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Tuesday, November 9, 2010

The Trail of The Stanley Cup

Greetings!

I have made mention several times in earlier blog postings about a remarkable three volume series of books that my grandfather Bert Powell gave me called The Trail of the Stanley Cup.

It was a limited-edition series that the NHL published in 1966-67 to celebrate the league’s 50th season. They only printed 1000 copies of the first two volumes - Volume 1 was published in 1967 and is 807 pages, Volume 2 in 1969 and was 913 pages - and a 978 page third volume was published in 1976, of which 1500 copies were printed. My grandfather was lucky enough to be given a two volume set in 1970-ish because of his involvement in helping to locate Canada's Sports Hall of Fame and Hockey Hall of Fame at the Canadian National Exhibition grounds in 1961. He gave the two volume set to me late in his life, around 1980, and I augmented his two volumes with the third volume thanks to my old friend Gary Meagher of the NHL.

These books were written (and illustrated) by a well respected and at the time retired mining engineer living in North Hatley, Quebec, Charles L. Coleman (Born 1902, Died 1985, buried here). Charles' bio from the book is below:

The following are pages from the preface to Volume 1 which might give you a sense for the books.








The books are a remarkable achievement and tell the history of the teams that competed for the Cup, from 1893 up to 1967, and they included 64 beautiful hand-rendered uniform illustrations done by Charles that were the inspiration for what I eventually did with Maple Leaf Productions and Heritage Sports Art.

I wanted to show you the uniform illustrations from the books - they are shown below - and as I said, these really were my inspiration for the 1700+ images of NFL, MLB, NHL, CFL and NCCAA football uniforms we later created. Keep in mind the illustrations below were done by Charles Coleman himself simply as a way to add a little colour to his remarkable books and they were certainly not intended to be anything more than a nice little reference. Little did Charles know what would become of some of them - more on that in a moment. But for now, drink in these 64 illustrations.

















Aren't these wonderful? Truly beautiful in their simplicity.

Now here's the rest of the story...

In the early 1990's the folks in the NHL licensing department made the decision to honour their past by creating a line of reproduction vintage jerseys under the "Heritage" label. This collection of jerseys was made by CCM Sport Maska, and below you will find six photos of jerseys from this collection that I actually own. I am unsure as to how many different jerseys were included in this 1990-ish CCM collection - - I do know there was at least one jersey for each of the Original Six teams plus at least the Philadelphia Quakers, New York Americans and St. Louis Eagles as pictured below.







If you know how many jerseys were in this collection, I would love it if you could share your knowledge with me ssillcox@rogers.com, just as I would be interested to know how many other Heritage Jerseys were produced in later collections in the following years. I believe the jerseys in this collection (ie those made in 1990-ish by CCM) can be differentiated from later collections by the following:

A. These jerseys seem to have the Heritage tag pictured below both in the back inside collar and lower left front panel of the jersey. Don't get confused by jerseys produced beginning in 2002-ish when the NHL initiated the "V" Vintage program for all NHL throwback products and ceased the Heritage collection logo - if it's got a "V" logo tag, that's from 2002 onward, not pre-2002.



B. These 1990-ish CCM jerseys seem to have "Circa 19xx" embroidered in the lower left front panel. (Having said that, I am fairly certain the St. Louis Eagles jersey below is from this collection and yet it doesn't have the Circa 19xx embroidered anywhere. I say that I am fairly certain the Eagles jersey is from this collection because I believe I bought all of these jerseys at the same time, but I could be mistaken and the Eagles could be from a later collection.)

The impetus for creating this 1990-ish collection was almost certainly the NHL's 75th anniversary season of 1991-92 when the Original Six team throwback jerseys were actually worn on some occasions by the Original Six teams. I am almost certain none of the other jerseys in this collection were actually worn by NHL teams, they were simply made for consumption by the general public.

In the grand scheme of things, I applaud the folks from CCM and NHL Licensing at the time because this was pretty leading edge stuff - even as recently as 1990-ish the leagues (NHL, NFL, MLB, NBA) didn't really honour their past, so this was a terrific first effort.

But what I find so wonderful and yet frightening at the same time about this 1990-ish effort is that the NHL and CCM went to a lot of effort making these jerseys, using a great woolen material (the label says 70% acrylic and 30% wool, but to an amateur fabric person like myself they scratch like 100% wool) and great sewn-on patches and logos, but when it came to the actual research into what the original jerseys looked like, outside of the Original Six teams, it appears they went no further than Charles Coleman's simple little illustrations as their primary, and in some cases only, source of information as to what the jersey looked like. Even Charles would have been horrified to think that 25 years later his little colour sketches were actually going to be reproduced as actual jerseys.

Would you agree with me that CCM used Charles Coleman's sketch as the basis for producing this New York Americans jersey?

Would you agree with me that CCM used Charles Coleman's sketch as the basis for producing this Philadelphia Quakers jersey? Especially when the picture below shows what the actual jersey looked like? (For fun, count the sleeve stripes: CCM 1990-ish reproduction above on left = 6 stripes; Charles Coleman above on right = 7 stripes; Original jersey shown below = 9 stripes;)

In this St. Louis Eagle's case, CCM must have done some research beyond Charles Coleman's sketch - bravo!

Isn't it amazing? To think of all the effort and expense that went into creating this Heritage line of jerseys and yet how little research was done into what the actual jerseys looked like - frighteningly lazy on someone's part and if nothing else, it makes for a great story and offers insight into what happens when marketing and sales take control of the ship - you don't know where you're going to end up!

As I said earlier, I don't know for sure how many different Heritage Jerseys were made in this 1990-ish CCM collection, and if someone knows this info I would love a definitive list so that I could then cross-compare and chronicle the reproductions jerseys against Charles' little sketches. I have a strong memory of visiting the Hockey Hall of Fame when it opened in its new location in 1993 and seeing:

A. A Winnipeg Victorias jersey clearly made from Charles Coleman's sketch below, which when reproduced on the jersey looked like a blob of fabric and certainly bore no resemblance to a Bison. Does anyone out there have a CCM 1990-ish reproduction Bisons jersey that we could cross-compare to Charles' sketch?


The image below was added in June 2011 and shows what the reproduction jersey looked like:


B. A Hamilton Tigers jersey clearly made from Charles Coleman's sketch below, which when reproduced on the jersey makes for a very odd tiger's head and certainly not at all what the actual tiger head on the Hamilton Tigers' jersey looked like. Does anyone out there have a CCM 1990-ish reproduction Tigers jersey that we could cross-compare to Charles' sketch?


The image below was added in June 2011 and shows what the reproduction jersey looked like - note how closely the CCM reproduction jersey matches the Coleman sketch and how different the tiger head looks from the actual one as seen on Joe Malone's jersey:


I can't help but think of what my father always says, "Never let the facts ruin a good story" - some of these 1990-ish CCM Heritage jerseys may not have been very accurate reproductions, but at least they got the ball rolling and I think Charles Coleman would have had a good laugh.

Thanks to Charles L. Coleman and thanks to you for reading!

All the best -
Scott

Scott Sillcox of Heritage Sports Art interviewed on Uni Watch

Greetings!

If you enjoy uniforms and jerseys, there is a remarkable and long established blog that you might really like called “Uni Watch – The Obsessive Study of Athletics Aesthetics”. This is the creation of Brooklyn NY based Paul Lukas, and he blogs virtually every day in frightening thorough detail about uniforms (and because Paul can do what he likes, he sometimes takes little tangents that might not be uniform-related but are almost always of interest to his readers – off the top of my head I think of a neat piece on closed bowling alleys, not exactly uniform related but great fun nonetheless).

Over the years Paul has built up a tremendously loyal readership and his readers are in many ways an extension of Paul, giving Paul eyes and ears and research capabilities far beyond what any one person could otherwise hope to accomplish. Paul and his readers are a great example of “crowd-sourcing”, a fairly new but mostly self-explanatory term. For instance, in a great example of both Paul’s uniform obsession and crowd-sourcing, Paul recently had trouble understanding why a 1950’s minor league baseball team had horizontal lines sewn across their jersey chest and pant knees, so he put the question to his crowd. Twenty four hours later he had a very detailed answer (I’ll let you look it up on Uni Watch so as not to spoil the answer) and the mystery was solved.

This may seem a bit of a mutual admiration society, but Paul was nice enough to conduct and then publish on October 20, 2010 a somewhat lengthy interview with me about Maple Leaf Productions, Heritage Sports Art and my whole uniform involvement.

The interview can be found at the Uni Watch site and I have copied the contents below. If you know me, you likely know I don’t like blowing my own horn, but the interview below helps explain how my little bag of tricks came about and I thought you might be interested.

Enough said – here’s the interview… Wherever you see “UW”, that means Uni Watch, and “SS” means yours truly.

------------------------------------------

As most of you know, I recently raffled off an original illustration from Maple Leaf Productions, the company that has been selling uni-historical posters,
clocks,

fridge magnets,

and other products for the past 15 years or so.

That raffle came about after I received a communiqué from Maple Leaf founder Scott Sillcox, who explained to me that he was selling off all the original artwork through a new company, Heritage Sports Art. I’d been aware of Maple Leaf’s product line but for some reason I had never thought to interview Scott or get the full Maple Leaf story. A few weeks ago we finally addressed that oversight.

Scott turned out to be a real gentleman and a great storyteller. Here’s how our chat went down.

Uni Watch: First, tell me about yourself. What’s your background, and what were you doing before you started Maple Leaf Productions?

Scott Sillcox: When I finished university in the early ’80s, I wanted to start the great Canadian magazine — sort of half Rolling Stone, half Time. But instead, through a series of connections, I ended up organizing trade shows, and I fell in love with it. Boat shows, petroleum shows, you name it. It turned out that I really love organizing things, and that’s what the trade show business is all about. By 1992, I’d started my own trade show company.

UW: And how did Maple Leaf get started?

SS: Well, you know how it is once you’re an entrepreneur. I always loved the history of sports, so I kind of morphed my trade show business into two businesses: one for trade shows and one for sports histories. In the late ’90s I decided I loved the sports history more, so I handed over the trade show business to some friends and concentrated on the licensed sports history.

UW: So you were interested in sports history, but were you always interested in uniforms?

SS: Yes. Let me tell you two stories about that. First, I was known in university as the guy who always wore hockey jerseys. I had maybe 20 jerseys from when I was a kid, and then friends would give me theirs.

UW: And this was 30 years ago, when it wasn’t so common for people to be walking around in jerseys, because merchandising hadn’t taken off like it has now.

SS: Yes, it was a bit unusual at the time. But I loved them. And the second thing is that one of my grandfathers had a series of books called The Trail of the Stanley Cup.


It was a limited-edition series that the NHL published in 1966-67 to celebrate the league’s 50th season. They only printed 1000 copies of the first two volumes, and then a third volume was published about three years later, and they did 1500 copies of that one. My grandfather was lucky enough to get a set, and he gave it to me late in his life, around 1980. Anyway, the books tell the history of the teams that competed for the Cup, from 1893 up to 1967, and they included some beautiful hand-rendered uniform illustrations. Those illustrations were the inspiration for what I eventually did with Maple Leaf Productions. [Note from Scott: See my November 2010 posting entitled "The Trail of the Stanley Cup" for a much more detailed story about these books.]


UW: Oh, so your basic style of showing a jersey on a headless mannequin, that was based on the illustration templates from the book?

SS: Yes, exactly. And when the NHL first did throwback jerseys in the early ’90s, I’ve been told that they used those same renderings for the logos.

UW: Wow — I’d never seen those renderings before. In fact, I’d never heard of this book series.

SS: They’re very rare, and I’m so lucky to have a set. I often say that if the house was burning down, that’s what I’d save.

UW: So when did Maple Leaf actually get off the ground?

SS: The licensed sports part was in 1996. I had applied to the NHL licensing department for a few years prior to that. I wanted to produce a family of products, mainly posters, showing the history of uniforms, and I got turned down a couple of times. And they were probably right to turn me down — I had no experience in selling to retailers.

UW: And was the way you were envisioning and describing the project at that time very similar to how it’s turned out? In other words, lots of products showing images of old uniforms?

SS: Yes, that was very much what I had in mind. I maybe didn’t fully envision how many products the images could be put on, the basic concept of uniform history and evolution was there from the start.

UW: So what happened after they turned you down?

SS: I thought if I published a poster that didn’t need licensing, and if it was successful, that would show that I knew what I was doing. So I did a poster called “The Original Six,” showing artists’ sketches of the Original Six hockey arenas. I’d consulted with lawyers to confirm that I didn’t need a license to do that. We probably sold about 100,000 of that. So then when I went back to the NHL in ’97, they said, “Okay, you’ve got a track record, you can be a licensee.”

UW: So that was the first Maple Leaf Productions product.

SS: Yes.

UW: Did your company name lead to any problems with the Toronto Maple Leafs, or does every company in Canada just call itself Maple Leaf This or Maple Leaf That..?

SS: Once in a while I’ve heard from the Maple Leafs organization, saying, “How did you get that name?” or “We really should have that name.” But nothing ever came of that.

UW: When you started doing this, people weren’t writing and talking about uniforms as much as they are today, and the interest in throwbacks and uniform history wasn’t as great as it is today. What made you think people would be interested in images of uniforms?

SS: I just thought it could look so attractive that even if someone wasn’t already interested in uniforms, seeing a team’s uniform evolution would make them interested. I just thought a fan of a team would be interested in seeing that, even if he’d never thought much about uniforms before.

UW: So once you got the NHL license, did you immediately put out posters of all the teams, or did you start with the Original Six, or what?

SS: Yes, I started with the Original Six teams, because I thought there would be the greatest demand for those, and then I expanded to the other teams. And then the NFL and Major League Baseball came next, in 2000.

UW: Did you approach them, or did they approach you?

SS: I approached them, and they were both wonderful to work with. At the time, the NFL had about 400 licensees. Now they have only about 80. They’re much more selective now — they keep whittling it down, and fortunately I’ve always made the cut.

UW: And over the years you’ve also worked with the CFL and the NCAA, right?

SS: Yes, that’s it.

UW: How many individual teams or schools have you documented over the years?

SS: I think it’s 115.

UW: And how many individual illustrations have you published in the course of documenting those 115 teams?

SS: Roughly 1700.

UW: You’ve never worked with the NBA. Why not?

SS: The NBA used to call me every year, and I was very flattered by that, but it never worked out, for two reasons: First, I’m not an expert in basketball history. I just don’t know that much about it. And secondly, it seemed to me that basketball are a little bit more about the here and now — what’s hot, what’s new — than they are about history and the past.

UW: Part of that, I think, is because basketball is by far the worst-documented major sport in terms of its history. It’s hard for fans to connect with that heritage if the resources aren’t there for them.

SS: One time the Washington Wizards asked us to do a fan giveaway, so we did do that. But aside from that, we didn’t think there was a market for the heritage side of basketball.

UW: Let’s talk about the process of creating the artwork on your products. First, they’re watercolors, right?

SS: Yes, they’re all watercolor paintings.

UW: I know you’ve had several different artists. Did you originally have just one and then you had to expand, or did you have a rotating stable of artists right from the start?

SS: Started with one — a wonderful man named Tino Paolini, who was an art teacher in Toronto.

UW: How did you find him, or know of him?

SS: I run an adult soccer league. A recreational league. And Tino was one of the players. That’s how I got to know him.

UW: So you explained what you had in mind for Maple Leaf Productions?

SS: Yes, and he got it right away.

UW: Is he a hockey fan? I mean, here you were asking him to paint hockey uniforms.

SS: His first love is soccer. But he likes hockey and other sports very much. He’s a wonderful artist, but he took about 24 man-hours to produce a painting, which meant he couldn’t keep up with the volume of illustrations we needed. I was always encouraging him, “Tino, can you work a little bit quicker?” And he’d say, “Scott, I’ll do my best,” and then the next one would be 23 and three-quarters hours. That was just his pace. But he had a great attention to detail, so in retrospect I’m glad he didn’t succumb to the pressure I was putting on him.

UW: So because he worked at a deliberate pace, that’s why you had to bring other artists on board?

SS: Yes. Nola McConnan, who became our most prolific artist, was a family friend. She had a lot of experience painting horses — an equine artist — but she tried a few paintings for us and sort of fell in love with the male torso.

UW: Was she a sports fan?

SS: Yes. After she did about 1000 paintings, she needed a year off, which was completely understandable.

UW: Do the different artists have their own stylistic quirks? Like, does one artist tend to show more texture than another, or maybe one of them has a particular flair for jersey typography, or whatever?

SS: As much as I would love them to be indistinguishable, they have their own identifiable traits. Tino specializes in rich, detailed color — many layers of color, so that the watercolor almost looks like an oil painting. He’s extremely detailed, right down to the stitching. Nola is a little more about light and angles and wrinkles — there’s a little more life in her images, as if the jersey were on a living person instead of a mannequin. And then our third artist, Bill Band, he’s a wonderful artist with a good attention to detail, but I would have to give him very explicit instructions. His style is sort of in between Tino’s and Nola’s.

UW: How large is each original painting?

SS: Most of them are 9 by 12 inches. Some of Tino’s original NHL pieces were larger — 11 by 17.

UW: Is each painting a still-life? In other words, is the artist looking at a real uniform that was placed on a real mannequin?

SS: No. I would give each artist a research file for the team in question. And inside the file would be 10 or 20 pieces of source material, sometimes with notes, along with a page of instructions to the artist — “Please note the double belt loops,” or whatever. [Here's another page of instructions. -- PL]

UW: What would the source material be — photos?

SS: I spent an ungodly amount of money on used books. Every football book I could buy, every baseball book I could buy, and then every team-specific book I could buy. And then I became the king of razor-blading books. And then I would augment that with many, many trips to the various halls of fame. And then there are media guides, baseball cards. Anything I could get my hands on. So I now have thousands of folders — every team, every year. And of course you learn along the way that just because a book lists a certain date, that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. I learned to discount almost any caption and to do my own confirming research.

UW: Did you approach any of the teams themselves?

SS: Unfortunately, I quickly learned that there are very few teams with a good sense of their own histories. I don’t mean to say they don’t care about their past, but they don’t tend to have a team historian or someone who’s particularly well versed in that kind of thing. About the only exception was the Chicago Bears — they were wonderful, and were willing to do anything they could to help me.

UW: Most of your old images must have been black-and-white. How could you be sure about colors?

SS: Well, I wasn’t trying to show every single year of a uniform’s evolution — just certain specific years. So if we weren’t sure about the colors a team wore in, say, 1923, we’d just show what they wore in 1924 or ’25, assuming we had good color information for one of those years.

UW: What other factors did you consider when deciding which steps in a team’s uniform evolution to include and which ones to leave out? Some teams have pretty complicated histories that you could never show in their entirety, even if you had perfect research materials documenting each step of the timeline.

SS: I wanted to capture the flavor of a team’s history. The most basic guideline is that I wanted a uniform from every decade. Beyond that, I wanted to include home and away designs and I wanted to honor championship seasons, because that resonates with fans. So we tried to mix in all of those factors.

UW: Would you often commission more illustrations that you ended up using?

SS: No. So much research went into each image, along with the artists’ work, that I almost felt duty-bound to use each one. Having said that, there are maybe 50 that have never seen the light of day, but that’s not very many out of 1700.

UW: Any good stories to share regarding research, like maybe a uniform that you had a hard time tracking down, or any other unusual anecdote?

SS: For years I’ve told my friends about the Steelers’ 1930 uniform. We couldn’t find one, or a photo of one. So we spent an ungodly amount of time in the Pittsburgh city archives, down at City Hall, trying to see what the city’s official crest was back around that time, because that’s what the Steelers’ 1930 jersey crest modeled on. Honestly, I think we spent about 20 man-days on that, and my wife would shake her head and say, “Scott, you have to be mad.”

UW: Obviously you want to get all the details right. Did you ever issue a product that turned out to have an inaccuracy?

SS: Yes. I took great solace in the fact that the second edition of Marc Okkonen’s book included a large number of changes and corrections from the first edition. It’s inevitable — you’re going to make mistakes. And of course we always fix them in the next printing.

UW: One thing I’ve only recently become aware of: When depicting a uniform from a given year, you had to avoid using a uniform number that could be tied to a particular player from that team in that season. I assume that’s due to player royalty issues, right?

SS: Yes. When I first got the NHL license, I sat down with the NHL people and said, “Now guys, can I show real uniform numbers?” And the NHL said, “Yes you can. We control the uniform numbers.” And I said, “Great.” So we published our first two posters — Canadiens and Maple Leafs — and basically the day they came out I got a phone call from a guy the NHL Players Association, and he said, “So how much are you paying George Armstrong for the use of his jersey?” And I said, “The NHL tells me I don’t have to.” And he said, “Well, we disagree.” And he basically suggested that I pull the posters off the market and re-do them without real numbers — or else pay the players a royalty. So I went back to the NHL, and they said, “Tell the P.A. to jump in the lake.” So I went back to the P.A., and they said, “That’s fine — we’ll see you in court.” So then I went back to the NHL and they said, “Scott, change your posters.”

UW: So the league gave you this advice — which I’m sure was given in good faith, just as you took it in good faith — but then, if you’ll allow me to mix my sports metaphors, they moved to goalposts on you. Did you they offer you any compensation for the hassle and the reprinting and all the rest?

SS: No. They said, “We could go to court on this — we think we’d win, and the P.A. probably thinks we’d win too. We want to have this fight with them, but you’re not the test case we want.” Basically, I was too small-potatoes. So yes, they did hang me out to dry, and I was very upset. But fortunately it’s not in my nature to stay angry about things. And at that point I had only done a handful of teams. So for those we just changed the numbers electronically — you can actually see the changes noted on the original artwork.


UW: So the version with the original number, which you ended up changing, is sort of like a phantom.

SS: Exactly. And from then on, we only showed uniform numbers that were either not worn by the team that season, or else were worn by more than one player that season, so it’s impossible to tie the number to a specific person. And we stuck to that system when I went to the other leagues. But for the NCAA, we do use real player numbers.

UW: That’s because college players, as amateurs, aren’t eligible for royalties, right?

SS: Exactly.

UW: As a Mets fan, I noticed that the image for the 1973 Mets uniform used number 14, which was actually retired for Gil Hodges during that season, and the 2008 Mets image shows number 42, which was an odd choice, since that number’s been retired by Major League Baseball.

SS: Paul, you’re probably the only person on the planet who would notice that.

UW: Actually, I’m fairly certain most of my readers would notice this type of thing. Don’t you think it’s a little weird to be using retired numbers? I mean, as a Mets fan, frankly, it really jumps off the page to see Gil Hodges’s number being used to represent a year after his death. That number is very iconic to Mets fans.

SS: Hmmm, I see, that’s interesting. I guess from my perspective, I’m trying to honor the team and the jersey — it’s about the team, not the individual. I might be missing that gene where I see a number and automatically think, boom, “That’s Gil Hodges” – my mind automatically thinks Team First, Player Second. But your point is well made. That’s a legitimate comment.

UW: How many different products have you put those illustrations on over the years? I’ve seen prints, plaques, coffee mugs, playing cards, clocks, T-shirts, fridge magnets — what else?

SS: You got most of them. It’s about a dozen different products.

UW: Do you get feedback or requests from your customers?

SS: Not as much as I might have thought — maybe two or three a week.

UW: And now I understand you’re selling the company. What’s that all about?

SS: In 2009 the NFL did their latest round of licensing consolidation, and it was shaping up like I wasn’t going to make the cut this time, because they were raising the annual guarantee of revenue that they wanted, and it was past what I would be able provide. And that’s fine — I’ve spent a good part of my life pursuing this and it’s been great. But I have other passions that I want to pursue, so I decided this would be a good time to find a buyer and move on. I can’t discuss who the buyer will be, but the plans are falling into place.

UW: And you’re also selling the original artwork.

SS: Yes. The new buyer will acquire the electronic art, which is really all they’ll need in order to use the images. But they can’t pay me enough for the originals. We’re selling about 1500 of the 1700. Most of them are priced at $350, but some are more than that, depending on the team or the year.

UW: The proceeds are going to the artists, which means you’re basically acting as a gallery here, right?

SS: Exactly. They get a share, I get a share.

UW: As I’ve clicked through the Heritage Sports site, I’ve noticed that some of the paintings have handwritten notes on them.
Who typically wrote those — you or the artists?

SS: Some of each. Say the jersey included a patch, and the patch had a very detailed design. It would be too tricky for the artist to render that as a tiny patch on the jersey image, so they’d render it larger, as a separate image, to show all the detail, and then give instructions on how the patch would be positioned on the jersey electronically. “Reduce patch 50%” or whatever. Again, I think that adds to the fun and flavor of the images.

UW: I’ve also noticed that you have artwork for teams that are fairly new. For example, you have two Minnesota Wild illustrations. Now, obviously, two images isn’t enough to group together in a poster or a plaque. Why did you even bother to create those images?

SS: Because at one point we did an NHL deck of cards, so we needed images from every team. I think those images may have ended up on fridge magnets as well.

UW: Similarly, I mentioned earlier that you have an image of the 2008 Mets. But you had no doubt done a Mets poster long before 2008. So you were always updating your image chronologies?
SS: Yes, you’re exactly right. Say we published our first Mets poster in 2000. We might have done another one in 2003, and then again in 2006 and 2008. We like to refresh the posters to show more recent iterations, so everything looks up to date.

UW: Do you think the new owners will keep updating things with new images, either with your artists or with their own artists?

SS: Good question. I’m not sure how that’s going to work out.

UW: If they don’t keep updating things, would that make you sad, to think that the progression will end and the project will essentially be over?

SS: Maybe it’s just the way that I’m built, but when I hand it over, I won’t look back. That’s just my nature.

UW: Sounds like the healthiest approach.

--------------------------------------
I want to thank Scott so much for this excellent interview, and for sharing some of his research files with me. Speaking of which, one of the Nebraska files he loaned me had a page with a super-cool logo I’d never seen before.

A nice capper to a great interview.

----------------------------------------

Scott here again!

Many thanks for making it through to the end of this interview!

All the best -
Scott

Monday, October 4, 2010

The Original Six - Canada's Best Selling Poster?

Greetings!

I don’t want to be one of those people who feel it’s their mission in life to tell people how to do things – how to save, how to be successful, how to be happy - my goodness I find that offensive when someone is that full of themselves. But one thing that does guide me as I wiggle my way through life is the thought that we’re probably never as smart as we think we are, nor are we as far off the mark as we might fear - the truth usually lies somewhere in between.

With that in mind, I’d like to tell the story of our first poster, The Original Six, which is in all likelihood is one of the best selling posters in Canadian history. It’s hard to say with certainty what the best selling posters are simply because poster sales isn’t a statistic that is kept/recorded.


The Original Six - One of Canada's best selling posters of all time

PS A small "commercial" from Fall 2022: To purchase a reasonably priced 8" x 24" plaqued mounted version of the Original Six Arenas poster that's ready to hang on your wall, please visit Heritage Sports Stuff.

I recently did a fun interview with a wonderful man by the name of Paul Lukas. Paul is the genius behind Uni Watch, an incredible blog/website devoted to what Paul calls “The Obsessive Study of Athletics Aesthetics”, or more simply, a blog about sports uniforms. It’s incredibly popular and the readers of uniwatch are great contributors of uniform bits and pieces – the amount of uniform information in the site is frightening, a remarkable achievement.

During the interview with Paul, he asked me how and when I became interested in jerseys and uniforms. What came to mind were two things:

1. While I was in university a million years ago (1978-1981), I had a collection of roughly 20 hockey jerseys that I wore around campus. I’m not entirely sure of my motivation for wearing them, if any, but in retrospect I sense it had something to do with being a Canadian going to university in New Jersey and wanting to make it known in some way that I was Canadian, and what better way than wearing hockey jerseys 24/7. I remember hearing someone describe me as “you know, the guy who wears the hockey pajamas”. It was a bit of a dog’s breakfast of a collection of jerseys - some were jerseys that I had as a kid, others were ones friends gave me, and a handful were ones that I bought. The point is that even that long ago, I was somewhat obsessed with jerseys.


In 1975 I traded a guy from Sweden a great 1972 Team Canada jersey for this jersey - not quite sure what I was thinking but this is the sort of jersey I wore on a daily basis in university.

2. In an earlier blog, I wrote abut my wonderful grandfather Bert Powell and a great three-volume collection of books he gave me called “The Trail of the Stanley Cup”. These books trace the history of Stanley Cup competition from 1893 to 1967. Remarkable stuff. Among a lot of other gems, the books contain approximately 64 simple colour sketches the author Charles Coleman made of great jerseys from the 1890’s through the 1920’s. These sketches stayed in my mind for years and I am certain they played an important role in my interest in jerseys.


Charles Coleman sketch from The Trail of The Stanley Cup

In the late 1980’s, I had the idea of creating two posters - one showing watercolour paintings of historic jerseys of every Toronto-based team that had competed for the Stanley Cup from 1893 to the present, and the other showing Montreal teams. The idea rattled around in my head for some time, and in 1992 I shared the idea with a hockey-mad friend who was looking for a project and we came up with a prototype.


This is the original prototype of our jersey posters - it shows Montreal jerseys largely because Charles Coleman offered more images of Montreal teams than Toronto teams.

The idea sat for a couple years. By 1994 I had started my own business, Maple Leaf Productions, and I made the decision to apply to the NHL for a license to produce the historic hockey jersey posters described above. I was turned down.

I applied again in 1996 and once again I was turned down. It subsequently came to my attention that there may have been some skullduggery going on between the NHL’s existing poster licensee “Norman James” and the-then person in charge of licensing, and if that was the case, so be it, I guess that’s the way the world works.

I was determined to get an NHL license and it was clear I needed a strategy. What I decided was that if I could produce and sell a successful hockey poster, one that didn’t require NHL licensing, when I next applied to the NHL for a license, I would likely be given a far warmer reception.

This was 1996. Chicago Stadium had closed in 1994, Boston Garden in 1995 and the Montreal Forum in 1996. This left Maple Leaf Gardens as the last of the Original Six arenas – the last one standing. So my poster idea was to create a poster honouring the six great arenas of hockey once again using artistic renditions, not photographs. The idea then morphed into producing two virtually identical posters – one called “The Original Six” and the other called “The Last The Best of All”. Both posters would show all six arenas, but in the “The Last the Best of All” poster, Maple Leaf Gardens would be in colour to reinforce the fact that it was still “alive”, and from a Toronto perspective, “the last the best of all”.

Here is the actual prototype poster we came up with:

Note the poster title we initially contemplated - a bit wordy!

In my mind I was fairly certain that of the two posers, “The Last The Best of All” would be the most popular. Of course I was dead wrong – The Original Six went on to become a best-seller and The Last the Best of All was forgotten fairly quickly. As I said, you’re never as smart as you think you are. Incidentally, if you have one of The Last The Best of All’s, hang on to it – it’s rare (so rare that even I don't have a good electronic copy of it to show you)!


The Last The Best Of All - 2nd place in a two horse race

It turns out that one thing I wasn’t so far off the mark with was that 18 months later, when I applied for an NHL license with a now-successful poster under my belt, the NHL granted me a license.

And that’s the story of The Original Six, one of the best selling posters in Canadian history.

Thanks!
Scott

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Three final quick asides:

A. It should be noted that the third time I applied for an NHL license, the gentleman who had been in charge of NHL licensing, the one who may have had too close a relationship with the Norman James Corporation, was no longer in the employ of the NHL.

B. Once we became an NHL licensee, we re-published the Original Six poster using NHL team logos and they made the poster that much more appealing – I really think it completed the poster. But I’d like to tell you about the logos we used in this poster. The NHL didn’t give us these logos as is usually the case – at the time the NHL didn’t have any vintage logos to give licensees. Instead, I had a copy of a terrific glossy NHL licensed products booklet that the NHL and their then-licensing director Fred Scalera produced in 1993-ish. This booklet was brilliantly produced and had some great vintage logos among many historic photos and other images. We scanned those logos using the highest resolution equipment we could at the time (a monster drum scanner) and re-created those logos electronically. The NHL liked the logos so much that they ended up asking us for the logos. And as far as I can tell, these images are still in use by the NHL today – all scanned from Fred's NHL product booklet.









These are the logo images we scanned from Fred Scalera's great 1993-ish NHL product booklet.

C. Our poster was titled “The Original Six”, an expression that was part of the public domain at the time. A few years later, the NHL licensing department demanded (and I use that term deliberately) that I sign a document disavowing any claim I may have had to that expression. What an impossible situation for a licensee to be put in – if I wanted to retain my NHL license, I had no choice but to sign. In my opinion, being a bully is not the way to run a business. And now thus it is that any time you see the expression “The Original Six”, you’re likely to see the ubiquitous TM close by.