Continued...

Dan and Brant are sitting in Brant’s office, which is strewn with hockey and racing gear. They’re a pair, the two of them: both fonts of the statistical and biographical trivia beloved of die-hard sports fans everywhere. Brant is Dan minus 26 years. They finish each other’s sentences, with the gregarious son constantly correcting the hale father, who seems to neither hear nor care.
Fahey the elder dispatches a fed up looking secretary to find catalogues filled with racing and hockey stuff. They treat me to a fast-paced lecture on the finer points of sports merchandising: how, for instance, the real estate on an Indy car is meticulously subdivided between the team, the sponsor and the driver—not to mention the driver’s helmet, which is a veritable nirvana of branding opportunity all by itself.

Leaping to his feet, Dan grabs a Mark Messier New York Rangers jersey hanging on the door. It’s an "authentic" game shirt—you can tell because of the fight strap at the back. In truth, it’s not so much an item of clothing as a maze of sometimes conflicting licensing deals: Besides the manufacture, the NHL gets a piece, the NHL Players Association takes another slice, and then Messier himself collects a hefty cut (which he may or may not have to share with his less famous teammates, depending on the deal). In other words for a $100-to-$200 NHL-approved sweater made by CCM, the addition of a star’s name and number will double the point-of-sale price.

Firms with NHL-licensing deals distribute the goods to retailers and end up paying the NHL about 7% to 10% of the wholesale price. Maraca’s most important service to its clients is keeping all the licensing deals straight—making sure, for example, that the Indy drivers are drinking nothing but the Indy authorized spring water during the post-race press conference. Maraca also works closely with the police to clamp down on the kids with the hockey bags full of contraband. "That’s how we generate our living—by keeping track of all these rights," says Brant, who recalled that the Carolina Hurricanes had to tape over one of their helmet logos during their Toronto series last spring because of a conflict between the team’s own licensing arrangements and one of the broadcaster’s exclusive sponsorship deals.

The talk turns to the events themselves, and I sense that what has kept the Fahey’s in this frenetic business is not so much an abiding love of the merchandise, but the thrill of game day, and their own role in it. With events like the Indy, Maraca is like—to switch sports—one of those low profile but ultra competent defencemen who rarely score or make flashy plays, but keep things absolutely under control. As Cynthia Galbraith, Molson Indy manager of communications, says: "They’re the pros. They provide a turnkey operation."

Fahey, who is wearing a Molson Indy golf shirt the day we meet, riffs on the importance of being flexible and trustworthy under very fluid circumstances (slumping ticket sales, inclement weather, random organizational screwups). "We like to say it’s shifting sand in the desert." He grabs two mounted maps of the Vancouver Indy and the World Youth Day venues, pointing out Maraca’s turf. "You’ve got your food, your cameras, your merchandise. The fun part is watching it develop. We go into a track [like] Vancouver. There’s nothing there. Its an empty field" In an overnight frenzy of labour, Maraca’s roadies, and those of the other contractors, lay the wire, plug in the pizza ovens, stock up the merchandise tents, and then sit back to wait for the crowds to stream by.

Dan gets a dreamy look in his eye: "You’re helping build this whole city…" "…which by Monday, at 5, is all gone," Brant, the pragmatist, adds.

But dispersed with the crowds are thousands of branded T-shirts, baseball caps and miscellaneous knick-knacks, all of which are intended to create that coveted neural circuit linking the recollection of a fun time with the image on someone’s product.