Episode 30: Heisman Moments, Magic Johnson, and Red Carpet Events — What Happened to the Sports Museum of America?
What do you get when you combine the Heisman Trophy, Magic Johnson, Steve Nash, red carpet events, and an all-star team of tourism pros in downtown Manhattan?
You get the Sports Museum of America—a $100 million startup attraction that opened with massive fanfare... and quietly closed less than a year later.
In this episode, host Mario Bauduin and three of his former teammates (and founding staffers) reunite to share the real story behind the museum’s rise and rapid fall. From events booked out for years to the day Tony Hawk tweeted asking for his trophy back—this one has everything: startup hustle, sports culture, tourism lessons, and a whole lot of heart.
🎙️ What we cover:
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The wild mix of ambition, heart, and inexperience that defined the launch
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What it felt like to work there—and why team culture mattered more than anything
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The surprising lessons about marketing, timing, and leadership
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Could it work today? We break it down
Whether you’re in travel, entertainment, or just love a good startup story, this episode will have you laughing, nodding, and asking, “What if?”
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Tickets to Travel, the Business of Travel Experiences, a podcast about the stories behind unforgettable experiences and the people who bring them to life. Today we're revisiting a truly ambitious chapter in the world of sports, tourism and entrepreneurship. Not to mention my career, I was fortunate enough to be a part of a few startups over the course of my career, all focus in online travel, ticketing and live events.
(00:01):
Today we're talking about the launch of the Sports Museum of America in downtown Manhattan, across from the charging bull statue hailed as the first National Sports Museum in the us. It was home to powerful stories, rare artifacts and moments that still resonate for those who were there. Now, if you're saying, wait, I've never heard of the Sports Museum of America before Mario, that sounds pretty cool.
It was. It really was. But after a year of planning, it was only open for maybe nine months. It was a strange economic time and as much excitement as there was for the museum, it flopped and had to close. I'm sure many people in the New York City tourism community are curious about what actually happened to the sports museum.
It was something else you could stand beside the actual Heisman Trophy. Try your hand at a NASCAR pit stop, tire change, or sit in a theater where the museum journey began with an emotional film about the 2007 New York Giants. When Eli Manning and the underdog G men shocked the world and beat the undefeated Patriots, led by some guy named Tom Brady.
That's right, kids Tom Brady actually lost a Super Bowl, and for any Giants fan today watching that would definitely bring a lump to your throat. I even got choked up back then and I'm a Niner fan. Today on the pod joining me are Joe, Brad, and Russ. Three colleagues and teammates of mine who became lifelong friends.
Joe helped bring our events to life with Grace and Grit. Brad, who left the NBA to help us build something new and sell group tickets and memberships. And of course, Russ who brought Hustle, heart and a marketer's mindset to every challenge we faced together. We were all part of something that blended culture, creativity, and the raw energy of sports.
They've all gone on to be thriving professionals in their own right, and they as well as I attribute many career lessons to those, call it 18 months at the launch of the Sports Museum. This is a conversation about leadership, about taking risks and resilience and about what it means to believe in something even when the odds are stacked against you.
So don't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube at TIX two, the number two travel pod, and visit ttt pod.com for more stories from the intersection of travel, entertainment, and innovation. Because at the Sports Museum, we had the Heisman, we had Eli, we had. Heart, so big heartfelt Shout out to all of our colleagues from the Sports Museum of America circa 2007 to 2009 because tickets to travel starts now.
So if you ask. Chat, GPT What Sports Museum of America is. It says, the Sports Museum of America was a short-lived museum in New York City dedicated to celebrating sports history and culture across various disciplines. It opened May, 2008 in downtown Manhattan near the Statue of Liberty Ferry Terminal.
The museum was notable for being the first National Sports Museum in the us. Housed exhibits on a wide range of sports, including football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and Olympic events. It also featured the Heisman Trophy. This is why I'm reading this because it's like, it reminds me of all the different events that we did.
Yeah. The Heisman Trophy and became the official home of the NASCAR Hall of Fame selection process and the Billie Jean King International Women's Sports Center. Despite its ambitious vision, the museum struggled financially and closed less than a year. Later in February, 2009, the economic downturn and lower than expected attendance contributed to its closure.
Many of its artifacts were returned to the organizations that had once loaned them. End of chatt pt. Very professional right? Ai, very professional, pretty darn accurate sounds, has stand to be something that exists now. Yeah, totally. I honestly don't remember the NASCAR part. I exact, I was suspect that, I think we just said memorabilia.
No, I think that was the only stretch that like, and maybe we did host that event. It sounds like we just hosted like a NASCAR Hall of Fame event. No, I possibly, I thought our events were great. That event space was beautiful. I have notes there guys. Oh, I, yeah. You were on the events team E. Exactly right. I feel like our team was the only team that didn't struggle as much as everyone else.
We had events booked out for two years plus. We were, we had corporate eyes, we had nonprofits, we had social like bar mitzvahs, birthday parties. Um, we threw some great parties with, was it Brody? No, not Brody. Was that the opening cocktail party, Brandon? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. We had Magic Johnson.
Steve Nash in the launch of Women's Pro Soccer, we had Terrell Owens do his book launch. Yeah. Big. We had influencers before they were influencers. We held the Super Bowl parade. That was like the home base. Mm-hmm. That's right. I told Eli Manning, you gotta get off your phone. We gotta, we're gonna get going here.
You probably still had a flip phone at the time. This is 2000. He definitely had a flip phone. So, so that's a pretty good kind of roundup, right? Chat GPT. Yeah, that's a good one. I enjoy that. They said many of the artifacts for were returned. It makes me wonder, oh, are there still artifacts that are in limbo?
Is Tony Hawk still like awaiting his childhood skateboard? Well, he hasn't, you know, he tweeted at me. I, I, he tweeted at me. Two years later and said, Hey, where's my trophy, bro? That's trophy. That's what it was. Yeah. So did you guys know that? Yeah, he did. That's a great, great story chat. Was it? And so I, yeah, he tweeted at me and I that, that's a great retweet.
And I said to him like, yeah, we're working on it. Where's Lynn Marsh? Oh my God. Shout out to Lynn. Never heard that name of forever. Yeah. I think he made a statement or two about still having some memorabilia a few years after that stuck with me. That's why he was my example. He, yeah. No, and I had a tweet conversation with him briefly, but.
He never followed me back though, unfortunately. Joe, when you first started at the Sports Museum, why did you started working there? Why did you want to work there? It was interesting. I wanted to, because I ran track in college, I thought I wanted to work in the sport industry. So what better way than the Sport Museum of America, right?
So it was a brand new establishment. Things were super new. I was like, it's downtown at New York. At that time it's, that was a natural progression. You graduate from college, you move to New York, at least in my family. You get an internship, you get a job. You live in New York City and you have a successful great life and all those things have actually happened.
So I nine outta ten's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, there you go. But what I liked about the sports exam is I think we had almost had like a pilot program. I was an intern. Every few weeks or so, I moved to a different department. I got to meet different people within the organization. And then at some point, obviously I found myself within the special events marketing industry, our department.
And I also, it's funny, I remember I took our last week of finals was also the week of the opening events and we had like six nights of events in a row. So I stayed in the city and took my finals at my cubby in the office. And that what's crazy still in the events industry. Yeah, transition more so into co-marketing.
(00:22):
But yeah, within co-marketing there's experiential, there's sponsorship, there's pr, there's, it runs the gamut. But I will say also, fast forward 10 years after the sports museum, I had the opportunity to work on another museum opening in New York City. And when I compare all the opportunities, capabilities that Sports Museum had versus this experience, we were well beyond our years.
Yeah. We had the funding, we had this, we had smart, really smart people. We had really ambitious team players. And that's why I say going back like I think we did so many things right? Because the other museum that I worked on didn't have half the capabilities. The team was built up of five people.
Investors had a lot more say than I think at the Sports Museum, and it was a for-profit museum as well. Tickets were well in the 35, $40 range, and it recently closed. It only sustained four years in New York. Oh, it did? Interesting. I didn't know that. So it was space. They have other locations. Yes. Yeah, around the globe, but.
New York City was meant to be the epicenter of this event. Sounds familiar. Sounds familiar. Yeah. We'll definitely talk more about your trajectory and really how, looking back on the sports museum experience, how it's shaped it, how it shaped your career a bit. Mr. Barnett, you, I remember when you came to the team, we were very honored almost because you came from this company called the NBA.
Selfishly, I just wanted to talk basketball with somebody, so that's why we hired you. You guys wanted to talk Warriors Hoops. See exactly it. You were the only one who could understand me at the time. But what did the Sports Museum mean to you? Because if you were leaving the NBA, this had to be something, right?
Yeah, so it's, it's funny you bring that up. My background was coming from Octagon, which is a giant sports athlete representation agency where I worked right outta school basically as a glorified intern. And then moved to New York City, back to New York City to work at the NBA. And within the NBAI worked in sales and marketing, a team of business operations.
So I had some great experiences with these two, like obviously legacy sports properties. Well-known sports properties. Yeah. And I think it was just through a friend of a friend, I saw an opening at this brand new all sports museum in lower Manhattan. Thought it was a really cool opportunity. Talking about the NBA is, right?
It's you learn a ton, you don't get paid a ton, but you make a ton of contacts, right? You're in a cool industry. So I thought, wow, this could be a good blend of kind of getting in on the ground floor at an entrepreneurial organization. And a couple people I knew there, general manners, some others, so I knew there's some bringing some heavy hitters.
To run this new platform. So I was excited to, to go and I'll never forget I met with you my first meeting. You know, I wore my suit and tie. I came in there, you're this west coast guy with all these great ideas. I thought I was, I knew sports, right? That was my background. Sports athlete representation, marking on that side, I was really green as far as attractions and tourism.
Yeah. So I appreciate that.
And you. I have a ton of credit to you. You opened my eyes. Oh wow. To a ton of things, but I still go back to today. That's amazing. Honestly, on a lot of this, and I think we talked about kind of what was the downfall, what was the upside? I think to Joanne's point, I think we had a lot of great people. We had a lot of great funding.
I think timing killed us. Both on time to hire staff. Like I know when I got there and you were like, I've only been here a couple of months. Normally if we're supposed to open in six months, I would've been here a year and a half, two years ago. So I was like, Ooh, okay, so we're behind the eight ball a little bit.
And then as you and I started working more closely together and going to some of these trade shows and talking to other people in this industry. We were just, we were a year and a half, two years, yeah. Late. Yeah. On a lot of things. Especially with the projection, the number, the projection in attendance.
The projection of revenue. Oh yeah. That could have come eventually. That would not in the way they had it. That, and I don't think you and I talked about this, you were not involved in those early discussions on attendance figures. Nope. You looked at and you're like, what? What do you mean form? This is what the Statue of Liberty does.
You know, I think we were expected to do that in year two or three. So I think the people were in place, the funding was in place, the management was in place, the museum was great, and we could talk about what exactly was in the museum and I think how we could have made that better. But yeah, for me it was just an exciting opportunity to be a part of something new where my past two jobs at Octagon in the NBA, these are established properties that I wasn't making the biggest impact on.
I thought I could make a big impact at the Smores. No, a hundred percent. I think we'll talk more about it, but it, it's really what it comes down to. It's a startup. And it's the culture that we were able to build at a startup. It's rare that you get those opportunities. Russ, how did you get your start at the Sports museum?
Because I think, I think I just found you at the gym. Think he was doing DoorDash? Yeah. I'm like, no. He was like over here and I was doing a lot of stuff. Yeah, it was you. So, yeah, the sports Museum is really the one that got away from me. Like the culture we had the way it was and just what it was at the time was amazing.
I think for me, I got into it through Mario. I was doing the soccer leagues at a gym on the east side of New York City, which you were playing in, and I was also working at Warner Brothers scheduling commercial breaks and at Warner Brothers. It was a great name. Um, forgot about that. Yeah, yeah. And, but it was, it was very, it was a very much an entry level media job, and I was very much one of.
Maybe 20 people that did the exact same job as me. So there wasn't like a lot of, oh, I'm learning this new skill, or I have a lot of mobility. It was like, you're gonna learn something, you're gonna do it day after day and you're one of many people. So I found it to be frustrating just from a career perspective starting out.
And then you said, okay, I'm doing this new thing. I had a familiarity and a relationship with you already, and it was a very easy decision of, Hey, I'm, I'm young enough that if this doesn't work out, this is the time to take risks. Sure. I would think it was. 22 years old. I was living in East 64th Street with, we were in a three bedroom, we had four guys in a three bedroom.
Somebody was sleeping in the living room with a bamboo shade down. We didn't even have a couch. We had a cooler. So my expenses weren't very high at the time. We're sitting on a cooler to watch tv. Literally, it was just the right time to say, okay, I'm gonna do this. I was always fascinated by sports. I didn't know if I wanted to work in sports, and this seemed like a foot, let's not discount that.
(00:43):
We're all sports fans. Yeah. Come on. You went nuts for the Buffalo Bills this season. Yeah. Love the bills. And I'd gotten a taste of that at Tuckman Sports. Russ and I have a shared passion now 'cause I'm marry into a Bills family. So we have lots of texts during the NFL season. Yeah. Really? Yeah. No. Anytime the bills are on, I text Russ.
Yeah. Because he's the one who's going through the pain. We text djo. Yes. It's funny how much overlap there is. It builds fandoms one, but also TSE is a big one. Brad and Jane and myself, we all worked at Tuckman Sports Enterprises. We all got. Our first taste in sports events and experiences at that place.
And it's, it was, I knew I had a base, I saw enough at TSC that I enjoyed working in sports and thought it could be something I could be successful at. That's great. So we've gone over how we all got there. We had interactivity in the museum. We had a great film. Right. That sort of walked everybody through.
We had some amazing artifacts. We had the Heisman Trophy. The Heisman Trophy, which I still relish those days. I got to hang out with Tim Tebow and Sam Bradford and Cole McCoy. Tim Tebow will always be like the man because I remember he had his, he had the surgery and he had broken his hand. He still like gave fist bumps to, to everybody.
But that was a unique time. What was the best part about the museum outside of, obviously working for all of us, but what were your favorite pieces of the.
Obviously I like many different sports, right? I thought having the Heisman Trophy there was pretty cool. I'm a big college football fan. I thought that was pretty, being the home of the Heisman I thought was a cool, just something to say. And people, every sports fan does know about the Heisman. I think we probably, there are some downfalls of that where it is just once a year.
It is just college sports. So if you're not a college football fan, you might not be as in tune with the Heisman Trophy. And I think, I don't think it hurt us, but I think almost sometimes we may have marketed too much towards that, where we probably needed some experiential things every month, if not every couple of weeks.
As far as in the museum. I did love that video room. I thought that was cool. Yeah. I thought we, with, with a lot of the experiences in the museum and some of the attractions, I think we need to, I know we're only open for a year and a half, but I feel like we should have turned some of those over quicker.
Like that NASCAR tire change was cool. I think you probably could have done something Oh, different with that. Yeah. Every couple months you could have updated that. I think it was one of the first places that you could record your own play-by-play, which is in a lot of museums now. I was in the Tennis Hall of Fame this past summer.
Yeah, it's in Springfield for basketball, and I'm sure now you could probably just download and have it on your phone. Yeah. For free or for a small fee. I think we probably could have done more things with pictures, but again, this was cell phone. This was at the beginning of that. So I think we're a bit ahead of our time as far as that went.
And then Joanne touched on the event space. The event space is great, and I think that was one of the highlights. Also game Day Energy rivalries history in the making. Grab your tickets for Pro Sports action@tickets.expotravel.com. Where fans belong. Score yours today@tickets.xpotravel.com. Scrolling is listening.
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We bring the voice, music, and production magic to make it all shine. Let's make audio content that works. Visit expo travel.com for media production inquiries today. That's right. We had a, that was a, a great time. I, I think when, for me in particular, I thought it was interesting that we had something brand new to New York City as an attraction.
And I think that's what you were alluding to earlier too, Brad, was that the four of us in particular, right. Like we developed other relationships in the tourism industry or New York City. So whether it's hanging out with the guys at Dave and Busters, or hanging out with the Statue of Liberty crew or anybody who was, or Broadway, right.
We had What was the guy? What was the Maps guy? What was the maps guys? Oh, that was it. Vincent. Vincent, yeah. Vincent Timone. Yeah. City guides. Yeah, city guides. So yeah, city guides. Is like, I still see those people, they still have kind of the same roles and. Yeah, they were so welcoming in terms of, wow, this is really cool.
Let's help you sell it. Let's create these different partnerships. It's really hospitality and tourism focused on the event side, I think it was such a new venue and so cool. Joanne, that, like you said earlier, we had these various opportunities to do bar mitzvahs, but also doing these, we had our own parties to introduce it to, whether it be the sports world or the travel world, and so what was your favorite event?
At the Sports Museum, Joanne, that's part one. We had, I would say the opening week. We had six days and nights of back-to-back events like star studded. There were influencer pre influencers, I would just say social lights of New York. I was in the elevator with Bethany Frankel at the time. She was like with my lipstick look.
Okay, and now she's obviously blown up. She's still an obviously influencer. TikTok, all the things. It was exciting. Like we had, we brought in the Taiwanese baseball team for a tour. I was like their translator. We didn't realize, we didn't have someone that could translate for them once they got there. It was just things, it was fun.
It was it. We weren't perfect by any means. We were still figuring out all of us, but everyone was so committed, right? Yeah. We might not have known the exact process of things. We figured it out and everyone had each other's back, and it was just really, really. Like a family almost. It was good vibes all the way around.
And you're right to say that I would wake up every morning and not exactly know what I was gonna run into that day because it, like you said, it could have been, oh, sh that's Steve Nash. I really wanna go talk to that guy. Yeah. And you really could, you could kinda get up in close and personal. What about you, Russ?
What was, uh, a memorable event or thing about the role that you took the next 'cause? Now, by the way, guys, I mean, I would qualify Russ as a bit of a digital marketing expert. So just getting one, I wanna hear what your favorite piece was, but then also let's start to, to move towards. Where things might have shifted, right?
(01:04):
Like where, what could we have done better? But first, let's start with what you liked and what you loved or what you remember best. I think I, the thing I like the most, and it's come up in my career and been a threat, is the variety of day to day. Like you, there are sales jobs where you attend the same 10 conferences and you plan your life around those conferences and or you call on the same accounts in the same way time after time.
And this was not one, one of those jobs, right? I think we knew what our targets were. We didn't know how we were gonna hit them, and we knew it needed to be a mixture of tactics. So one day I might be getting trained on a ticketing system and physically learning how to print custom tickets by somebody who's gonna tell us, Hey, you wasted a click there.
You can do that more efficiently. The next day. I'm on a bus in Pawtucket Road Island with. To folks from Madame TSOs and The Intrepid and Dave and Busters, and we're presenting to nursing home travel coordinators. That's right. The next day I might be at an event checking people in, or I might be making a relationship with a pizza place and getting them to the grotto.
Yeah, the grotto. Shout out to the grotto. Great. And our grotto great partner to the sports museum, convincing them to staple a free ticket to every menu they sent out that weekend. And I think for me, I knew I didn't. I was at a point where I wanted to be exposed to a variety of different things and a different ways of doing business and soak it in and see what I could learn.
And that was a great place to, to fail quickly and pivot to the next thing or to try something and try to scale a success. And that's been, you can see it in my career. I've gone on to work at different agencies and I've very purposely said, okay, I'm gonna do a little bit of time on this channel at this agency.
Oh, I wanna be here and work on this other channel. Oh, I wanna bring it all together at a n Yeah. Campaign or narrative agents. At any of these agency, did they ever ask you to fly your cars? No, that was a unique, uh, that was, sorry. That was just us at the Sports Museum. That was, those were the end days when the ideas were like, Hey, you, you should flag down every taxi in New York City, offer them 10 free tickets and.
See you to this day. That's the plumes idea. Rehearse. I loved hearing you guys make these references. 'cause of where I sat in the office. I was a triangle to like Russ and Brad and then Mario was further down the hall. Yeah. So every time like Russ or Brad got the call with some organization that agreed to hand out flyers, it'd be like, hell yes.
We're like cheering. We got the GTO pizzeria. Ring the bell. Ring the bell. Yeah, ring the bell. You guys would leave. We had one popup banner that you guys would take to go to like these bow, I think and just bring, you were tight to stood up and I was like, wow. Okay. So it's really fun. Are you, when I hustle those conferences?
Yes. Yeah. It's when you come from a, a travel background, you do the circuit, like you said, Rus and you, you understand that these are long term relationships. So what Brad was saying at the beginning. When you open up an attraction at theme Park, anything, it's really based on, and we were talking about this earlier, it's really based on those relationships.
So whether it's a group of school kids from Harlem who wanted to come down and experience it, and you give 'em a discounted ticket to do that, or it's a major tour operator out of Germany who wanted to understand what all these American sports were. It was one of those things where you had to get in front of them and those were the opportunities at the conferences, but you didn't ever see the business right away.
And I think that was maybe the lack of experience from, uh, from the founder's perspective of understanding. What they had was not a sports venue, it was a tourism attraction. Exactly right. It's not Madison Square Garden. It's not Yankee Stadium. It's Madam TSOs with sports objects. Yeah. Yeah. So big difference.
The idea is of ticketing, like if you go to Madison Square Garden, you go to an arena of some type. There is a pretty pronounced 20, 30% of the group business fills the arena. But this is like how many games or how many events every single year. Correct. And then marketing overlays that, and it gives you all the one day sort of opportunities for people to come in and do that.
So on the attraction basis, that lead time in travel is much longer because you're talking about seasonality. Yeah, from different markets and also local markets. At that point of the sports museum, I don't think the founders really understood that. And so right away it was like, look, we built this thing.
Why isn't anybody coming? How come you can't call your friends? In New Jersey or in Long Island and just get them here. Yeah. And I think that's, that was the main theme throughout the experience that I think there's just a lack of understanding of one, you do have a very cool product. Mm-hmm. But it takes time and it takes the development of these relationships to build this type of tourism business.
So we were decently funded. Right. We talk about, we did have one six. It's like that. A hundred million In a hundred million. Sorry. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. To build it. But I'm just say for advertising goes, what people think is a lot of money for advertising in New York City is a drop in the bucket. We talked about, we did bus, subway, newspaper ads.
What we thought was like aggressive advertising was, we did that for maybe a week. Right? Yeah. We couldn't sustain that for years. Yeah. We couldn't sustain it for months. Yeah. So that in New York, we're not in Omaha like that. In New York. A very short time span, so you're right. Like we did advertise, I think at the right places.
But that quickly came and went. And then everyone looked around and was like, now what? Yeah. It was this piggyback effect that we were trying to maintain, at least on the group side. 'cause it made sense on the tourism board. 'cause you have 60 million travelers a year typically coming to New York City. A good percentage of that 60 million is gonna go see the Statue of Liberty.
And so we were so close in proximity to that. It was like, oh, they're getting 6 million people a year, then we're gonna get 4 million. And we would just be like, no, but that's. I can understand your logic, but there's a lot of work. It's not like the Statue of Liberty was just made last year. That's what it is.
Correct. It's equity. Yeah. The equity that the Statue of Liberty has versus the sports. When the Sports Museum started out, they, we had to do both, right? You had to create a brand and get equity behind it, and that's why you see those partnerships that we went out and built and. Likely paid for or made deals with around things like the Heisman.
We're borrowing equity from the Heisman and using it to build our brand name, right? Everyone knows that the Heisman is we'll piggyback and borrow your equity. And then at the same time, we also had to do that direct response of, Hey, we're couponing. We're going out there and being in city guidance saying $5 off.
Come here. We can attribute that directly to that partnership that we paid for. For me, it's both. It's partnerships and its relationship and I do think those words are different words because I think. We went out, we built a ton of partnerships with different halls of fame. They got us the borrowed equity.
(01:25):
Maybe we paid for those. I wasn't involved in those decisions. I can't speak to 'em. But there was an exchange of value and to some degree with those, right? But then relationships tends to be a. More response. And Brad, to your point, take much longer to develop and much longer. And I think those are two different strategies, partnerships versus relationships.
Absolutely. I just think in general, I think the marketing efforts early on were so strong to your point, like we had commercials, we were on buses, we were on subways platforms, and then it almost felt like it fell off. And then we went to grassroots marketing. But what, what was happening in that in between time?
Mm-hmm. And that's where I'm, I actually don't know because it was like all the grandness of when we first opened and there was excitement. We built attendance and driving sales, and then it felt like overnight it was like, all right, now we're hitting the phones to get school groups and tour guide, tour groups in.
What happened in between is what? I don't remember. That exists. I remember those street teams. We hired street teams for a while. Did That's saying, I remember phone, phone fingers. I'm like, but that the powers that be above us, they had to have known that it was gonna take more than that to get to drive millions of attendees.
I think that's, we're getting to the root of it, right? It was, they didn't, yes. And then to my other point, yes. I'll say now further on my career, like I am an advisor on a CPG brand. And the ways that we are successful is that we have people that are smarter than us, that are, that come on as strategic advisors that have been in the industry for 15, 20, 25 years.
And without their guidance, it would make our, what we do impossible. Right. And it goes back to who were we, who did we have on the board, who, who was helping to advise as to how the money was being spent. And 'cause the idea was there. I always say this like we had a great product. It was once people got there, they're like, this is amazing.
You never had one person come out of the experience saying that. It was just like this was incredible. That's very true and that's very true. Was like no one was like, this sucks. This is a horrible experience. I remember the elevator door would open at the end and people would be like, you would just see the buzz and people with the kids, the family.
So exciting. I remember saying this exact same thing 10 years later when I worked on the second museum, is our concept is great. We have awesome exhibitions. We touch on such cultural, I. And people love the space. We just can't get people in through the doors. And this is 10 years later. I think it's, I wondered too if, is it just a matter of time, if we could have lasted another year or whatever and just gotten to the point where we were rotating more fresh exhibits, more fresh interactive elements in, would we see people coming back?
Purely conjecture? I have no idea. But would that have worked? Is it just a matter of, of getting to a certain, or if we had the runway, like Mario said, like we were planning six months out, if we had two years, would this be different? I don't know guys what chat GPT said it was during the financial crisis, right?
The stock market crash, Lehman Brothers, all these things happened. And then I think what we were chatting about this earlier, like we were in this weird marketing gap. Yeah. That could you imagine? I, it would've been amazing if Magic Johnson was launching his book at the Sports Museum and then tweeted it out.
There was no Twitter. Rus and we booked him on the, on a, the Bleacher Report podcast before, things like that where he was bringing it up. Yeah, there was just, when you talk about there's that, what did we do in the interim? I don't even know that middle type marketing existed back then. It was, it seemed to me like there's either big brand equity building back then or very direct response channels.
That middle what Now we have language like demand generation to talk about. Nobody was using that. There was no direct to consumer brands. There was no DTC playbooks or metrics that were even available on that initial opening party. If every one of those celebrities and sports legends had turned around and done a TikTok Yeah.
Or a story, what would've been the value and impressions? Yeah. Have your glam bot there, like E does in every single thing they do. How many glam bots show up in your FYP page that stars are doing? I think we're almost selling it even more short. We had those, they were red carpet events. Yeah. And these people came for, and we couldn't advertise because we didn't have a bad time away to do that.
We were gonna buy the pictures of Getty Images mm-hmm. The next day. And then put a newspaper ads together. I'm laughing when I see, when I wrote down with bus, newspaper, subway ads. Yeah. Could you imagine if that's how people were, was trying to be successful today? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. By a couple years.
No, so I'm just sayings. Missed it by a couple years. And then in a downtown Manhattan location. Now, let's be honest, like the location itself, it wasn't a corner lot, it didn't have great signage. You're amongst corporations. There's no, there's no families and houses around there. And then not to mention, when you mentioned a little bit ago, 50,000 people in that area lost their jobs literally two weeks before reopen.
So we're going in there to target those corporations and they had 10,000 employees there, and they were gonna buy this corporate package that would allow them to go for free or for whatever amount of money. And then those fields just disappear. And I'm walking into somebody, by the way, who probably either is going to get fired or lose their job and their company's losing money and now I'm asking 'em for a couple hundred thousand dollars for a corporate membership.
Yeah, no, that budget's gone. The people are gone. So that's why I feel like timing was idea, I think is still good. And I think the people work great as we're 20 years later and we're all friends and we still talk to a bunch of people there. But to me, I go back to the timing. The timing was it, I think, yeah.
I also think the for-profit model didn't help at the time, like we were one of the first for-profit museums. So the concept of paying to go to a museum, especially in New York City, which is the epicenter of cultural events where a lot of it is donation based. Right. To go to natural history. Yeah. Or the ticket prices are low or it's free.
So here we are saying like, we are brand new to New York City. We're the first of its kind for profit, 27 $30 a ticket. And at that time was unheard of, right? So between that, the financial crisis, our location, I just feel like the odds were stacked against us. Do you guys happen to know what the official business name was for the Sports Museum of America?
I knew this at one point, but I, for just paperwork purposes. Yeah, but now I don't. The National sports Attraction. Yes, that's what it was. Which would've been more appropriate if it was a different name. Maybe you could get away with it because then it, it goes back to your Madame ods, right? It, that is a for-profit attraction.
But with the, putting that word museum, you're right. Mm-hmm. It does have this New York City connotation that there's gonna be on pay by donation, or there's gonna be a little bit more consideration given to that particular market where it was located. And I feel like there's. Yeah, I know you've got more.
(01:46):
Yeah, and they're not, and you look at, I think the thing that interests me is the NFL experience, right? I look at that in contradiction. NFL comparison, B Formula, woman. Yeah. They didn't use the word museum. They used the word experience, but even the NFL experience, they closed in 2018 and I went there and I loved it.
I was great. I had a blast at the NFL. Totally immersive. A lot of fun. I went with Jane Busman wise or another. Shout s alumni, we got a blast. We created content together. We shared the content on the social. It still didn't get past 2018, and there's no bigger name in sports than the NFL. Like talk about equity in a name right there.
So I think, yeah, it's, I think it's very difficult to have these experiences last have the longevity that you'd want them to have. If, even if the NFL can't do it, who can do it? Is my question. Like what museums are having longevity in for-profit, and what are the things that make them successful? You think there's a reason that they're in Canton, Ohio.
Springfield, Massachusetts. It's cheaper Rent. Rhode Island. Oh yeah. It's cheaper for Rent A destination too. O ota, New York. I think that, and that's something that should be mentioned here too, is I think part of the strategy was to give a New York City home to some of those halls of fame and some of those different organizations to bring more awareness for them out in Canton, out in wherever they may be.
Mm-hmm. Maybe we didn't leverage those partnerships enough or their marketing enough, but again. To your point, Russ, it's it, the NFL couldn't do it. Maybe on the Olympic side, that would've, that might have done it, but I think we had so many gold medals in that place. Yeah. Didn't think we had an Olympic event, didn't we?
Yeah. I don't think it was an Olympic year, but I feel like we had some kind of Olympic event where we invited Olympic. I remember the wrestling team, Henry Saluto, the US wrestling team, who became a UFC champion. Go. I remember walking him around the museum. I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah, so there was some kind of Olympic tie to it, but it's interesting how these remote locations, like the Canton locations that you were mentioning, Cooperstown.
Cooperstown can bring in the millions of people because it's a destination. Like people are going Cooperstown just for that, making a weekend out of it. Meanwhile, we were in New York City of all places. Yeah. We couldn't get anybody to come down on the sixth. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Not for anything though. Also a lot of that's group sales for these big, like I think of cou, my brother-in-law just took his son to a baseball tournament at Cooperstown and he was like, it's a machine there.
They have all the hotels are. Adjacent to the baseball fields, you see the base fields, they bring in hundreds and hundreds of kids every weekend in the summer, presumably every weekend in the summer have a giant tournament. And of course, all those kids are being packaged a ticket to the, the Hall of Fame.
And it's, it, my brother-in-law loves going with his kids because it is an entire experience. And, but that's the only reason they're going to Cooperstown. They're not going mm-hmm. Cooperstown Distillery, as great as their whiskey may be, they are going for that. But that was the intent, like to give you a little sliver of baseball.
The destination. Yeah. And a sliver of the Olympics and a sliver of that so that it was top of mind on your next trip. Yeah. But is that sliver enough to give you an appetite is I guess would be the question, right? Yeah. Cooper's down there immersing you for two days. That's a whole experience. Is it? Is this just like.
The snack you get from the fridge, that always leaves you hungry. I think we've hit on a quite a few things, obviously during this first part of the conversation in that it's, it was, it's not a sports venue, it's an attraction. I think that's p Brad, you brought up location being a major thing. Yeah. Timing the economy and it's, and like when you think about it, just in this conversation, there's a ton to just.
Think about and what were they doing? Why was this the time? And I think a lot of this stuff was happening where you couldn't really telegraph it at all. Remember Mario? This is during right? The rejuvenation of lower Manhattan. That's true. So the reason we got that 50 million, so it was a hundred million dollars project, 50 million funded privately, 50 million funded.
From the government post nine 11 Rejuvenate to Rejuvenate Lower Manhattan. I never fought kind of the founders of the people that raised the money for that. I think they did a really great job there. I think they didn't know what business they were in, and they hired some sports people, some marketing people, some advertising people.
One travel guy. I was just gonna say one ality travel person, we probably needed five more of you probably to run the business side. So again, like that's where early on, and then we talk about the timing. Like then they did it late and then they had some kind of projections that Lord knows who came up with those projections.
Yeah, but you and a lot of smart people weren't involved in that and then tasked everybody with something that might've been impossible looking back at it. Yeah. I think to your point, yeah, we'd come in with Reforecast and they would like, Nope, sorry, we need X, and they would never, to your point, they would never justify Y, the Y, and so then that, that got us thinking, especially towards the end.
Here's a good transition question. When did each of you know it was over? What was the incident or the time that you're like, oh man, I like this place a lot, but it's getting a little crazy. I. It might be time to go. I'll say, I will say, because I was on the events team, I was never at my desk. I was always in the museum or in the actual event, space, walkthroughs, meeting with the caterers, et cetera.
But there was a time that I remember for multiple weeks on end that every time I would go down to the event space, go through the museum, it was empty. I was like, there's no one here. And that's why I was like, oh, we're, we have all these walkthroughs, people interested in booking out events. We have no one coming through our actual physical doors on the day-to-day.
And that's when I was like, I think it's just a matter of time. Yeah, that's a good point. I remember being in a store, which you gotta enter and exit through the store, so I thought that was like a good litmus test of how many people were in there and same kind of thing. It was pretty barren and I talked to the employees in the store and there were just t tooling their thumbs and playing games and hanging out, listening to music.
And were not very busy. And shout out to Marcy and Dana because. That was a dope store guys. Yeah, dope store. I was gonna talk about this earlier. Yes. Really nice store with some really cool stuff. That was probably ahead of his time also from the apparel side. Yeah, a hundred percent. And then Russ, you stole a lot of that stuff at the end.
Uhoh, I stole quotes around I. Was there and borrowed, but I do still have a track jacket from the sports museum. That is, no, I'm pretty sure you gave me a sports museum uniform. A sports museum of soccer ball like last year. Yeah, I'm pretty sure did some of that stuff. I think it was collector. A gold medal maybe.
Yeah. Full disclosure. Me, Tony did not take the artifacts. No, no artifact. I think for me, I knew when the layoff started happening and it was happening to people that were considerably more senior than myself and yeah. You were the one that was the wake up call for me. I was like, oh, that's somebody who's involved at a planning function of this place and they've removed that person and they haven't instilled anyone behind them.
(02:07):
So this isn't a clear signal of, okay. This plan wasn't working. So here's another plan that we're gonna give you guys to activate on. It was just like, Hey, we need to cut this cost. Like Exactly. Really? Yeah. You are a much less expensive resource. Russell. They were saying to me, not in those words. No one ever said that.
Right. But I could see that I was being kept on because I was less expensive than many of the other folks there. And I just. There was no plan to activate. And there were moments along the line that were very unexpected that I thought, Hey, this is a bump. This is an unexpected moment. I think I remember we were, we presented in, in a boardroom of a giant financial firm, which will remain nameless, and who was somebody on our board.
And that was a moment where I was like, Hey, this is crazy that I'm in this room, that this is happening. I'm not really sure what we're going for, but I'm going for it. And that was alarming, but it was when that layoff happened, without a clear plan of succession, without a clear plan of. This is what we're pivoting towards.
For me, it was like, okay, I had rolled with the unexpectedness up until, and then it just got silly. Right? Then the sister of that board advisor became our general manager with absolutely zero experience in our industry, would come in every three days, calling all hands meeting. Literally just like point to people around the room who has the best idea.
I think that's when the, Hey, take all these, buy one, get ones, give them to cab drivers. Yeah, and the cab drivers give them out was an idea by our, one of the founders. So like that, it just became silly. That was past the point where all at that point our resumes are all out and other things. Yes, there were some telltale signs early on.
Yeah, they still owe, I think Howie raised still owed at least a steak dinner or a couple hundred bucks off of the promoting. He did the flyers. Ya Out, shout out to Howie. This will have to shout out to Howie. We'll have to do for his compensation. No, I think you're, it's so funny, I just think of if there was a Netflix television show.
I was just thinking the same thing there. There would or a series, right? The rock, eyes and Fall. Yeah. A limited series. There's very distinct characters throughout this. I don't know who's gonna play us. Maybe John Cusack plays me, who knows? But there's people say Elon Musk, which is Bruno Mars is playing.
Oh, Bruno. I'm much taller than Bruno. But there's some very, that was really an introduction also for someone who didn't grow up in New York City, of just understanding people in New York who were part of the investment group and all these different things. And in that television show, you could see very pronounced characters and roles being put.
And I think for all of us that was like, wait a second. We're not part of a corporation. This is a startup and this is a startup with people, some very wealthy people behind it, but they're not providing the right guidance or the right communication as to what was going on behind the scenes. And yeah, when I exited, I think JU and others, the GM and everybody else were starting to exit as well.
And I think at that point we all. We're like, man, how do we save this thing? And then it became like, I don't think they're gonna try to save it at all. And so I remember just having conversations with people afterwards, like the other tourism people, and they're like, what exactly happened? I'm like. I can't even begin to tell you, like you wouldn't understand it.
And so it takes this much time afterwards for us to sit on a podcast and say, let's just go through the process of how we got there and what went on, how amazing of an experience, the type of culture that we had, and then what happened at the end. How has this experience Russ shaped your career going forward Post.
Sports museum. I think it's my introduc. It was my introduction to being scrappy, to saying, okay, you have a goal. There are multiple different ways to accomplish that goal. You're gonna roll up your sleeves and you're gonna contribute much more than your job position says. Now, a lot of my career has been in account management at client services roles, at advertising agencies, and you, there's a type of person that works those jobs.
The Pete Campbell type, right? They're shaking hands. They're just relationship advisors. They do very well, but there's a type of person that does that job that takes into consideration operations and project management concerns and creative concerns. And I've always been much more the latter of somebody who has a relationship with our creative teams, are in the work on the day-to-day, giving comments and a thoughtful way of the work.
On the work and helping clients develop briefs and just more talking about the tracking of a website rather than just delivering of the website, right? So that you can relate it to, to core KPIs. And I think the Sports Museum was my intro to that. Up until then, the job I had before was do this one thing, get good at this one thing, that's all that's ever gonna be asked of you.
And then the sports museum was like, no, if you wanna succeed or you want to. Something to work. You have to have your finger in many different places here. And you have to have it on many different pulses and Right. Just able to hang in different areas. Yeah. Get after it. Like figure, figure it out.
Everything's figureoutable. Yeah. And here's the goal. I don't care how you get there. I don't care who you have to talk to. Yeah. But here's, let's go find a list and let's go knock it down. We're gonna go show up and do this. What about you, Brad? I just think you'll, you learn every, you learn something from every experience you go through.
Good and bad. And like we said in the beginning, I came from this. Two giant sports properties that aren't entrepreneurial anymore. They're, they're certainly corporate. Yeah. If you wanna put it that way. So this was my first entrepreneurial experience and like I said, I love the culture. It was an exciting place to work.
Like you said, Mario, like you were excited to get, go to work every day. Yeah. Because you didn't know who was gonna show up what the project was gonna be. I actually really loved the leadership. I love you as a leader. I thought JU was a great leader, right? So I trusted the people around me to do the right things.
They taught me a lot like you. You taught me everything I know about that tourism hospitality space. I'll never forget that. And I told you that. I still take both me to this day. Probably the strongest thing I learned was like how not to go from ownership to management. There's a big difference between.
Funding and founding the place and then running the place, right? You see this with team owners, right? We're talking about, oh, the cowboys and the jets and these owners that have a lot of money, that have a lot of means, which shouldn't be the GM of the team, should certainly not be the coach of the team, shouldn't be picking the player personnel.
So to me, I look for that now and worked in a couple jobs since then. And now I work at a kind of a private family run company. I. But I trust that founder. I trust where they're from, like they're smart enough to hire the people around them that are great. And that's who the people they lean on, right?
(02:28):
That's the best part of when you work in a family or a private company. So yeah, I'd still take those lessons learned at Sports Museum with me to this day. Yeah. Yeah. Great experience. Likewise, Joe. She knows, you know, when I think back on it, she's winding up. She's winding up to close it down. For me, it felt like a very personal experience.
I was new into this industry. I was an intern, my first internship out of college. I got to experience a job where I thought to myself, wow, does the perfect job exist? I'm skipping on the way to work. I really enjoy the people I'm working with. I'm surrounded by really powerful female leaders who are outspoken, who really helped to show me what is possible in this industry.
So for me, it feels like this was a really great gateway into kind of what I want the trajectory of my career to look like. I think the biggest piece I would say is team culture like that is so important and throughout my career, whether in hospitality, f and b or a lot of the agency roles that I've played in that team culture, I think back on.
And I try to carry that through throughout any of my experiences. We had such great culture, we were hardworking, we got shit done and it's, you can have all those things simultaneously. You can go out and grab drinks with your coworkers and still crush it the next day at work and hit goals and KPIs. And you know that all of that can coexist.
The work hard, play harder model, I think still stands true. And the Sports Museum was a perfect example of that. Shut it down, boys. Mike, if the Sports Museum was here today, do you think it would be successful? It would have to be different. It would have to be a different version of the sports museum.
There'd have to have more tentacles. There have to be more experiences built in. There'd have to be programming. Panels, events going on at night, we'd have to cultivate more culture within the city. I think those are the areas that other museums were seeing that are sustainable have, could it exist in lower Manhattan in that footprint?
You know what, I go back to the other museum I worked on. We were flat iron traffic, great space, iconic historical building. And it didn't work there either. Maybe if they put it at the foot foot of the Statue of Liberty, that would work. It'd be an add-on ticket. Literally, you take the fer over off plus up.
Yeah. Bo, go buy one, get one free. You get to go to Sports Museum at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Attention travel and ticketing innovators. Whether you're a startup disrupting the industry, or an established company ready to take your distribution strategy to the next level. Expo Travel is your ultimate partner in online travel and ticketing distribution.
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Welcome to Tickets to Travel, the Business of Travel Experiences, a podcast about the stories behind unforgettable experiences and the people who bring them to life. Today we're revisiting a truly ambitious chapter in the world of sports, tourism and entrepreneurship. Not to mention my career, I was fortunate enough to be a part of a few startups over the course of my career, all focus in online travel, ticketing and live events.
(00:01):
Today we're talking about the launch of the Sports Museum of America in downtown Manhattan, across from the charging bull statue hailed as the first National Sports Museum in the us. It was home to powerful stories, rare artifacts and moments that still resonate for those who were there. Now, if you're saying, wait, I've never heard of the Sports Museum of America before Mario, that sounds pretty cool.
It was. It really was. But after a year of planning, it was only open for maybe nine months. It was a strange economic time and as much excitement as there was for the museum, it flopped and had to close. I'm sure many people in the New York City tourism community are curious about what actually happened to the sports museum.
It was something else you could stand beside the actual Heisman Trophy. Try your hand at a NASCAR pit stop, tire change, or sit in a theater where the museum journey began with an emotional film about the 2007 New York Giants. When Eli Manning and the underdog G men shocked the world and beat the undefeated Patriots, led by some guy named Tom Brady.
That's right, kids Tom Brady actually lost a Super Bowl, and for any Giants fan today watching that would definitely bring a lump to your throat. I even got choked up back then and I'm a Niner fan. Today on the pod joining me are Joe, Brad, and Russ. Three colleagues and teammates of mine who became lifelong friends.
Joe helped bring our events to life with Grace and Grit. Brad, who left the NBA to help us build something new and sell group tickets and memberships. And of course, Russ who brought Hustle, heart and a marketer's mindset to every challenge we faced together. We were all part of something that blended culture, creativity, and the raw energy of sports.
They've all gone on to be thriving professionals in their own right, and they as well as I attribute many career lessons to those, call it 18 months at the launch of the Sports Museum. This is a conversation about leadership, about taking risks and resilience and about what it means to believe in something even when the odds are stacked against you.
So don't forget to follow us on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube at TIX two, the number two travel pod, and visit ttt pod.com for more stories from the intersection of travel, entertainment, and innovation. Because at the Sports Museum, we had the Heisman, we had Eli, we had. Heart, so big heartfelt Shout out to all of our colleagues from the Sports Museum of America circa 2007 to 2009 because tickets to travel starts now.
So if you ask. Chat, GPT What Sports Museum of America is. It says, the Sports Museum of America was a short-lived museum in New York City dedicated to celebrating sports history and culture across various disciplines. It opened May, 2008 in downtown Manhattan near the Statue of Liberty Ferry Terminal.
The museum was notable for being the first National Sports Museum in the us. Housed exhibits on a wide range of sports, including football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and Olympic events. It also featured the Heisman Trophy. This is why I'm reading this because it's like, it reminds me of all the different events that we did.
Yeah. The Heisman Trophy and became the official home of the NASCAR Hall of Fame selection process and the Billie Jean King International Women's Sports Center. Despite its ambitious vision, the museum struggled financially and closed less than a year. Later in February, 2009, the economic downturn and lower than expected attendance contributed to its closure.
Many of its artifacts were returned to the organizations that had once loaned them. End of chatt pt. Very professional right? Ai, very professional, pretty darn accurate sounds, has stand to be something that exists now. Yeah, totally. I honestly don't remember the NASCAR part. I exact, I was suspect that, I think we just said memorabilia.
No, I think that was the only stretch that like, and maybe we did host that event. It sounds like we just hosted like a NASCAR Hall of Fame event. No, I possibly, I thought our events were great. That event space was beautiful. I have notes there guys. Oh, I, yeah. You were on the events team E. Exactly right. I feel like our team was the only team that didn't struggle as much as everyone else.
We had events booked out for two years plus. We were, we had corporate eyes, we had nonprofits, we had social like bar mitzvahs, birthday parties. Um, we threw some great parties with, was it Brody? No, not Brody. Was that the opening cocktail party, Brandon? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. We had Magic Johnson.
Steve Nash in the launch of Women's Pro Soccer, we had Terrell Owens do his book launch. Yeah. Big. We had influencers before they were influencers. We held the Super Bowl parade. That was like the home base. Mm-hmm. That's right. I told Eli Manning, you gotta get off your phone. We gotta, we're gonna get going here.
You probably still had a flip phone at the time. This is 2000. He definitely had a flip phone. So, so that's a pretty good kind of roundup, right? Chat GPT. Yeah, that's a good one. I enjoy that. They said many of the artifacts for were returned. It makes me wonder, oh, are there still artifacts that are in limbo?
Is Tony Hawk still like awaiting his childhood skateboard? Well, he hasn't, you know, he tweeted at me. I, I, he tweeted at me. Two years later and said, Hey, where's my trophy, bro? That's trophy. That's what it was. Yeah. So did you guys know that? Yeah, he did. That's a great, great story chat. Was it? And so I, yeah, he tweeted at me and I that, that's a great retweet.
And I said to him like, yeah, we're working on it. Where's Lynn Marsh? Oh my God. Shout out to Lynn. Never heard that name of forever. Yeah. I think he made a statement or two about still having some memorabilia a few years after that stuck with me. That's why he was my example. He, yeah. No, and I had a tweet conversation with him briefly, but.
He never followed me back though, unfortunately. Joe, when you first started at the Sports Museum, why did you started working there? Why did you want to work there? It was interesting. I wanted to, because I ran track in college, I thought I wanted to work in the sport industry. So what better way than the Sport Museum of America, right?
So it was a brand new establishment. Things were super new. I was like, it's downtown at New York. At that time it's, that was a natural progression. You graduate from college, you move to New York, at least in my family. You get an internship, you get a job. You live in New York City and you have a successful great life and all those things have actually happened.
So I nine outta ten's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, there you go. But what I liked about the sports exam is I think we had almost had like a pilot program. I was an intern. Every few weeks or so, I moved to a different department. I got to meet different people within the organization. And then at some point, obviously I found myself within the special events marketing industry, our department.
And I also, it's funny, I remember I took our last week of finals was also the week of the opening events and we had like six nights of events in a row. So I stayed in the city and took my finals at my cubby in the office. And that what's crazy still in the events industry. Yeah, transition more so into co-marketing.
(00:22):
But yeah, within co-marketing there's experiential, there's sponsorship, there's pr, there's, it runs the gamut. But I will say also, fast forward 10 years after the sports museum, I had the opportunity to work on another museum opening in New York City. And when I compare all the opportunities, capabilities that Sports Museum had versus this experience, we were well beyond our years.
Yeah. We had the funding, we had this, we had smart, really smart people. We had really ambitious team players. And that's why I say going back like I think we did so many things right? Because the other museum that I worked on didn't have half the capabilities. The team was built up of five people.
Investors had a lot more say than I think at the Sports Museum, and it was a for-profit museum as well. Tickets were well in the 35, $40 range, and it recently closed. It only sustained four years in New York. Oh, it did? Interesting. I didn't know that. So it was space. They have other locations. Yes. Yeah, around the globe, but.
New York City was meant to be the epicenter of this event. Sounds familiar. Sounds familiar. Yeah. We'll definitely talk more about your trajectory and really how, looking back on the sports museum experience, how it's shaped it, how it shaped your career a bit. Mr. Barnett, you, I remember when you came to the team, we were very honored almost because you came from this company called the NBA.
Selfishly, I just wanted to talk basketball with somebody, so that's why we hired you. You guys wanted to talk Warriors Hoops. See exactly it. You were the only one who could understand me at the time. But what did the Sports Museum mean to you? Because if you were leaving the NBA, this had to be something, right?
Yeah, so it's, it's funny you bring that up. My background was coming from Octagon, which is a giant sports athlete representation agency where I worked right outta school basically as a glorified intern. And then moved to New York City, back to New York City to work at the NBA. And within the NBAI worked in sales and marketing, a team of business operations.
So I had some great experiences with these two, like obviously legacy sports properties. Well-known sports properties. Yeah. And I think it was just through a friend of a friend, I saw an opening at this brand new all sports museum in lower Manhattan. Thought it was a really cool opportunity. Talking about the NBA is, right?
It's you learn a ton, you don't get paid a ton, but you make a ton of contacts, right? You're in a cool industry. So I thought, wow, this could be a good blend of kind of getting in on the ground floor at an entrepreneurial organization. And a couple people I knew there, general manners, some others, so I knew there's some bringing some heavy hitters.
To run this new platform. So I was excited to, to go and I'll never forget I met with you my first meeting. You know, I wore my suit and tie. I came in there, you're this west coast guy with all these great ideas. I thought I was, I knew sports, right? That was my background. Sports athlete representation, marking on that side, I was really green as far as attractions and tourism.
Yeah. So I appreciate that.
And you. I have a ton of credit to you. You opened my eyes. Oh wow. To a ton of things, but I still go back to today. That's amazing. Honestly, on a lot of this, and I think we talked about kind of what was the downfall, what was the upside? I think to Joanne's point, I think we had a lot of great people. We had a lot of great funding.
I think timing killed us. Both on time to hire staff. Like I know when I got there and you were like, I've only been here a couple of months. Normally if we're supposed to open in six months, I would've been here a year and a half, two years ago. So I was like, Ooh, okay, so we're behind the eight ball a little bit.
And then as you and I started working more closely together and going to some of these trade shows and talking to other people in this industry. We were just, we were a year and a half, two years, yeah. Late. Yeah. On a lot of things. Especially with the projection, the number, the projection in attendance.
The projection of revenue. Oh yeah. That could have come eventually. That would not in the way they had it. That, and I don't think you and I talked about this, you were not involved in those early discussions on attendance figures. Nope. You looked at and you're like, what? What do you mean form? This is what the Statue of Liberty does.
You know, I think we were expected to do that in year two or three. So I think the people were in place, the funding was in place, the management was in place, the museum was great, and we could talk about what exactly was in the museum and I think how we could have made that better. But yeah, for me it was just an exciting opportunity to be a part of something new where my past two jobs at Octagon in the NBA, these are established properties that I wasn't making the biggest impact on.
I thought I could make a big impact at the Smores. No, a hundred percent. I think we'll talk more about it, but it, it's really what it comes down to. It's a startup. And it's the culture that we were able to build at a startup. It's rare that you get those opportunities. Russ, how did you get your start at the Sports museum?
Because I think, I think I just found you at the gym. Think he was doing DoorDash? Yeah. I'm like, no. He was like over here and I was doing a lot of stuff. Yeah, it was you. So, yeah, the sports Museum is really the one that got away from me. Like the culture we had the way it was and just what it was at the time was amazing.
I think for me, I got into it through Mario. I was doing the soccer leagues at a gym on the east side of New York City, which you were playing in, and I was also working at Warner Brothers scheduling commercial breaks and at Warner Brothers. It was a great name. Um, forgot about that. Yeah, yeah. And, but it was, it was very, it was a very much an entry level media job, and I was very much one of.
Maybe 20 people that did the exact same job as me. So there wasn't like a lot of, oh, I'm learning this new skill, or I have a lot of mobility. It was like, you're gonna learn something, you're gonna do it day after day and you're one of many people. So I found it to be frustrating just from a career perspective starting out.
And then you said, okay, I'm doing this new thing. I had a familiarity and a relationship with you already, and it was a very easy decision of, Hey, I'm, I'm young enough that if this doesn't work out, this is the time to take risks. Sure. I would think it was. 22 years old. I was living in East 64th Street with, we were in a three bedroom, we had four guys in a three bedroom.
Somebody was sleeping in the living room with a bamboo shade down. We didn't even have a couch. We had a cooler. So my expenses weren't very high at the time. We're sitting on a cooler to watch tv. Literally, it was just the right time to say, okay, I'm gonna do this. I was always fascinated by sports. I didn't know if I wanted to work in sports, and this seemed like a foot, let's not discount that.
(00:43):
We're all sports fans. Yeah. Come on. You went nuts for the Buffalo Bills this season. Yeah. Love the bills. And I'd gotten a taste of that at Tuckman Sports. Russ and I have a shared passion now 'cause I'm marry into a Bills family. So we have lots of texts during the NFL season. Yeah. Really? Yeah. No. Anytime the bills are on, I text Russ.
Yeah. Because he's the one who's going through the pain. We text djo. Yes. It's funny how much overlap there is. It builds fandoms one, but also TSE is a big one. Brad and Jane and myself, we all worked at Tuckman Sports Enterprises. We all got. Our first taste in sports events and experiences at that place.
And it's, it was, I knew I had a base, I saw enough at TSC that I enjoyed working in sports and thought it could be something I could be successful at. That's great. So we've gone over how we all got there. We had interactivity in the museum. We had a great film. Right. That sort of walked everybody through.
We had some amazing artifacts. We had the Heisman Trophy. The Heisman Trophy, which I still relish those days. I got to hang out with Tim Tebow and Sam Bradford and Cole McCoy. Tim Tebow will always be like the man because I remember he had his, he had the surgery and he had broken his hand. He still like gave fist bumps to, to everybody.
But that was a unique time. What was the best part about the museum outside of, obviously working for all of us, but what were your favorite pieces of the.
Obviously I like many different sports, right? I thought having the Heisman Trophy there was pretty cool. I'm a big college football fan. I thought that was pretty, being the home of the Heisman I thought was a cool, just something to say. And people, every sports fan does know about the Heisman. I think we probably, there are some downfalls of that where it is just once a year.
It is just college sports. So if you're not a college football fan, you might not be as in tune with the Heisman Trophy. And I think, I don't think it hurt us, but I think almost sometimes we may have marketed too much towards that, where we probably needed some experiential things every month, if not every couple of weeks.
As far as in the museum. I did love that video room. I thought that was cool. Yeah. I thought we, with, with a lot of the experiences in the museum and some of the attractions, I think we need to, I know we're only open for a year and a half, but I feel like we should have turned some of those over quicker.
Like that NASCAR tire change was cool. I think you probably could have done something Oh, different with that. Yeah. Every couple months you could have updated that. I think it was one of the first places that you could record your own play-by-play, which is in a lot of museums now. I was in the Tennis Hall of Fame this past summer.
Yeah, it's in Springfield for basketball, and I'm sure now you could probably just download and have it on your phone. Yeah. For free or for a small fee. I think we probably could have done more things with pictures, but again, this was cell phone. This was at the beginning of that. So I think we're a bit ahead of our time as far as that went.
And then Joanne touched on the event space. The event space is great, and I think that was one of the highlights. Also game Day Energy rivalries history in the making. Grab your tickets for Pro Sports action@tickets.expotravel.com. Where fans belong. Score yours today@tickets.xpotravel.com. Scrolling is listening.
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We bring the voice, music, and production magic to make it all shine. Let's make audio content that works. Visit expo travel.com for media production inquiries today. That's right. We had a, that was a, a great time. I, I think when, for me in particular, I thought it was interesting that we had something brand new to New York City as an attraction.
And I think that's what you were alluding to earlier too, Brad, was that the four of us in particular, right. Like we developed other relationships in the tourism industry or New York City. So whether it's hanging out with the guys at Dave and Busters, or hanging out with the Statue of Liberty crew or anybody who was, or Broadway, right.
We had What was the guy? What was the Maps guy? What was the maps guys? Oh, that was it. Vincent. Vincent, yeah. Vincent Timone. Yeah. City guides. Yeah, city guides. So yeah, city guides. Is like, I still see those people, they still have kind of the same roles and. Yeah, they were so welcoming in terms of, wow, this is really cool.
Let's help you sell it. Let's create these different partnerships. It's really hospitality and tourism focused on the event side, I think it was such a new venue and so cool. Joanne, that, like you said earlier, we had these various opportunities to do bar mitzvahs, but also doing these, we had our own parties to introduce it to, whether it be the sports world or the travel world, and so what was your favorite event?
At the Sports Museum, Joanne, that's part one. We had, I would say the opening week. We had six days and nights of back-to-back events like star studded. There were influencer pre influencers, I would just say social lights of New York. I was in the elevator with Bethany Frankel at the time. She was like with my lipstick look.
Okay, and now she's obviously blown up. She's still an obviously influencer. TikTok, all the things. It was exciting. Like we had, we brought in the Taiwanese baseball team for a tour. I was like their translator. We didn't realize, we didn't have someone that could translate for them once they got there. It was just things, it was fun.
It was it. We weren't perfect by any means. We were still figuring out all of us, but everyone was so committed, right? Yeah. We might not have known the exact process of things. We figured it out and everyone had each other's back, and it was just really, really. Like a family almost. It was good vibes all the way around.
And you're right to say that I would wake up every morning and not exactly know what I was gonna run into that day because it, like you said, it could have been, oh, sh that's Steve Nash. I really wanna go talk to that guy. Yeah. And you really could, you could kinda get up in close and personal. What about you, Russ?
What was, uh, a memorable event or thing about the role that you took the next 'cause? Now, by the way, guys, I mean, I would qualify Russ as a bit of a digital marketing expert. So just getting one, I wanna hear what your favorite piece was, but then also let's start to, to move towards. Where things might have shifted, right?
(01:04):
Like where, what could we have done better? But first, let's start with what you liked and what you loved or what you remember best. I think I, the thing I like the most, and it's come up in my career and been a threat, is the variety of day to day. Like you, there are sales jobs where you attend the same 10 conferences and you plan your life around those conferences and or you call on the same accounts in the same way time after time.
And this was not one, one of those jobs, right? I think we knew what our targets were. We didn't know how we were gonna hit them, and we knew it needed to be a mixture of tactics. So one day I might be getting trained on a ticketing system and physically learning how to print custom tickets by somebody who's gonna tell us, Hey, you wasted a click there.
You can do that more efficiently. The next day. I'm on a bus in Pawtucket Road Island with. To folks from Madame TSOs and The Intrepid and Dave and Busters, and we're presenting to nursing home travel coordinators. That's right. The next day I might be at an event checking people in, or I might be making a relationship with a pizza place and getting them to the grotto.
Yeah, the grotto. Shout out to the grotto. Great. And our grotto great partner to the sports museum, convincing them to staple a free ticket to every menu they sent out that weekend. And I think for me, I knew I didn't. I was at a point where I wanted to be exposed to a variety of different things and a different ways of doing business and soak it in and see what I could learn.
And that was a great place to, to fail quickly and pivot to the next thing or to try something and try to scale a success. And that's been, you can see it in my career. I've gone on to work at different agencies and I've very purposely said, okay, I'm gonna do a little bit of time on this channel at this agency.
Oh, I wanna be here and work on this other channel. Oh, I wanna bring it all together at a n Yeah. Campaign or narrative agents. At any of these agency, did they ever ask you to fly your cars? No, that was a unique, uh, that was, sorry. That was just us at the Sports Museum. That was, those were the end days when the ideas were like, Hey, you, you should flag down every taxi in New York City, offer them 10 free tickets and.
See you to this day. That's the plumes idea. Rehearse. I loved hearing you guys make these references. 'cause of where I sat in the office. I was a triangle to like Russ and Brad and then Mario was further down the hall. Yeah. So every time like Russ or Brad got the call with some organization that agreed to hand out flyers, it'd be like, hell yes.
We're like cheering. We got the GTO pizzeria. Ring the bell. Ring the bell. Yeah, ring the bell. You guys would leave. We had one popup banner that you guys would take to go to like these bow, I think and just bring, you were tight to stood up and I was like, wow. Okay. So it's really fun. Are you, when I hustle those conferences?
Yes. Yeah. It's when you come from a, a travel background, you do the circuit, like you said, Rus and you, you understand that these are long term relationships. So what Brad was saying at the beginning. When you open up an attraction at theme Park, anything, it's really based on, and we were talking about this earlier, it's really based on those relationships.
So whether it's a group of school kids from Harlem who wanted to come down and experience it, and you give 'em a discounted ticket to do that, or it's a major tour operator out of Germany who wanted to understand what all these American sports were. It was one of those things where you had to get in front of them and those were the opportunities at the conferences, but you didn't ever see the business right away.
And I think that was maybe the lack of experience from, uh, from the founder's perspective of understanding. What they had was not a sports venue, it was a tourism attraction. Exactly right. It's not Madison Square Garden. It's not Yankee Stadium. It's Madam TSOs with sports objects. Yeah. Yeah. So big difference.
The idea is of ticketing, like if you go to Madison Square Garden, you go to an arena of some type. There is a pretty pronounced 20, 30% of the group business fills the arena. But this is like how many games or how many events every single year. Correct. And then marketing overlays that, and it gives you all the one day sort of opportunities for people to come in and do that.
So on the attraction basis, that lead time in travel is much longer because you're talking about seasonality. Yeah, from different markets and also local markets. At that point of the sports museum, I don't think the founders really understood that. And so right away it was like, look, we built this thing.
Why isn't anybody coming? How come you can't call your friends? In New Jersey or in Long Island and just get them here. Yeah. And I think that's, that was the main theme throughout the experience that I think there's just a lack of understanding of one, you do have a very cool product. Mm-hmm. But it takes time and it takes the development of these relationships to build this type of tourism business.
So we were decently funded. Right. We talk about, we did have one six. It's like that. A hundred million In a hundred million. Sorry. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. To build it. But I'm just say for advertising goes, what people think is a lot of money for advertising in New York City is a drop in the bucket. We talked about, we did bus, subway, newspaper ads.
What we thought was like aggressive advertising was, we did that for maybe a week. Right? Yeah. We couldn't sustain that for years. Yeah. We couldn't sustain it for months. Yeah. So that in New York, we're not in Omaha like that. In New York. A very short time span, so you're right. Like we did advertise, I think at the right places.
But that quickly came and went. And then everyone looked around and was like, now what? Yeah. It was this piggyback effect that we were trying to maintain, at least on the group side. 'cause it made sense on the tourism board. 'cause you have 60 million travelers a year typically coming to New York City. A good percentage of that 60 million is gonna go see the Statue of Liberty.
And so we were so close in proximity to that. It was like, oh, they're getting 6 million people a year, then we're gonna get 4 million. And we would just be like, no, but that's. I can understand your logic, but there's a lot of work. It's not like the Statue of Liberty was just made last year. That's what it is.
Correct. It's equity. Yeah. The equity that the Statue of Liberty has versus the sports. When the Sports Museum started out, they, we had to do both, right? You had to create a brand and get equity behind it, and that's why you see those partnerships that we went out and built and. Likely paid for or made deals with around things like the Heisman.
We're borrowing equity from the Heisman and using it to build our brand name, right? Everyone knows that the Heisman is we'll piggyback and borrow your equity. And then at the same time, we also had to do that direct response of, Hey, we're couponing. We're going out there and being in city guidance saying $5 off.
Come here. We can attribute that directly to that partnership that we paid for. For me, it's both. It's partnerships and its relationship and I do think those words are different words because I think. We went out, we built a ton of partnerships with different halls of fame. They got us the borrowed equity.
(01:25):
Maybe we paid for those. I wasn't involved in those decisions. I can't speak to 'em. But there was an exchange of value and to some degree with those, right? But then relationships tends to be a. More response. And Brad, to your point, take much longer to develop and much longer. And I think those are two different strategies, partnerships versus relationships.
Absolutely. I just think in general, I think the marketing efforts early on were so strong to your point, like we had commercials, we were on buses, we were on subways platforms, and then it almost felt like it fell off. And then we went to grassroots marketing. But what, what was happening in that in between time?
Mm-hmm. And that's where I'm, I actually don't know because it was like all the grandness of when we first opened and there was excitement. We built attendance and driving sales, and then it felt like overnight it was like, all right, now we're hitting the phones to get school groups and tour guide, tour groups in.
What happened in between is what? I don't remember. That exists. I remember those street teams. We hired street teams for a while. Did That's saying, I remember phone, phone fingers. I'm like, but that the powers that be above us, they had to have known that it was gonna take more than that to get to drive millions of attendees.
I think that's, we're getting to the root of it, right? It was, they didn't, yes. And then to my other point, yes. I'll say now further on my career, like I am an advisor on a CPG brand. And the ways that we are successful is that we have people that are smarter than us, that are, that come on as strategic advisors that have been in the industry for 15, 20, 25 years.
And without their guidance, it would make our, what we do impossible. Right. And it goes back to who were we, who did we have on the board, who, who was helping to advise as to how the money was being spent. And 'cause the idea was there. I always say this like we had a great product. It was once people got there, they're like, this is amazing.
You never had one person come out of the experience saying that. It was just like this was incredible. That's very true and that's very true. Was like no one was like, this sucks. This is a horrible experience. I remember the elevator door would open at the end and people would be like, you would just see the buzz and people with the kids, the family.
So exciting. I remember saying this exact same thing 10 years later when I worked on the second museum, is our concept is great. We have awesome exhibitions. We touch on such cultural, I. And people love the space. We just can't get people in through the doors. And this is 10 years later. I think it's, I wondered too if, is it just a matter of time, if we could have lasted another year or whatever and just gotten to the point where we were rotating more fresh exhibits, more fresh interactive elements in, would we see people coming back?
Purely conjecture? I have no idea. But would that have worked? Is it just a matter of, of getting to a certain, or if we had the runway, like Mario said, like we were planning six months out, if we had two years, would this be different? I don't know guys what chat GPT said it was during the financial crisis, right?
The stock market crash, Lehman Brothers, all these things happened. And then I think what we were chatting about this earlier, like we were in this weird marketing gap. Yeah. That could you imagine? I, it would've been amazing if Magic Johnson was launching his book at the Sports Museum and then tweeted it out.
There was no Twitter. Rus and we booked him on the, on a, the Bleacher Report podcast before, things like that where he was bringing it up. Yeah, there was just, when you talk about there's that, what did we do in the interim? I don't even know that middle type marketing existed back then. It was, it seemed to me like there's either big brand equity building back then or very direct response channels.
That middle what Now we have language like demand generation to talk about. Nobody was using that. There was no direct to consumer brands. There was no DTC playbooks or metrics that were even available on that initial opening party. If every one of those celebrities and sports legends had turned around and done a TikTok Yeah.
Or a story, what would've been the value and impressions? Yeah. Have your glam bot there, like E does in every single thing they do. How many glam bots show up in your FYP page that stars are doing? I think we're almost selling it even more short. We had those, they were red carpet events. Yeah. And these people came for, and we couldn't advertise because we didn't have a bad time away to do that.
We were gonna buy the pictures of Getty Images mm-hmm. The next day. And then put a newspaper ads together. I'm laughing when I see, when I wrote down with bus, newspaper, subway ads. Yeah. Could you imagine if that's how people were, was trying to be successful today? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. By a couple years.
No, so I'm just sayings. Missed it by a couple years. And then in a downtown Manhattan location. Now, let's be honest, like the location itself, it wasn't a corner lot, it didn't have great signage. You're amongst corporations. There's no, there's no families and houses around there. And then not to mention, when you mentioned a little bit ago, 50,000 people in that area lost their jobs literally two weeks before reopen.
So we're going in there to target those corporations and they had 10,000 employees there, and they were gonna buy this corporate package that would allow them to go for free or for whatever amount of money. And then those fields just disappear. And I'm walking into somebody, by the way, who probably either is going to get fired or lose their job and their company's losing money and now I'm asking 'em for a couple hundred thousand dollars for a corporate membership.
Yeah, no, that budget's gone. The people are gone. So that's why I feel like timing was idea, I think is still good. And I think the people work great as we're 20 years later and we're all friends and we still talk to a bunch of people there. But to me, I go back to the timing. The timing was it, I think, yeah.
I also think the for-profit model didn't help at the time, like we were one of the first for-profit museums. So the concept of paying to go to a museum, especially in New York City, which is the epicenter of cultural events where a lot of it is donation based. Right. To go to natural history. Yeah. Or the ticket prices are low or it's free.
So here we are saying like, we are brand new to New York City. We're the first of its kind for profit, 27 $30 a ticket. And at that time was unheard of, right? So between that, the financial crisis, our location, I just feel like the odds were stacked against us. Do you guys happen to know what the official business name was for the Sports Museum of America?
I knew this at one point, but I, for just paperwork purposes. Yeah, but now I don't. The National sports Attraction. Yes, that's what it was. Which would've been more appropriate if it was a different name. Maybe you could get away with it because then it, it goes back to your Madame ods, right? It, that is a for-profit attraction.
But with the, putting that word museum, you're right. Mm-hmm. It does have this New York City connotation that there's gonna be on pay by donation, or there's gonna be a little bit more consideration given to that particular market where it was located. And I feel like there's. Yeah, I know you've got more.
(01:46):
Yeah, and they're not, and you look at, I think the thing that interests me is the NFL experience, right? I look at that in contradiction. NFL comparison, B Formula, woman. Yeah. They didn't use the word museum. They used the word experience, but even the NFL experience, they closed in 2018 and I went there and I loved it.
I was great. I had a blast at the NFL. Totally immersive. A lot of fun. I went with Jane Busman wise or another. Shout s alumni, we got a blast. We created content together. We shared the content on the social. It still didn't get past 2018, and there's no bigger name in sports than the NFL. Like talk about equity in a name right there.
So I think, yeah, it's, I think it's very difficult to have these experiences last have the longevity that you'd want them to have. If, even if the NFL can't do it, who can do it? Is my question. Like what museums are having longevity in for-profit, and what are the things that make them successful? You think there's a reason that they're in Canton, Ohio.
Springfield, Massachusetts. It's cheaper Rent. Rhode Island. Oh yeah. It's cheaper for Rent A destination too. O ota, New York. I think that, and that's something that should be mentioned here too, is I think part of the strategy was to give a New York City home to some of those halls of fame and some of those different organizations to bring more awareness for them out in Canton, out in wherever they may be.
Mm-hmm. Maybe we didn't leverage those partnerships enough or their marketing enough, but again. To your point, Russ, it's it, the NFL couldn't do it. Maybe on the Olympic side, that would've, that might have done it, but I think we had so many gold medals in that place. Yeah. Didn't think we had an Olympic event, didn't we?
Yeah. I don't think it was an Olympic year, but I feel like we had some kind of Olympic event where we invited Olympic. I remember the wrestling team, Henry Saluto, the US wrestling team, who became a UFC champion. Go. I remember walking him around the museum. I thought that was pretty cool. Yeah, so there was some kind of Olympic tie to it, but it's interesting how these remote locations, like the Canton locations that you were mentioning, Cooperstown.
Cooperstown can bring in the millions of people because it's a destination. Like people are going Cooperstown just for that, making a weekend out of it. Meanwhile, we were in New York City of all places. Yeah. We couldn't get anybody to come down on the sixth. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Not for anything though. Also a lot of that's group sales for these big, like I think of cou, my brother-in-law just took his son to a baseball tournament at Cooperstown and he was like, it's a machine there.
They have all the hotels are. Adjacent to the baseball fields, you see the base fields, they bring in hundreds and hundreds of kids every weekend in the summer, presumably every weekend in the summer have a giant tournament. And of course, all those kids are being packaged a ticket to the, the Hall of Fame.
And it's, it, my brother-in-law loves going with his kids because it is an entire experience. And, but that's the only reason they're going to Cooperstown. They're not going mm-hmm. Cooperstown Distillery, as great as their whiskey may be, they are going for that. But that was the intent, like to give you a little sliver of baseball.
The destination. Yeah. And a sliver of the Olympics and a sliver of that so that it was top of mind on your next trip. Yeah. But is that sliver enough to give you an appetite is I guess would be the question, right? Yeah. Cooper's down there immersing you for two days. That's a whole experience. Is it? Is this just like.
The snack you get from the fridge, that always leaves you hungry. I think we've hit on a quite a few things, obviously during this first part of the conversation in that it's, it was, it's not a sports venue, it's an attraction. I think that's p Brad, you brought up location being a major thing. Yeah. Timing the economy and it's, and like when you think about it, just in this conversation, there's a ton to just.
Think about and what were they doing? Why was this the time? And I think a lot of this stuff was happening where you couldn't really telegraph it at all. Remember Mario? This is during right? The rejuvenation of lower Manhattan. That's true. So the reason we got that 50 million, so it was a hundred million dollars project, 50 million funded privately, 50 million funded.
From the government post nine 11 Rejuvenate to Rejuvenate Lower Manhattan. I never fought kind of the founders of the people that raised the money for that. I think they did a really great job there. I think they didn't know what business they were in, and they hired some sports people, some marketing people, some advertising people.
One travel guy. I was just gonna say one ality travel person, we probably needed five more of you probably to run the business side. So again, like that's where early on, and then we talk about the timing. Like then they did it late and then they had some kind of projections that Lord knows who came up with those projections.
Yeah, but you and a lot of smart people weren't involved in that and then tasked everybody with something that might've been impossible looking back at it. Yeah. I think to your point, yeah, we'd come in with Reforecast and they would like, Nope, sorry, we need X, and they would never, to your point, they would never justify Y, the Y, and so then that, that got us thinking, especially towards the end.
Here's a good transition question. When did each of you know it was over? What was the incident or the time that you're like, oh man, I like this place a lot, but it's getting a little crazy. I. It might be time to go. I'll say, I will say, because I was on the events team, I was never at my desk. I was always in the museum or in the actual event, space, walkthroughs, meeting with the caterers, et cetera.
But there was a time that I remember for multiple weeks on end that every time I would go down to the event space, go through the museum, it was empty. I was like, there's no one here. And that's why I was like, oh, we're, we have all these walkthroughs, people interested in booking out events. We have no one coming through our actual physical doors on the day-to-day.
And that's when I was like, I think it's just a matter of time. Yeah, that's a good point. I remember being in a store, which you gotta enter and exit through the store, so I thought that was like a good litmus test of how many people were in there and same kind of thing. It was pretty barren and I talked to the employees in the store and there were just t tooling their thumbs and playing games and hanging out, listening to music.
And were not very busy. And shout out to Marcy and Dana because. That was a dope store guys. Yeah, dope store. I was gonna talk about this earlier. Yes. Really nice store with some really cool stuff. That was probably ahead of his time also from the apparel side. Yeah, a hundred percent. And then Russ, you stole a lot of that stuff at the end.
Uhoh, I stole quotes around I. Was there and borrowed, but I do still have a track jacket from the sports museum. That is, no, I'm pretty sure you gave me a sports museum uniform. A sports museum of soccer ball like last year. Yeah, I'm pretty sure did some of that stuff. I think it was collector. A gold medal maybe.
Yeah. Full disclosure. Me, Tony did not take the artifacts. No, no artifact. I think for me, I knew when the layoff started happening and it was happening to people that were considerably more senior than myself and yeah. You were the one that was the wake up call for me. I was like, oh, that's somebody who's involved at a planning function of this place and they've removed that person and they haven't instilled anyone behind them.
(02:07):
So this isn't a clear signal of, okay. This plan wasn't working. So here's another plan that we're gonna give you guys to activate on. It was just like, Hey, we need to cut this cost. Like Exactly. Really? Yeah. You are a much less expensive resource. Russell. They were saying to me, not in those words. No one ever said that.
Right. But I could see that I was being kept on because I was less expensive than many of the other folks there. And I just. There was no plan to activate. And there were moments along the line that were very unexpected that I thought, Hey, this is a bump. This is an unexpected moment. I think I remember we were, we presented in, in a boardroom of a giant financial firm, which will remain nameless, and who was somebody on our board.
And that was a moment where I was like, Hey, this is crazy that I'm in this room, that this is happening. I'm not really sure what we're going for, but I'm going for it. And that was alarming, but it was when that layoff happened, without a clear plan of succession, without a clear plan of. This is what we're pivoting towards.
For me, it was like, okay, I had rolled with the unexpectedness up until, and then it just got silly. Right? Then the sister of that board advisor became our general manager with absolutely zero experience in our industry, would come in every three days, calling all hands meeting. Literally just like point to people around the room who has the best idea.
I think that's when the, Hey, take all these, buy one, get ones, give them to cab drivers. Yeah, and the cab drivers give them out was an idea by our, one of the founders. So like that, it just became silly. That was past the point where all at that point our resumes are all out and other things. Yes, there were some telltale signs early on.
Yeah, they still owe, I think Howie raised still owed at least a steak dinner or a couple hundred bucks off of the promoting. He did the flyers. Ya Out, shout out to Howie. This will have to shout out to Howie. We'll have to do for his compensation. No, I think you're, it's so funny, I just think of if there was a Netflix television show.
I was just thinking the same thing there. There would or a series, right? The rock, eyes and Fall. Yeah. A limited series. There's very distinct characters throughout this. I don't know who's gonna play us. Maybe John Cusack plays me, who knows? But there's people say Elon Musk, which is Bruno Mars is playing.
Oh, Bruno. I'm much taller than Bruno. But there's some very, that was really an introduction also for someone who didn't grow up in New York City, of just understanding people in New York who were part of the investment group and all these different things. And in that television show, you could see very pronounced characters and roles being put.
And I think for all of us that was like, wait a second. We're not part of a corporation. This is a startup and this is a startup with people, some very wealthy people behind it, but they're not providing the right guidance or the right communication as to what was going on behind the scenes. And yeah, when I exited, I think JU and others, the GM and everybody else were starting to exit as well.
And I think at that point we all. We're like, man, how do we save this thing? And then it became like, I don't think they're gonna try to save it at all. And so I remember just having conversations with people afterwards, like the other tourism people, and they're like, what exactly happened? I'm like. I can't even begin to tell you, like you wouldn't understand it.
And so it takes this much time afterwards for us to sit on a podcast and say, let's just go through the process of how we got there and what went on, how amazing of an experience, the type of culture that we had, and then what happened at the end. How has this experience Russ shaped your career going forward Post.
Sports museum. I think it's my introduc. It was my introduction to being scrappy, to saying, okay, you have a goal. There are multiple different ways to accomplish that goal. You're gonna roll up your sleeves and you're gonna contribute much more than your job position says. Now, a lot of my career has been in account management at client services roles, at advertising agencies, and you, there's a type of person that works those jobs.
The Pete Campbell type, right? They're shaking hands. They're just relationship advisors. They do very well, but there's a type of person that does that job that takes into consideration operations and project management concerns and creative concerns. And I've always been much more the latter of somebody who has a relationship with our creative teams, are in the work on the day-to-day, giving comments and a thoughtful way of the work.
On the work and helping clients develop briefs and just more talking about the tracking of a website rather than just delivering of the website, right? So that you can relate it to, to core KPIs. And I think the Sports Museum was my intro to that. Up until then, the job I had before was do this one thing, get good at this one thing, that's all that's ever gonna be asked of you.
And then the sports museum was like, no, if you wanna succeed or you want to. Something to work. You have to have your finger in many different places here. And you have to have it on many different pulses and Right. Just able to hang in different areas. Yeah. Get after it. Like figure, figure it out.
Everything's figureoutable. Yeah. And here's the goal. I don't care how you get there. I don't care who you have to talk to. Yeah. But here's, let's go find a list and let's go knock it down. We're gonna go show up and do this. What about you, Brad? I just think you'll, you learn every, you learn something from every experience you go through.
Good and bad. And like we said in the beginning, I came from this. Two giant sports properties that aren't entrepreneurial anymore. They're, they're certainly corporate. Yeah. If you wanna put it that way. So this was my first entrepreneurial experience and like I said, I love the culture. It was an exciting place to work.
Like you said, Mario, like you were excited to get, go to work every day. Yeah. Because you didn't know who was gonna show up what the project was gonna be. I actually really loved the leadership. I love you as a leader. I thought JU was a great leader, right? So I trusted the people around me to do the right things.
They taught me a lot like you. You taught me everything I know about that tourism hospitality space. I'll never forget that. And I told you that. I still take both me to this day. Probably the strongest thing I learned was like how not to go from ownership to management. There's a big difference between.
Funding and founding the place and then running the place, right? You see this with team owners, right? We're talking about, oh, the cowboys and the jets and these owners that have a lot of money, that have a lot of means, which shouldn't be the GM of the team, should certainly not be the coach of the team, shouldn't be picking the player personnel.
So to me, I look for that now and worked in a couple jobs since then. And now I work at a kind of a private family run company. I. But I trust that founder. I trust where they're from, like they're smart enough to hire the people around them that are great. And that's who the people they lean on, right?
(02:28):
That's the best part of when you work in a family or a private company. So yeah, I'd still take those lessons learned at Sports Museum with me to this day. Yeah. Yeah. Great experience. Likewise, Joe. She knows, you know, when I think back on it, she's winding up. She's winding up to close it down. For me, it felt like a very personal experience.
I was new into this industry. I was an intern, my first internship out of college. I got to experience a job where I thought to myself, wow, does the perfect job exist? I'm skipping on the way to work. I really enjoy the people I'm working with. I'm surrounded by really powerful female leaders who are outspoken, who really helped to show me what is possible in this industry.
So for me, it feels like this was a really great gateway into kind of what I want the trajectory of my career to look like. I think the biggest piece I would say is team culture like that is so important and throughout my career, whether in hospitality, f and b or a lot of the agency roles that I've played in that team culture, I think back on.
And I try to carry that through throughout any of my experiences. We had such great culture, we were hardworking, we got shit done and it's, you can have all those things simultaneously. You can go out and grab drinks with your coworkers and still crush it the next day at work and hit goals and KPIs. And you know that all of that can coexist.
The work hard, play harder model, I think still stands true. And the Sports Museum was a perfect example of that. Shut it down, boys. Mike, if the Sports Museum was here today, do you think it would be successful? It would have to be different. It would have to be a different version of the sports museum.
There'd have to have more tentacles. There have to be more experiences built in. There'd have to be programming. Panels, events going on at night, we'd have to cultivate more culture within the city. I think those are the areas that other museums were seeing that are sustainable have, could it exist in lower Manhattan in that footprint?
You know what, I go back to the other museum I worked on. We were flat iron traffic, great space, iconic historical building. And it didn't work there either. Maybe if they put it at the foot foot of the Statue of Liberty, that would work. It'd be an add-on ticket. Literally, you take the fer over off plus up.
Yeah. Bo, go buy one, get one free. You get to go to Sports Museum at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Attention travel and ticketing innovators. Whether you're a startup disrupting the industry, or an established company ready to take your distribution strategy to the next level. Expo Travel is your ultimate partner in online travel and ticketing distribution.
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