Man behind the Whiteout happy to see it’s back

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 22/04/2015 (3816 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Before the Whiteout, good guys wore white.

The all-white frenzy that has gripped Winnipeg in the days running up to the Jets first playoff game on Monday – and continues tonight at the MTS Centre – has a lengthy history.

Back in April, 1987, Rod Palson, then a partner and creative director at Palmer Jarvis Communications, met with Madeline Hanson, vice-president of marketing for Jets 1.0, in the run up to the team’s playoff series against the Calgary Flames.

Complicating matters slightly during their lunch at Rae & Jerry’s was the fact they to come up with something yesterday and do it inexpensively. Oh, and the Jets had already come up with a clunker of their own – wear red, white and blue. Sure, those were the Jets colours at the time, but making a statement with three different colours was going to be impossible.

Luckily, the seeds of what would become the whiteout were sown a couple of years before and when Palson proposed the whiteout name and a campaign to back it up, Hanson loved it.

Two years before on April 7, 1985, the Jets had tied the Calgary Flames 4-4 on the last day of the season, setting up a best-of-five Smythe Division semi-final between the two teams to start three days later.

The morning of April 8, Hanson walked across the street from the old Winnipeg Arena to the old CKY-TV and radio offices to meet with the station’s manager, Roy Hennessey, and the assistant program director on the radio side, Raccoon Carney. Her hope was to come up with something to build on the growing excitement surrounding the team.

There were a couple of things preventing a campaign being developed from scratch. First, the Jets had no budget for this kind of thing. Second, CKY’s promotional budget had already been blown and third, there was no time to get any corporate partners involved.

During the meeting, Carney came back to the station’s promotion for the last Jets home game that season. (Jets games were broadcast on 58 CKY at the time.) Some 5,000 “cheap white hats” bearing a few corporate logos had been given away with the tag line, “Good Guys Wear White Hats.”

Figuring that everybody would have something white in their closets, they came up with a shortened slogan, “Good guys wear white,” and set out to promote people coming to the game dressed in white.

Decades before social media even existed, they started promoting it on 58 CKY an hour later, and shortly afterwards on sister station, 92 CITI FM, as well as on the television station.

When Carney walked through the arena’s back entrance prior to the game on April 10th, he saw nothing but white. The Jets built off the fans’ energy and defeated the Flames three games to one before falling to the Edmonton Oilers in the next round. (Winnipeggers who are good at holding grudges will remember all too well that Flames defenseman Jamie Macoun broke Dale Hawerchuk’s ribs, all but killing the Jets’ chances of defeating the Wayne Gretzky-led Oilers.) “I think it’s remarkable one of the most visually spectacular moments in sports from a fan perspective was created by a bunch of radio guys,” said Carney, now the assistant program director at TSN 1290.

The following year, a parody of the 1986 Wang Chung hit, Everybody Have Fun Tonight, was covered by CITI’s morning show DJs, becoming Everybody Wear White Tonight.

The Jets were defeated by the Flames that year but when Calgary advanced to play the Oilers in the Smythe Division final, their fans were invited to become part of the inaugural “C of Red.”

Enter Palson and Hanson the following year.

As part of the inaugural official whiteout, Palson organized a group of Winnipeg celebrities to lip sync Everybody Wear White Tonight for a video, a la We Are The World.

The rest is chaotic and frenzied history.

“It was magical. It was cool to see how quickly it meshed. The bandwagon was created quickly. It was an unbelievable spectacle from the get go,” Palson said.

geoff.kirbyson@freepress.mb.ca