ended up being picked?
MCDARBY: Yes.
HIRSHON: And his last name is Blanco, B- L- A- N- C- O?
MCDARBY: Yes. And he’s now a musician down in Venezuela called King Chango.
HIRSHON: Huh. Had he worked on other projects there?
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MCDARBY: You mean Andrew? Yeah. Andrew’s a very good
designer.
HIRSHON: That begs the question: What do you think went wrong if anything with the logo? Was it just that the team wasn’t that good?
Why was it so poorly received?
MCDARBY: No. No. It’s always difficult to mess with tradition. You never know what’s gonna happen. The Islanders had a dynasty for a lot of years and then they started going bad, and when the team didn’t do well, the logo affected it. But I’ll tell you what I think made the logo just go really bad is when they played the Rangers, all the fans would be yelling, “We want fish sticks!”
HIRSHON: Right.
MCDARBY: And as a player, you don’t want to be bombarded with stuff like that. It was a poor choice. And he definitely looked too much like the Gorton’s fisherman, you know?
HIRSHON: Was that a conscious thing that you were talking about in meetings, or did that not come up until afterwards, the comparison to Gorton’s?
MCDARBY: That didn’t come up until later. I definitely thought that we were treading on thin ice with that, mind the pun there. [He laughs.]
HIRSHON: About the comparison to Gorton’s fisherman?
<
br /> MCDARBY: Yeah. Yeah.
HIRSHON: So it was kind of a risk that you guys knew about, but you just decided we’re gonna take it?
MCDARBY: Yeah. Yeah. It was an in- your- face fisherman. And that’s what they approved. I can’t take blame for that. I can’t give blame to Ed or Andrew, because that’s where we were directed. I had hundreds of sketches they could have chose from, and that’s what they chose.
HIRSHON: But it was pretty much Andrew working alone on this one logo that ended up being picked.
MCDARBY: Yeah. Yeah. But like I said, we all did sketches. They end up in the buckets, and they chose that one.
HIRSHON: Gotcha.
MCDARBY: But originally, his original sketch was more heroic and, like I said, more Art Deco- looking. It had a pretty cool style. Now I 204
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doubt you could ever get a hold of those sketches, because SME threw a lot of that stuff away.
HIRSHON: Right. Ed said that he did have some papers, and he thought he had some original sketches that he offered to try to fish out for me.
MCDARBY: They used to have these gray books with everything in them. If he held onto them, he would have them.
HIRSHON: You don’t happen to have anything from that period, do you?
MCDARBY: I’d have to look. I doubt it. They kept all the original artwork. I’d have copies and stuff like that, if I still have it. But I probably couldn’t give it to you, because it’s supposedly property of SME, and only they can give that out.
HIRSHON: I understand that. At some point, I guess, if you do come across it, I could run it past Ed, or you could do it, because he said to me about his own papers that, well, the only one who would have any rights to it would be SME, and “I’m granting you permission, so it’s not a problem.” So I think that he understands that aspect of it.
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