Barstool Biographies: Becoming El Pres Pt. 3
By 2009, Dave had surrounded himself with a team of talented and reliable writers. The original three, as he calls them, were Jamie Chisholm, Peter Manzo, and Jerry Thornton. They each offered a distinct style but in those early days, their work more closely resembled articles and stories than blogs. The prose was longer, with fewer quips and more research. For the sports writers, statistics and analysis ruled the day while the lifestyle pieces read like short stories. Mock graduation speeches, parody letters written to Jack Bauer, and stories recounting woeful wedding weekends were just a few of the many pieces I found. Dave remembers this group fondly and speaks with special reverence about Manzo’s writing. “He was one of the best writers we ever had; his writing was sublime. But when we transitioned into the blog, he couldn’t adapt.” As Barstool continued its inevitable divorce from the biweekly newspaper and drew ever closer to a fully digital format, those who couldn’t adapt to the quicker writing turnaround were cut loose.
But where experience was lost, new talent was found. Around this time, Dave had sent out an open invitation calling for writers in New York. He saw no reason why the success of his Boston venture could not be recreated in another city. Among the virtual pile of submissions in his email inbox, he found Kevin Clancy and Keith Markovich. Kevin, a diehard New York sports fan who was already maintaining his own blog (“For Sure Not”), was an easy decision. KMarko, on the other hand, was more eccentric. “Keith was strange. His writing was all over the map. I’d read one piece and think, ‘that’s really good.’ And then I’d read another and think ‘I have no idea what you just said.’” But something about the quiet, measured Markovich made it impossible for Dave to choose between the two. He had enough money to bring on just one salaried employee, so he offered the job to both writers with the stipulation that they would have to split the money. They agreed.
These are the types of turns in the Barstool origin story that, as I research and write this piece, continue to blow my mind. Kevin had a full-time, well-paying job in expensive New York City – Keith had just graduated from Emory University and was weeks away from starting Journalism graduate school. This was 2009, when the economy was still reeling from the collapse in 2008. Yet both young men agreed to split a $50,000 salary ($25,000 each for you math nerds) to come work for Dave at a time when Barstool’s future was extremely uncertain. This, in hindsight, seems both incredibly selfless and financially insane, but the hiring stories of nearly every Barstool blogger are filled with sacrifices. Kevin humbly attributes his leap of faith to his hatred of his day job at the time, but I think both guys saw something in Dave, and in Barstool, that they believed in. Whatever it was, the hiring of KFC and KMarko set the table for a new standard of content that would, over the next decade, transform Barstool Sports into the multi-platform media monster it is today.
Seeing the success of his New York branch, Dave put out similar calls for writers in Philly and Chicago. He hired Mo in Philly and Neil in Chicago. Dave had sought to hire Dan Katz, a young blogger who ran “The Hot Glove,” but initially Dan turned him down. But when Barstool Chicago opened, Dan reached back out to Dave and asked if he could write part-time. It didn’t take long before Dan was dwarfing Neil, at which point Dave fired Neil and made Dan Chicago’s head blogger. Big Cat was officially aboard the pirate ship.
Barstool now had bloggers in Boston, New York, Philly, and Chicago; the major sports capitals of the eastern U.S. were covered. I ask Dave if, at this point, he felt that the future of Barstool was safe. “No,” he tells me. “In 2010, we did a concert. Stoolapalooza, with Sam Adams. We had never been on a college campus before. And we showed up, and it was mayhem.”
The now-infamous Stoolapalooza was just meant to be another event series. Dave planned a tour of 6 colleges around the northeast (URI, Providence, Quinnipiac, UNH, and UMass– he can’t remember the 6th and I’m not going to look it up). “We thought we would be in frat basements, little bars, playing for 200 people. But the schools would call us offering to use their big concert halls and auditoriums, major event spaces. I sorta said, ok, I guess we can try. And then we’d sell 3,000 tickets in a day.” The Barstool Bus would arrive on campus to a storm of Viva La Stool signs and eager fans wearing shirts that bore Dave’s likeness. They would chase the bus as it carefully navigated around them; they were treated like rock stars. But while the recognition was great, the real victory was the financial success of the tour. “For the type of money we were making, this was the first time it was real money. That was the first time I thought, wow. We have a very real thing here.”
Given the success of Barstool in 2010, it’s hard to believe that the following year, the company was nearly bankrupted by a second tour. The “Back To Stool” tour stands as a stark contrast to the lean, humble ideology of its predecessor: where Dave had commissioned Sammy Adams $20,000 for Stoolapalooza, he was now enlisting talent to the tune of $200,000 per show. They rented enormous concert venues and spent hundreds of thousands on production and marketing. But in the end, Barstool had bitten off more than it could chew. Nobody bought tickets. “It was a gigantic failure,” he admits. “We were able to cancel venues and get 30 cents on the dollar at most places, which is what saved us.”
Back To Stool stands as a humbling reminder of the fallibility of young businesses. Dave returned to Barstool’s roots, focusing his energy on the content of the blog. But a year later, the need for capital convinced him to put together another tour that stood between the humble grassroots approach of Stoolapalooza and the overreaching optimism of Back To Stool. This would be the Blackout Tour. The premise was simple: under black lights, fueled by the pumping consistency of EDM music, college coeds could party in glowing white outfits and neon accents.
The tour was extremely popular, with tickets selling out in minutes. But it proved dangerous because the world of EDM music was so strongly infiltrated by drug use. Dave insists there wasn’t a single overdose at any of the blackout concerts, but overdoses at similar events like Electric Zoo placed the blackout tour in the same conversation. Wary of these dangers, Dave pulled the plug. This would be the last time Dave would use a concert series for the sake of creating capital for Barstool.