Minor league team tokes the line with Michael Phelps Night

Like other minor league teams, the AHL's Milwaukee Admirals have promoted their product by any means necessary. When owner Harris Turer took over the franchise nearly four years ago, for example, he declared the team needed a jock-strap night called "Admirals Supporter Night."

The team handed out 1,500 athletic supporters to fans. "Someone put a logo on the front of it and wrote, ‘We're nuts about Admirals Hockey,'" recalled Charlie Larson, director of communications for the Admirals, the minor league affiliate of the Nashville Predators.


On Thursday night, Feb. 19, the Admirals will set the bar a little ... uh, higher: a night dedicated to the Michael Phelps marijuana scandal. For the Admirals, it's been a delicate balancing act between exploiting the comedy in the scandal and avoiding its controversy.

"Don't Be Like Mike" Night is, of course, inspired by a photo of the Olympic champion swimmer using a bong at a party in South Carolina that was published in a British newspaper. The media firestorm over the image resulted in Phelps being suspended by USA Swimming and dropped by Kellogg's as a spokesman.

To many, the situation isn't exactly a laughing matter, seeing as how Phelps was a hero to many young athletes. That was the challenge for the Admirals -- a team that counts Milwaukee Brewers assistant GM Gord Ash and pitcher Ben Sheets among its minority owners -- in attempting to mine some humor from the scandal.

"Every time you do something, you're going to irritate someone no matter what you do," said Larson. "But this is a tongue-in-cheek promotion, and people know it."

Here's what the team has planned for "Don't Be Like Mike" Night against the Rockford IceHogs, an affiliate of the Chicago Blackhawks:

• All fans who are graduates of a DARE program (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) can get into the game for just $2 by bringing their DARE graduation certificate to the Admirals' office or the Bradley Center box office.

• Anyone with the name Michael, Phelps, Mary Jane, Cheech, Chong, Weed (Wied) or anyone who has won an Olympic Gold Medal can also get their ticket for only $2.

• The team is giving away a weed wacker from National Ace Hardware, signed by the Admirals.

• If the team scores with 4:20 -- a number that's synonymous with pot culture -- on the clock in any period, one fan will win a season ticket for the following season.

• The team is providing a document shredder outside of section 225 for fans to destroy their own incriminating, Phelps-like photos.

"It's a fine line that you walk," Larson said. "One of the ideas that was bandied about was giving away little bags of Doritos to the first thousand people. But you can't be promoting drug use at all."

One rejected idea had the team holding the promotion on April 20 (4/20), but that's during the postseason. Another consideration was doing some sort of gimmick with the infamous glass tube in the Phelps photo


http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Minor-league-team-tokes-the-line-with-Michael-Ph?urn=nhl,140741

I bet a lot of people got $2 tickets, Michael is a pretty common name.


They should of thrown Harold and Kumar into the mix too