Save Your Nicholls [Part 3/3]
Terry Nicholl, Roy Turner, Bill Kentling, and Steve Shaad build a culture of innovation.
Terry Nicholl continued to make himself conspicuous when he landed in Wichita in 1981, but this time off the pitch. Though a solid performer, he was a member of the supporting cast. While Coach Turner told stars like Andy Chapman or Erik Rasmussen to go out there and be creative, he told Nicholl to, “Go help ‘em!”
Normally, fans gravitate to the stars. Some stars accept the attention gracefully and some begrudgingly. But Terry Nicholl was no star. So he gravitated to the fans.
“I was an average player, but I had a little fan club before Erik Rasmussen and Chico Borja. That fan club was active and busy. It was genuine, honest community involvement,” Nicholl said.
They were known as “Terry’s Troops” and they would help bind Nicholl together with the people of Wichita. His extensive coaching licenses allowed him to extend that bond to their children.
“Terry Nicholl was always accessible and wanted to meet people. He made certain contacts as the sport allows you to do and took advantage of his playing career to have a career after,” Turner said.
In the mid-1980s, the fake-bake business was booming. Sun tanning salons sprouted up across the country, especially in less-than-tropical places like Kansas. Steve Shaad watched all the Wings players flock to get that just-home-from-vacation look.
“While all the players were going to Sun-Tana to get their suntans, Terry was asking Gloria Runyan, the owner of Sun-Tana, ‘How do you do this business? How do you make your money? Where do your customers come from?’ And then he buys one of her stores,” Shaad said.
Kentling believed Nicholl saw what Frank Carney had done through the franchising of Pizza Hut and realized it was a way to ensure his family’s future. And it was the perfect way to build his personal brand. With Wings players and Wings Angels dance team members coming in and out the door throughout the day, everyone wanted to take a trip to Sun-Tana to get a little bit orange.
“I think he always had his mind on, ‘What am I going to do when I can’t play anymore?’ I don’t know the salary figures, but I’m guessing that Terry was never near the top of the list in salary. … He was a worker, a good defender, a decent forward, but he knew he better have a backup,” Shaad said.
Nicholl enjoyed watching Kentling work his magic in the office and understood that he was learning from someone who had sat at the feet of other masters.
Bill Kentling started promoting sports under the tutelage of Ray Dumont at the National Baseball Congress, a semi-pro baseball tournament that brought players like Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Dave Winfield, Tony Gwynn, Barry Bonds and Aaron Judge to Wichita’s Lawrence-Dumont Stadium every summer. But his unofficial Ph.D. in the art of creative management came at Pizza Hut under Frank Carney. There, Kentling ran the Pizza Hut Basketball Classic, an all-star game of sorts for collegiate athletes. When he took over the new MISL franchise, he saw the games as not just a sporting event, but an opportunity to put on an exciting show full of thrills and maybe even some fisticuffs.
“Bill Kentling was such an innovator, such a creator. I remember one time I got sent off [the pitch]. I was in trouble, and I saw Bill walking toward me. I thought he was going to say, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing, you daft bugger!’ But he said, “No, that’s good, you did right.’ It was a totally different angle,” Nicholl said.
In Wichita, Kentling’s office served as a kind of innovation laboratory for the team. Any seemingly dumb idea could be proposed, and it might be mocked at first, but then transformed into a brilliant Barnumesque spectacle: members of the Angels dance team delivering balloon-grams to audience members, win a truck if you kick a soccer ball through the open window, engage in a war of words with a rival team via newspaper editorial pages, etc. etc. etc.
“It was a beautifully fertile environment where seeds were put in the ground and a bloody tree showed up in that spot in a week,” Nicholl said.
And when retirement came for Terry Nicholl, he was ready. He had built and sold a successful business, was armed with coaching licenses galore, and built-up goodwill everywhere he went. The Porsche and Mercedes in the garage of his palatial home in suburban Cincinnati are all the evidence you need of his success. Not that money is everything.
“What money does is allow you the freedom to pick the opportunities you choose,” said Kentling.
A lovely dinner with your wife at the Candle Club…followed by drinks with Wings fans at The Hatch Cover. Soccer camps in the summer. Fundraisers for local charities. The latest self-help books. Buy a rental property down the street. Open an investment account at Mid-Kansas Federal Savings and Loan. Flash a smile to the fans, sign autographs until no one is left in line, and chat with the kids you met at an elementary school last week. The first into training and the last to leave. Visit the office to pick up some tips on how to start your own business. Live for the moment but plan for what’s next.
Ok, lads, that’s the right way to do it, Turner thinks.