How Did This Guy Turn This Guy Into Phillys Most Popular Pitchman?
Somewhere out in TV Land, meanwhile, producers are cueing up one of the regional commercials built around Runyan. Maybe you’ve seen the spots for McDonald’s coffee: Runyan is in the locker room when a flunky shows up with a cup of java for him. Runyan deems the effort “chest-bump-worthy,” and the little dude bounces off Runyan the way you might bounce off a Buick. Maybe you’ve seen Runyan’s sepia-toned commercials for Ford pickup trucks, in which he rams himself into a blocking sled in a dusty rock quarry, or pulls a rope in a tug-of-war against an F-150. You may have filed away, in a special part of your cranium, Runyan’s TV commercials for Lee’s Hoagie House (the local chain created a sandwich called the Runyan), or the billboard for a New Jersey Harley-Davidson dealer that featured the Eagles lineman with the slogan “Get Your Motor Runyan.” Careful Runyanologists might even have noticed the big man’s little scene in the sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in late September.
Standing just off-camera for the Runyaning of Philadelphia, making it happen, is a thin man with a shaved head and a BlackBerry.
CRAIG KAPLAN IS sometimes called Runyan’s agent. But Runyan has a separate player agent, Ben Dogra, who in 2000 convinced the Eagles to give Runyan what was (briefly) the richest contract ever for an offensive lineman: $30.5 million for six years, plus a $6 million signing bonus. (They renewed in 2006 for three seasons at a reported $12.5 million.) Dogra works for CAA Football, a unit of L.A.-based monolith Creative Artists Agency.
Kaplan, in contrast, is a one-man operation out of Bala Cynwyd who works in thousands, not millions. He gets local gigs for local guys in the thriving economy built on the insane passion of radio-show callers like Jerry. It’s an interconnected tapestry of sports radio and cable TV, pre-game shows and post-game parties, crab fries and Wing Bowls, personal appearances and charity golf events and car dealers and bar owners and restaurateurs who understand that bringing in local athletes attracts a crowd, and who, as fans themselves, get to use their marketing budgets to buy themselves a piece of the action.
Philadelphia isn’t unique in its insular sports mania; we’re just a little extra- psychopathic about it. You could argue Philly isn’t so different from Pittsburgh or Cleveland or Green Bay — except we do have teams in all four major-league sports pumping out pieces of our shared heritage and athletes through whom we can channel our dreams. You might say we’re no different from New York or Los Angeles or D.C. — but then, of course, you’d just be wrong. Those cities’ hearts beat around things that have nothing to do with sports. And they have real celebrities. You could say we’re most like Boston or Detroit or Chicago — except their sports economies don’t include the governor of the state showing up to do football post-game analysis at the local cable sports network, which is owned by the biggest media company in town, which also owns the hockey and basketball teams.
Kaplan, 46, knows the territory, and in a culture bred on moderate expectations, he has built a small empire. He was raised in Bala Cynwyd and graduated from Lower Merion High in 1980. Went to (but didn’t graduate from) Charles Morris Price School of Advertising & Journalism. Kaplan isn’t a natural extrovert. He’ll tell you how many Eagles’ cell-phone numbers he has, and he makes sure the newspapers know whenever he gets an athlete a deal, but he’s a Philly guy, subdued, muffled. He works hard to be this pesky.
