Why do you think the gum immediately found an audience?
I remember looking through a one-way mirror during market research studies and hearing kids talk about why they liked Big League Chew. They said they liked the fact that they could share it easily with their teammates or friends, that they could open up the pouch and someone could take a pinch. It is gum as a communal experience.
Aligning a gum with baseball was also smart. It is the sport of chewing and spitting.
Absolutely. Big League Chew would never work in basketball. There’s too much going on. In baseball, you’re sitting around between innings and between plays.
Another inspiration for Big League Chew, beyond Todd Field’s shredded licorice, was seeing guys in the bullpen who chewed tobacco having competitions on how far or how accurate they could spit. It was just disgusting. And it could have tragic consequences. Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, who dipped his whole career, died of cancer of the salivary gland. Gwynn’s former agent John Boggs mentioned to me that Tony had said during his last years: “If only I had started chewing bubble gum instead of tobacco, I wouldn’t be in the soup I’m in now.”
It’s interesting that you’ve always seen Big League Chew as an alternative to chewing tobacco. When I was growing up, some parents saw the shredded gum as an introduction to Red Man and the like, just as they viewed bubble gum cigarettes as a gateway to smoking Marlboros.
The gateway idea is all fantasy. I’ve never had anyone come up to me and say, “I got hooked on Red Man because of you.” The reason nobody has ever said that to me is because that person probably doesn’t exist. I don’t think anyone goes from shredded bubble gum to chewing tobacco any more than kids who use Nerf guns become terrorists.
Big League Chew rose to popularity at the same time as the Reagan administration began the war on drugs and during the era of the expansion of the D.A.R.E. program. Did you ever get any guff from the governmental or activist organizations?
There was an organization called NSTEP, the National Spit Tobacco Education Project. They were not fans of Big League Chew. Joe Garagiola, the late catcher turned broadcaster, was a big crusader for NSTEP.