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Kent knew marketing was, for a professional sports team, a necessary evil. So, for the most part, did the rest of the Aces, although the younger Mashkov lingered in a state of simmering near-revolt about this. There was a real limit to what they could do about most of it, and he’d learned early, as he had about most things not involving Jack Zimmermann, to pick his fights prudently.
The latest meeting might just break him, though. The original idea for the ads—short clips of plays, focusing in on different players, backed by intermittently appropriate bits of music, and ending with a mellifluous announcer proclaiming (at the start of the season) that it was hockey time again, and the Las Vegas Aces were ready! To! Win! was pretty standard stuff for any sports team, and the follow-ups for different home games were pretty much more of the same. It was catchy, the clips were highlight reel stuff, the ads were short enough to be economical to run, and for the most part, no one had pointed it out too loudly when the music was inappropriate, if you really listened to the lyrics. (The younger Mashkov was still not happy about his clip, even if everyone else in the Aces' organization, if not the entire Pacific Division, thought Elvis belting “You’re the Devil in Disguise” was altogether too apt.)
The ad for the upcoming homestand against Providence though—he leaned back in his chair. There were so many problems, and not just with Jack’s potential reaction when he saw it—if he saw it, which was not a certainty. But then there was the rest of his team, the Falconers’ management, the hockey community generally, and various groups in the local community other parts of the Aces’ management had been working with to convey a positive, family-friendly, community-oriented image for the team. He felt the muscle twitch that started up when he was especially tired and stressed crawl around his left eye. He could see the trains heading towards each other for the wreck, and he was pretty sure that if he ran out there to try and flag them down he’d be smeared between the two locomotives.
Not that the shots of Jack inconveniently scoring off Fleury and Lundqvist and Holtby, as well as the Aces’ own goalie in the Providence game, weren’t stellar. But Amy Winehouse was not going to sit well with a lot of people—and it wasn’t as if you could claim the lyrics “They want me to go to rehab but I said no, no, no,” were too ambiguous to be offensive. It was entirely possible that the younger Mashkov was going to get that fight with his cousin Alexei he burned for, and while it wouldn’t grieve Kent to see either of them knocked on his ass, this sort of thing had the potential to clear the benches, and when that happened, the captains were supposed to do something. Something like keep it from happening in the first place.
And if he said something, the skeevy little bitch who had just played this clip for them would be all over his “special relationship” with Jack. Because it could be marketed. Because it was dirt. Because she loved dirt. These meetings were mostly supposed to be show and tell sessions, anyway, so the players could see what was coming, and know how hard marketing was working, just for them. The teams’ input was, most of the time, listened to politely, and then, back in the marketing department, ignored or mocked.
He felt the twitch again and hoped it wasn’t too visible.
Swoops spoke up. “I don’t like this. My dad’s an alcoholic. Meetings, Twelve Steps, and all that. I don’t like making jokes about it.” He took a breath and went on, before Sandra could flip her overly blonded hair back over her shoulder and try to talk him around. "Zimmermann’s a big boy, and he can take his lumps—and I’m sure he does. But there are too many other people out there who don’t need this shit.”
Sandra had her mouth open (that shade of matte lipstick wasn’t a good choice for her coloring, but Kent would keep that thought to himself) but before she could tell Swoops he was overreacting, Gertsen weighed in. “Not to be a drag, but a drunk driver killed my kid and my dad. This isn’t cool. Like Swoops says, Zimmermann can deal with the consequences of his choices, and he’s been dealing for a while just fine. But there’s more people involved than just him. We run the ad, we play the game—and maybe the Falcs make it bulletin board material and maybe they don’t. But then they leave town, and we deal with the reaction from everyone in the recovery and mental health communities here.”
“Yeah,” said Buff. “And it’s stupid to say it’s a short little ad that only going to run a few days. It’s gonna get picked up, and then your Tumblrs and your Twitters and Youtubers and everyone else are going to crawl all over us for being insensitive dicks about mental illness and prescription drug misuse and addiction issues and we won’t have a leg to stand on. Someone will lean on Zimmermann, and he’ll tactfully step forward, look at the cameras through those big sincere blue eyes, say that he wasn’t personally offended, but it was an unfortunate choice on our part, given all the people in the world who struggle with mental health and addiction issues blahblahblah, and we will be crass insensitive dicks, and the PR staff will be unhappy, and the league offices will be unhappy, and we will have toasted several years’ work in the community, and probably if the yelling gets loud enough, someone in marketing gets fired. But I’ll still be playing hockey, so it’s all good.” He grinned.
"Well, yes but—" Sandra started.
Tosh chimed in. “Don’t we have some kind of fundraising thing with the mental health alliance coming up? I think I got a reminder email about that; anyone else?”
The younger Mashkov leaned forward. “I will have to fight Lyosha. I do not mind fighting him; but this will be personal.”
None of the other players in the room said a word; they all knew that the personal fights were the worst, the fights that got out of hand the fastest.
“Also,” said the younger Mashkov “it is not good to mock the sufferings of others.” He was likely ready to go on, with a well-reasoned discussion of the morals and ethics, Christian and otherwise, that would apply in this case, but Kent decided it was time for him to weigh in before he could go full Orthodox seminary dropout on them.
“I hate an own goal. I’d rather not score one here. Maybe we should run this past a few more people, before we proceed. Jack can deal, and so can the rest of the Falcs, but Buff and Gertie are right; we live here, and we don’t need to make trouble for ourselves. The people who live here all the time are not necessarily going to look at this and laugh it off. Especially the people we’re trying to work with; the hospitals and charitable groups; they don’t give a shit about whether coming down on us makes them seem uncool.”
“Yeah,” said Swoops, “there’s a guy on the internet who says the failure mode of ‘clever’ is ‘asshole’, and this looks like a clear case of it to me.”
Sandra pursed her mouth up—it was a move that was probably a lot cuter when she was still under thirty, and Kent wondered if she knew it was going to give her little lip wrinkles pretty soon, combined with her tanning bed abuse—and said “Since you’re all so solicitous of Mr. Zimmermann’s escapades—“
“Escapades?” said the younger Mashkov. “I am not understanding escapades here.”
“Peccadilloes,” Buff said. “Missteps. Bad behavior. Personal lapses. Sins. Instances of bad judgment.”
“I know the word,” the younger Mashkov said. “But Zimmermann does not have escapades. He plays hockey, and he does free skills workshops with children, and he visits the sick and the elderly. He goes to bed early and does not party. He eats fruit tarts. I am not understanding escapades.”
Kent heard Sandra take a breath, and felt the skin around his eye crawl again.
Gertsen answered him first. “Zimmermann overdosed on prescription medicine right before the draft in—2008? 2009? He dropped out of the draft, went into treatment, went to some university in New England, played there, did OK, signed with the Falconers.”
“Yeah,” said Buff. “Our captain here, the notorious KVP, was his liney at Rimouski, if you want it from the horse’s mouth instead of some of the horses’ asses out there, even if he’s probably well past sick of it. But you’ll hear a lotta shit talked about it, without much of anything to back it up. Which is beside the point here; we’re not worrying about Zimmermann’s tender feelings; we’re worried about not looking like assholes to our fanbase, such as it is, and staying out of hot water on the internet. Like Swoops says, the failure mode of ‘clever’ is ‘asshole’. Let’s just not, folks.”
“Shame not to use those shots,” Kent said. “You’ve got some pretty good examples of Jack’s war on goalies there. Anything else we could use for the jingle?”
He could tell Sandra was moving past pissed, just as he could tell that Jared, the marketing head, was considering whether he wanted to get into a pissing contest with the PR staff and deciding that today was not that day. He wondered if someone would come up with something before Sandra’s anger over having her spot condemned—he was pretty sure either she’d put it together, or one of her interns had, because she was so determined to stand up for it—got the better of her.
“Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto,” said the younger Mashkov, to the amazement of everyone in the room; he’d given no previous indication of any interest in, let alone knowledge of, western popular music from any point in time after the Beatles broke up.
Gertsen and Buff started laughing, and Swoops stared. “Who are you,” Kent asked, “and what have you done with Mikhail Semyonovich?”
“That’s perfect,” Gertsen said, “perfect. The Canadian Hockey Robot. The Zimmboni.” He looked at Jared and Sandra. “Do it. Do it. It’ll still be all over the league, but they’ll love it. We’ll have given everyone a new chirp.”
“The rights will probably be cheaper than the Winehouse, too,” Jared said, and at that point Kent was fairly certain they’d won. He’d deal with the consequences of Sandra’s ire later; he was pretty sure it would be more than balanced by the gratitude of the PR staff.
They’d all live to fight Marketing another day.