MCDARBY: Yeah. We’ve had our falling- out, but I have no animosity towards Ed. It was a great time in my life, and it was some of the best work I’ve ever done. Let it lie.
HIRSHON: I appreciate the opportunity also to put it in context, because that’s what— I think it’s easy for people to say, “Oh, yeah, it’s one of the worst logos of all time,” but not appreciate what was going on at that time with these logos geared toward kids.
MCDARBY: There was definitely purpose for everything that we did with it. Design- wise, it’s a nice logo, but the content is what killed it.
You know what I’m saying? We massaged that logo till it looked really nice. The color palette’s nice. It’s a nice circular logo. From a design standpoint, it’s a good logo, but from a content, it’s a bad logo.
HIRSHON: In 1995, before the Islanders could even officially unveil the logo, there was a story in the Daily News that pans the logo and first makes the comparison to the Gorton’s fisherman in public.
MCDARBY: Really?
HIRSHON: And the headline of the story was “New Isles Logo Will Make You Sea Sick.”
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MCDARBY: [He laughs.] Oh my God.
HIRSHON: And they did a photo illustration of Denis Potvin, who was the captain of the Cup teams, and they show the new logo on his jersey.
MCDARBY: Oh, boy.
HIRSHON: The author is really harsh on the Islanders and has this whole thing about the Islanders. “All they have left is their storied history ’cause they’re such a bad team now, but now they’re even gonna move away from their history and they’re gonna make the dynasty team obsolete.” He really runs hard on them.
MCDARBY: He probably was a diehard Islander fan from that era and doesn’t like change. And anytime you do this kind of thing, third jerseys, everything, actually, when they asked me to work on the Liberty logo, I was like, “No way.” I said, “You can’t change the Rangers logo.” And then when they told me, “Oh, it’s a third jersey,” I said,
“Oh, okay. That’s all right. As long as they’re not wearing it all the time.” You’re taking away a tradition, people’s— their experiences with their fathers and their sons. That’s just an image that’s ingrained in their DNA. And then you’re changing that. That’s always gonna go up against— you’re asking for trouble.
HIRSHON: Yeah. Something that Ed had brought up also was that the NHL introduced the third jerseys a few years after the fisherman.
If this had maybe been an Islanders third jersey, it wouldn’t have been as poorly received as this idea that you’re moving away from the dynasty teams, like forget the old Islanders logo that people had this attachment to.
MCDARBY: Exactly. And actually that’s what they started to do.
I think that was probably a knee- jerk reaction to the Islanders logo.
People said, “Well, okay. We’re gonna keep the traditional logos. Maybe we’ll update the color palette. But we’ll use this only on days that Fox Sports is televising the games.” You know? But it’s still a way for them to sell more merchandise.
HIRSHON: The one point I made to Ed, or everyone who I speak to, because I spoke to a guy from the Islanders too, is that I’ve been to a lot of Islanders games over the years, and even recently people still wear 215
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the fisherman jersey. You see it all the time in the stands. So as much as people might want to say they don’t like it, like you said, the sales—
MCDARBY: It’s a nice- looking logo. It is. Like I said, kids would gravitate more to it. We’ve done that too. We’ve done youth logos.
And that’s what it is. It’s a youth logo.
HIRSHON: Yeah. So I know that it still has that appeal to a lot of people and some sort of emotional attachment even though the team wasn’t good then. But I think it still represents, for a certain generation of fans— it’s kind of like my dad was the dynasty years and then I was the fisherman years.
MCDARBY: Right.
HIRSHON: So that’s probably still going on a little bit.
MCDARBY: It’s the only Islander jersey they have, so when they go to a game, they’re gonna put it on. [He laughs.]
HIRSHON: Well, I think there’s that too, especially when you shell out 140 bucks for a jersey, you’re not gonna necessarily get rid of it.
MCDARBY: That’s right.
HIRSHON: I heard this story that I’ve gotta confirm, but apparently when the Islanders finally moved away from the fisherman, they actually sent Steve Webb out onto the ice, who was one of their enforcers at the time, and they had him tear off the jersey at the end of the game, like actually rip it to shreds.
MCDARBY: Oh really? “This is it. It’s over with.” They made a media circus out of it, huh?
HIRSHON: Yeah. Which I thought was kind of like, Why are you bothering? It’s probably best for PR to just quietly let this go away, but to actually send your goon out onto the ice and say, “Okay. Rip it to shreds. It’ll get cheap laughs and cheap applause.”
MCDARBY: But to me, that means your front office failed. That’s what you’re telling me. Right? The people who chose this logo are your management, and apparently they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. That’s all you’re saying. You’re right. You’re right. Just make it go away. Don’t make a media circus out of it. [He laughs.] You’re taking everybody who was involved in that thing and embarrassing them.
HIRSHON: And there was another story from that time too, where 216
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right before they got rid of the jersey, apparently they held this event at the Coliseum where if you brought in your fisherman jersey, you could exchange it for the old Islanders logo jersey, and they donated the fisherman jersey to a town in Massachusetts where the Gorton’s seafood brand is based.
MCDARBY: [He laughs.] I’ve never heard that. That’s great.
HIRSHON: It was to the American Red Cross in that town where Gorton’s is based. Again, it’s kind of funny to look back, but it’s also like, Are you drawing more attention to something that obviously didn’t succeed? Why don’t you just wear it during the time the NHL
tells you to wear it and then let go of it and do it quietly?
MCDARBY: Exactly. Bury it in the backyard.
HIRSHON: Yeah. But they called a lot of attention to it. I don’t know.
The whole era, they handled things in a very unique way when a lot of other teams, I think, would have gone through a much different process of whether they adopted the logo, and then once they realized it was a failure how they could have gone about it instead of this very public way.
MCDARBY: There’s something odd about the way it went, too. I think somebody was very adamant for that logo, because normally SME would do test markets. They’d go out with the sketches and see what the people on the island would like. We definitely used to use that information. Now I don’t remember that ever happening with the Islanders. I think somebody was adamant to have this fisherman in their own way. They were set on it, and they weren’t changing on that.
HIRSHON: And I asked Ed about that. Did you do focus groups or surveys or some kind of outreach?
MCDARBY: Yeah. We used to do that with all our logos.
HIRSHON: And he said that in this case the Islanders said, “We want to do that on our side,” and they ran their own— or said they ran their own— internal investigation, and they were content. At that point, that’s sort of on the Islanders for either making up the fact they did this or whoever they interviewed may have said that they liked it.
I’m not sure.
MCDARBY: Well, I mean, focus groups are ridiculous for the first 217
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thing, ’cause you could skew it any way. If you just show it to a kid, if they say, “This is who you want to market to,” of course the kid’s gonna pick the fisherman because most kids don’t know who the Gorton’s fisherman is either, you know?
HIRSHON: And they just liked the a
nimate object.
MCDARBY: Yeah. They’re like, “Oh, that’s a tough fisherman.
That’s cool.”
HIRSHON: Yeah. So I don’t know how that all went down, but that is an interesting dynamic, and I’m gonna try to reach out to some of the Islanders’ owners at that time. Apparently, they’re still on Long Island. So that’s part of this process, too. As I’m finding names in stories like yours, I’m just trying to contact people, and some people aren’t around or they may not want to talk about this.
MCDARBY: When you finish this report, I’d love to take a look at what these other people have to say. It’s very interesting to me.
HIRSHON: The Daily News article really interests me ’cause I feel like that got out ahead of them, and even though a lot of people may have liked the jersey, once they heard that “Oh, this is a jersey you shouldn’t like,” because the Daily News ridiculed it—
MCDARBY: They already had a preconception to dislike it.
HIRSHON: Exactly. Yeah.
MCDARBY: That’s the power of the media, you know. Where with the Rangers, when we came out with the Liberty logo, it was so well received, something like $8 million in the first week that they sold in merchandise. It was ridiculous. It was a ridiculous number. It all comes down to good marketing.
HIRSHON: I was reading something about this fisherman logo where the Islanders had been twenty- sixth in jersey sales out of thirty teams, or whatever there was at that time, and they went up to seventeen.
MCDARBY: They made money.
HIRSHON: So it’s not like it was a financial failure. I think it did make them money. It was just more of a cultural lashing.
MCDARBY: The problem is, in the end, who loses out are the manufacturers. They’ve got all this merchandise, and after the first initial push, they have all this stuff that they’ve made, and no one buys it 218
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because of the backlash. Those are the people who lose out. The team doesn’t lose out as much as the manufacturers do.
[Two minutes were excluded from transcription when Hirshon
responded to McDarby’s inquiries about the nature of this research.]
HIRSHON: I’ll definitely keep you in the loop as things proceed.
MCDARBY: I don’t do much sports anyway. I work for Toys ‘R’ Us now, toy logos. But I did love doing sports stuff. I’m a very big sports person. I’m trying to get back into it, but it’s so hard to get involved, just getting in touch with the league people. And most of them have in- house design personnel. There are very few good logos coming out lately from my standards. I think the best logo that came out in the last ten years is probably the Texans.
HIRSHON: Oh, yeah. The Texans logo. It’s a very classic kind of design, simple.
MCDARBY: And some of the worst are like the Ravens. Those are the worst logos in sports.
HIRSHON: It seems like the general movement at this time is more towards retro logos, and they’re just going back to the logos the teams wore in the ’70s and ’60s and ’50s.
MCDARBY: Exactly. Because the team had a heyday when they
were successful. That’s the emotional response that they want and tying back into that.
HIRSHON: Even with the Islanders now, they’re saying that one of the things the fans are clamoring for is the old, old logo when they first were there in the ’70s, which I guess was a little bit different.
MCDARBY: Oh, God. So bad. So bad. I mean the Capitals did it, too. They went back to their old logo. I don’t get it. They’re from the time, and they look it. But at least update them, refresh them. You can do that, too.
HIRSHON: I guess it’s just cheaper, right, if you go back to the logo you’ve already copyrighted, that you already used years ago.
MCDARBY: Oh, sure. Yeah. It’s a simple fix. But to me, the whole reason SME even became a company is because these new jerseys and these new identities made money. It was a new jersey to buy. It’s new merchandise to buy. And it was fresh, and it was new. And that’s what 219
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all these teams jumped on board to do because they saw the numbers.
But in the Islanders’ case, that’s why they jumped on board, to make money, but they didn’t think about the content. A lot of times, evolutionary logos, we just take the logo that they all remember and freshen it up, give it some dimension, give it some Mylar threading that made it pop, you know? And we could have done that, too.
HIRSHON: Yeah. And in the years since, it seems like that’s what they’ve done, taken that same logo and just changed some of the colors in it, had different sorts of camouflage on it, or make it white instead of orange.
MCDARBY: When they came out with just the NY with the hockey stick, that was okay. That was just pulled off the old logo. But they didn’t do anything to it. They didn’t do enough to it to make it fresh, you know?
HIRSHON: Yeah, personally, I wasn’t a big fan of that, either. I felt if you’re going for the maritime, this is the whole problem that Long Island has with its image and what represents Long Island. To just have the NY seems to disconnect from the whole idea that we’re the suburban team against the big- city Rangers, and that’s why we have a map of Long Island or a fisherman or something that represents us.
MCDARBY: Right. Something that separates you from the city of New York.
HIRSHON: And when you just take off the NY, it’s sort of like we’re going away from that. But they are moving to Brooklyn, so that’s, I guess, part of the idea. We’re gonna start forgoing the maritime, and we’re big city too now.
MCDARBY: I’m gonna try to get involved in that. I’m gonna call the NHL and see if I can get involved in that, the redesign of the Islanders.
HIRSHON: Yeah. I’m wondering what they’re gonna do ’cause they keep saying they’re gonna keep the old logo, but they also talked about a third jersey that’ll look kind of like the Nets jerseys with some sort of black- and- white scheme. A lot of people are really worried in the face of the fisherman. They’re kind of worried what they’re gonna do. Can you still have Long Island on the jersey if you’re not playing in Nassau or Suffolk County?
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MCDARBY: It’s crazy to me that you would keep that name. If you’re in Brooklyn, call it the Brooklyn— something from Brooklyn—
the Brooklyn Bridges or whatever. I’m from Brooklyn. Why would I watch the Islanders? I live in Brooklyn. You’re not recognizing your core audience. It doesn’t make sense.
HIRSHON: They made the argument that Brooklyn is technically on Long Island, but as you know, from a cultural standpoint, it’s a ways away. It’s a world of difference between people in Brooklyn and how they live and their kind of urban style with the subway and everything, and then you have Long Island with the—
MCDARBY: Brooklyn wanted to dissociate themselves from New
York altogether. They want to become a state of their own. That’s the mentality of Brooklyn. You’re putting the Islanders in Brooklyn. I don’t know. Doesn’t make much sense.
HIRSHON: I hear you. Well, that’ll be fun if you get involved in that.
It’ll be kind of coming full circle for you, I suppose.
MCDARBY: Yeah. I’ll have some retribution. Do a really great logo for them. [He laughs.]
HIRSHON: Exactly. They could use it. They haven’t had an original idea in a while, so that would be fun.
MCDARBY: Yeah. Yeah. I take a lot of pride in my work. When something goes bad like that, you feel really bad. You do, you know? ’Cause you put your best efforts out there, and when it’s just strategy that goes bad, there’s nothing you can do about it, you know?
HIRSHON: Right. For what it’s worth, I’ve seen a lot of people post-ing old photos of them with Nyisles in the Coliseum parking lot or at the game, so people still appreciate your designs. It’s still out there.
MCDARBY: That’s cool.
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NOTES
INTRODUCTION
; 1. Allan Kreda, “Islanders Struggling to Adjust without an Injured Top Wing,” New York Times, February 4, 2015, B14; Justin Tasch, “Isles Admit Kyle Has Eye Injury,” New York Daily News, February 4, 2015, 58.
2. “Florida Panthers at New York Islanders,” WRHU (Hempstead NY), February 3, 2015.
3.
Adam
Gretz, “The Islanders Are Bringing the ‘Fisherman’ Logo Back for One Night,” January 9, 2015, http:// www .cbssports .com /nhl /eye
-on -hockey /24949447 /the -islanders -are -bringing -the -fisherman -logo
-back -for -one -night; Sean Leahy, “Islanders to Bring Back Infamous Fisherman Logo One Last Time,” October 6, 2014, http:// sports .yahoo
.com /blogs /nhl -puck -daddy /islanders -to -wear -modernized -version -of
-infamous -fisherman -jerseys -one -last -time -011508289 .html; “The 20
Worst NHL Jerseys of All Time,” March 5, 2015, http:// www .si .com /nhl
/photos /2015 /03 /05 /20 -worst -nhl -jerseys -all -time /1; Gabe Zaldivar,
“New Big Ten Logo and the Worst Logos in Sports History,” December 13, 2010, http:// bleacherreport .com /articles /542429 -new -big -ten -logo
-and -the -worst -logos -in -sports -history /page /22.
4. “Florida Panthers at New York Islanders.”
5. Daniel Fraudman, Twitter post, February 3, 2015, 2:12 p.m., “The fisherman jersey was greedlanternjet levels of dumb. #isles #islestwitter,”
https:// twitter .com /DFraudmanOnNYI /status /562690165983178752; Mark Nagi, Twitter post, February 3, 2015, 10:39 a.m., “Still hideous.
MT @NYIslanders: Tonight is the night the #Fisherman returns. The
#Isles wearing for warmups only.,” https:// twitter .com /MarkNagi /status
/562636482390028288; John Crozier, Twitter post, February 3, 2015, 6:45 p.m., “Ahoy, Captain ‘@NYIslanders: Here it is! @91Tavares models tonight’s #Fisherman warmup jerseys on the ice. #Isles,’” https://
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