Darren Rovell's Gatorade blog

Who Spilled Gatorade On Leon Durham's Glove

The Leon Durham Gatorade story is one of the most famous in Gatorade lore. This from the introduction of my book:

Only once did I associate Gatorade with failure—when Chicago Cubs second baseman Ryne Sandberg accidentally spilled a bucket of the drink on first baseman Leon Durham’s glove 10 minutes before the start of the fifth and final game of the 1984 National League Playoffs. Durham’s error in the seventh inning of the game helped the Padres take the lead and eventually win.

“The glove got heavy and sticky after the Gatorade spilled on it,” Durham said.

Yesterday, the Northwest Herald asked Cubs catcher Jody Davis about the moment.

"I didn't know anything about (the sticky glove)," Davis told the paper. "I didn't hear anything about that until six or seven years after that. Shouldn't have mattered."

Gatorade Endurance Strategy Appears Off Target

Gatorade Endurance Formula, with double the sodium and packed with more electrolyes than your everyday Gatorade, has been out for a while now. And despite a targeted communication strategy, it's either not getting through to endurance athletes or there's really no need for this type of product. How do I know. Because I've been running half marathons this year (and you'd have to say that's an endurance event) and I'm hard pressed to see a couple bottles of Endurance before a race. Take today for example. I went to Woodstock, Vermont, to run the Covered Bridges Half Marathon (a gorgeous race), about 1,600 people were in the race. And before the race, I was around for more than two hours at the start, I saw maybe 300 bottles of Gatorade (or more) and one bottle, yes one bottle, of Endurance Formula. So either people don't feel the need or they don't know the difference.

Jimmie Johnson's Team Responds

Earlier on this blog, I talked about Jimmie Johnson's curious response to a reporter's question about whether he drinks Gatorade "like in the commercial." Jimmie said he didn't, which I interpreted to mean that he didn't have the in-car drinking system that they advertise in the commercial starring Matt Kenseth. I'm still pretty sure that the reporter was asking specifically about that because it came right after Johnson talking about dehydration. But today I got a nice call from Kristine Curley in Johnson's camp. She told me that Jimmie interpreted it to mean, did he drink Gatorade like the way he pours the drink over his head in the commercial? I know, a little confusing. But she assured me that Johnson does use the in-car drinking system.

Using Gatorade To Sell Competitor

Since I've been covering Gatorade, I've seen so many people, who were one of hundreds of people who had something to do with Gatorade's rise, use their experience at Quaker Oats as a reason for consumers to believe in their new product. Case in point: Sunset Brands. Sunset Brands recently entered a letter of intent to acquire ZOIC Nutrition Drink and license it from its owner LifeForce Labs  (http://www.lifeforce-labs.com/). Apparently the founders of LifeForce Labs are John Serieka and Bruce Svetz, who they say served as "lead developers of Gatorade's alternative markets model." They go on to credit the two for building that business channel from "$5 million to over $300 nationally before being incorporated into the $2 billion PepsiCo Foodservice business." My main point here isn't so much to question the two about their credentials, but it's just funny to me how their involvement with Gatorade becomes a fairly sizeable chunk of the press release. So many people had a hand in Gatorade's rise that it's really impossible to put too much weight into the numbers that go along with executives in the top brand positions at the time. If you were in sales and marketing a Quaker in the late 80s and early 90s, you saw astronomical rises in the numbers, but how much can you attribute to your job and how much is it merely the great niche that Gatorade provided in society?