Stuff You’ll Love: A unique take on new Bruins coach; Polar Park mea culpa; Creative spark from a ‘Bigfoot Hunter’; OK Computer’s lasting legacy
Trying something new here. Every Monday morning I’m going to kick your week off with a collection of things from here and far that will give you some new ideas for your next project, story, campaign, whatever.
Since this is “Boston’s Best Sportswriting”, it only makes sense that I lead off with a few great stories from local scribes. But I draw so much inspiration for my creative work from things outside of the Boston sports hub — and you should too.
Here goes…
One-of-a-kind perspective on new Bruins coach
Jim Montgomery is set to be introduced as the Boston Bruins’ 29th head coach in franchise history today.
I’m still a bit shocked that the Bruins let go of the well-liked Bruce Cassidy in the first place. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that with him out of the picture, Patrice Bergeron is coming back for one more year and Jake DeBrusk has rescinded his trade request. There may have been dysfunction below the surface that we’re only now learning about.
They say the best predictor of the future is the past, and that’s where the Boston Globe’s Chad Finn comes in with a perspective only he can tell. Finn was the sports editor of the University of Maine’s student newspaper during the Black Bears’ volcanic run to the 1993 national championship.
That team, led by Hockey Hall of Famer Paul Kariya, is considered one of the greatest in the history of college hockey. And leading the way was Montgomery and his mentorship of the young Kariya, who became the first freshman to ever win the Hobey Baker Award that season.
Finn’s up-close account of Montgomery’s leadership as a player is worth the read. Part of the charm with Finn’s writing is his self-deprecation and willingness to pounce on a ricochet, and he lays down a good one here on spectacular Bruins goalie flameout Blaine Lacher.
My favorite part is reserved for the late Shawn Walsh, coach of that iconic Black Bears team, and his efforts in recruiting Kariya:
In his rare quiet moments, Walsh would note with some gratefulness how much Montgomery’s presence made the adjustment to college — and then fame — easier for Kariya, whose confidence off the ice was initially masked by shyness. When asked why he chose Maine over other suitors such as Harvard and Boston University, Kariya said the climate reminded him of North Vancouver, he liked the business school, and going to college in a big city didn’t much appeal to him.
During recruiting, Walsh seized upon that last part. Driving back from Hockey East media day in Boston before the 1991-92 season, Walsh began dictating a recruiting letter to send Kariya.
“Dear Paul, just sitting here stuck in the awful Boston traffic and thought I’d check in . . .”
His passenger who told me that story estimated he was driving around 90 miles per hour north on I-95 at the time of dictation.
I know pay for play has always been below the surface to some degree in college sports, but I feel like nuggets like these reflect a bygone era when creativity was absolutely imperative to selling a program. I love NIL, and what it’s done to invigorate the entrepreneurial spirit in a level of sports desperately in need of it. But I do worry if college recruiting will simply devolve into a battle of the highest bidder. More on that some other time.
The Summer of Joey Mac
It’s been a hell of a few weeks for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette’s Joe McDonald, who I had the pleasure of working with for six years at ESPNBoston.
Few writers in town break bigger Bruins stories than Joey Mac, and he’s been all over the moves of late, including his scoop that Patrice Bergeron is returning.
He’s also been giving colorful accounts of all the Red Sox players who’ve been making rehab starts in Worcester lately, and that’s where I’m focusing here. It wasn’t too long ago that McDonald, a fiercely proud lifelong Rhode Islander, vilified the controversial decision to move the Triple-A club out of beloved McCoy Stadium to brand new Polar Park. The PawSox were Rhode Island’s identity. They were absolutely beloved there. Heck, they might be the only reason any out-of-towners knows about Pawtucket.
Most Rhode Islanders were furious when the PawSox relocated north on Route 146 to the Canal District. I was among those who were outraged at local politicians for allowing the team to leave. I voiced my opinion in a column I wrote for a former employer that gained national attention.
I told many people that I would never step foot in Worcester, or attend a WooSox game because of my allegiance to the PawSox, McCoy Stadium and Rhode Island.
I was wrong.
The T&G hired me in January 2021 to cover the WooSox. Since my time here, I have learned to respect the deep history of Worcester and its passion for baseball. Polar Park has become a destination, and the ballpark is a phenomenal place to watch a game.
OK Computer’s Silver Anniversary
With Radiohead’s iconic OK Computer turning 25 this year, Pitchfork has been re-surfacing some of its past long-form content on the landmark album that completely changed the direction of rock and roll forever.
Love them or hate them. But in my lifetime, there has been no band that consistently faces such a mountain of anticipation of their next project, then consistently puts out a product that surpasses the expectations, as Radiohead. A big reason for that is their perpetual willingness to ignore fans’ expectations and explore new boundaries that sound good to them, but not always to us.
When your fans love you, they’re often willing to consume your next project with an open mind. This perhaps explains their follow-up to this masterpiece, Kid A, which Time magazine once famously called “the weirdest album to ever sell a million copies.”
Marc Hogan made a point in this piece about re-defining the idea of the Great Rock Album that is still very relevant today:
One way to explain the absence of a manifest 21st-century equivalent to OK Computer is that OK Computer was an ending point. Part of this line of reasoning has to do with the technological shifts that have affected the album format itself. British writer Tim Footman, in his 2007 book Welcome to the Machine: OK Computer and the Death of the Classic Album, suggested that the modern potential for varied, customized listening experiences “helps to ensure that OK Computer is the last entry into the Rock Album Hall of Fame.”
Personalized playlists show up regularly on listeners’ phones today, but the idea of an album has proven to be stubbornly persistent. It is still the unit that organizes so much of the cultural discussion around music, in year-end polls, on award shows, and in streaming exclusives. As shown by the continuing flow of ambitious albums, the desire to make a complete musical statement is still alive and well, but the identities of the artists making those statements—and the musical tools they use—have changed. Radiohead’s landmark LP wasn’t the last, then. It opened the way for new firsts.
This is a really important distinction that the music industry was glacially slow to understand, and it cost them dearly when the internet got its footing.
For decades, the business model in music was centered around the album sale — in other words, you went on tour to push people towards buying your latest record. As technology transformed consumption and listening habits, this was always a doomed model. The fact that the Grateful Dead became one of the most lucrative musical acts in American history by flipping this model on its head (making albums to sell tours and merchandising) should say something.
Radiohead were ahead of most of their contemporaries on this. The album is never more important, but not for financial reasons. The market is so fractured these days that I don’t think it matters as much how many you sell, or at what price point. Just that what you do is high quality, unexpected, and pushing the envelope. Because what that does for your brand, for everything else in your ecosystem, is worth manifold. It sells more than just expensive concert tickets, t-shirts, artwork, etc.
What happens when you laugh at yourself, part infinity
Seattle Mariners rookie phenom Julio Rodriguez showed up to the clubhouse in arm floaties and scuba goggles the day after his laugh-out-loud base-running blooper trying to turn a double into a triple.
But it didn’t stop there. His teammates had some fun with it too, re-creating “the scene of the crime” at third base.
I feel like in a sport as individualized as baseball, with such a grueling marathon schedule that can be hard to stay motivated for, a team that likes playing with one another can fight above its punching weight. The Mariners are the hottest team in baseball right now, winners of 7 straight, 15-3 over their last 18, and one game out of the third wild card spot. They clearly like each other. Worth keeping an eye on.
Lessons in creativity from…Bigfoot?
Former Nike CMO Greg Hoffman has a great new book out, Emotion By Design, reflecting on his three decades at The Swoosh, and the lessons you can take away to inspire your own creative teams. It’s well worth the read.
In one of the early chapters, Hoffman mentions a design team retreat in the early 1990’s that included a guest speaker who called himself a “Bigfoot Hunter”. The guy was deadly serious about Bigfoot, and dressed like “a cross between Frank Lloyd Wright and Crocodile Dundee.” The talk left a lasting impression on Hoffman:
At the time, I didn’t fully grasp the importance of inspiration and the process of finding it. But over the years, and looking back on this particular episode early in my career, I can now understand why we sat around and listened to Bigfoot Hunter. The point wasn’t to laugh (although we certainly did); the point was to open our eyes—in an entertaining way— to something we otherwise never would have encountered. I can’t say that Bigfoot Hunter inspired anything specific in my own creative journey, but I can say that over my career as a designer and then as a marketing leader, I often thought of him when I knew I had to look for creative inspiration in unusual places.
Curiosity is the catalyst for creativity. It’s what allows you to see opportunities and harness the inspiration to seize them. Finding inspiration can be difficult, despite how infinite it is. So rather than waiting for it to find you, create a plan that allows it to flow naturally through you and into your work. So, bring the outside world into yours through habits and rituals and, in turn, empower yourself and your team to achieve greater creative results.
Leaving inspiration to chance, where it just hits you in a random moment, is not a recipe for sustained success in the creative world. You have to go out and find it. While some may be born with a seeker’s mentality, others can learn to be more curious. Curiosity is a muscle, and muscles need to be trained. Knowing this allowed Nike to consistently fuel its imagination and build a culture of creative curiosity.
I’m going to write more about this in a separate column later this month. This is going to sound odd, but I believe that if you really want to be truly creative in your career, you ought to believe in Bigfoot. And I don’t mean become a full-on “Bigfoot Hunter.” But just believe in the idea that some supernatural creature we’ve never seen and know nothing about could be out there in the wild. Among other things, this mindset will help you remove assumptions about the problem you’re trying to solve, which is often how some of the best ideas out there began to form. It also changes your viewpoint (How would Bigfoot approach this problem?), another key method to spark ideas.
Joe Lacob had a deal to buy the A’s?
Whatever remains of Oakland Athletics fans have to be pissed off by this San Francisco Chronicle story about Joe Lacob, who said he’d verbally agreed to buy the team back in 2005, only to be thwarted by…Commissioner Bud Selig (LOL).
There’s a valuable lesson here — relationships matter just as much as your qualifications or credentials. You can’t always buy your way into everything.
“It got yanked from under me. I was really pissed at Bud Selig,” Lacob said. “I easily qualified; that wasn’t the issue. Bud basically did what he wanted to do, and he didn’t know me. So I learned a little lesson from that, which is it’s not all about money. You’ve got to have the right friends in these leagues.”
So what did Lacob do? On the advice of then-NBA Commissioner David Stern, he bought into his hometown Boston Celtics as a minority partner and built relationships with league honchos.
“When the Warriors came up in 2010, I had an advantage, ironically — maybe my only advantage — over Larry Ellison, which was I knew everybody in the league really well,” said Lacob, who partnered with Peter Guber to buy the Warriors in 2010, five years after MLB denied him, for $450 million. The team is now valued by Forbes at $5.6 billion.
“It’s interesting. The reaction to what happened with the A’s kind of helped me get the Warriors.”
Here’s a thought. If Lacob had gotten his wish in 2005, would he be as good of an owner? Think about all the lessons he probably learned along his relationship-building journey about how great sports franchises are run, and all the ideas he probably got about how he could improve upon things. Failure before success can be a blessing in disguise.
After all, we’ve seen plenty of obscenely-rich outsiders with little institutional knowledge take over a sports franchise and perpetually embarrass themselves (cough, cough, Sacramento Kings).
Motivation of the Week
Renowned marketing guru Seth Godin’s blog, which goes out daily to millions of subscribers, is a must-follow for anyone looking to tell better stories. The sports take-industrial complex catches a stray from Sunday’s entry, “Best [Insert] Ever”, but the point is a strong one:
This is a trap worth avoiding.
When we examine our life experiences, the ones that stand out are usually about change. Either we were changed or we helped someone else get to where they sought to go.
And change is fleeting. And change changes us. We can’t step in the same river twice, because the second time, the river itself has changed.
The pressure we put on ourselves for every project to be “the best ever” experience creates a shallow race for bling instead of a deeper, more useful focus on what’s actually possible.
Seeking to rank our experiences takes us out of the moment. It turns us into sportscasters, spectators and statisticians. We end up comparing our wedding or our box office numbers or our tweet stats not only to our own best ever, but to the stats of others.
This summer is unlikely to be your best summer ever. But it will be a summer, and it’s up to each of us to decide what to do with it.
Every project is worth the journey if we let it be.