Men of Teal : In San Jose, Sharks Know the Way to Bring Out True Colors in Fans

The first note sounds, and the fans take their cue.

Curving their hands into claws, fingers spread, one palm facing up and the other down, they move as one body with 34,380 arms. To the ominous rumbling of the theme from “Jaws,” they drop their top hands down and move their bottom hands up, creating a sea of snapping mouths ready to chomp anyone not wearing teal, black and white.

Welcome to the Shark Tank.

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Detroit fans have their octopus, thrown onto the ice before playoff games since the days it took eight victories to win the Stanley Cup. Montreal fans have their glorious history and the ghosts who inhabit the Forum.

San Jose Shark fans, with barely three seasons to look back on--not that they’d want to remember the first two--have a zeal for teal.

“This is a feeding frenzy,” said Steven Stratton, a San Jose insurance agent and financial adviser. “I lived in California and watched the Kings, but it was never like this. Having the Sharks come to town, to the bedroom community of San Jose, it was really something I wanted to get in on.”

This passion for the Sharks, built on civic pride and primed by clever marketing, is blossoming in San Jose.

Signs advertising space for rent in office buildings are printed in white on teal backgrounds. Prominent teal letters dominate a billboard on Santa Clara Street, near the new, $162.5-million San Jose Arena (a.k.a the Tank). Along busy Almaden Boulevard, lines on the sidewalk marking the location of underground sewer lines are painted in teal. The marquee outside the Holiday Inn flashes three messages: “Welcome Democratic Century Club. Hello Cathedral of Faith. Go Sharks!”

“It’s funny to see, and we appreciate it for sure,” said goaltender Arturs Irbe, the team’s most popular player. “We have to thank our organization for the colors and the logo, and we are proud people are wearing our logos and symbols.”

Wearing Shark colors has become more than a fashion statement for the trendy. The Sharks reached the Stanley Cup playoffs this season for the first time, beating out the Kings and Mighty Ducks for the eighth Western Conference playoff spot. Their unlikely success--they won 17 games their first season and only 11 last season--has captured the fans’ hearts.

“The first two years, they suffered. We were kind of a joke around the league,” forward Gaetan Duchesne said. “But they kept coming and coming this year.”

They come to the team store in a steady stream. Bonnie Conte, working the cash register, can hardly keep up with the demand for souvenirs.

By 1 p.m. last Friday, she had run out of bags, so buyers left with arms full of unwrapped goodies. Showing good taste--and good credit lines--they ignored the $8 hockey stick toothbrush holders to snatch piles of black T-shirts ($22.95 each) depicting an open-jawed Shark and the warning, “First attack on the post-season.” Those shirts are the top seller, along with a teal shirt with a Shark breaking through a sheet of ice and the slogan, “The playoffs used to be safe.”

Conte’s earrings, tiny black Sharks piercing her lobes, were not for sale.

“I’ve been a fan since the beginning, and more so since I’ve been at the store,” she said. “Everyone is a fan. The last few days have been really great. You can walk out on the street and see people at bus stops and business people coming out of work wearing teal. That makes it great for the players to show our support.”

Everyone wants to support the Sharks, though not everyone wants to pay for the privilege. Last week, four men were arrested for breaking into the arena. Their booty? Not money. Not tickets. They pilfered shirts, pucks, key chains and a stuffed toy of S.J. Sharkie, the team mascot.

Those who took the legal route to fandom had to act fast. The 3,300 tickets available for the first two playoff games against the Detroit Red Wings were sold in 18 minutes. The 3,300 tickets for tonight’s Game 5 vanished in 11 minutes. Barbra Streisand took 26 minutes to sell out the place.

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The Sharks asked fans to wear team colors to the home playoff opener, and about 95% complied. “Reveal your teal,” was the theme, and they revealed it in jerseys with players’ names on the back, their names, or whimsical messages such as “Stanley 1” or “Playov ’94.” They roared when the players skated onto the ice through the mouth of a huge, snarling shark, creating sound waves that set decorative teal, white and black balloons bouncing.

“You get, what is it called, goose bumps?” said center Igor Larionov, a star of the great Soviet teams of the 1980s.

Said right wing Ulf Dahlen: “When we’ve been down in big games, they’ve gotten behind us and lifted us. They might be number one in the league.”

The Sharks were No. 1 among NHL teams in merchandise sales in their first season and third among all pro teams, behind the Chicago Bulls and the Raiders. According to Bernadette Mansur, NHL director of corporate communications, the Sharks retained their popularity this season despite competition from the relentlessly marketed Ducks.

The Sharks touched off a quantum leap in sales of NHL licensed merchandise from $100 million in 1989 to $800 million in 1992-93. Sales are projected to reach $1.1 billion for the fiscal year ending in June, a third of what the NBA and NFL ring up but significant to the newly marketing-conscious NHL.

“Every expectation is (the Sharks) are going to be one of the front-runners, if not the front-runner,” Mansur said. “Their penetration is deep on the West Coast, but the Sharks’ distribution is pretty much national.”

Make that international.

Not long ago, in a photograph printed in newspapers around the world, Princess Diana of Wales posed with her sons during a ski trip. Prince William, second in line to the throne of England, was wearing a Shark cap.

“Eight people sent me that picture,” said Greg Jamison, the Sharks’ chief operating officer. “That was obviously a very, very big thing.”

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In their first season, playing at the dowdy Cow Palace in Daly City, the Sharks sold out their 40 home games. But they didn’t merely take from the community: They established a program called Sharks and Parks, which provides street hockey equipment and instruction to local schools and recreation centers. By June, Jamison said, 30,000 kids will have been involved in the program.

Jamison joined the Sharks last September after 13 years with the Indiana Pacers and Dallas Mavericks. His job is to ensure the Sharks succeed after the attraction of a new arena and a “hot” color fade, as it inevitably will.

“Sometimes things are novelties and wear off quickly. Sometimes they take hold, and we think this has taken hold,” Jamison said. “The fact that it is San Jose’s and Santa Clara County’s (team) is a point of pride. Plus the fact that the arena is in the city, right downtown, lends itself to a strong sense of loyalty.

“It was tough winning only 11 games last year, so this year has been even more fun. I see people come out for the first time and like it. As one person told me, he brought somebody to a game, showed him how the blue line works, explained offside, and that’s all you really need.”

George Fraser knows hockey. He’s a Detroit native--”I grew up two blocks from Gordie Howe and I skated as a kid,” he said--and he’s a Shark season ticket-holder.

“This is a town that is starved for a sports identity,” said Fraser, an insurance executive. “San Francisco has the Giants. Oakland has the A’s. We have the Sharks now. This is big time.”

The players enjoy that this-is-our-team feeling.

“At the beginning when I came here, you could go out and not be recognized. Now, everywhere you go at least one person recognizes you,” Duchesne said. “It’s nice. You can see we made a difference here, and people are starting to really like hockey now.”

Said Jamison: “We’re looking to bring not only good hockey, but a flair to the presentation. The NHL puts a good, strong product on the ice from an entertainment standpoint. We need to continue to entertain, but the entertainment is never meant to overshadow the product. Sports marketing sometimes gets away from that. We want to enhance the product. We want people to say, ‘I went to watch the San Jose Sharks play a hockey game. While I was there they gave away this and that and I really had a good time.’ ”

They have had good times and seen good hockey. The Sharks on Saturday rallied in the third period for a 4-3 victory over the favored Red Wings, tying their playoff series at 2-2. Irbe, who declared the fans’ ruckus Friday “the loudest maybe in NHL history,’ revised that estimate Saturday and will probably have to revise it yet again tonight, at the Tank.

“I’m really happy to play in front of this type of crowd,” he said. “I think they recognize us not only as a nice-looking team but as a good team.”