The Mix Tape, Vol. 66
Welcome to this week’s Mix:
🏈The value of an iconic sports moment
✈️The worst of travel experiences
🎂Turning 47
We’re on Vol. 66, and there’s a dumb joke Star Wars joke to be made about executing Order 66.
Let’s just skip it and get on with this week’s mix …
What is an iconic sports moment worth?
Last Sunday, the Arizona Cardinals beat the Buffalo Bills (sorry, Steve) on an iconic Hail Mary pass from Kyler Murray to DeAndre Hopkins.
Fans instantly dubbed the play the “Hail Murray.”
To a sports sponsor like Nike, what is a play like the Hail Murray worth when one of their athletes is involved?
Sometimes, a lot.
You couldn’t ask for a more perfect and prominent placement of the Nike “Jumpman” logo, as Hopkins out-jumps three Bills defenders to make the catch.
Occasionally, marketing goes just perfectly.
The Hopkins photo reminds me of another iconic Nike sports moment: Tiger Woods’ chip-in at the 2005 Masters:
The way the ball stops at the cup’s edge, lingers as the Nike logo gets max exposure, and then drops in the hole in the most dramatic way possible …
I’m not saying it was fixed. But we should search archived footage for a guy hanging out on a nearby grassy knoll with a remote control.
Tiger’s chip-in was instantly worth about $1 million in pure airtime:
Though Nike could turn around a spot within the week, it has already realized between $750,000 and $1 million in equivalent advertising time, according to Raymond Howland, golf editor of Joyce Julius & Associates, a sponsorship evaluation firm.
Howland said that in the live shot and the five subsequent replays during CBS' broadcast, the swoosh on the ball was shown for a total of 20 seconds. Howland said the strong television ratings overnight Nielsen ratings for the final round were up 41 percent over last year combined with additional replays on CBS and other sports networks more than quadrupled the value.
And who knows the subsequent value of that shot. $10M? $50M? Impossible to quantify, really.
Anyway, sports sponsorships are pretty run of the mill … until sometimes they aren’t.
Your worst travel experience probably wasn’t this bad
Remember your worst flight ever?
Maybe you were diverted. Or stuck on a runway for hours.
Or maybe you were on a redeye home from Vegas and a guy with horrendous nicotine breath was pounding vodkas while singing Sinatra tunes for four hours?
(I can’t enjoy “Fly Me To The Moon” the same way anymore.)
Whatever your worst experience, I doubt it tops this:
On the 10th of June 1990, a mid-air drama unfolded in the skies over England after an explosive decompression rocked British Airways flight 5390. As the plane climbed toward cruising altitude on a flight to Málaga, the cockpit windscreen suddenly blew out, sucking the captain partially out of the plane. While the flight attendants held onto his legs for dear life, the sole remaining pilot lined up for a harrowing emergency landing in Southampton
The maintenance guy used the wrong bolts on the windshield. Oops.
The co-pilot and navigator thought the captain was dead. They held onto him to keep his body from going though an engine.
In actuality, they saved the captain’s life:
There was little hope for Captain Lancaster, who had been pinned to outside of the plane amid 600kph winds and temperatures as low as -17˚C. But, as paramedics removed his body from the plane, he started to show signs of life. Within a few minutes, he had opened his eyes, regained consciousness, and appeared to be recovering!
Unbelievable.
The captain suffered minor injuries, and kept flying (inside the cockpit) for years afterwards.
Remember: it can always be worse.
Turning 47
I turned 47 this week. It doesn’t seem possible. Some years I have wrestled with birthdays, particularly when I don’t feel I’m where I need to be in life and as a person.
And I am definitely not where I want to be professionally right now, as my extended career “transition” continues.
But despite this and other challenges, I felt gratitude on this birthday. I have my health. A strong marriage. Strong faith. Supportive family members. I live in a place where it’s 80 degrees in mid-November. And we had great friends over to watch football and celebrate another trip around the sun.
It’s been a challenging year for many of us, and yet that’s when we need to appreciate not just the small things, but the big and important things that, because they are consistently good, we often take for granted.
Thank you for reading and sharing.
Please hit reply if you have questions, comments, or open rebuttals. (Or just want to say hi.)