The April 20, 1995, issue of the New York Daily News was dominated by coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing. On page eighty-four, however, the newspaper unveiled a sports scoop. A few days earlier, an upstate New York newspaper, The Schenectady Daily Gazette, reported that the National Hockey League’s New York Islanders were “ready to make a fisherman in a boat their new logo” and change their colors to Atlantic blue with silver, bright orange, and navy blue trim. Schenectady was three hours from Long Island, so most Islanders fans had not seen the blurb. Besides, the Gazette did not publish a picture of the fisherman logo itself. Enter the Daily News, which branded itself “New York’s picture newspaper.” It had somehow obtained a copy of the logo and showed off its acquisition in a photo illustration spanning three columns. “Forget about Islander tradition,” the caption read. “Here’s what Denis Potvin would have looked like with the new ‘fish sticks’ logo on his sweater.” There was the Islanders’ Hall of Fame captain, his arms raised in celebration, with the fisherman logo superimposed over the original crest on his jersey. Two months before the Islanders planned to unveil the fisherman logo, it had been leaked to a tabloid with a penchant for sensationalism and puns.
Alongside Potvin’s picture, the Daily News ran a story with the bold-face headline “Isles’ New Logo Would Be Sea Sick.” For nine unrelenting paragraphs, beat writer Colin Stephenson characterized the logo change as a flagrant departure from tradition, “the one thing the Islanders have to be proud of in these dark days leading up to their elimination from playoff contention.” The article acknowledged the Islanders’ weak apparel sales, which ranked them twenty-fourth among the twenty-six NHL teams, lagging far behind the Kings, Ducks, Sharks, and Panthers. “But none of those teams has anything to offer their fans but snazzy uniforms,” Stephenson wrote. “The Islanders have four Stanley Cups in their history, which isn’t that long. They would move as many replica jerseys next season by building a winning team as by coming out with a new uniform.” The story criticized the Islanders for “replacing one of the most distinctive logos in sports with some ripoff of a frozen-dinner symbol” that was “embarrassingly reminiscent of the Gorton’s fisherman, the advertising logo used on boxes of Gorton’s frozen fish sticks.” Stephenson concluded his rebuke of the rebrand by imagining the Islanders’ young stars, such as Brett Lindros, Ziggy Palffy, and Eric Fichaud, trying to draw inspiration from the championship banners in the rafters at Nassau Coliseum. “They won’t see their proud logo hanging there reminding them of what is possible,” he wrote. “Instead, all they’ll see are museum pieces of a bygone era to which they have little or no connection.”
. . .
The Daily News was not the logo’s only detractor. One fan hung a banner at the Islanders’ arena, Nassau Coliseum, reading, “Fish sticks are for dinner, not our logo.” Others likened the crest to the bearded character on boxes of Fisherman’s Friend cough drops. Many signed a petition to protest the new jerseys.
This excerpt from We Want Fish Sticks was edited for clarity and context.
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Nicholas Hirshon is an assistant professor at William Paterson University in New Jersey, where he is the founder and advisor of the campus chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He holds a B.S. from St. John’s University, a M.S. from the Columbia Journalism School, and a Ph.D. from Ohio University. A former reporter for the New York Daily News from 2005 to 2011, he has published articles in American Journalism, Case Studies in Sport Management, Journalism History, and the International Journal of Sport Communication. He is the author of the forthcoming book We Want Fish Sticks: The Bizarre and Infamous Rebranding of the New York Islanders (University of Nebraska Press, 2018). Hirshon recently took a few minutes to share some insights about the focus and research process involved in We Want Fish Sticks with history division membership co-chair Rachel Grant.
Q: Can you describe the focus of your book?
A: We Want Fish Sticks tells the colorful story of one of the worst branding efforts in sports history. After winning four straight Stanley Cups in the early 1980s, the National Hockey League’s New York Islanders suffered an embarrassing sweep by their geographic rivals, the New York Rangers, in the first round of the 1994 playoffs. Hoping for a new start, the Islanders swapped out their distinctive logo, which featured the letters NY and a map of Long Island, for a cartoon fisherman wearing a rain slicker and gripping a hockey stick. The new logo immediately drew comparisons to the mascot for Gorton’s frozen seafood, and opposing fans taunted the team with chants of “We want fish sticks!” During a rebranding process that lasted three torturous seasons, the Islanders unveiled a new mascot, new uniforms, new players, a new coach, and a new owner that were supposed to signal a return to championship glory. Instead, the team and its fans endured a twenty-eight-month span more humiliating than what most franchises witness over twenty-eight years. The Islanders thought they had traded for a star player to inaugurate the fisherman era, but he initially refused to report and sulked until the general manager banished him. Fans beat up the new mascot in the stands. The new coach shoved and spit at players. The Islanders were sold to a supposed billionaire who promised to buy elite players; he turned out to be a con artist and was sent to prison. It’s an impossibly true story about one of the wackiest periods any sports team has ever experienced.
Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?
A: I started rooting for the Islanders in 1999, two years after they ditched the fisherman logo, and I saw lots of fans wearing those jerseys. I was curious why the team adopted that logo, and why it became so reviled. It didn’t look so bad to me! When I became a reporter for the New York Daily News in 2005, I began noticing how the Islanders received such little media attention despite playing in the nation’s largest media market, and I figured that was part of the reason why I couldn’t find much written about the fisherman logo. By the time I entered my Ph.D. program at Ohio University in 2013, I knew I wanted to write my dissertation on something related to the history of the Islanders. The story of the fisherman logo was too colorful to pass up. All the major figures in the rebranding were still alive, so I had the opportunity for oral history interviews. And this all happened in the mid-1990s, when I was growing up, so it was nostalgic.
Q: What archives or research materials did you use?
A: I knew that exploring the story of the Islanders rebranding would be complicated because much of the team’s history isn’t represented in traditional archives. I enjoyed that challenge. I knew I would have to track down all these former hockey players and designers and team broadcasters for interviews, and I’d have to make use of unconventional sources: game programs sent to me by Islanders fans who I met on Twitter, team memorabilia that I bought on eBay, stray documents provided by my oral history subjects or found in the limited archives available. That hunt for sources was so much fun. A friend who works for a television station in New York City helped me find period telecasts of sports anchors talking about the Islanders. Thankfully, I could track the team’s day-to-day affairs in the four major New York newspapers, the Times, the Daily News, the Post, and Newsday, the main newspaper on Long Island. It was satisfying to try to make sense of all these scattered sources and build them into one cohesive chronology.
Q.: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?
A: I make the argument in the book that the Islanders’ marketing campaign was the worst sports branding failure of all time. The spectacularly negative reaction to the fisherman jersey marked a milestone in the history of sports merchandising, and the scathing coverage by New York sports journalists was a big reason why the fans turned against the jerseys, management, and some of the players. My former employer, the Daily News, received a leaked copy of the fisherman logo in the spring of 1995, months before the team planned to unveil it, and made the first mocking comparison to the Gorton’s fisherman. From that day on, the logo was doomed to fail. The lessons learned from the Islanders rebranding fiasco still inform teams’ branding decisions today. I’m convinced one of the main reasons why the Islanders have never made any dramatic changes to their jerseys in the past quarter century is because they’re so gun shy after the fisherman flopped.
Q: What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?
A: Choose a topic that will hold your interest through many months and very likely several years of researching, writing, editing, pitching to publishers, and promoting. You can overcome a lack of easily available resources, as I did, but you can’t make up for a lack of your own passion for the subject. That passion will drive you to turn over every stone to tell the story you know is there.