The Yucks by Jason Vuic

Author:Jason Vuic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Chapter Five

Go for O!

The on-looker can’t help but wonder whether consecutive losing will have permanent results. Will marriages break up? Will off-season jobs become a shambles? . . . And what about the city of Tampa? Will the name enter the lexicon as a swear word, as in “Go Tampa yourself!” . . . Only time will tell.

—John Clancy, Oui magazine

In September 1977, at the beginning of Tampa Bay’s second season, three friends in the marketing department at Tampa’s Busch Gardens theme park had an idea. They’d been drinking, remembers Thom Stork, a member of the group, when one of them said, “Hey, what if we lost every game again this year? What if we broke the record? Maybe we should somehow encourage this . . . you know, as a community!” Stork was a Bucs fan to the core. His ex-wife had sold preseason exhibition tickets for Bill Marcum, the promoter, and Stork had seats on the fifty-yard line. (Forty years later, in today’s Raymond James Stadium, he sits in almost the same seats.) “I can’t recall which one of us it was,” he insists, “but someone said, ‘Why don’t we sell T-shirts? Why don’t we sell T-shirts that say, ‘Go for O!’ ”

It was a joke at first, but when the Bucs opened 1977 with their fifteenth loss in a row, the men decided to act. With an opening investment of $450, they hired an artist, checked with the U.S. Copyright Office to see if anyone had used the slogan, and printed a hundred shirts. Because “Bucco Bruce” was copyright protected, the design they used was a seventeenth-century galleon, a pirate ship presumably, sinking bow-first. In orange letters, the words read: “Tampa Bay 1977. Go for O!” The shirts were a huge hit. At the team’s first home game, the men sold every one. They pulled wagons through the parking lot, selling T-shirts to tailgaters, and took out ads in the sports section of the Tampa Tribune. They even had a plane pulling a “Go for O!” banner fly over Tampa Stadium.

On a whim, the men sent shirts to Hugh Culverhouse and John McKay. (McKay threw his in the garbage.) They also sent shirts to NBC’s The Tonight Show and Today show, and both programs used them on air. “The Tonight Show was a big one,” says Stork. “That was great press, because Johnny Carson was always ripping on the Bucs. But my favorite was the Pro Football Hall of Fame. We sent a T-shirt to the museum there, so when you walked in, right there in the Tampa Bay exhibit, there was a T-shirt that read ‘Go for O!’ ”1

Go for O! Losing. Losers. That’s what America thought of the Bucs. “Tampa Bay was the worst franchise in the history of the world,” wrote future Buccaneer and Hall of Fame nose tackle Warren Sapp. “Growing up, I was a huge Dallas Cowboys fan, but on Sundays we got Bucs games on TV. . . . Oh, I used to pray that lightning would come down and strike the tower so I could see the Cowboys.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.