Posterized: The Backstory Behind The Barbells, Flight Suits, Motorcycles, Hardhats, And More

During the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, the Charlotte Hornets practiced just over the North Carolina-South Carolina border in the town of Fort Mill at a training facility adjacent to the old Knights Stadium. One day within this timeframe, Louis Shaffner stopped to fill up his car at a nearby gas station, only a few minutes away from the two neighboring complexes.

Once his gauge had gone from empty to full, Shaffner walked inside to pay his petroleum tab and immediately noticed something familiar. Well really, it was a bunch of familiar somethings. Mounted all over the walls were framed posters featuring the basketball stars who practiced right up the street, many of whom were dressed in some rather unusual outfits. 

“Oh boy, this guy is my biggest fan here,” recalled Shaffner. “And I didn’t even know who he was, but he had these posters all over the place.”

Unbeknownst to this gas station employee, Shaffner was the photographer that along with a handful of others, helped create these iconic shots. Just about all of them were then turned into single-night giveaway posters during the original Charlotte Hornets era.

A former Deck Division Officer in the US Navy, Shaffner (whose first name is pronounced ‘Louie,’ despite a self-admitted lack of French ancestry) began working in the Hollywood photo and film industry once he finished his military service in the early 1970’s. A decade later, he relocated to Charlotte and started his own commercial photography business, working with companies like First Union Corporation, Bank of America, WSOC-TV, Belk’s and Hanes. Before long, another brand-new client came buzzing Shaffner’s way.

“I had a sales rep that came back to me one day and said, ‘Louis, they’re starting this new team in Charlotte,’” said Shaffner. “She had met Renea Mathews (then Renea Bared), who later became the Hornets’ VP of Advertising and Promotions. She was the one that started hiring me to shoot the team. We worked together closely along with her boss and VP of Marketing, Tom Ward. That whole beginning of the Hornets was so exciting for everybody in Charlotte. Everybody wanted to be involved and go to the games.”

One of Shaffner’s initial tasks was to photograph the inaugural Charlotte Hornets team heading into its debut NBA season in the fall of 1988. Contrary to some of the additional iterations that unfolded later, this photo shoot was standard protocol. Players and staff were lined up shoulder to shoulder in two rows – one sitting in front, the other standing behind it.

“[Team owner] George Shinn had just paid for this big, beautiful scoreboard that dangles from the center of the arena,” explained Shaffner. “He wanted to get that in the shot and I’m talking to him on how to do that. It’s a wide shot and then you’re going to lose the players on the bottom. So, we had the scoreboard lowered down where he and the players could be standing on the floor with the scoreboard above and behind them, but still low enough to see it.”

Shinn (pictured below in the front row, fourth from the right) got his wish as Shaffner squeezed in all 19 bodies plus the mammoth lit-up scoreboard into the background. Soon, Shaffner was offered the chance to sit courtside and shoot some in-game shots. “I think I did it a couple times, but that wasn’t really my thing,” he said. “I was more of a specialty photographer.”

“Everything was just so new here in Charlotte,” said Ward, who had spent the previous seven seasons working for the Washington Bullets. “The teal, purple, Kelly Green, and Carolina Blue pinstriped uniforms broke the mold of the NBA. Everything that we did, we knew we needed to do different and unique. We knew from Day One, it had to be a total entertainment experience. We wanted to make sure as often as we could that whenever anybody left a game, they had something in their hands. That helped extend our brand into the marketplace and really become part of the fabric of the community. The posters were a big part of that.”

Finishing with a 20-62 record and winning one out of every three to four home games meant the organization needed to go above and beyond. Whether it was giveaways, apparel, halftime entertainment, you name it, everybody had to be bought in on being different. For the most part, ideas usually got rubber-stamped quickly by executives like Shinn, General Manager Carl Scheer, or Shinn’s advisor and future Team President, Spencer Stolpen.

“I used to kid with my colleagues at the Celtics,” Ward joked. “They were one of the most traditional NBA teams and their idea of halftime entertainment was to roll the ball cart out to center court and walk away. We were putting on full-fledged halftime shows, putting the spotlights on, bringing in acts from Las Vegas, doing all kinds of crazy things. We had to entertain fans because we knew the product on the court was going to take time to nurture.”

Support for the Hornets was bubbling off the charts when they began their second season, despite finishing with the league’s second-worst record the year before (fellow expansion team Miami was 15-67). The freshness of a new franchise only lasts so long before things can start getting stale – there’s a rapidly-ticking-louder-and-louder alarm clock that comes with it. At some point, you must make the jump, compete, and win consistently.

Few understood how entertainment and showmanship complimented the on-court product better than Scheer. The organization’s first General Manger had been the new guy in town before, too, previously working as an executive for the ABA’s Carolina Cougars and Denver Nuggets. Prior to merging with the NBA in 1976, the ABA was a rival league that also needed to think different to draw in fans. Most famously, Scheer debuted the inaugural Slam Dunk Contest at the 1976 ABA All-Star Game, an event that is now a staple of NBA All-Star Weekend.

The next year, Shaffner was called back to the Hornets, although an in-house photographer would now be handling the traditional team shot. The organization had begun contracting an outside agency to assist with generating a seasonal theme. Once one got finalized, Ward, Mathews and Shaffner crafted a corresponding poster, which was then sent to a printing company for mass production. Harris Teeter soon became the giveaway’s chief sponsor, something that helped extend the supermarket chain’s brand throughout the region.

“We would sit together in Renea’s office and bounce around ideas,” said Shaffner. “We wanted to do some fun stuff that was different. As far as I know, he went with every idea we came up with it. We were just thinking of fun things to do, crazy ideas and everything we did, George seemed to like.” Added Ward, “Carl was great to work with. He understood the challenges we had to deal with and that it was a new market. We threw a lot of stuff against the wall.”

The poster created for the 1989-90 campaign doubled as a message to the fanbase. Players, staff and the mascot, Hugo, were photographed separately, then arranged in a pyramid-like configuration pointing down a long road towards a glistening sunrise. This illustration perfectly portrayed where the organization envisioned going at the time.

“It was trying to depict hope and that the future was bright for the team,” said Ward. “I asked Carl, ‘What do you think of this?’ and he just said, ‘That’s great.’ Back then, there was a small number of decision-makers, and those decisions were made quickly. Carl would sign off and that was pretty much it.”

Unfortunately, ‘The Road to the Future’ went a bit off course. Head Coach Dick Harter was fired following an 8-32 start and Scheer resigned in late March of 1989 because of a contract dispute. Despite the Hornets finishing with one less win than they had their first year, fan support was unwavering, and attendance remained high.

“After that, things started to progress,” said Ward. “It takes time. Expansion is hell getting out of the gate. You basically get the leftovers from every team. Players they don’t want, those are your building blocks. You’ve got to use the draft, trades, and things like that. If you’re bad enough for long enough, you’re going to get some good first-round picks out of it like we eventually did with Larry Johnson and Alonzo Mourning.”

Despite taking a small step backwards, the Hornets were moving towards the future. 

Most of these shoots took place on Media Day before the season started, although were later rescheduled for after the trade deadline to avoid any potential roster hijinks. Beginning at the downtown Grady Cole Center – where the Hornets practiced their first few seasons – and then the Fort Mill facility, Shaffner’s ingenuity was put to the test with bigger and bolder ideas. Many modern advancements in photography and digital design hadn’t been developed yet, including Photoshop, which was still in its infancy stages when the ‘Season of the Stars’ was created.

“We shot each player individually at the Grady Cole Center from the balcony looking down and instructed them to kind of ‘fly’ towards me,” Shaffner explained. “I had this studio setup with holes in a black sheet and lights shining through it to look like stars. Just one click and the final image was then a bunch of little photographs combined. George Shinn loved that one and even made a wall-sized print of it, which was way too big for what I had intended it for. That one became a Topps basketball card, which was real exciting for me.”

Before Photoshop, projects that required piecing together different images were often outsourced and cost a pretty penny. While advancements in editing programs made the process more user-friendly for photographers like Shaffner, patience was an absolute necessity.

 “At the time, Photoshop was the latest, greatest, and fastest, but it wasn’t very big,” he said.
“My Macintosh computer had such high resolution trying to compose these images. I would put somebody in the shot, make some changes, click save and then it would take so long to render, that I’d go lie down in the next room, and wait to hear the beep to tell me it had finished. It was tedious and slow. I think some of these posters turned out pretty darn good considering how primitive we were. I was really excited with them.”

With no astronomers around to consult, Shaffner recalled a humorous debate with Ward about how Saturn’s rings should bend. “I wanted to have them the way they’re done in the picture because it led your eye downwards into the poster,” he said. “For some reason, Tom visualized Saturn’s rings titled the other way. I explained to him, ‘Tom, this is space! The rings aren’t tilted any certain way. It depends on the point of view you’re looking at them from.’ I guess he finally saw what I was talking about and went along with it. That was a funny little conflict.”

“The players were so great,” added Ward. “Probably a lot of that was because of the context. Again, no one wanted them and suddenly, they were thrust into the spotlight. They became folk heroes and rode the tide. We had 23,000 people came to a game every night and when you’re the only game in town, they really basked in the limelight and did everything we asked.”

A new face of the franchise in No. 1 overall pick Larry Johnson and a new Head Coach in Allan Bristow both made their poster debuts during the 1991-92 season. There are more stars in this one – literally and metaphorically – shooting out the top of the Charlotte Coliseum, which by now, had become so engrained in the local community that it was simply just the ‘The Hive.’

“Whenever we’d go on a run during a game, we’d put ‘The Hive is Alive,’ on all the electronic boards and pan the crowd to the fanatical fans,” said Ward. “‘The Hive is Alive,’ really became a rallying cry and tribute to the amazing fandom that had consumed the city. Everybody used the term ‘The Hive is Alive,’ – we just took it to the next level and incorporated the players. It became common vernacular to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to The Hive.’ It’s like if you’re now in Philadelphia, you’re going to ‘The Linc’ (Lincoln Financial Field) to watch the Eagles play.”

“The Hive really was alive,” said Mathews, who was traded (no, really and for an unknown “probably fabulous” return, she said) from the Hornets’ Ticketing Department to the Marketing Department in the 1990 offseason. “It was all the city was talking about. The parking lot was busy, everything was busy. There was always a crowd. Everyone shooting out of the building was us saying, ‘Okay, this is happening. This is a real thing and a lot of fun.’ That’s what we were trying to portray. Very seldom did you hear it referred to as The Coliseum. It was ‘The Hive.’”

This poster shows what pre-Photoshop airbrushing was like. On the bottom row, second from the left is center Eric Leckner, a towering 6’11” giant in real life. Here though, he’s smaller than the 6’4” Dell Curry two spots to the right and about the same size as the 6’0” Elliot Perry next to him. Perhaps this was done to draw more attention to the star players? “There’s some perspective involved in this photo,” said Mathews. “You can see Mr. Shinn, and you know he’s not the same height (supposedly 5’7”) as Allan Bristow (6’7”). I don’t know if I thought about it at the time, but I can see it now in retrospect. It was an imperfect science.”

Another curiosity is Assistant Coach Mike Pratt rocking a cozy cardigan sweater to the left of Leckner. This beauty looks like it was plucked right from the rack in Bob Saget’s Full House closet and is quintessential 90’s fashion at its finest. Why this attire and not the standard suit, then? “That’s what he liked to wear,” said Mathews. “He liked to wear his sweaters.”

Added Ward, “That was ironic because George Shinn made all the players wear a suit, coat, and tie to travel. Our uniform was basically a banker’s uniform in those days. We had white shirts, no facial hair and had to wear ties. That was our uniform of the day.”

Imaginably inspired by Superman, ‘The Men of Teal’ were born in Charlotte, far away from planet Krypton. Johnson – the reigning NBA Rookie of the Year – is front and center tightly squeezing a basketball with his gigantic mitts. Tony Bennett, No. 2 overall pick Alonzo Mourning, Kenny Gattison, and David Wingate are all gripping dumbbells and ready for Venice Beach. The muscles are everywhere and so is an edgy attitude. These Hornets meant business, and nothing could stop them – not even kryptonite.

The entire poster creation process usually took about a month and a half, and sometimes longer if a player was unavailable for a shoot. Such was the case for ‘The Men of Teal,’ which initially didn’t include Muggsy Bogues for some unspecified reason. For group shots like this, it was a little tricky to duplicate the exact same lighting later for just one player and then seamlessly reinsert him into the picture. “I went through a lot of work to make sure everybody knew when the shoot was and had exactly what they needed for it,” said Mathews.

Whether at Media Day or after practice, the setups required for these shoots were often large, complex undertakings. If a player or coach couldn’t make it, get what you can and figure the rest out later. Bogues’ absence from ‘The Men of Teal’ shoot might have been a very minor inconvenience at the time, but hardly the one thing Mathews remembers most about that day.

“We wanted the guys to look wet and sweaty, but they weren’t sweaty from the workout that day,” she said. “So, I had to grab baby oil and a spritzer. All the guys are there, the coaches are there, the photographer is there, and I say to Larry, ‘Larry, you don’t look slick enough.’ I had to put baby oil all over him and the other guys are watching and cracking up. I’m laughing and said to the rest of the players, ‘You’re not all getting this. I’m just doing it for Larry.’”

“Wow, I’m still friends with just about everybody on here,” said Dell Curry, glancing at ‘The Men of Teal’ over 30 years later. “Muggsy, Kenny Gattison, ‘Zo, Kendall Gill, Johnny Newman, Mike Gminski, Kevin Lynch, Tony Bennett – you can’t forget him. We had a pretty good team. Allan Bristow had us running the motion offense. I remember I wanted a towel around my shoulders. I thought that looked good. ‘Zo had to have the barbell to show his guns – that was his request.”

More than seven years after Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, and Val Kilmer smashed box office records with their 1986 blockbuster Top Gun, the Hornets decided to join Maverick and Iceman in the skies. If ‘The Men of Teal’ marked the first significant deviation from the normal team shot, then ‘The Sting Squadron’ took things into the stratosphere. Get costumes, get props, get whatever was needed – just remember to make it fun and above all else… be different.

“I remember the black jumpsuit things I had to find for the guys,” Mathews said. “How do you find something like that for Alonzo Mourning? He’s bigger than your average guy, but we never came up with anything we couldn’t make work. Secretly, I think the players really enjoyed when they got to wear the costumes, but they would never let me know that. I would always tell them, ‘You have to be really serious and stern,’ and then they’d laugh at me because I was being funny and serious at the same time.”

“I don’t remember how that idea gelled out,” added Shaffner. “I think ‘The Sting Squadron’ was pretty much one shot superimposed with this background. All the lighting on each one is pretty good there. I’m not sure whether I composited this poster or not.”

Recalled Curry, “We were all joking about how far we were going to unzip that zipper to show our chests. Looks like Muggsy (#1) won, Scott Burrell (#24) was a close second. The hardest part was getting everyone aligned height-wise. I had the headphones – that’s another one where I had something around my neck. They had each one of the flight suits made up and fitted with our jersey number on them. Good creativity whoever thought of doing these. It was cool we were doing something outside of our uniforms. That intrigued everybody.”

Nothing exemplifies Charlotte’s rapid growth better than comparing the current city skyline to what it looked like nearly 30 years ago. Back then, there were five major identifiable buildings lined up from left to right, starting with the One First Union Center (now One Wells Fargo Center), and running down to NationsBank Corporate Center (now Bank of America Corporate Center). Arranged next to, behind and on top of these colossal structures, these supersized hardwood giants look more ready to battle King Kong than they do the Sacramento Kings. Symbolic of what they were doing in the real world, the Hornets were taking over the city.

It’s fitting that ‘The Charlotte Skyline’ was highlighted in this giveaway, given what transpired on Jan. 3, 1995. The most unique poster ever created by the Hornets was unveiled on this date, and while it was one that everybody had access to, it couldn’t be hung up on the bedroom wall. 

Before relocating to the Charlotte Coliseum, the Hornets’ front offices were originally located in the downtown First Union Corporation building, then a major team sponsor. Looming over Ward every time he commuted to and from work was a gigantic, 12-story façade pressed up against the side of the First Union headquarters – a blank canvas, if you will. Not directly visible in ‘The Charlotte Skyline’ poster, this area was tucked behind the two tallest buildings on the left.  

“We were really starting to take off with Alonzo, Larry, and Muggsy,” Ward said. “Traveling with them was like traveling with The Rolling Stones or The Beatles. I asked a friend of mine, Al Sale, who was the Head of Marketing at First Union and his SVP of Sports Marketing, Nancy Lawler, who lobbied hard for the idea, ‘What if we put something up on the building? Wouldn’t that be a great way to engage our partnership?’ Al agreed and said, ‘You can have the canvas, you just got to pay for it!’ We had such a good relationship with them.”

Unlike how it is today with Spectrum Center, the Charlotte Coliseum sat a solid 20-to-25-minute drive without traffic from the downtown area. The mid-1990’s Hornets were overflowing with coolness and their visibility was about to be cranked up a few more notches. Ward authorized a $100,000 payment – no small sum for the Marketing Department at the time – for a vibrant 21,000 square-foot mural of the Larry-Alonzo-Muggsy trio covering the side of the First Union building. First stenciled out and then filled in with paint, this beautiful masterpiece was a brilliant one-of-a-kind undertaking with just one teeny, tiny flaw.

“We weren’t smart enough back then to realize players get traded,” said Ward with a laugh, referencing the Alonzo Mourning deal that transpired only 10 months later. “So, we ended up having to change it out and put Vlade [Divac] on there in 1996. More trades took place, and we ended up going with Hugo after that. We really wanted to weave our brand into the fabric of the community by creating this larger-than-life branding platform. There really wasn’t a true connection between the murals and all the posters, but that was the largest poster we ever did. People could see it flying into Charlotte and it really let us put our flag in uptown, so to speak.”

“That mural was iconic,” added Bo Hussey, a former Public Relations intern during the inaugural season who worked his way up to becoming the Director of Publications for the organization’s monthly Sting Magazine and Inside the Hive. “Everybody wanted to take their picture with that mural in the background. When you think about any city in today’s world, all of them have these Instagram walls where everybody goes to get their picture taken. The one in Nashville has the two angel wings on it. We were way ahead of our time with things like the mural.”

Legendary singer-songwriter Bruce Springsteen released his third studio album called Born to Run back in 1975, featuring a single by the same name that is now considered one of the all-time greatest rock-and-roll songs. This poster shoot was Bristow’s last one as ‘The Boss’ of the Hornets and the first for future three-time NBA All-Star Glen Rice, who was acquired from Miami in exchange for Mourning the same day as the season opener. 

It was around this time that the Hornets’ in-house design team had expanded enough to where these posters could now be put together internally. Shaffner would continue to shoot the players, then transfer over the images. Photoshop was becoming more workable and soon, Hornets.com made its debut on the worldwide web. Technology was off and running, just like the motorcycles brought into the Hornets’ Fort Mill Training Facility for ‘Born to Run.’

“They did all these shots separately because they didn’t want everybody to see things like Allan Bristow wearing a vest and showing his guns,” said Curry grinning. “I think they thought if they tried to get us all together, it was going to be too much fun, too chaotic to take a picture. When we saw this after the fact, we all thought it was pretty cool. We gave the coaches a little grief over their outfits, especially Allan with the leather vest and Bill Hanzlik’s little hat on. It looks like we’re The Village People. I think the coaches thought their costumes were a little funny, very out of character and would everybody take them seriously after all this? This is one of my favorite ones because I used to ride a motorcycle back when I shouldn’t, so I enjoyed that one.”

Adding to the silliness, the motorcycles were too big and cumbersome to have 10 different ones lined up together, so Shaffner photographed just three from multiple angles. The Hornets continued to be their popular, trendy selves, so much so that even those who were helping the players reach these cultural heights were also becoming recognizable figures in Charlotte. 

“I was with Larry when he was on the bike,” said Mathews, drawing back on her memories from this shoot. “There are photographers everywhere because it’s a regular Media Day. The next morning, I get into the office and on the front page of the paper is a picture of myself with Larry on the motorcycle that says, ‘Team Photo Shoot Yesterday.’ A framed photo of that picture was then later sent to me from a shop in town because everybody knew us and what we did. They must have thought, ‘Well, she has to have a picture of this.’”

For the second straight offseason, the Hornets parted ways with one of their superstars, this time sending Johnson to New York for Anthony Mason and Brad Lohaus. Despite Rice and Johnson both averaging over 20 points during the 1995-96 campaign, knee issues limited Bogues to just six appearances and the 41-41 Hornets missed the playoffs. Bristow’s contract was bought out and San Antonio assistant Dave Cowens – a Hall-of-Fame player who won two NBA titles and the 1973 NBA MVP with Boston – was hired as the team’s new Head Coach.

Even though they fell short of the 1996 postseason, the Hornets led the NBA in attendance for the seventh time in their eight years of existence. Still though, Ward knew the organization needed a spark, especially with fan favorites Mourning and Johnson now playing elsewhere.

“We were starting over, and the vibe wasn’t good in the community that we weren’t keeping our star players,” he said. “We couldn’t afford it being a small market. There was no premium seating. We had 12 sky suites that were the size of phone booths. Our building was huge, but 23,000 tickets at $20 bucks apiece isn’t going to get you into the upper echelon of the NBA when other teams are selling $200,000 sky suites. We had to trade Larry and Alonzo.”

Ward and Cowens got together and concocted a plan, one that went well beyond a one-night-only giveaway poster. The direction they chose helped catalyze the team to a franchise-record 54 wins in the 1996-97 season, a mark that has yet to be topped to this day.  

“I’ll never forget that meeting,” said Ward. “Dave sat down, and I said, “Dave, look we have to come out with a marketing campaign to get fans excited, reengaged, reignited and passionate because we’re sort of starting over.’ I asked him, ‘What kind of playstyle are you going to have?’ and he responded, ‘We’re going to play hard every game.’ I said, ‘We’re going to play Hornets Hard Ball?’ to which he replied, ‘Yeah, we’re going to play Hard Ball out there every night.’”

During his playing days, Cowens hustled and dove on the floor for every loose ball that he could find. The incoming Mason embodied this tough, physical spirit as well, bullying his way all over the hardwood with a hulking 6-8, 255-pound frame. So, Hornets Hard Ball was brought to life and utilized every single which way from an entertainment and promotional standpoint. As for the ‘Men at Work’ poster, it doesn’t get much harder than working long hours in a steel mill.

“Eight games in, we’re 3-5 and the media is saying, ‘What’s this Hornets Hard Ball? They’re hardly winning any games! Some marketing guy must have come up with that,’” joked Coach Cowens at the time. Said Ward, “A few months later, all the new parts and pieces finally clicked. The Charlotte Observer created an image of Hugo with a hard hat on hitting the time clock and it says, ‘It’s Hard Ball After All.’ I felt some redemption after they threw me under the bus. It all worked out in the end, so Hornets Hard Ball would probably be my favorite poster that we did.”

“Very creative there with the hardhats,” said Curry. “We’re not wearing our uniforms, but again, you can tell who everybody is. The theme ‘Men at Work’ and going to do a job, that was us. We had some very close teams, and everybody was on board making these posters, especially after we saw the finished product. I think it made us that much closer. I don’t know of any other teams that really thought outside the box to do the stuff we were doing.”

Late in the summer of 1997, Ward left the Hornets for another expansion franchise in the NHL’s Nashville Predators, eventually returning in 2003 as the Charlotte Bobcats’ Executive VP of Business Operations and Chief Marketing Officer. There were also some changes on the court. Former fifth overall pick JR Reid was brought back for a second stint in Charlotte, along with first-time Hornets David Wesley and Bobby Phills. Bogues made two early-season appearances before he and Tony Delk were traded to Golden State for BJ Armstrong.   

The 1997-98 campaign marked the Hornets’ 10^th as an NBA franchise and a celebration was certainly in order. While there were some festivities for the fifth anniversary five years prior, turning double digits was a much bigger deal. “The 10^th was a milestone as far as we were concerned,” said Mathews. “When I look back on it, I think the players are thinking, ‘Thank goodness Renea didn’t ask me to put on some costume. We’re not wearing anything funky. We can just wear our uniforms and be ourselves.’ They look so happy here.”

Mathews ordered a Harris Teeter cake – an appropriate sponsor tie-in, of course – and balloons for this shoot, which a couple players might have been shot individually for. Forget the flight suits, motorcycles, and blue-collar garments – RSVP’ing to this party required only one thing (Assistant Coach Paul Silas got the message).

“Of course, I had to prompt them to smile, but like I said, I wasn’t bugging them,” added Mathews. “I don’t think any of the shoots were really very hard for them, but they had an easier task here. We knew we could get it over with quickly because we had everything at the practice facility ready to go and they could just step in. We had a big day.”

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you in this one. After several years of various get-ups, the Hornets decided to… just wear their normal practice uniforms? Well, there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for the unexpected simplicity – the NBA lockout.

Lasting from July 1, 1998, to Jan. 20, 1999, this 204-day break was the result of owners and players failing to agree on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement. Basically, the rules and regulations outlined in this contract dictate how the league operates, especially when it comes to things like player contracts, revenue distribution, free agency, and the salary cap. By the time a new one got ratified, 464 regular season games and the All-Star Game had been canceled.

But until then, no CBA meant the players couldn’t be inside team facilities or do anything to promote their organizations. “Everything was hard that year,” Mathews recalled. “We made a great postcard, while we were in lockout and sent it to our season ticket holders. We had a lot and needed to do what we could to retain them. It was Hugo carving a turkey and the headline was, ‘So much for the Bird exception,’” referencing a salary cap term named after former player Larry Bird that had become a source of contention in the ongoing CBA negotiations.

With 50 games jammed into a microscopic three-month window, there wasn’t much time for the players to do anything other than play. The Hornets regularly took the court three times over a four-day span and at one point, played three nights in a row. The travel schedule was nightmarish and days off were few and far between. So, the Marketing Department did the best it could working with this season’s exhausted crew.  

“Everything had to be jump-started when we finally started playing again,” Mathews said. “Everything was happening so fast. It was just, ‘Do this, get it done,’ and then still end up with something we were happy with. It was less joyous, but it was what was happening at the time.”

The renegotiated CBA had long been settled heading into the 1999-00 NBA season, but the Hornets weren’t ready to ditch their Sunday best quite yet. There was no shortage of courtroom-based films released in the 1990’s – My Cousin Vinny, A Few Good Men, Philadelphia, The Pelican Brief, and Double Jeopardy just to name a handful.

So, were the Hornets posing as lawyers here? Or maybe bankers? After all, banking was and still is a massive part of Charlotte’s economy. Neither, in fact – the players were dressed like they would for any road trip because suits were mandatory to board the plane under Shinn’s ownership. “They’re supposed to be themselves going on the plane on the way to the games,” said Mathews. “I’m not saying the staff looked like that, but the players really dressed up.”

All the players were shot collectively for this poster minus Derrick Coleman, who accidently left his dress shoes at home. Even when given the option to stand in the back so his feet wouldn’t be noticed, Coleman still declined to be included. So, the burly 6-10 forward stood to the side while everybody else stacked themselves onto the stairs. Coleman had to be photographed by himself – he remembered his shoes this time – and Photoshopped into the picture afterwards (standing on the third step, furthest to the left).

“This one was probably shot in color, but we printed it in black and white,” explained Mathews, touching on the poster’s finer details. “I liked to play around with the printing process. I know the one from the lockout year and ‘Men of Teal’ were shot in color, but we printed full color black and white. It makes for a more intense black and a more intense white.”

Few television shows in history were more attention-grabbing than Survivor when it first debuted to American audiences on May 31, 2000. This was also in the pre-DVR era, so if you missed an episode, good luck dodging spoilers the next day. Alliances, immunity challenges, tribal councils and who could forget watching contestants devour grubs during dinnertime? Still pumping out seasons today, Survivor is on the Mount Rushmore of reality TV.

Sort of reversing how they transcended basketball into pop culture, the Hornets hatched up a plan to bring elements of the cutthroat Borneo-based competition into their own seasonal look.  

“Survivorwas extremely popular,” said Mathews, who purchased real torches for this shoot. “We were doing things in the game presentation related to Survivor – little games and what not that were played during timeouts. I don’t remember what any of them were anymore, but I remember it was more than just the poster. We did some other things related to it.”

One of the show’s most popular trinkets was the buff, a color-coded bandana-like piece of headwear that indicated which tribe contestants represented. Some of the players wore them for this shoot, which in hindsight, was an unintentional precursor to the team’s ‘Band Together’ movement, where all the Hornets rocked headbands for the 2002 NBA Playoffs. 

“This was before Baron Davis got the whole headband thing going,” said Mathews, referring to the trend’s originator. “The headbands were such a big thing. The whole team wore them, the fans wore them, everybody wore them, I wore one. I remember going down to [then Ericsson Stadium] and getting permission to put headbands on the Panther statues outside. Everybody was cooperating with us, wanting to be a part of it and wear the headband. That’s what’s still so amazing to me after all these years when I think about it, is the solidarity that there was.”

Added Hussey, by now the organization’s Director of Creative Services, “Anything we could do to feed that passion and make it about the team and the unity, we did it. Even down to the last season with Baron and those guys wearing the headbands, it was the little things. Fans still showed up, they still wore the headbands and there was still this unity and sense of community that was so special.”

Every Charlottean was a member of the Hornets’ tribe, which saw its torch get extinguished with a hard-fought seven-game series loss to Milwaukee in the 2001 Eastern Conference Semifinals. The purple and teal were still survivors though, at least for the time being.

The devastating terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, brought the entire country to a standstill. Normal everyday life was halted, and the nation was still mourning when the NBA season was set to begin two months later. Due to the timing, NBA games weren’t directly disrupted by Sept. 11, unlike the NFL and MLB, which immediately called for postponements. The theme for this year’s poster paid tribute to the thousands of lives lost and impacted by that tragic day.

“It was another interesting printing situation where we printed the players and the words with a gloss and the background was matte,” explained Mathews, describing a more dulled-down, flatter photographic tone. “So, it almost had a dimension, which really interested me. It was longer, stretched out and had different dimensions, which was purposeful, as well.”

As everybody knows, the Hornets moved to New Orleans following the 2001-02 season. The Queen City was without NBA basketball for two full years before the Charlotte Bobcats tipped off their inaugural season in 2004. Ward departed the organization for a second time in 2005, going on to work for the Washington Nationals, New Orleans Hornets, Philadelphia 76ers, Carolina Hurricanes, IMG College, the Alliance of American Football’s Birmingham Iron and most recently, the Charlotte Knights.

“I look back very fondly and proudly of what we accomplished in this market,” said Ward, who remains close friends with many former Hornets co-workers. “We were agents for change. What we were doing had implications or repercussions across the league. Either we weren’t smart enough, we didn’t care, or we knew we were going to do it different because we had to as an expansion franchise. We couldn’t fall back on history or tradition. We had to create our own.”

Mathews stayed in Charlotte and assisted the NBA with getting the Bobcats up and running on an interim basis. She soon left the sports industry but stayed in marketing for roughly the next decade. Eventually earning her Real Estate Broker’s license, Mathews has worked for Keller Williams SouthPark since 2016.

“Working at the Hornets was so rewarding for me,” she said. “I loved my job. I loved what I did. People loved our product – not just the play, but the presentation of the game, everything that surrounded it, the things we did in town and for the community. They were in love with us, and you could feel that every time you gave something away. It was just so memorable. I don’t live in that time anymore, but I cherish every moment of it.”

The man behind the lens, Shaffner continued doing commercial photography work for several more years and spent time working as a Hedge Fund Manager. He never came back to shoot the Bobcats or Hornets again, and the stylized giveaway posters were unofficially discontinued once the NBA returned to Charlotte.

“It’s hard to come up with a superlative for what it was,” reflected Shaffner. “Everyone talked about the Hornets, thought about them, wanted to go to the games. There wasn’t an empty seat during those early years. It was the hot ticket in town and more than a basketball game – it was an event. I remember it so fondly and it was a real kick to be a part of it. It made you feel special. Any time you wanted to go somewhere or talk to somebody, just say you were shooting the Hornets, and they’d fall all over you. It was a fun time, it really was. I don’t remember it every day, but talking about it now started reminding me about what it was like.”

Hussey went wire to wire working for the Hornets during their original era, missing a total of seven games between Opening Night in 1988 to the final home playoff appearance in 2002. Like Mathews, he stayed in Charlotte when the team left, transitioning to Arena Football before resuming his role as Director of Creative Services with the Bobcats from 2004 to 2006. Still working in advertising and marketing, Hussey is now on the other side of professional sports and going on his 10^th year as a Hornets’ season ticket holder.  

“Charlotte was incredibly different 35 years ago than it is today,” he said. “It really was unheard of for a city this small to get a team and the place just went nuts. Nine-and-a-half years of sellouts in a 24,000-seat building? That just doesn’t happen. The community took ownership of the team. Yes, having Glen Rice and superstars like LJ and ‘Zo was nice, but they went out of their way to make themselves part of this community. Sometimes when you’re in the middle of it, you don’t realize how special it is. Then, you get to where we’re sitting today and looking back on those times. Man, the way this city embraced the franchise at that time was special.”

These individuals and countless others were brought together by a brand-new NBA organization for an unforgettable magical ride many, many years ago, much of it taking place under the radar and behind closed doors. Sure, the relocation altered things a little bit here and there for the Charlotte Hornets. What won’t ever change though is how these iconic giveaway posters, the imagination behind them, and most importantly, the people who were responsible for their creation will forever be a part of the franchise’s legacy.