Peter Moore is responsible for some of the most iconic designs in sportswear history. In the 1980s he developed the Jordan 1, the shoe that turned a small Portland-based sportswear company into a global titan, and the original sketch for the “Jumpman” logo. Years later, after moving to Adidas, Moore adapted its iconic “trefoil” logo into something a bit more modern. That logo, to this day, appears on the lion’s share of professional soccer jerseys across the globe.
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In 1995, Moore — then the global design director at Adidas — was asked to handle a smaller, less noteworthy project for an upstart American soccer league. Given the incredible heights his work had reached, this job might have felt insignificant at the time, but a quarter-century later, his work crafting the brand identities for three of Major League Soccer’s initial franchises — D.C. United, the Kansas City Wizards and the Columbus Crew — has proven to be vitally important as the league continues to grow.
Moore’s work on those original crests and identities was superb. They were standouts amongst the inaugural 10 teams’ designs, many of which look garish and dated today. United’s identity and colors have remained relatively untouched for 25 years, with their 1996 kits lauded as arguably the best in the league’s history. The Wiz — later the Wizards — have evolved into Sporting Kansas City but their technicolor, rainbow-themed early kits are easily among the league’s most memorable.
And the Columbus Crew? Well, the recent firestorm over the club’s very brief change to “Columbus SC” just two years after fans mounted a successful campaign to “Save The Crew” from relocation shows the lasting legacy of that brand and the early design decisions associated with it. The name, the colors, the club’s first crest — those three construction workers, arms folded, steely gazes — they are design icons in a league whose identities grow more and more milquetoast by the year.
“There were lots of things about the Crew that were interesting,” says Moore, now 77 years old. “But none of them compare to the name itself. It was just very unique for soccer, especially the full name; it kind of rolls off your tongue. The Crew’s name just fed into my desire to make this new league — and its teams — American. I was convinced that a professional soccer league would fail if it were to be in the image of Manchester United, or Liverpool, or any of the traditional European clubs or leagues.”
“The new badge,” continues Moore. “It’s just wrong. It is so contemporary that it just becomes boring. It has no emotion whatsoever. But that’s what is trending these days — and I’ve found that I do not like much of anything that’s trending.”
Last December, long before the Crew’s wildly unpopular and eventually unsuccessful rebrand, I set out to identify the three men from the Columbus Crew’s original crest. A pair of ownership changes in the past half-decade, an MLS Cup win last year and a gleaming new stadium that opens on July 3 have ushered the Crew toward the future, to promises of increased revenue and relevance. Just last week, the club announced it would pay homage to the original work crew at its new stadium, allowing a fan to jackhammer a slab of concrete after every Crew goal. OSHA violations aside, it’s a good gimmick.
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The loss of Historic Crew Stadium and the club’s ever-changing visual identity, though, have sometimes filled me with dread. Clubs across MLS have never done a great job of preserving their own history, and now it feels like you can see it disappearing in real-time.
More than any other major professional league in the United States, MLS likes to tinker. Its teams love to alter the foundations of their identities, changing names and crests before their current designs even have a chance to garner any cachet, trying to keep up with the latest design trends in a desperate bid for relevance. Over the past 10 years alone, eight franchises have changed their crest or name in some form or another, often to include the phrase “Football Club.” The New England Revolution — the last of the league’s original 10 teams operating with their original name and crest — are changing their badge in the near future. It’s dizzying.
Columbus is lucky enough to have in its ranks Steve Sirk, a man who has covered and documented the team in some form or another for 25 years. Writers like Steve can handle the actual stories — the championships, the legends — while I’m more interested in preserving the dumber bits, like the identities of those men in the hard hats. I reached out to Sirk to see if my mystery has already been solved. He told me it hadn’t, and he pointed me to Jamey Rootes, the Crew’s original general manager.
I reached Rootes a week or so later, just days after he resigned as the president of the NFL’s Houston Texans and six months before he would join the Houston Dynamo as the team’s new CEO. Rootes has spent the past two decades working in American football, but his time with the Crew holds a special place in his heart. He joined the club in 1995, not long after winning a pair of NCAA men’s soccer championships at Clemson. He was intimately involved in the team’s initial branding, working in concert with Moore and others at Adidas on the Crew’s name, original logo and their first kits.
The Crew was MLS’s very first franchise, a distinction they carry for having been the only club in the league to meet the league’s 10,000-deposit minimum on season tickets. In its initial franchise application in the summer of 1994, the club was referred to as the Columbus Eclipse. A news report from the time suggests that the name was used because, at the very moment they crossed over that sales threshold, a solar eclipse darkened the city of Columbus.
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That name, though, would be short-lived. The Columbus Crew moniker originated from a competition run by the local paper, the Dispatch. A reader suggested it might be an homage to Christopher Columbus and the teamwork involved in his journey to the Americas.
It would beat out a slew of other suggestions. Some were reasonable, Rootes recalls, like the Columbus Pride, a lion-themed identity since adopted by the NWSL’s Orlando team. Other entries managed to efficiently distill the essence of the ‘90s into single words, like the Xtreme or the Goalrillas. And yet others pushed the envelope even further into absurdity: Fans of Columbus-based White Castle petitioned to have the club named the Slyders, an homage to the fast-food outlet’s square-shaped hamburgers.
“I’ll tell you something most people don’t know,” says Rootes. “There’s a name that we seriously considered that we didn’t wind up going with: The Knights of Columbus. That’s kind of interesting, right? It’s kind of a double meaning — the Knights of Columbus is a (Catholic fraternal) group, right? And Columbus is the city.
“And Knights …” Rootes trails off, as he reconsiders his logic. “I mean it just sounded like a pretty cool name.”
In the end, they liked the Crew the most, ditching the Christopher Columbus connection for something with more contemporary relevance.
“‘America’s Hardest Working Team,’ that was the moniker,” remembers Rootes. “That was our tagline. So as we looked at the city — Columbus and Cleveland appear to be very different because of Cleveland being, well, kind of a rust belt town. Columbus seems to be more of a cosmopolitan area with one of the largest universities in the country, and of course the state capital. On the surface, it’s more sophisticated, but what the two cities share are just your traditional, midwestern values, with hard work being chief amongst them.”
The club’s black and yellow colors are standouts in MLS, among the most easily identifiable color schemes in the league. Yet to anyone even vaguely familiar with the American sports landscape, they do feel … a little familiar.
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“I mean, the yellow and black, that was kind of just a nod to the (Pittsburgh) Steelers,” says Rootes. “To that deep, deep loyalty that they have. We thought it looked great.”
When I asked him about the design of the crest itself and the three men in it, Rootes pointed me to former Adidas design executive Tommy Kaine, who then sent me to Peter Moore. Adidas handled the bulk of the design process, according to Rootes, with the usual back-and-forth between client and designer. Rootes did weigh in on one aspect of the work crew depicted in the crest, though.
“When you say you’re about teamwork, that can’t just be one person,” he says. “That’s why we put three in there. They’re like Con Edison guys — hard hat, lunch pail, hard-working people that the fans really identified with.”
Rootes does not know who the three guys in the logo are based on, though. And to make things even more maddening, he closes our interview by offering a frustrating piece of information, the type of thing familiar to anybody who does any kind of American soccer archeology:
“About 10 years ago,” he says, “I had all the original logo boards, all of the alternates and materials from that process in my attic. I wound up throwing all that stuff out when we moved.”
After countless retrospectives on his association with Michael Jordan, Peter Moore is happy to discuss the design process behind the Crew’s original crest in what turns into a weeks-long email exchange.
Moore’s logic at the time — that the game of soccer needed to be Americanized to gain a footing in this country — guided many of MLS’s original designs, and is still hotly debated in American soccer circles today. The Crew’s original badge might feel dated to some, but to many, the crest carries more authenticity than a number of the league’s newer designs and identities; ones that have been crafted specifically to emulate European clubs, or to be as non-divisive and easy to digest as possible.
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Moore rages against the idea that the league’s newer designs are better because they are “cleaner,” a word frequently tossed around when describing the more minimalist modern designs, and fashion in general.
“This trend towards ‘cleaner’ design,” he says, “has made these modern designs so ‘clean’ that they’re just boring. Eventually everyone is going to look very much the same — and that’s what happens when you follow a trend versus create something that relates to the concept of the team and its image.”
The basic design for the crest came to Moore and his team fairly quickly. “I always thought the idea of a work crew was great,” he says. “It was very Midwest, very American and totally unique. Nobody had put people in a soccer badge, for the most part.”
Moore knew he’d need some source material for the crest, so he pitched Adidas and MLS on a novel idea — he’d take a team out to a construction site, pick a trio of real workers and photograph them right then and there.
“Our insurance wouldn’t cover it,” he says, “so we had to shoot models instead.”
Adidas threw together a few different versions of the Crew’s badge, but eventually settled on the final product, which they unveiled in October 1995 at a nightclub in downtown Columbus. Work barriers were placed around the dance floor. There were meals for media members served in lunchpails. Rootes and his team stood behind a podium espousing the hard-working, tough-as-nails identity of a team that had yet to sign a single player.
In 2014, the Crew updated their branding for the first time, ditching Moore’s design for a black-and-yellow roundel and tweaking their name, as well. The badge was fine — many fans liked it — but undoubtedly, a piece of the club’s history was wholly pushed aside. To Moore, it was an unnecessary change, one that got him thinking about what he’d have done to update the logo.
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“I tried to make the three workers timeless,” he says, “but if I had to update the logo today I’d go out to a steel construction site and see what was in fashion for steelworkers, and update the ‘work crew’ accordingly — similar to what Morton Salt does with the little girl in the rain: Her hair and length of her skirt change from time to time.”
Moore also says he would’ve updated the club’s colors to a brighter, more synthetic yellow, the type used in modern construction signage, a bit like what the Crew did during their redesign in 2014. More than anything, though, he bristles at the suggestion that many designs need wholesale changes in the first place.
“All of this change, the constant change in design, is just to have new things to sell,” says Moore. “It is now a business and no longer a passion or badge of honor. How can you feel proud wearing a jersey that is going to change next month, or one that’s thrown out because it’s no longer trendy? To me it’s a sign of not believing in your product, and that then reflects the team and the fans. The New York Yankees baseball hat has not ever changed, to my knowledge … and it is still the No. 1 (Major League Baseball) hat sold today.”
“You want to sell more merchandise?” Moore concludes. “Win more games, win more championships.”
A dozen or so emails into my exchange with Moore, I steered our conversation back toward the important stuff. I’d assumed that the three construction workers in the crest were, well, construction workers. Now, much to my amusement, I’d found out that they weren’t — I’d bought the Crew’s blue-collar advertising spiel, plain and simple.
Moore had no idea who the three men were, but he offered me a breadcrumb. He wasn’t positive, but he suspected the photographer he worked with on the shoot was Steve Bonini, a long-time associate. I tracked Bonini down, hopeful that he’d have some of his original materials from the shoot, maybe even some photos or negatives.
He was, in fact, the photographer at the shoot, he told me. “But I don’t have any of the original art,” he says. “It was all done pre-digital, and therefore (Adidas) took it and I never saw it again.”
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I hopelessly emailed Adidas with what was surely the dumbest media request they’ve gotten in years. After some badgering, I got a response: “This is a really tough pull. I know we won’t have anything.” I can’t tell whether the person I’m emailing is being honest, or whether they’re just eager to rid themselves of an overzealous idiot on a fool’s errand. I press on.
A week or so later, Bonini followed up with an important detail — the name of a modeling agency in Portland where he suspects he may have sourced the models for the shoot. Portland? This brawny, rough-hewn, Midwestern construction crew was actually composed of models from the Pacific Northwest? Couldn’t they have at least used a trio of lumberjacks?
“Advertising,” Bonini says to me, “is just smoke and mirrors.”
Miraculously, the company — Sports + Lifestyle Unlimited — still exists, under its original owner, Dave Weiss. Feverishly, I pounded out an email to Weiss. I found his number and called him. And I sent him a text message. I also sent one of his kids an email, for good measure. It’s not normal behavior. Days later, he responded.
“I don’t recall this specific project and I don’t have an efficient way to research this,” he writes.
My heart sank.
“However, I may recognize one of the models in the logo who we represented around this time. I haven’t been in touch with this person for many years, but I’ve just reached out via LinkedIn. He may recall if this is actually him, and who the other models may have been. I will be in touch if he responds to me.”
A week or so later, Weiss followed up. His memory had served him correctly. Almost a year after I first started poking around, I was an inch away from positively identifying one of the three dudes in the Columbus Crew’s original crest. But Weiss declined to identify the man. “I’ve passed along your email,” he writes. “He can contact you if he chooses to do so.”
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I’m aware of how stupid all of this is. But believe me when I tell you that the week that followed that email is among the longer ones I’ve lived through. At this point I’d spent months, on and off, trying to unlock this mystery. I’d talked to a half-dozen former Crew employees, to current and former employees of MLS, to historians, to a former writer for the Dispatch. I tried Adidas and Nike, I dug through my own collection of old media guides and programs. I pored through newspaper clippings. I felt like I might have to put these guys on a milk carton, or worse — turn my work over to Reddit or something. Unthinkable.
The idea that I had come this far — within a single degree of one of these guys — and that he might just … not email me, well, it was too much to bear.
At some point during the week I found myself gazing intently at my computer screen. I sent a message to my editor: “I am sitting here, staring at my inbox, waiting for one of the guys from the Crew logo to email me. Is that sad?”
“Definitely a low point,” he replies.
Not long after that exchange, I got a phone call.
“I’m the guy on the right,” the voice says.
Fifty-year-old Andre Cobbs spent the six months after he graduated high school in the early ‘90s framing houses. That was the totality of his experience as a construction worker.
A few years later, he found himself modeling, and the rest is history.
“It was just another paycheck,” Cobbs says of the shoot. “MLS was obviously fairly new at the time. We had been told what it was for, but I didn’t really have any idea what to expect out of it. So even hearing you just tell me right now that I was on the badge of that team for like 20 years, I mean … that is kind of cool, right?”
Cobbs’ memories of the shoot, like Bonini and Moore’s, are hazy. He remembers it taking an hour or two, and he remembers the initial casting call, one that required him to do little to nothing. “I think they were just looking for the ‘look’ more than anything.”
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“The direction at the shoot was different,” he remembers. “Just like, ‘We need you guys to look tough, but not overly tough,’ and, ‘We need you to cross your arms.’ It was just kind of weird. They had us wear helmets. At one point they were like, ‘Look like a construction worker.’ What does that even mean, ‘look like a construction worker.’ I have no idea.”
Cobbs, if you’re wondering, is not a Crew fan. Still based in Portland, he watches soccer the way so many Americans do — he’ll catch the World Cup, or the Olympics, but doesn’t follow MLS very closely. Cobbs says he’s attended a couple of Timbers games, and keeps an eye on the NWSL’s Thorns, as well, but he is and always has been a basketball and (American) football fan. In a strange twist of fate, Cobbs actually started working at Adidas as an account executive earlier this year. Adidas’ PR folks may have thought this would be a tough pull, but the guy from the Crew crest was actually just … in their office.
Sadly, he doesn’t remember the other two models who worked with him that day. “They weren’t guys I worked with regularly,” he says, “so yeah, I don’t know.”
A few minutes into the call, I started running out of questions. Scrambling, I asked Cobbs if he’s ever been recognized, if a stranger has ever approached him and said, “Hey, are you the guy from the Crew logo?”
Cobbs laughed. “No. That has not happened.”
So then, to the other two members of the work crew, a humble plea: Step forward from the shadows and claim your rightful place as MLS design icons. I’m easy enough to find. Send me an email. Or don’t — just let the rebrands of rebrands continue to accumulate, leaving you to be remembered fondly as relics of a more interesting time in the American game, one where badges were logos, clubs were teams and soccer was still … soccer.