Boston may not have its World Series crown yet, but for now, it appears to own the word "strong."
Ever since the deadly bombing at the marathon in April, the city has clung tightly to the phrase "Boston Strong" as a local expression of its resilience.
That grip was tested during Monday's Game 5 of the World Series, with a planned promotion for the 2014 Chevrolet Silverado. Before the third inning, St. Louis Cardinals legend Ozzie Smith was scheduled to instruct fans at Busch Stadium to hold up placards that spelled out "Silverado Strong."
The promotion, invoking a word at the center of the redesigned truck's current ad campaign, was an effort to honor the brand's "commitment to baseball and its fans," GM spokesman Michael Albano said in an email Tuesday.
But the stunt never got off the ground. Photos of the signs went viral before the game, generating considerable buzz on social media, with some seeing it as a crassly commercial allusion to the Boston rallying cry.
"Due to Chevrolet usage of Silverado Strong, I will boycott Chevy for life!!!" a Boston fan wrote in a Twitter message. "Way to make profits off others misfortunes," a Cardinals' fan wrote.
A wary GM quickly canceled the promotion, and issued a statement Monday saying that it "realized there was the possibility that we may offend some of the very fans we were trying to honor."
Said Albino: "One of the benefits of social media is it allows an almost immediate, two-way conversation and feedback. So, while it did not drive our decision, we were glad to receive support online."
That didn't stop blogger David Brown of Yahoo Sports from piling on, and accusing GM of trying to "profit from domestic terrorism with a marketing campaign."
Why would the use of the word "strong" to describe a truck stir such passions?
After all, automakers have been using variations of the theme for years to advertise the toughness of their trucks, from Chevy's 2007 "Like a Rock" campaign to Ford's 35-year-old "Built Ford Tough" tag line. Even if Chevy's "Strong" ads debuted in July, three months after the Boston bombing, automakers have owned the idea of "strong" for decades.
It's fair to call GM tone-deaf. With millions of Boston fans and sympathizers following every World Series pitch -- both baseball and commercial -- someone at the company ought to have made the verbal connection and backed off the idea well before the placards got into fans' hands.
But for a Yahoo Sports writer to say that an American automaker tried to profit off an act of terrorism is ridiculously over the top — even for a sports blog. The promo was never intended to be an insult or a challenge to Boston.
Nobody owns the word "strong," but pulling the ad was ultimately in good form. As GM North America President Mark Reuss put it in a tweet following the removal of the ad: "Sometimes you just do what is right."
Maybe certain folks at Yahoo could show the same restraint.
