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Percival Blanco

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Aug 2, 2024, 9:51:47 AM8/2/24
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"Bad Sport," a series of six short documentaries about sports scandals that will stream on Netflix, revisits one of the darkest moments in Arizona State University history, sports-related or otherwise, one the school and its fans would like to forget: the point-shaving scandal involving former player Stevin "Hedake" Smith.

"Hoop Schemes," directed by Luke Sewell, offers, in addition to interviews with Smith and others involved, a straightforward explanation of how betting lines and point spreads and throwing games works, should you ever be in need of such knowledge.

The quick version of what happened is this: ASU was a constant underachiever in basketball. "They were a sleeping giant," Kent Somers, a columnist for The Arizona Republic who covered the team at the time, says in the film. "And most of us who lived there thought this giant is never going to wake up."

Smith and Burton, who he enlisted to help him, came through in a strange way: Smith scored 39 points, but ASU won by exactly six points. This led to fixing another couple of games, with Gagliano at this point betting millions of dollars all around town in Las Vegas (he had to keep bets under $10,000 each to avoid suspicion).

It's all ugly stuff. Smith and Burton talk about how easy it was to do, as does Gagliano. And they suggest that it is so easy it could happen again. Smith and Burton also talk about how student athletes should be paid, so that they aren't temped by the money to fix or throw games.

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Pepsi's most bizarre stunt, however, was its 1996 "Drink Pepsi Get Stuff" campaign. The crux of it was that consumers were encouraged to mass purchase cans of Pepsi to accumulate "Pepsi Points" in exchange for "Pepsi Stuff," or fun prizes. Notable items included a shirt, a leather jacket, some classy shades and, yes, a $23 million Harrier fighter jet.

Pepsi execs assumed the astronomical "price" of the jet would make it impossible for anyone to attain it. But they clearly thought wrong after one determined college student accepted the offer as a challenge and later sued Pepsi for the fighter jet prize that never existed in the first place.

Netflix's latest four-part docuseries, "Pepsi, Where's My Jet?" explores the epic saga between the multibillion-dollar company and college student John Leonard. Directed by Andrew Renzi, the series features interviews with Leonard and his business partner along with hot-shot PepsiCo executives and the lawyers who worked on the case.

The campaign was publicly introduced via a fun and amusing television commercial. In it, Pepsi offered a Pepsi logo t-shirt (which was worth 80 Pepsi points), a leather jacket (which was worth 1200 Pepsi points) and a pair of sunglasses (which was worth 125 Pepsi points). The final prize, and the company's most outlandish offering, was a $23 million Harrier fighter jet that was worth an astounding 7 million Pepsi points.

Pepsi's offering, however, was not a mere "joke" to John Leonard, who was a 20 year old community college student when he first saw the campaign's commercial. Leonard was also an avid mountain climber and world traveler. So for him, the pricey jet granted him both freedom and adventure. To help support his passions, Leonard worked multiple odd jobs, including teriyaki delivery person, window washer, paperboy, glass cutter and climbing guide.

Per Leonard's calculations, he would need to drink 190 Pepsi cans a day for 100 years in order to attain the required 7 million Pepsi points. That wasn't feasible for him or his family, so Leonard formulated a business plan to speed up the process. He also enlisted the help of Todd Hoffman, who was Leonard's climbing-buddy-turned-investor and 20 years his senior.

Leonard's multimillion-dollar business deal outlined labor costs, transportation costs and storage costs, which all totaled to a whopping $4.3 million. Leonard determined that he needed to buy 1.4 million 12-pack cans of Pepsi, which is over 16 million cans. Those cans would also take up about 600,000 cubic feet of storage space, meaning Leonard would need to store them across various warehouses. Leonard proposed acquiring six warehouses across six metropolitan areas and hiring his own workers, who would cut and store the Pepsi labels for him.

Prior to acquiring their Harrier Fighter Jet, Leonard and Hoffman had to confirm whether it was even legal to purchase a jet in the first place. Leonard reached out to the Pentagon under the guise that he was a student who needed the information for a school project. Leonard got in touch with Kenneth Bacon, the Chief Pentagon Spokesman from 1994 to 2001, who told him that it was legal to buy a Harrier jet as long as it didn't have all the armaments on it.

Leonard and Hoffman also agreed that after they secured their jet, they would showcase it at airshows, which could possibly open up additional business opportunities with advertisers and production companies, which would help recoup the money.

Leonard and Hoffman's $700,008.50 check eventually reached Pepsi's headquarters, much to the company's dismay. Turns out, the Pepsi jet campaign was a complete sham and the company didn't have a Harrier jet prize to offer.

Swette along with Michael Patti (Pepsi's former creative director) and Jeff Mordos (the former COO of Pepsi's Ad Agency) were set on ignoring the check, in hopes that Leonard's scheme would not encourage others to send money for the jet. In one instance, Patti suggested that the company keep the $700,008.50 and reward both Leonard and Hoffman with the model jet used in the Pepsi commercial.

As part of their legal battle against Pepsi, Leonard and Hoffman reached out to attorney Lawrence "Larry" Schantz. But, unfortunately, Pepsi beat them to the punch and sued Leonard first, simply as a way to intimidate him and Hoffman into dropping their fight.

"I was surprised that they initiated a lawsuit, frankly," Todd said in the documentary. "If anything, I thought there would have been a phone call or there would have been, 'Can we sit down and talk with you guys and see if you're real, if you're not real, if you really believe this ad, or you didn't?' Or whatever. We just filled out their instruction book and they followed it up by suing us."

To add to the hoopla, Pepsi edited their commercial shortly afterwards. The original 7 million Pepsi points for the Harrier Jet was changed to 700 million. Underneath the newfound price was the disclaimer "just kidding" written in parentheses.

"We were gonna have to bring public pressure to bear on John Leonard's behalf," Avenatti explained in the documentary. "You know, by way of some aggressive public relations action. A full-court press with the media. I told him, 'We're gonna kick Pepsi's ass, and all of their lawyers and all of their media types. We're gonna outplay them at their own game.'"

Unlike Pepsi, Leonard and Avenatti did not have the money or the means to launch a $50 million ad campaign. So, in order to publicize Leonard's side of the story, they relied on free media, like radio shows, that invited John to speak on air. Soon, television crews, television networks and talk shows reached out to Leonard to broadcast his tale.

In the documentary, Avenatti mentioned that he spent hundreds of hours researching Pepsi and its past promotional scandals. He learned that Pepsi had run the same campaign in Canada with a disclaimer at the end of the ad specifying that the Harrier fighter jet was not an available prize. He also learned about Pepsi's deadly bottle cap lottery campaign in the Philippines. The 1992 campaign, also known as "Number Fever," promised low-income residents various sums of prize money, ranging from 100 pesos to 1 million pesos, if they had a Pepsi bottle with the winning number on its cap. Things quickly went awry when Pepsi erroneously printed 600,000 bottle caps with the lucky number for the grand prize and cheated people out of the money they rightfully deserved. On May 25, the final day of the campaign, riots broke out, which left at least five people dead.

In the end, Leonard lost the "Pepsi Points Case" after the court, presided over by Judge Kimba Wood, determined that the case didn't have merit because "no objective person could reasonably have concluded that the commercial actually offered consumers a Harrier jet."

"From a long-tenured, federal judge's perspective, it may have not seemed like a legitimate offer," Leonard said in the documentary. "But I can tell ya, millions of my peers saw the commercial and thought it was an offer."

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