| It’s Draft Day. You have your Pro Football Weekly
"Fantasy Football Guide ‘99." You have your pro football encyclopedia. You
are well-read on all the league’s inside information. You are all set to make your
pick. Yet there is something missing.
You look around the room and see that everyone else has something you do not — a
football helmet.
"It just gives that little edge," Joe Zumpano Jr., president of JNJ Sports
Inc., said of his heady idea.
JNJ Sports Inc., located in Bannockburn, Ill., heads into the 1999 season hoping to add
a new element to fantasy football.
"We thought, ‘What if we could get fantasy football team logos on a helmet,
an actual piece of football equipment, outside a T-shirt or a hat or something?’
" Zumpano said.
Zumpano, who went into business with co-founders Nick Lavalle and Jeff Ardito, said he
and his fellow fantasy football participants had been using logos to identify their teams
for years. Zumpano said he wanted to give the idea of fantasy logos a whole new dimension
by placing them on miniature football helmets.
"It provides something to have on Draft Day and to have on your desk,"
Zumpano said. "You can have a championship helmet made, to say you won the fantasy
football championship in, say, 1994, to razz your buddies with, show them you won the
championship (on) Draft Day. That’s (proving) to be very popular."
Since debuting the helmets during the 1998 football season, Zumpano said about 100 have
been sold, and most have been individual orders.
"We’re finding that a lot of guys are ordering the helmets individually, but
they don’t want the others guys in their league to know about the helmets until Draft
Day," Zumpano said. "But if eight or more guys in a league order, we’ll
throw in a free championship helmet at the end of the season."
JNJ Sports also provides mini-helmets for Iron Mike’s Grill in Chicago and will
soon be shipping an order to Brett Favre’s Steakhouses in Milwaukee and Green Bay,
Wis.
Among the orders for the mini-helmets, Zumpano has received many unique requests for
fantasy football logos.
One request was for a team name that was too vulgar to be printed, and that left
Zumpano and his associates in a dilemma.
"We thought, ‘How do we get the guy what he wants?’ " Zumpano said.
"We can’t have anybody naked or print the word (expletive deleted) on the
helmet."
For this one request, Zumpano ended up putting a depiction of a scantily clad woman
with a tattoo on her arm and a cigarette in her mouth, sitting on an armchair.
"There are some fun challenges brought up with those requests," Zumpano said.
A cleaner request, Zumpano said, was for a team named the Apostles. A caricature of the
Pope on the side of the helmet was the result of that request.
A two-color helmet with the logo of your choice can be purchased for $44.95. For more
information, JNJ Sports Inc. can be reached at (847) 604-4375, or via the Internet at jnjsports.com. JNJ Sports Inc. will also
be at SportsFest ’99 in Chicago. |
