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PrintSwagger time
Mayor Coleman wants the city to shed its inferiority complex and get an attitude. This, fellow citizens, isn’t going to be easy.
Illustration by Mario Noche
Mayor Coleman has declared that this is the year of swagger and, boy howdy, it’s about time. If ever a city needed some swagger, if ever a city’s people needed to cast off their mopey, homegrown sense of inferiority and say, “Hey, Kiss Our Assets!” it is Columbus in 2012.
We’re 200 years old, damn it! The 15th-biggest city in the country. As the mayor says, people from Cincinnati, Cleveland and Pittsburgh—our less populous, but far more famous neighbors—move here, not the other way around.
So why do we not have more pride—some swagger—about our city’s rise as a great American success story? If you were going to come up with a slogan that reflected most Columbusites’ attitude about their own town, it probably would be something like “Columbus: It Is What It Is.”
The mayor, understandably, isn’t going to point out the failings of a populace that has given him four terms (and counting) in office. But I will.
What’s the matter with you people?
It’s one thing if people on the coasts or in Chicago are sadly indifferent to Columbus’s place among the country’s great cities, but what’s your excuse?
It’s not like you haven’t been told. This magazine, the daily paper and the TV stations are quick to tout the latest stab at civic boosterism. When National Geographic listed Columbus as one of the world’s 10 best winter vacation destinations, when Forbes called us one of the country’s next big boomtowns, that kind of thing is always big news in Columbus.
Really, the Short North, the Arena District, German Village, the Blue Jackets, Columbus Commons, the Scioto Mile—any of those suffering from a lack of publicity? The zoo, COSI, Battelle, Ohio State—each among the best in the country in its respective field—you know about them, right?
But despite the best efforts of the mayor, the media, civic grandees and generations of professional brand-builders and image-makers, it seems Columbus is less than impressed with itself.
That may be fine with you and that’s part of the problem. You start to wonder, really, if there’s something in the water (well, when it comes to the Scioto River, we know there’s something in the water). Go ahead, start compiling a list of people in Columbus who might reasonably qualify as someone with swagger.
I’ll wait.
At one time, Columbus was the home of the World Heavyweight Champion, heir to Ali, Tyson, Jack Johnson—major swaggerers, every one. Buster Douglas was a good fighter, a courageous man, but one thing Buster did not do was swagger.
Columbus also could once claim the winner of the Indianapolis 500 as one of our own, a driver in league with the A.J. Foyts and Mario Andrettis of the world. Bobby Rahal was indeed a great racer, but swagger? Not so much.
Jack Nicklaus, our most famous athlete, the greatest golfer ever. Lots of confidence, sure, but guys who wear plaid pants do not swagger convincingly.
There has never been a more ferocious football player than Chris Spielman. On the field, he was pure menace, terror for the other side. His swagger made him an all-star at OSU and in the NFL. Chris retired, settled down in Columbus and now? Nicest guy in the world, great father—you want to take him home and introduce him to Mom.
We did have a swaggering football star in Columbus recently—anybody remember Terrelle Pryor? We didn’t run him out of town exactly, but we hope he never comes back. Joey Galloway was another OSU football star who walked with a permanent strut. When he started ripping his helmet off after touchdowns to better bask in adulation, he was chided for arrogance and told to keep his hat on.
All right, forget sports. Let’s have the swagger nominees from the arts—you know, the avant-garde. Or from our thriving rock music scene. Or from business: There are some very sharp, very rich people in this town—who’s Columbus’s answer to Donald Trump? I’ve been told there are some guys with swagger in our business community, but “they just may not be putting it out there.”
I talked to a number of prominent Columbusites for this story, people who enthusiastically support Mike Coleman’s call for swagger, who agree wholeheartedly that it’s sorely lacking in a city that should be recognized as one of the best anywhere.
But ask them why people seem oblivious or indifferent to their own city’s accomplishments, why Columbusites (maybe we just need a better name for ourselves) don’t have the swaggering pride of a Pittsburgher or a Baltimorean, and they’re stumped.
First, the mayor says, let’s define what we mean by swagger. The dictionary definitions use words such as “boastful,” “braggadocio” and “arrogant.” That’s not what he has in mind.
“It’s not being braggadocios, it’s not being boastful,” Coleman says. “Swagger is about belief. It’s about having the confidence to do what is necessary to make this an even greater city. We shouldn’t hide from our successes. We’re very different from where we were not long ago.”
So why don’t his constituents get it? In a New Year’s Day op-ed in the Dispatch, Coleman wrote that swagger “does not come naturally to us as a city. We’re not prone to brag about ourselves. And we should not. We have a Midwestern tendency to be humble. And we should be. But while these traits may be admirable, we cannot allow them to be self-defeating.”
“People who live in Columbus, we describe ourselves as a cowtown, a sleepy old cowtown,” Coleman says. “We need to view ourselves differently.”
“People like to stay in a comfort zone, keep the status quo,” says Paul Astleford, CEO of Experience Columbus, the convention and visitors bureau. “This has plagued Columbus since the beginning of Columbus 200 years ago.”
“Compared to other communities, we’re very modest,” says Columbus Partnership CEO Alex Fischer. “Midwestern modesty has inbred among itself.” When it comes to swagger, he says, “We don’t think like that.”
Fischer, who came here from Tennessee, recalls a presentation he made early in his tenure at the Partnership: “A community leader came up to me and said, ‘We need to tone it down a little.’ ”
“I think a lot of Midwesterners, the personality, it’s different, you’re less opinionated, you are less passionate,” says Bret Adams, who, as a lawyer for some of the biggest names in sports here and around the country, has seen a fair amount of swagger and done some himself. “People from Pittsburgh, they are so proud of being from Pittsburgh. If you’re from Columbus—I mean, you care about your city, you’re just a little less passionate about it.”
Buck Rinehart, maybe the most swaggery mayor Columbus has ever had, admits the source of our stubborn humility is a mystery to him: “That’s the $64,000 question, buddy.”
Here are a few theories that may help explain why this city, this maddeningly modest city, just can’t get its swagger on.
The Blue Jackets
Simply put, the Blue Jackets have let us down. Nothing defines a city like its sports teams (see Pittsburgh); nothing could spur a swagger uprising like our own hockey team driving for the Stanley Cup.
Back in the late ’90s, when we knew we had a team, but it hadn’t taken the ice yet, there was keen anticipation: This was gonna put Columbus on the map, baby! Major-league franchise, national exposure, the big time. It has not worked out that way.
The Blue Jackets (owned in part by the same guys, the Dispatch Printing Company, that own Columbus Monthly) have been around for 11 years with only one sorry playoff appearance to show for it. This season, they have not just been dull, mediocre or bad. They have been rotten, on pace for one of the worst seasons ever by an
They have no personality, no image, no heart. They’re not scrappy, loveable losers, they are an embarrassment. Their fans, those dwindling few, even staged a protest at Nationwide Arena calling for heads to roll. As for national recognition, Google “Blue Jackets” and “laughingstock.”
It’s a painful subject for city leaders who just engineered a bailout for the Jackets. Mike Coleman answers reluctantly when I ask him: If the Blue Jackets were better—not great, just better—wouldn’t that help with the swagger thing?
“I agree,” he says after a considerable pause. Then he rallies: “I’m confident they will be. They need a little swagger. If I could just talk to them before every game. . . .”
Rinehart doesn’t think the Jackets’ woes are hurting the city’s self-image: “We don’t define ourselves in Columbus by a professional sports team.” After all, he says, we still have Ohio State.
But what effect might a successful franchise have had? “No one nationally is identifying our city with professional sports,” Adams says. “My hope when the Blue Jackets came to town was that we could have been a Green Bay in football, an Oklahoma City in basketball. I thought by this point we’d be to the
Oklahoma City, Adams points out, is like Columbus in size, demographics and (lack of) image. A local rich guy persuaded the NBA to plop the old Seattle SuperSonics there, built an arena with a surrounding district of bars and restaurants, hired top-notch basketball people and produced a winner. “In the National Basketball League now, Oklahoma City is identified with the Miamis and the Bostons,” Adams says.
Well, we can always fondly recall the Chill: Minor-league they may have been, but they had tons of swagger.
Missed opportunity
Let’s talk about public art, of which Columbus has less of and spends less on than any city aspiring to national greatness should. The latest proposal is for a four-story “hyperboloid” structure (you know, the thing people are calling a cooling tower) on the Scioto Mile.
You talk about public art on the Scioto River and my head starts to hurt. In 1996, Columbus had the chance to embrace genius, a giant blue-glass snake that would have covered the Broad Street Bridge, stretching from riverbank to riverbank.
It was the winning entry in a design contest—by local sculptor Todd Slaughter (he did the giant mortarboard at Franklin University) modeled after the Serpent Mound in Adams County. It was awesome. It would have been instant recognition for Columbus; every time the Goodyear blimp showed up for an OSU game, downtown Columbus and its giant blue snake would have been televised nationally.
It had swagger written all over it and it died a quick death because the county engineer said, well, it’s going to be tough to maintain (he also admitted that he just didn’t like it). City leaders seemed fine with that call. The media (with the notable exception of The Other Paper, where I worked at the time) had no enthusiasm for the Snake. So the greatest idea in the history of Columbus—it was compared to the Gateway Arch in St. Louis—went nowhere and the Broad Street Bridge remains naked to this day.
I still haven’t gotten over it, to tell you the truth, so as I canvassed today’s city leaders on the subject of swagger I asked, hey, what about the giant blue snake?
“You know, that might have actually gone up if it had been in the last four or five years,” says Astleford.
Coleman, who was a fan of the Snake, says things are different now. Look at the design for the cool Main Street Bridge he pushed through. “I caught hell over that,” he says. “We wouldn’t have built that kind of bridge 20 years ago.”
So what’s stopping us now? You want swagger? As The Other Paper said 16 years ago: Make the Snake.
It’s the natives’ fault
A radio exec in Cincinnati who used to work in Columbus tried to explain to me why the two markets are so different, why Cincy’s top station is a lively, irreverent hoot and our top station gets by on syndicated reruns. Cincinnati is parochial, he says, “and in Columbus everybody is from somewhere else.”
It’s true, you know. Were you born here? I wasn’t. My wife wasn’t. Mike Coleman wasn’t. Buck Rinehart wasn’t. Chris Spielman wasn’t. Ask the next person you see: They most likely weren’t either.
“I find that people from somewhere else have more swagger about Columbus than the people who are from here,” says Fischer. So, it’s the natives who are the problem? “Well, I wouldn’t put it quite that way.”
I will. I talked to Sam Shamansky, one of the city’s top criminal defense attorneys and a guy who virtually swaggers for a living. He’s spent his whole life here and he couldn’t care less about whether Columbus has swagger. “The usual bullshit,” he says. “Image over substance.” He went on to say a number of rude things about his hometown, which you really don’t want to hear.
I sought out those of my friends I know are natives. One of them wasn’t even sure who Mike Coleman is. “Swagger?” he said. He wasn’t interested.
My friend Charlie from Columbus is well-informed and knows very well who Mike Coleman is and he read his column exhorting us to swagger. “Nobody cares about Columbus, dude,” he says. But we’re the 15th-biggest city in the country—shouldn’t that count for something? “Well, it’s all right, I guess, if you just want to live here.”
“When you live here and have been here for a long time you don’t see the changes,” says Pete McGinty, chief marketing officer for the advertising firm Fahlgren Mortine. “My son is now 6-foot-6 and you don’t notice him growing up. I just recently realized—he’s as tall as me. It’s like that.”
“Maybe those who were born and raised here take the things we see, the potential and the great assets of this city, for granted,” Rinehart says.
Astleford frames it this way: If we weren’t a great city, why do all these people who come here for school or a job end up staying? “If you don’t have people from outside moving in there’s something wrong. People see something here that makes them want to live here.”
The Columbus Swagger Hall of Fame
Come on, you say, Columbus does too have its swaggerers. How about Coleman, the self-appointed swaggerer-in-chief? “I think the mayor has set the mark for swagger,” Astleford says. “The mayor is a pretty cool guy himself,” McGinty says.
My conversations produced quite a few nominees for our Swagger Hall of Fame. Several people mentioned OSU president Gordon Gee, and I suppose he’d qualify, though I think what you’re really seeing there is more like chutzpah.
Limited Brands CEO and founder Les Wexner? As Astleford says, he’s seen as an innovator in the world of retail. Putting underwear models on a runway and creating the phenomenon of Victoria’s Secret takes a certain amount of swagger, but I don’t know who associates sexy with Columbus.
There’s personal injury lawyer Kevin Kurgis, whose TV commercials burst with swagger: “I don’t get paid unless you get paid.” There’s former school board chief and world-class hurdler Stephanie Hightower, who is not to be trifled with, as she demonstrated in her showdowns with the late Bill Moss (with considerable swagger of his own when he was on the school board) and the time she chased down that kid who threw a rock at her SUV.
Experience Columbus PR guy Scott Peacock nominates the Crew, winner of the 2008
And this Urban Meyer fellow looks as if he knows a thing or two about swagger, with his two national championships while leading the University of Florida football team and his self-described “hair’s on fire” coaching style.
My own nominees: Samuel B. Hartman, who made a fortune and spent a fortune in Columbus some 100 years ago selling Peruna, a patent medicine “prohibition tonic” that was more than 20 percent alcohol; Cromwell Dixon, a Columbus teenager who was the first to fly over the Continental Divide in 1911 (he died in a plane wreck one month later), and, my favorite current swaggerer, OSU basketball player Samantha Prahalis, who is from Long Island, by no coincidence. She’ll kick your butt.
Speaking of butt-kicking, John Kasich got one last November with the referendum that shot down his S.B. 5, and only time will tell whether it takes any of the starch out of him. Swagger has served him well—the man has never lost a run for office and he was in his element at Fox News, holding his own with swagger masters such as Bill O’Reilly. And he swaggered his way through his first year as governor.
I asked Coleman whether our Republican governor was a good example of Columbus swagger. The mayor thought for a second and said, “He lives in Westerville, doesn’t he?”
The mayor, meanwhile, nominates Children’s Hospital: “They went to Nationwide and said, ‘Give us $50 million and we’ll change our name.’ That’s swagger.” The mayor also says his new recycling program is an example of swagger.
That tells me we have a lot of work to do.
So, how do you convince Columbus that it has what it takes to swagger? We know snappy catchphrases don’t work. Let’s see, Columbus Mayor Jim Rhodes way back in the 1940s (that’s 70 years of mayoral cheerleading) came up with “Come to Columbus and Discover America.”
We’ve had “Columbus: We’re Making It Great,” “Columbus: More Than You Dreamed,” “Surprise, It’s Columbus!” and, more recently, “Discover Columbus,” a sign that the sloganeers appear to be running out of steam.
As the Dispatch asked in a 1999 editorial, “Does a slogan ever really move anyone?” No.
So what do you need to instill some swagger? Well, having a mayor not afraid to brave the snickers of professional cynics is a start. Rinehart applauds Coleman: “If you’re in a position of being mayor of a city and you don’t believe you’re the greatest city in the country, you don’t deserve to be mayor,” he says. “If the mayor doesn’t think like that, who else is going to?”
My suggestion for a short-term injection of swagger? Change the city song. We have one, you know. Experience Columbus commissioned local songstress Donna Mogavero to write one about six years ago and she came up with “The Streets Where I Live” (“old homes mix with fancy cafes,” and “a park full of roses puts a smile on our faces”).
Now, I have not heard this particular ditty, but I know enough of Mogavero’s work to guess that this song does not do much swaggering. I offer another song from a local group, the late, great New Bomb Turks, off their Destroy-Oh-Boy!! album: “Let’s Dress Up The Naked Truth.”
Listen to that bad boy and you’ll be swaggering your ass off.
Jeff Long is a freelance writer and columnist for The Other Paper.
