LAST FALL, AFTER THE RED SOX WON THE WORLD SERIES IN ST. LOUIS,Charlie Jacobs found himself in a mob, face to face with police inriot gear, as he attempted to sneak onto the field at Busch Stadium.It was an unusual position for the executive vice president ofanother Boston sports team. It's not as if he's some star-struck fan.He is the son of the Bruins owner and king of concessions, JeremyJacobs. Forbes magazine puts the elder Jacobs's net worth at about $1billion. Charlie Jacobs has met his share of famous people.
But still, there he was, pressing toward the field and then, tohis own surprise, leaping the wall and blending into the crowd. Itwas, he recalls, a moment to cherish. Like his father, 34-year-oldCharlie Jacobs is a businessman. But he is also a sportsman - ahockey guy - and the glory of the Red Sox victory last fall remindedhim of what he was missing.
Back in Boston, the Bruins weren't playing. The National HockeyLeague had locked out the players on September 15, 2004, after theunion refused to accept a cap on team payrolls. The lockout would ultimately lead to the cancellation of the entire season and to dire predictions that hockey was done, its epitaph written: 'Here lies asport that always felt too Canadian, anyway.' Hockey had become thefirst major North American sport to lose an entire season to a labordispute. And in the process, the thinking went, it didn't just losemoney, it lost fans. During the lockout, which ended in July with anew contract, hockey felt 'out of sight, out of mind,' says HarrySinden, the Bruins president today and coach during the glory years.Worst of all, nobody seemed to miss it.
'Who the hell knows what the impact is going to be? But I can tellyou it's going to be a whole lot more negative than the league or theteams are letting on it will be,' says Jim Boone, the cofounder ofthe NHL Fans Association. 'I hear a lot of season ticket holderssaying they're not coming back. I have dozens of fans, hundreds offans, sending us e-mails saying, `Nothing against you guys - theNHLFA - but I'll never spend another nickel on hockey ever again.''
Major League Baseball endured similar anger after its 1994 players' strike. A 20 percent drop in attendance followed. And whileNHL teams say they're optimistic that it won't be that bad - theBruins, for example, boast a 92 percent season-ticket renewal rate -the league is preparing to take its licks. It has estimated thatrevenue will fall 20 percent from the 2003-2004 season. This year,the cable sports network ESPN dropped NHL hockey. The league signedinstead with The Outdoor Life Network, which also carries the Tour deFrance. The question is: Will people watch?
But with the Bruins set to take the ice Wednesday for the firsttime since April 2004, Charlie Jacobs has a plan to bring the fansback that goes beyond cheap tickets and rule changes. As the Bruins'executive vice president, he hired a branding firm this year to helpthe franchise rediscover itself. The idea was to recast the Bruinsbrand. Create a message. Remind people who they are, what they'vedone, and what they still want to do. Then overcome the perceptionthat the owner, his father, doesn't care about winning.
This last part has less to do with the lockout than it does with history. The Bruins have won only one playoff series in the last 10years. They haven't held the Stanley Cup since 1972. And that streakjust happens to coincide with 30 years of Jacobs ownership.
Along the way, Jeremy Jacobs has been called many things: miserly,reclusive, passionless. The mystery man from Buffalo. 'I don't thinkany of it's fair,' Charlie Jacobs says. 'But it's not for me to say,right? Who cares if any of it's fair?' All he knows is that theperception is out there. That's why he came to Boston. To make up forthe sins of his father and, now, to start over after one of thedarkest periods in the history of hockey.
It's easy to forget that Boston was once a hockey town. The Bruinsof the early 1970s had the city on a string. The team hadpersonality. When Boston won the Stanley Cup in 1970, Bruins playerJohn McKenzie dumped beer over Mayor Kevin White's head. Two yearslater, White returned the favor after the Bruins won the cup a secondtime. Center Derek Sanderson was a household name, known for his wildhair and mink coats. But above all, Boston belonged to Bobby Orr,widely considered the best defenseman of all time.
'Everybody played hockey,' says Rich O'Rourke, 39, a buyer forSports Etc., an Arlington store that specializes in hockey equipment.'That was the cool team. They had long, shaggy hair, and they'd goout there, and, if they had to, they'd fight the other team. BobbyOrr was the biggest star Boston had ever seen.'
News reports said that 100,000 people filled the streets tocelebrate the Bruins' 1970 cup victory over the St. Louis Blues. Twoyears later, when the Bruins beat the New York Rangers, the throngswere back. Thousands were waiting at Logan Airport when the teamlanded at 2:15 a.m. Chaos filled the terminal. Windows were broken. Aticket counter destroyed. Phone booths were smashed. Players tookrefuge in the Eastern Airlines cocktail lounge as the crowd chanted,'We're number one.'
It was, says Sinden, a 'golden era' of hockey in Boston. In theyears that followed, hockey rinks went up at an incredible clip. Morethan half of the 40 state rinks opened in the 1970s, nine in 1972alone. And by the end of the decade, Joe Bertagna, a hockey coachfrom Arlington and now the commissioner of the mighty Hockey Eastcollegiate conference, would find programs filled with boys namedDerek. The name, which hadn't cracked the Social SecurityAdministration's top 100 names for boys in Massachusetts in 1966,peaked at 27th in 1971 and 1972.
But as quickly as the Big Bad Bruins rose to prominence, they disappeared. By the time Jeremy Jacobs and his brothers bought theteam in 1975, Sanderson was gone, and Orr, a free agent, was on hisway out. Orr's best playing days, it turned out, were over. He had abum knee and wasn't worth the $3 million the Chicago Blackhawks paidhim in 1976. But at the time, no one knew that for sure. So theJacobs family - 'owners in from out of town,' as former Globecolumnist Mike Barnicle put it - took the heat. 'It's like tradingTed Williams,' one miffed fan told the Globe at the time, 'to the oldPhiladelphia Athletics.' Thus was born a theory now well-trodden:Jeremy Jacobs won't pay for talent. CHARLIE JACOBS WAS 4 YEARS OLD INTHE SPRING OF 1976. THE youngest of six children, he didn't playhockey so much as he rode horses. But Bruins games framed hischildhood, especially after his father had a huge satellite dishinstalled on the property so that the family could watch its team.'Every dish that God ever made, we had,' says Jeremy Jacobs, whowould dispatch his boys to clear snow off them during the longBuffalo winters.
In this way, Charlie Jacobs became a hockey fan. He learned thegame. He worked with the Los Angeles Kings after graduating fromBoston College in 1993, and today he plays in two adult hockeyleagues. 'Hockey, to Charlie,' says his father, 'has been more to himthan it has been to any of us.' And so when Jeremy Jacobs camecalling in 2001, asking his son to leave a dot-com business for aposition with the Bruins, Charlie Jacobs said yes.
Jeremy Jacobs, like his father before him, had always been a businessman first, not the sort to charge the field at Busch Stadium.He came from a line of men who turned popcorn sales into a sports-concession empire. And that's how he saw himself: as a 'hot dogsalesman' who bought the team in 1975 because it was 'a goodinvestment.'
And it was. Jeremy Jacobs's company, Delaware North, had $1.7 billion in revenue in 2003. But that 'good investment' talk hardlyrallies the fans, who, by 2000, were chanting, 'Jacobs sucks! Jacobssucks!' The Big Bad Bruins were now just bad. Ray Bourque, another Bruins hero, had been traded. The team missed the playoffs in 2000and 2001. And if that wasn't tough enough for fans, they had to watchBourque win his elusive Stanley Cup with the Colorado Avalanche.
Enter Charlie Jacobs. Jacobs began hanging with the scouts,sitting at the draft table, and living the seesaw life of a hockeyguy, where one's fortunes rise and fall with the team.
'Charlie lives it. He lives and breathes it like I do. Like Harrydoes. Like our players do,' says Bruins general manager MikeO'Connell. 'It's a good thing.'
But it wasn't until the lockout that Charlie Jacobs really tookcharge. That's when he began pushing the idea that the Bruins neededto reevaluate their brand. Not everyone agreed. 'Did I think itneeded it? No,' says O'Connell. The Bruins were, after all, one ofthe NHL's storied franchises. 'People were skeptical,' Charlie Jacobsconcedes. ' `You're going to tell us what the Bruins mean? Come on.'' Talking about meaning was 'weird,' Sinden says.
Yet, there they were this spring, debating the team's brand dimensions, essence, attitude, and message. It sounds like corporatebabble. But for better or for worse, brand studies are a growing partof 21st-century sports. And this is where Charlie's world and hisfather's overlap.
SME Branding, the New York firm that facilitated the Bruins discussions, lists everyone from sumo wrestler Akebono to tennisbrand heavy weight Anna Kournikova among its clients. The NHL usedthe firm for its own brand study just before the lockout. Thesediscussions led the league to tweak its logo; silver, the color ofthe Stanley Cup, now replaces orange in the NHL crest. Ed Horne, NHL success, for winning fans back. There are branding success stories.Take, for example, basketball's Detroit Pistons.
Five years ago, losing fans and games, the Pistons were a team introuble. 'They had forgotten who they were,' says Ed O'Hara, SME'schief creative officer and senior partner. But a brand study gavethem a slogan - 'Every Night' - and a list of values that harken backto the tough, hard-working championship Pistons of a decade before.
Brandweek, a business publication, hailed the campaign for helpingto restore pride in the Pistons and giving other woebegone teamshope that they, too, could remake themselves. That's one reason thatCharlie Jacobs says he's excited about the newly polished Bruinsbrand coming this fall to billboards, radio stations, and televisionsnear you. A glossy report summarizes the 'brand essence': 'The Cup,tradition, hard work, devotion, team, the Garden.' The things thatonce made the city's hockey team worth celebrating at the airport inthe middle of the night. The slogan: '. . . it's called Bruins.'
'We needed it badly,' Sinden says of the team's self-examination.But Sinden, who has been with the team since the 1960s, through thetitles and the droughts, knows better than anyone that none of itwill matter if the Bruins don't put it together on the ice.Rebranding may have helped the Pistons, but the 2004 NBA title helpedmore. 'Nothing but nothing comes close to taking the place of yourproduct,' he says. 'In other words, I can tell you the Bruins arerespected, have pride and passion and guts - and this, that, and theother. And I can put those words on a sign or on TV. But when youcome to play, I could say, `You're terrible.''
THERE IS MUCH THAT CHARLIE JACOBS says he cannot remember aboutthe hour or two he spent on the field in St. Louis last fall. But heremembers very clearly a woman he found kneeling and crying at homeplate. 'I think of that elderly woman,' he says, 'of what the Red Soxmean to her and her family, and how important it is. It was soimportant that she was down on her knees at home plate sweeping updirt into an envelope.'
He says there are people out there who feel the same way about theBruins - a smaller group of people, to be sure, but no lesspassionate. And Jacobs says he wants to win the Stanley Cup for them.'I wake up thinking about the Stanley Cup. I wake up, eat breakfast,play with my kids, and start thinking about hockey. I kiss my wifeand come to work thinking about it,' he says. 'I think that's allpeople need to know . . . that we're committed.'
But perceptions don't disappear overnight. Already, hockey fansare grousing about the same old Bruins - good enough to win but notgood enough to win it all; a team that failed to land a free-agent superstar this summer despite a new salary cap; a team with an ownerwho still hasn't proven his commitment to winning.
'You need to win, Jerry,' Boston Herald sportswriter MichaelFelger told Jeremy Jacobs on WEEI six weeks ago. 'You need to win aplayoff series.'
Off to the side in the studio sat Charlie Jacobs, silent butlistening. Before nightfall, the company plane would whisk the fatherback to Buffalo. The son, on the other hand, was staying.
