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Pushing Mr. Pride aside
When an online gaming site offered Bluff, Alaska $100,000 to change its name to Pokershare.com, Alaska, Flashlight took the PR bait (“For $200K we could be Meth-baby, Alaska,” April 13). The only apparent catch was that White Mountain had to spend the hundred grand on education. Flashlight noted that Bluff, Alaska is a camp, not a city. No one lives there. No one goes to school there. So Pokershare.com's offer fell to nearby White Mountain, a city of 224 six miles from the coast of Norton Sound. Now, unlike towns in Kentucky, Arkansas and Utah, White Mountain is calling Pokershare's bluff.
In a letter dated May 17, the mayor of White Mountain told Pokershare's PR reps that while the city would like to keep its name, the White Mountain city council would be more than happy to “allow a body of water to be named Pokershare.com Lagoon.” That body of water, currently known as Sampan Lagoon, is close to town, said White Mountain city clerk Amy Titus. “It seems bigger than a pond but not as big as a lake,” she said.
Pokershare hasn't responded to White Mountain's offer yet, said Jeanette Liang of PopCulturePR, the firm that came up with the change-your-town's-name gambit. The gaming site “has a million and five things to do because the World Series of Poker is coming up,” Liang said. “So this is on hold.” Still, Pokershare has every intention of making good on their offer, Liang said, and will consider White Mountain's lagoon proposal.
The gaming site has put its money where its mouth is before. Pokershare gave away 8,000 gallons of gasoline to motorists in New York on Memorial Day weekend. Liang said they're planning a similar giveaway in Los Angeles the weekend before Independence Day. As promotions go, the New York gas giveaway was a good bet: Pokershare spent an estimated $26,000 on fuel, and recouped mentions on the radio and local TV news, and even a story in The New York Times.
The town-rename might be an even better wager.
For offering to buy burgs' names, Pokershare.com's name has been splashed in local, regional and national media from Swindleville, Louisiana to Cheatham, Arkansas - and Pokershare hasn't paid a penny. PopCulturePR principal Darren Shuster even got a trip out of it.
Shuster traveled to Alaska in April, when he spent a night in White Mountain. Titus, the city clerk, put him on her snowmachine and showed him around. “It was a nice day but it was cold,” she said, “and I think he got cold.” Liang said Shuster “had a crazy adventure” in White Mountain and that he even “played poker with some Eskimos.” Shuster was unavailable for comment.
Locals said Shuster did not make it to Bluff, Utah, Bluff City, Arkansas or Sharer, Kentucky, whose names Pokershare also offered to buy. Each of those towns also has fewer than 350 people. Pokershare's town-rename initiative for them apparently consisted of someone calling around with the offer and then contacting media.
In Kentucky a call went to Judge Hugh Evans. His jurisdiction includes the town of Sharer, which is so small that it does not even have a sign that says “Sharer,” Evans said. “They don't have a mayor and they don't have a city counselor.” Pokershare “said they'd give $100,000 to a school, but [Sharer doesn't] have a school.”
Evans said he told Pokershare's PR firm that he could not speak for the people of Sharer. “Then it just kind of went away,” Evans said.
“But it was in newspapers across the country.”
Patrick McDermott, former chairman of the service area board in Bluff, Utah, said Darren Shuster called him with the name-change offer but he didn't take it seriously. McDermott said he told the media about the offer because he thought it was so silly.
Bluff's name doesn't just belong to the people who live there now, McDermott said, it belongs to the past, present and future. “We tried to say, 'Look, the idea of selling the name of the town for $100,000 is as stupid and short-sighted as the idea of actively recruiting radioactive waste to be stored in the area,'” he said.
The moral, McDermott said, is that a town may be small and it may be poor, but “you don't have to sell yourself out.”
In September of 2005, when Sharer, Kentucky was considering the pitch to change its name, Shuster said, “If they say 'no,' that's OK. We can go to another city... Let them tell their constituents that they're going to turn down that kind of money. For what? Civic pride?”
The World Series of Poker begins June 25 and is slated to end August 10. In two months, White Mountain should know if they're getting $100,000 for education in return for renaming a lagoon. If all goes according to Hoyle, Pokershare should be getting another round of media mentions no matter the outcome. As they have here - even though Flashlight will give you 10-to-one odds that Pokershare.com Lagoon won't be in the Alaska atlas any time soon.
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