The Son of the Ice Cometh
Even before the ruinous NHL lockout, Jeremy Jacobs was one of the most hated team owners in Boston sports history. Now, as the Bruins work to recover past glory, the distant owner has dispatched his son on a mission to bring back the love. And, more important, the fans. Can Charlie Jacobs make Boston a hockey town again?
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 in riot gear, as he attempted to sneak onto the field at Busch Stadium. It was an unusual position for the executive vice president of another 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, Jeremy Jacobs. Forbes magazine puts the elder Jacobs's net worth at about $1 billion. Charlie Jacobs has met his share of famous people.
But still, there he was, pressing toward the field and then, to his own surprise, leaping the wall and blending into the crowd. It was, he recalls, a moment to cherish. Like his father, 34-year-old Charlie Jacobs is a businessman. But he is also a sportsman - a hockey guy - and the glory of the Red Sox victory last fall reminded him of what he was missing.
Back in Boston, the Bruins weren't playing. The National Hockey League had locked out the players on September 15, 2004, after the union 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 a sport that always felt too Canadian, anyway." Hockey had become the first major North American sport to lose an entire season to a labor dispute. And in the process, the thinking went, it didn't just lose money, it lost fans. During the lockout, which ended in July with a new contract, hockey felt "out of sight, out of mind," says Harry Sinden, 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 tell you it's going to be a whole lot more negative than the league or the teams are letting on it will be," says Jim Boone, the cofounder of the NHL Fans Association. "I hear a lot of season ticket holders saying they're not coming back. I have dozens of fans, hundreds of fans, sending us e-mails saying, `Nothing against you guys - the NHLFA - 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 while NHL teams say they're optimistic that it won't be that bad - the Bruins, for example, boast a 92 percent season-ticket renewal rate - the league is preparing to take its licks. It has estimated that revenue will fall 20 percent from the 2003-2004 season. This year, the cable sports network ESPN dropped NHL hockey. The league signed instead with The Outdoor Life Network, which also carries the Tour de France. The question is: Will people watch?
But with the Bruins set to take the ice Wednesday for the first time since April 2004, Charlie Jacobs has a plan to bring the fans back that goes beyond cheap tickets and rule changes. As the Bruins' executive vice president, he hired a branding firm this year to help the franchise rediscover itself. The idea was to recast the Bruins brand. Create a message. Remind people who they are, what they've done, and what they still want to do. Then overcome the perception that 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 10 years. They haven't held the Stanley Cup since 1972. And that streak just 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 think any 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 the perception is out there. That's why he came to Boston. To make up for the sins of his father and, now, to start over after one of the darkest periods in the history of hockey.
It's easy to forget that Boston was once a hockey town. The Bruins of the early 1970s had the city on a string. The team had personality. When Boston won the Stanley Cup in 1970, Bruins player John McKenzie dumped beer over Mayor Kevin White's head. Two years later, White returned the favor after the Bruins won the cup a second time. Center Derek Sanderson was a household name, known for his wild hair 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 for Sports Etc., an Arlington store that specializes in hockey equipment. "That was the cool team. They had long, shaggy hair, and they'd go out there, and, if they had to, they'd fight the other team. Bobby Orr was the biggest star Boston had ever seen."
News reports said that 100,000 people filled the streets to celebrate the Bruins' 1970 cup victory over the St. Louis Blues. Two years later, when the Bruins beat the New York Rangers, the throngs were back. Thousands were waiting at Logan Airport when the team landed at 2:15 a.m. Chaos filled the terminal. Windows were broken. A ticket counter destroyed. Phone booths were smashed. Players took refuge 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 the years that followed, hockey rinks went up at an incredible clip. More than half of the 40 state rinks opened in the 1970s, nine in 1972 alone. And by the end of the decade, Joe Bertagna, a hockey coach from Arlington and now the commissioner of the mighty Hockey East collegiate conference, would find programs filled with boys named Derek. The name, which hadn't cracked the Social Security Administration'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 the team in 1975, Sanderson was gone, and Orr, a free agent, was on his way out. Orr's best playing days, it turned out, were over. He had a bum knee and wasn't worth the $3 million the Chicago Blackhawks paid him in 1976. But at the time, no one knew that for sure. So the Jacobs family - "owners in from out of town," as former Globe columnist Mike Barnicle put it - took the heat. "It's like trading Ted Williams," one miffed fan told the Globe at the time, "to the old Philadelphia Athletics." Thus was born a theory now well-trodden: Jeremy Jacobs won't pay for talent.
CHARLIE JACOBS WAS 4 YEARS OLD IN THE SPRING OF 1976. THE youngest of six children, he didn't play hockey so much as he rode horses. But Bruins games framed his childhood, especially after his father had a huge satellite dish installed on the property so that the family could watch its team. "Every dish that God ever made, we had," says Jeremy Jacobs, who would dispatch his boys to clear snow off them during the long Buffalo winters.
In this way, Charlie Jacobs became a hockey fan. He learned the game. He worked with the Los Angeles Kings after graduating from Boston College in 1993, and today he plays in two adult hockey leagues. "Hockey, to Charlie," says his father, "has been more to him than it has been to any of us." And so when Jeremy Jacobs came calling in 2001, asking his son to leave a dot-com business for a position 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 dog salesman" who bought the team in 1975 because it was "a good investment."
And it was. Jeremy Jacobs's company, Delaware North, had $1.7 billion in revenue in 2003. But that "good investment" talk hardly rallies the fans, who, by 2000, were chanting, "Jacobs sucks! Jacobs sucks!" The Big Bad Bruins were now just bad. Ray Bourque, another Bruins hero, had been traded. The team missed the playoffs in 2000 and 2001. And if that wasn't tough enough for fans, they had to watch Bourque 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 hockey guy, where one's fortunes rise and fall with the team.
"Charlie lives it. He lives and breathes it like I do. Like Harry does. Like our players do," says Bruins general manager Mike O'Connell. "It's a good thing."
But it wasn't until the lockout that Charlie Jacobs really took charge. That's when he began pushing the idea that the Bruins needed to reevaluate their brand. Not everyone agreed. "Did I think it needed it? No," says O'Connell. The Bruins were, after all, one of the NHL's storied franchises. "People were skeptical," Charlie Jacobs concedes. " `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 corporate babble. But for better or for worse, brand studies are a growing part of 21st-century sports. And this is where Charlie's world and his father's overlap.
SME Branding, the New York firm that facilitated the Bruins discussions, lists everyone from sumo wrestler Akebono to tennis brand heavy weight Anna Kournikova among its clients. The NHL used the firm for its own brand study just before the lockout. These discussions led the league to tweak its logo; silver, the color of the 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 in trouble. "They had forgotten who they were," says Ed O'Hara, SME's chief creative officer and senior partner. But a brand study gave them a slogan - "Every Night" - and a list of values that harken back to the tough, hard-working championship Pistons of a decade before.
Brandweek, a business publication, hailed the campaign for helping to restore pride in the Pistons and giving other woebegone teams hope that they, too, could remake themselves. That's one reason that Charlie Jacobs says he's excited about the newly polished Bruins brand coming this fall to billboards, radio stations, and televisions near you. A glossy report summarizes the "brand essence": "The Cup, tradition, hard work, devotion, team, the Garden." The things that once made the city's hockey team worth celebrating at the airport in the 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 the titles and the droughts, knows better than anyone that none of it will matter if the Bruins don't put it together on the ice. Rebranding may have helped the Pistons, but the 2004 NBA title helped more. "Nothing but nothing comes close to taking the place of your product," he says. "In other words, I can tell you the Bruins are respected, have pride and passion and guts - and this, that, and the other. And I can put those words on a sign or on TV. But when you come to play, I could say, `You're terrible.'"
THERE IS MUCH THAT CHARLIE JACOBS says he cannot remember about the hour or two he spent on the field in St. Louis last fall. But he remembers very clearly a woman he found kneeling and crying at home plate. "I think of that elderly woman," he says, "of what the Red Sox mean to her and her family, and how important it is. It was so important that she was down on her knees at home plate sweeping up dirt into an envelope."
He says there are people out there who feel the same way about the Bruins - a smaller group of people, to be sure, but no less passionate. 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 wife and come to work thinking about it," he says. "I think that's all people need to know . . . that we're committed."
But perceptions don't disappear overnight. Already, hockey fans are grousing about the same old Bruins - good enough to win but not good 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 owner who still hasn't proven his commitment to winning.
"You need to win, Jerry," Boston Herald sportswriter Michael Felger told Jeremy Jacobs on WEEI six weeks ago. "You need to win a playoff series."
Off to the side in the studio sat Charlie Jacobs, silent but listening. Before nightfall, the company plane would whisk the father back to Buffalo. The son, on the other hand, was staying.
Keith O'Brien is a freelance writer in Jamaica Plain. E-mail him at keith@keothob.com. 