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Ground rule #9: Only try to sell a product that the customer wants to buy.

Chapter Nine

THE JUMP-START GOLDEN RULE

While Billy Ray Bates was the most charismatic player I've ever been associated with, there is one player who is the most ANTI-charismatic. He is far and away the runaway leader in this dubious category. Nobody is in second place. That player is Derrick Coleman.

I had never seen anything like this in all my time in pro sports. Derrick was the star of the New Jersey Nets, and yet, the fans hated him more than any other player in the history of the franchise.

If we ran a picture of our star player in a direct response ad for our 7-game packages in the newspaper, we wouldn't get one response. When we featured any other player, the phones would ring off the hook.

A slew of season ticketholders wrote that they would not renew their season tickets if Derrick was still on the team.

When I left the Nets, I took a golfing vacation in Ireland and sure enough, Derrick's shadow followed me across the Atlantic.

The golf courses in Ireland are the most challenging in the world. The reason is that weather is 50% of the course. Ireland is windy, and sometimes rainy, and the wind is a factor on every hole, particularly the "links" courses that run along the ocean. When I played Ballybunion on the west coast, I had to really plant myself firmly just to putt in the 45-mile-an-hour wind.

In the midst of this golf heaven, Derrick Coleman popped up in a most unusual way.

We were bracing ourselves against the wind on the tee of a par three hole. It was 167 yards over a bottomless ravine—167 yards straight into the teeth of the howling wind.. My caddie handed me my driver. "I hope it's enough, lad," he said. The caddie should know. He had been caddying at this club for 50 years. Looking at him, he might have started caddying when he was 51.

I didn't want to take a chance with one of my new Titleists, so I rummaged around in my golf bag. I found an old New Jersey Nets ball that was pretty well beat up. The caddie saw the logo on the ball. He asked me about the Nets. I told him I used to work for them. He then asked me in an Irish brogue that I could hardly understand, "Is that Derrick Coleman really an arsehole?"

Unbelievable! This caddie knew two NBA players—Michael Jordan and the Darth Vader of the NBA, Derrick Coleman.

I laughed. Then I teed up the Nets ball, drilled it over a ravine into a 30-mile wind, and it dropped six feet from the hole. Birdie putt. And, I won another Guinness.

Ground rule #13: Make your client a bonafide real-life hero.

Chapter Thirteen

I'LL BE YOUR FRIEND FOR ANOTHER YEAR

I've said to people that what I like about being in pro sports is that it means nothing. In sports, you don't pollute the rivers or the fields or the skies like some companies do. You don't manufacture anything tangible. You just pay young men an illogical amount of money to play games in front of people.

There is a redeeming factor, of course, about working in pro sports. Pro sports provide a relief for individuals from the problems of their world and our world. This relief is more encompassing than the salve generated in other entertainment areas like the movies or a concert.

A movie or a concert lasts for a couple of hours and there is no on-going emotional attachment. With pro sports, the emotional attachment is year long. The season lasts about seven months, then there is the off-season. A fan can be mentally entrenched with his/her team for 12 months out of the year, year after year, decade after decade.

Some may say that this entrenchment is not good. Yes, there are some fans where their favorite team is more important to them than their jobs. Or even their family. That, of course, is an extreme. I guess you'd call that a fanatic.

For most fans, the teams provide a mental ballpark where they can escape to a little bit each day.

Sometimes, a fan will try to take this mental ballpark with them to the next life.

In the early 1980s, Sue Miller, my marketing assistant at the Portland Trail Blazers, came into my office with an unusual request from such a fan.

"I got a call from a woman that asked where she could buy a copy of the 'Blazer Music,'" Sue said. The "Blazer Music" that Sue was referring to was the music that we played at the beginning of our radio broadcasts.

The music was semi-original. Several years before, we had gone to a sound studio and listened to hundreds of instrumental songs in the sound studio's library trying to find a piece that we thought was right for the Blazers . Instead of picking one piece of music, we selected about six or seven. We took what we liked from each piece and then edited them together for our own distinctive sound. We had a drum roll from one piece of music, trumpets from another, steel guitars from a third. With careful editing, the "Blazer Music" sounded terrific. With that music, we had our announcer do a voice over, "This is Portland Trail Blazer basketball...".

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