First in Thirst

How Gatorade Turned the Science of Sweat Into a Cultural Phenomenon

Darren ROVELL

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780814410950
• eBook ISBN: 9780814429099
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Food Industry
• Index: Business

Gatorade is an enthralling story, brought to life in bright color and sharp detail in this book as journalist and author Darren Rovell chronicles every astonishing milestone of the company’s history.

With unprecedented access to the inventors, the marketers, the analysts and observers, and key company figures past and present, Rovell recounts the sweat-drenched University of Florida football practices, the first (unpalatable) prototypes, and the commercial and financial interest that quickly took hold following the drink’s first on-field successes. Then came the advertising, sponsorships, product placements (many of them fortuitous), and finally the two milestones that cemented Gatorade’s iconic status once and for all -- the ubiquitous Gatorade bath and the Michael Jordan "Be Like Mike" endorsement deal.

With refreshing candor, First in Thirst also offers an inside look at all the aspects that went into building the brand, such as:

• negotiations,
• battles,
• lawsuits,
• mergers and acquisitions,
• product strategies,
• lucky breaks,
• and even the mishaps that have attended Gatorade’s reign as the 800-pound gorilla of the sports-drink scene.

First in Thirst identifies the nine Gatorade Rules, business principles that have helped Gatorade become one of the most dominant brands ever. By adhering to these principles, businesses in other industries may achieve greater brand recognition and market share. Long before America knew what "deep-down body thirst" was, a team of university scientists had already invented something to quench it. This book is the story of the product and the company, and of America’s fascination with the one and only Gatorade.

CHAPTER 1

Sweat in a Bottle

IN THE BASEMENT of the pharmacy wing of J. Hillis Miller Health Center, in a room with unfinished floors and protruding pipes, surrounded by piles and piles of canned foods saved for a possible atomic attack, an eccentric nephrologist and his colleagues were working at a feverish pace.

Most university labs are closed at 8:30 p.m., but these fluorescent lights were used to putting in overtime. Dr. Robert Cade, a 37-year-old associate professor of medicine who specialized in kidney disease, and his research fellows at the University of Florida were carrying out yet another experiment. And, since they knew that the next day their magic potion would face what was sure to be its largest test yet, there was no time to spare.

It had been a month since Dewayne Douglas, a former University of Florida player who was an assistant coach of the university’s freshman football squad, had sat down to lunch with Dana Shires, one of Cade’s fellows whom Douglas had befriended in his other role as the hospital’s chief of security.

On that day in August 1965, Douglas, who had been named to the All-Southeastern Conference (SEC) third team as a senior in 1952, told Shires that the freshman team was in bad shape. Over the weekend, 25 players had been admitted to the hospital’s infirmary because of heat exhaustion and dehydration.

This was a serious matter. In the 1960s, as many as 25 football players across the country died each year from heat-related diseases. In Florida, some of the players were losing more than 15 pounds during every game. Seeking a solution, Douglas (who said that he had lost as much as 18 pounds on some game days) pleaded with Shires to come up with something to negate the strain that the brutal summer heat had inflicted upon his players.

Players who drank too much water would get stomach cramps, while players who put too much salt in their bodies would often experience leg cramps. After Shires filled Cade in on the conversation, the two wasted little time.

Making the perfect drink for football players wasn’t exactly a priority. Cade, who had joined the University of Florida’s medical department in 1961, was working on slightly more heady research projects, such as the regulation of sodium levels in rats.

He had classes to teach and patients to worry about. At the time, the University of Florida was one of only a few places in the country where doctors were performing kidney dialysis. But given Cade’s history of mixing drinks at his hepatorenal (liver-kidney) symposiums, there was no chance that he would pass up the idea of making a concoction in the best interest of science.

Every Friday, the lab was the most popular place to be in the hospital, as the 5-foot-7 Cade gave a quick 20-minute lesson and then prepared various drinks in beakers and test tubes for the audience. It was no wonder that he was named the most popular teacher in the medical school for two straight years.

It wasn’t so much that Cade thought that some day one of his ideas would make him millions. He was far from being materialistic. Take, for instance, the fact that, despite making millions over the nearly 40 years that Gatorade has been on the market, Cade and his wife, Mary, still live in the modest ranch house that they had called home before the product was even invented.

For Cade, it was more about using science to solve problems. He was particularly intrigued by the fact that football players rarely had to go to the bathroom during a game, or, in Cade’s words, “to wee.”

It didn’t hurt that Cade was also a big sports fan. He was so enamored with the St. Louis Cardinals that after graduating from Southwestern Medical School in 1954, he saw to it that his first internship was at the St. Louis City Hospital, 630 miles away. That was a short distance from Sportsman’s Park, where he could see Red Schoendienst and Stan Musial hit and Harvey Haddix pitch.

Cade was beginning to fall in love with the Gators, and he and the others knew that replacing fluids would be a true advantage for the team, as the athletes’ loss of fluids led to dehydration, serious salt depletion, and in some cases severe heat stroke. Luckily, Cade—himself a former high school track athlete—had a group of eager young medical school fellows who, despite the strain of their daily work, were willing to follow their leader. Shires, in particular, also had a fascination with sports. He had played high school football in Florida.

Cade and Shires were aware that a decent amount of information about the physiology of body temperature was available. Sweat was made up of more than water and salt, but they weren’t quite sure of its exact composition.

Cade sent one of his other fellows, Alex DeQuesada (a Cuban who had arrived at the university just one month before), to the library to learn about the formulation of sweat. In just two hours, DeQuesada returned with almost everything that had ever been written about the topic.

In addition to DeQuesada’s research, Cade and Shires were armed with a paper they had received at the 57th annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Investigation, which had taken place in Atlantic City just months before. At the meeting, Dr. Sidney Malawer, who had been a medical resident at the University of Florida the year before, had presented his findings on how water, salts, and sugars are most effectively absorbed in the body.

Malawer concluded from his studies that a beverage containing salt and glucose (a sugar that didn’t need to be broken down) would move into the body much more quickly than water in one section of the small intestine. A curious Shires and Cade (surely not knowing how they would ever apply this interesting information) took Malawer out for a lobster dinner the night of his presentation, asking questions and absorbing his study.

The conversation turned out to be important for the doctors months later, since they wanted to invent a drink that would be immediately beneficial to athletes as they were playing the game. Malawer had done his experiment on 18 men, but the University of Florida doctors needed to study athletes in order to figure out the amount of salts they needed to replenish.

So Cade and Shires went to the office of the team’s head trainer, Jim Cunningham. There, they told Cunningham, Douglas, and the University of Florida’s varsity head football coach, Ray Graves, that they would need to use the players to determine the proper amounts of ingredients for their solution.

At most college programs at the time, even water wasn’t readily available. One school of thought was that dehydration would toughen up players. The on-the-field success of torture artists like Paul “Bear” Bryant, who didn’t let his players rehydrate themselves in any fashion, didn’t help change things. Bryant won 323 games at Maryland, Kentucky, Texas A&M, and Alabama. But the doctors explained to Graves that the machismo attitude that had been pervasive in sports was actually hurting the performance of teams run by stringent coaches.

While some coaches adhered to the extreme philosophy practiced by Bryant, other coaches were more lenient. Some allowed their players to practice sip-and-spit—at games and practices, the players would swish water around their mouths before spitting it out. Others provided a cold, wet towel that the team would bite on, trying to strain every last drop of water out of it.

More-progressive coaches provided players with salt pills to replace the sodium lost when players perspired. Unbeknownst to many coaches and trainers at the time, however, the salt pills had the potential to raise the sodium in the body to harmful levels.

Graves knew plenty about the tough-coach philosophy. He didn’t practice it, but he had had to endure it as the star center of three University of Tennessee squads that went 28–4 throughout his career. Even as captain of the 1941 team, his legendary Tennessee coach, General Robert Reese Neyland, provided players like Graves only with a lemon to suck on during games and practices.

The doctors told Graves that if they were able to devise a solution that would replenish what the players lost through sweat, it would prevent the players from becoming dehydrated and could even help make them stronger than their opponents in the fourth quarter of games.

Graves didn’t exactly understand the biochemistry and physiology behind the reasoning, but he agreed to do it.

“Coach Graves deserved a lot of credit for sticking his neck out and trusting the doctors,” said linebacker Chip Hinton, who played on the freshman team, the “Baby Gators,” in 1965. “He realized the bottom line was to win, and if it could help us, he was all for it.”

Graves didn’t give the doctors a carte blanche. After being assured that the fluids would be safe, he worried that they would affect performance. He didn’t want his elite athletes serving as any kind of guinea pig.

“You can take the freshmen and do anything you want with them,” Graves said. “But you can’t mess with the varsity team.” Sometime later in the conversation, Graves added Larry Rentz to the “do not touch” list. That meant that Rentz could drink the solution, but he could not be tested and prodded by the scientists.

Rentz was a highly touted quarterback from Coral Gables Senior High School who had never lost a game throughout his entire high school career. He was well-known in Florida because his team had won the state championship in his junior and senior years and because the championship game in his senior year, against Tampa Robinson, was televised for the first time. He was so coveted that coaches from Florida, Miami, and Georgia Tech had called his mother at home and at work incessantly until the day he finally settled on heading to Gainesville to play for the Gators.

Graves’s concern was understandable. Even though he was convinced that the potion was safe (the doctors had assured him that there would be nothing toxic in the solution), no one knew what it would do in terms of performance. The freshmen were his future, but he was starting to turn the University of Florida into a school with a serious football program, and he didn’t need to have any of his best recruits, who were now upperclassmen, negatively influenced by some experiment.

Since taking over in 1960, his team had averaged more than six wins per season, and Florida’s only wins against teams that finished the season in the top 10—Penn State (1962), Alabama (1963), and LSU (1964)—had come under Graves.

In fact, Florida’s 10–6 victory over quarterback Joe Namath and No. 3 Alabama in 1963 was the Crimson Tide’s first loss in Tuscaloosa in more than five seasons of Bear Bryant’s leadership. After that loss, the team didn’t lose again at home until 1982.

The Guinea Pigs and Testing

With Graves’s approval, Cade, Shires, DeQuesada, and another fellow named Jim Free soon began attending practice for the freshmen. Prior to 1973, under NCAA regulations, freshmen were not allowed to play varsity.

On each day of practice for one week, they brought a temporary lab to the field and used two freshmen per day for their subjects.

“We were using humans for our scientific experiments,” said Free, who as a research fellow was working with Cade on renovascular hypertension. “In today’s world, we probably never would have gotten away with that.”

But at the time, doing something like this was not considered unethical. The participation was up to the players, and they were never told that they had to participate.

The first day, two of the freshmen team’s largest players, 6-foot-2, 242-pound tackle George Dean and 6-foot-6, 244-pound tight end Jim Yarbrough, served as the lab subjects. They were picked in part because their veins were so large, making the blood tests easier. The doctors collected preworkout blood and urine samples, and the players put on special rubber gloves that ran up their arms, to collect all the sweat. Finally, the players were injected with Evan’s Blue Dye to measure the blood volume.

Throughout the two-hour practice, Dean and Yarbrough dumped the sweat collected in their gloves into a bucket. And when the practice was over, the doctors took additional blood and urine samples. They then brought the samples back to the lab to analyze the numbers. Both Dean and Yarbrough, on this scorching hot day, had lost about 25 percent of their total body sodium, an amount that could have been lethally dangerous.

“We did it in part because we thought what they were doing could change the sport,” said Dean, whose arm turned black and blue after one of the doctors missed one of his veins taking a sample that day.

If the players ever thought the doctors were going too far, they told them so. One...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Sweat in a Bottle
• Chapter 2: The Mystique is Born
• Chapter 3: From Field to Shelves
• Chapter 4: Wrestling Over Gatorade
• Chapter 5: The “Tipping” Point
• Chapter 6: “Be Like Mike”
• Chapter 7:“We’re Going to War”
• Chapter 8: The Gatorade Rules
• Chapter 9: Gatorade Critics
• Epilogue
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author