News to me: There is a Museum of Public Relations in New York City, which boasts hundreds of rare artifacts, oral histories, letters, photos and film to “bring PR history to life.”
It happens that, in a half-century as a sports journalist, I have dealt with countless PR practitioners, what we used to call—not unkindly—tub-thumpers. And it happens that one of the best of them, Jay Horwitz, has lately been the topic of heartfelt appreciations after 39 years as PR chief for the New York Mets.
Horwitz has been assigned a new position as “team historian” and tasked with gathering alumni and tidbits for next year’s 50th anniversary of the Mets’ first World Series championship. But as he moves on, I propose including a symbol of quintessentially quirky Horwitz salesmanship in that carnival-barker hall-of-fame: Specifically, what I would call a 1978 “game-used” tape measure from Horwitz’ pre-Mets days.
The relic in question was employed 40 years ago at Mama Leone’s Midtown Manhattan restaurant, where a small group of New York track and field writers had gathered for their weekly luncheon to hear college and club coaches pitch potential news about their athletes’ latest running, jumping and throwing feats. To some extent, those were exercises in being numbed by numbers—mostly dry statistics like split times, personal bests and local meet records.
At the time, Horwitz was the sports information director for New Jersey’s Fairleigh Dickinson University. And his chore was to somehow sell the local media, already inundated by the Big Town’s myriad sports happenings, on some reason to pay attention to FDU’s decidedly humble athletic operation. Which he did brilliantly with an ear for the novel, dispensing odd morsels—beyond the cold stats—that were both revealing and entertaining.
FDU had a sprinter then named Ephraim Serrette who kept a list of the various misspellings of his name, 13 in all, from meet results—Abraham Seit, Eram Sert, Earl Serrette, Ephrimim Sirreti and so on—so Horwitz playfully passed that along. FDU had a baseball player whose summer job at a munitions factory was putting pins in hand grenades. Horwitz let the news hounds know. FDU had a hurdler who asked to leave practice early to go to his ballet class and “before he knew it,” Horwitz giggled in retelling the tale years ago, “I was at the ballet class with a guy from the wire service.”
FDU had another hurdler whose hobby was collecting snakes and Horwitz, naturally, requested the athlete bring the aforementioned reptiles in cages to a track workout, where a local photographer was waiting to document another deliciously idiosyncratic sports moment.
The story got even better because, as Horwitz later reported, “the damn snakes got loose. Four boa constrictors running around the damn track, slinking along. They bolted, and guys were running every which way, and this hurdler running after his snakes, grabbing them….”
Only a crack PR person could orchestrate that kind of breaking news.
Anyway, for that luncheon at Mama Leone’s (which then was a theatre-district landmark but has been closed since 1994), Horwitz brought along FDU’s star high jumper, Franklin Jacobs. Jacobs already was plenty newsworthy, having recently defeated the world’s top-ranked jumper, Dwight Stones, by clearing 7-feet-6 inches, lifting Jacobs to No. 1 in the United States and No. 3 in the world in his event.
Horwitz raised the bar by pushing an additional nugget, precipitated by his earlier telephone query to the Amateur Athletic Union. “I’ve got a kid here who’s 5-foot-8 and he’s jumping over 7 feet,” he informed the AAU. “Is that unusual?”
He was told that the average high jumper stood 6-1 ¾, almost half a foot taller than Jacobs. He went to the Guinness Book of World Records and learned that, at the time, a 5-foot-9 San Jose State jumper named Ron Livers had cleared 7-4 ¼ for the existing record—19 ¼ inches—of jumping above one’s own head.
By the time Jacobs arrived at that luncheon, he already had gone 22 inches above his height. Horwitz had a major scoop to advance.
“I’ll never forget the track luncheon when we measured him,” Horwitz recalled soon after the event. “Franklin kept saying to let me measure him to see if he grew taller. And I kept saying, ‘Franklin, don’t do that. You don’t want to be taller. You want to be 5-8.'”
Jacobs was beckoned to stand as a flexible retractable tape was produced and unfurled from the floor to the top of his noggin, the way track officials check the high jump crossbar for accuracy after a significant leap. “I was sitting in my seat saying, ‘Please, God, let him be 5-8,’” Horwitz said. “I mean, I knew he was 5-8, but….”
Four days later, in the Millrose Games at Madison Square Garden, Jacobs upped his best to 7-7 ¼, which remained his career optimum and, at 23 ¼ inches over his head, still stands as the record these four decades later. (It was equaled in 2005 by the 2004 Olympic champion Stefan Holm of Sweden, who was 5-11 ¼ and jumped 7-10 ½.)
The Museum of Public Relations should find that tape measure, put it on display and have Jay Horwitz sign it, a manifestation of the man’s golden (and fun) promotional touch.