We continue with Joshua’s Hunt’s conversation with Jim Riswold. If you missed Part 1, go here.
With David Kennedy’s death in October 2021, and Dan Wieden’s less than a year later, the eulogies all but closed the book on a period that redefined sports marketing. And yet, even as big ideas gave way to big data, the cultural influence of W+K’s glory years has persisted in pop culture as defiantly as Riswold has clung to the advertising profession.
In a recent interview for entertainment magazine Variety, Spike Lee told the actor and director Bradley Cooper about how Riswold and his colleague Bill Davenport had cast him in his series of Nike commercials alongside Michael Jordan.
When Tiger Woods announced he was ending his decades-long partnership with Nike in January, it was Riswold who bade farewell to the golf legend in an advertisement for the brand published in The New York Times: “It was a hell of a round, Tiger,” he wrote, alongside a photo evoking the 1996 “Hello World” commercial that heralded the start of Woods’s professional career.
When I spoke to Riswold the day after the Times ad ran, its promise as a metaphorical device for my story was never far from my mind. If we talked long enough about putting old business to rest in the twilight of a brilliant career, the emotional resonance of his illness would shine through.
Then near the end, out of nowhere, Riswold asked if I knew just how sick he was, and before I could manage a thoughtful reply, he told me he was dying.
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