NASHVILLE – It’s on the hats and the shirts. It’s on the banners that hang around the arena. It’s the nickname that encapsulates the jubilant mania that exists around Nashville Predators home games, and the community of fans that have crowded their bandwagon for the last several years.
It’s one word: SMASHVILLE.
Ward was the executive vice president of business operations for the Predators when the franchise was born in 1997. He was there when Smashville was born, and he helped deliver it. Twenty years later, it’s come to define a team that’s redefining what a hockey town looks like. Which is to say that Smashville has come a long way from Ward trying to sell a team that barely existed, without a name or a mascot or players, to a market that approached hockey like an alien concept.
“I’m like, ‘oh my god,’” recalled Ward. “We’re getting humiliated on national television, and we don’t even have any players yet!”
Ward arrived in Nashville from the Charlotte Hornets of the NBA. The task at hand was an arduous one, and there wasn’t a moment to lose. “We had to get this thing up and running because we had to sell 12,000 season tickets. The team was a conditional franchise, like Atlanta and Minnesota at the time. We had about six months to really sell the 12,000 tickets to become a full-fledged franchise,” he said.
The expedited schedule for the hockey team was due to the fact that the Houston Oilers were relocating to become the Tennessee Titans, and they wanted to get a jump in the market. So Ward and the team’s executives had to figure out, fast, how to sell a sports team that didn’t really have anything to sell. “We had no name, no logo, no players, no nothing,” he said.
What he did have was Nashville, which provided everything his team currently didn’t possess – marketable faces, from the city’s country music scene. So the team decided to ask some of the biggest names in country music to sell hockey to their fans through a series of print ads ad billboards. “We got folks like Garth Brooks and Martina McBride, and Vince Gill and Laurie Morgan to really be the faces of the franchise when we had no players,” he said. There was one condition: The team wanted them to black out their teeth in the print ads, to create a “hockey smile.” It was going to be a comedic spin on the “Got Milk?” ads, as someone like Amy Grant would smile with a gap-tooth grin next to the words “Got Tickets?” They obliged.
“Suddenly, one of them does it, and we’re in USA Today and Sports Illustrated and everywhere else,” said Ward. “They all agreed to do it with getting any money for it. That’s how the country music community really embraced this team today.” It’s also where the seeds for SMASHVILLE were planted. “It’s always going to be Music City, but Music City and Smashville are actually joined at the hip thanks to our early marketing,” said Ward.