AAF careful with Hotshots
League did its research before announcing nickname
Sean Misner loved football. Absolutely loved it.
He played receiver and defensive back in high school, where his teammates called him “Mighty Mouse.” He played in the backyard with his family. He looked forward to playing with his son.
He had gold cleats inspired by Deion Sanders that he ordered online. He had a star tattoo for the Dallas Cowboys on his calf. He got it after going with his mom, Tammy, to get hers. She was a little nervous about the pain, but he held her hand the whole time. He had a Cowboys sticker on the back of his truck.
He played football up through his first year of community college. He coached high schoolers outside of Santa Barbara. But he still missed actually playing.
When Tammy first heard about the Alliance of American Football, a small new league of pro teams, she was a little
bit sad.
She thought Sean might have tried out for Arizona’s team, if he had had the chance.
“I always thought, gosh, maybe Sean would have some kind of opportunity,” she said.
Instead, the truck with the Cowboys sticker carried Sean’s ashes home to California.
Instead, his son was born two months after he died in the Yarnell Hill Fire.
Instead, the team was named after Sean.
The process
The Alliance of American Football was founded in March of 2018 as the latest professional football league. It sought to complement the NFL, not compete with it. It lasted just eight weeks of the regular season before majority owner Tom Dundon pulled funding, shutting down operations indefinitely.
But before all that, in September of 2018, the AAF rolled out the second batch of names for the eight teams in the new league. The Salt Lake Stallions. The San Antonio Commanders. The San Diego Fleet.
The Arizona Hotshots.
The naming process was deliberate, but still raised a few eyebrows. There’s no other team name quite like it.
Hotshots are elite crews of wildland firefighters. Like other fire crews, they cut brush and dig fire lines in the dirt using chainsaws and Pulaskis. Unlike other crews, they take on the most challenging, most dangerous parts of a fire. They are the ones who get called when times are toughest.
The team said the name was meant to honor all hotshots, men and women in Arizona and across the country.
But in Arizona, was there really any question which hotshots were “the” hotshots?
Before June 30, 2013, much of the country had never heard of Prescott, where the Granite Mountain Hotshots were based, or of a hotshot crew at all. But by the next day, America would become deeply familiar with both, through the stories of firefighters like Sean Misner. He was one of 19 killed in the Yarnell Hill Fire.
It was the deadliest wildfire in Arizona, the deadliest U.S. wildfire in 80 years, and the largest loss of firefighters since Sept. 11, 2001.
A tight-knit community in Arizona was thrust into the national spotlight, and the rest of the country learned more about what a hotshot is through the stories of the 19 who would not return.
Nearly six years later, they cycled back into the public eye. This time, they were emblazoned on the jerseys of a football team.
The team names were decided behind closed doors at the AAF league office, without input from the franchises themselves. Marc Jacobson, head of brand for the league, says that the league threw out about 50 names for each team. From there, they looked into further discussion, copyright laws and market research. They kept circling back to the Hotshots.
“Ultimately, when we did the research, it just rose to the top,” he said.
All of this happened at AAF headquarters, before informing the team in Arizona, the group that would then be responsible for unveiling the name. When he finally got word, team president Scott Brubaker knew it was a “tricky” line to walk.
“The responsibility part is we need to communicate this right. And we need to do it well, and do it with compassion and honor and all those different things,” he said. “And certainly not making any kind of marketing campaign, because that would be inappropriate. So it was tricky. And I needed a lot of help to contextualize the thing and make sure that we were really sensitive to all the different people involved.”
The Granite Mountain Hotshots tragedy had already had plenty of sports tieins. The Diamondbacks wore special patches. The Cardinals helped funnel donations.
In North Carolina, John Marsh was recognized at halftime of an Appalachian State University football game; He and his son Eric had both gone to school there. Eric Marsh had been the hotshots’ superintendent, and was among the 19 who died.
But those sports events were singular. A team name, and the branding that came with, was intended to be permanent.
Other professional teams make nods to historical events, natural disasters or even to government groups — the New England Patriots, the Columbus Blue Jackets, the Carolina Hurricanes, the Texas Rangers.
But there was no other team name quite like this on a stage so large.
While the front office repeatedly said the intent was to include all first responders, the immediate association was still more specific, to 19 deaths that were still so recent.
Tying the team instead to Arizona was purposeful. While there are more than 100 hotshot crews across the U.S., just 11 are based in Arizona. There are 48 in California, which also had an AAF team.
John Truett, who has worked 39 years in firefighting and who served as an unofficial consultant to the team, was quick to say that there was never a controversy. Plus, anyone in the wildland firefighter community didn’t have much time to think about it: By the time the season started in February, they were busy looking ahead to wildfire season.
Aside from some feedback over things like the axes in the logo — the team said they were unique hotshot tools called Pulaskis, while others said they looked more like pickaxes — Jacobson said the people he heard from were excited.
“It’s very special and very, very happy that we were able to develop something that I think people have embraced and understand why we did it,” Jacobson said.
He said in March that the branding process was the most memorable thing he’d ever done. Part of that stems from the fact that it was so unique; Jacobson does not anticipate ever working through a branding process quite like this again: “I don’t think we call we would call a team ‘the Titanic,’ right?”
In the six months since the league announced the team name, the families of those men have had time to process this latest nod of remembrance.
First, they had to find out. The team did not reach out to the families directly. Many family members of the Granite Mountain crew learned about the name from the newspaper, from social media or from each other. There was some skepticism at first, and even shades of indignation. But mostly, there was genuine curiosity: What was this team, and how would they actually recognize the hotshots?
The team partnered with the 100 Club of Arizona, an organization that aims to provide financial relief and emotional support to the families of first responders who are killed or seriously injured in the line of the duty.
“When we were approached by them, we thought, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ We just wanted to make sure they were doing everything for the right reasons,’” said Angela Harrolle, president of the 100 Club of Arizona. “And they absolutely were.”
According to Jacobson, before the league office selected the name, they consulted fire departments throughout Arizona. They felt good about the feedback, confident in their research and believed their tribute was tasteful. They also knew no name would please everybody. But the most important feedback was the most subjective: What would the families think?
John Marsh thought it was a great honor. He loved that the colors mimicked the crew’s uniforms. Tammy Misner agreed, while recognizing reasons someone could feel differently.
“They may like it, or they may feel offended because they’re a football team and they’re not the real hotshots. Maybe this football team, the players, they don’t really know what it’s like to be out there on the fire,” she said.
But she thought it was an honor. “I think that anything that can bring light and bring recognition, just in the fact of understanding what happened and what these guys do.”
Dan Parker took a moment to process it.
“When I first heard about it, it kind of took me back. Like ‘What? What is this? Why are they calling themselves the Hotshots?’ ” he said. “I was not not okay with it, but it did take me back when I first heard about it.”
It took him back to his son, Wade, who was in his second year on the crew at the time of the fire. Wade, who was all-region in football and all-state in baseball. Wade, who was Rookie of the Year for the hotshots in 2012. Wade, who is frozen in time at age 22.
Ultimately, Parker was swayed by how he believed Wade would feel.
“I know that he would be jumping up and down,” Parker said. “If he knew, if he saw that going on, if he was here – he would think it were neater than sliced bread.”
The families
On Sunday, March 3, 26 family members representing six of the 19 fallen hotshots came to Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe for the Hotshots’ second home game of the season.
Suzanne Wagner, mother of Garret Zuppiger, took the field for the coin toss. Then, the families spent most of the game together up in the suites.
With about five minutes left in the second quarter, the families congregated by the Pat Tillman statue in the north end zone, waiting for halftime. The lone survivor of the Granite Mountain crew, Brendan McDonough, was there as well. There were long hugs, piggybacks, and some tears.
They’re used to these events now, the families, these gatherings of the only people who truly understand. These memorials have now become an accustomed part of their lives.
“I told a lot of the families when all this first happened there, whether we like it or not, we all became a family,” Parker said. “And we will be now until the day we’re not here anymore.”
And so that new family took the field. A member of the stadium operations team told them to walk onto the field in single file, but in the actual moment, they walked out in more natural clumps. Here was Dan Parker with his wife, Michelle. There was Amanda, Sean’s widow, with their son, Jaxon, born two months after the fire.
A video featuring Deborah Pfingston, mother of hotshot Andrew Ashcraft, and Desiree Steed, widow of crew captain Jesse Steed, started the tribute. While halftime is usually a break for food, drinks or the bathroom, Sun Devil Stadium seemed to stand still and silent.
Partway through the video, Sean Misner’s widow, Amanda, knelt down at midfield as their son, Jaxon, buried his head in her shoulder, inconsolable. He would later shriek out “I miss my daddy!” as Amanda carried him off the field.
At the end of the line of families was McDonough, nicknamed Donut, the lookout on that fateful day and the crew’s lone survivor.
“I think it’s turned out phenomenally well,” McDonough said after halftime. “I think they’ve really put a lot of effort into trying to make it authentic and not so cheesy, and honoring really. They’ve respected my brothers’ name and their legacy and the crew, but also honor all hotshots.”
McDonough was stopped and embraced by fans as he later walked back up the stairs of the north end zone, but for the beginning the halftime recognition, he stood alone. That was before Bruce Lindquist, grandfather of Garret Zuppiger, pulled him over for a long embrace.
“I said, ‘ Donut, join us. Cause you don’t have any family here, but you’re part of the Zuppiger family,’ ” Lindquist said.
While only six of the 19 families were on hand, Harrolle felt that was normal.
“We didn’t have anyone not participating because they objected to it on any level,” she said. Many of the families don’t live in Arizona, much less in Tempe. The timing of a Sunday night 6 o’clock game didn’t help. Tammy Misner would have loved to have been there, but trip from southern California was too hard to swing. Some of the families that were there stayed at the stadium until about 9, mingling after the game before making the drive that night back to Prescott.
Families all grieve in different ways. Harrolle, who got involved with the 100 Club after her own husband was killed in the line of duty, says it’s normal to have an ebb and flow of when people want to be involved and vocal, and when they want to take a step back into the privacy they knew before.
And of course, this is far from the first or only memorial for the 19 families. There have been speeches, state parks, museums, murals and movies. This routine has been performed time and time again, with the football franchise just marking the latest act.
“I think that their intent is to honor them. We have no control how they do that,” Parker said. “We honor our guys in our own way, and we know that there’s other people out there that want to honor them. And we think that that’s great.”
The name of each crew member was called out in alphabetical order. Then, a banner was unfurled in the south end zone with the number 19, the first and only number retired in the AAF.
The future
The ceremony was over.
Just like that, the rest of the stadium went back to watching football.
The hotshots’ families did too, but even on a celebratory night, in suites high above the field, there were subtle reminders of the tragedy that brought them there in the first place.
Nearly six years since the Yarnell Hill Fire, Lindquist still has a photo of his grandson as the background on his phone. Zuppiger is holding a chainsaw in the picture, and Lindquist proudly tells how he could use the massive power tool with enough precision to pop open a beer bottle.
Dan Parker tells a story of Wade’s high school football days as if it were yesterday. About to be tackled just outside the end zone, Wade had the foresight to lateral to a teammate who punched it in as Wade himself was throttled to the ground.
And the families are looking toward the future, too. Tammy Misner is training for the Boston Marathon, first by running a few half marathons. She just ran one on Sunday, the day before Sean’s birthday. John Marsh serves on the board of the Granite Mountain Interagency Training Center, which will teach visitors about the crew through interactive exhibits.
So the timing of the team name helped. Had it been proposed in the months after the tragedy, as families went from shock to grieving to being entrenched in a legal battle for benefits, it probably would have been far too soon. Now, enough time has passed that that there’s an emphasis to continue the legacy.
“It really hasn’t been that long, but for a community of hotshots that were so well supported, and so involved, to have that taper off, and then have somebody come back and say, ‘We remember, we honor this, we want you to know that we are going to carry on this legacy in the most positive way possible,’ is probably the most impactful thing ever for these families,” Harrolle said.
Tammy Misner was able to meet some of the players ahead of the season. She told them about Sean, and she told them about her hopes for the team.
“I really hope and pray that this, you know, this turns into something and that it does well,” she told them.
The Hotshots played in Sun Devil Stadium, where fire imagery is woven in to the setting. Banners with flames licking upward line the concrete walls of the end zones year-round. Some overlapped with the Hotshot logos, the flames literally creeping up over the team name. The student section is known as the Inferno. The sounds of chainsaws reverberated after big plays. Sponsored ads around the concourse asked fans if they can handle the heat.
The pregame video drew on inspiration from firefighters, but also showed images of the late Pat Tillman and the late Sen. John McCain, before jumping to the team’s logo and live footage of the players running out of the tunnel.
“Heat. Searing, scorching heat,” it said. “Fourteen-hundred degrees of seemingly unstoppable power. Arizona is home to many types of hero: mavericks, warriors and hotshots.”
It was very different from a typical sports highlight reel.
For the team though, the focus is on the similarities between the two groups. A lot of firefighters get into the field because they’re former athletes and are drawn to the tight-knit aspects of a crew. There’s camaraderie, and there’s a greater goal. There’s overlapping terminology, and there’s competition.
“There was only one time the Garret even said anything bad about the Hotshot crew,” Lindquist recalled, smiling. “That’s when he didn’t get rookie of the year, and he got mad at Wade Parker.”
And alignments matter, too. The X’s and O’s of a football scheme make a plan for how the team will work together to protect the ball. A quick diagram shows where everyone should be and where they go next.
On June 30, as the inferno advanced, the hotshots pulled on their fire shelters as a final means of protection. After the flames rolled over and after they were found, it was notable how close together they still were, a team until the very end.
“To die with that kind of devastating effect and still have been cohesive enough to stay together instead of anybody panicking and running off, it’s just something to marvel over,” said Dan Fraijo, the Prescott Fire Department chief at the time. Fraijo, who lives in Prescott but was unable to attend the game, supported the name as well.
To make sure the players understood the name they were taking on, a key part was educating the men who would be donning the Hotshots jerseys. Coach Rick Neuheisel and other team staff debriefed their players about the Yarnell Fire and the lives lost ahead of the season.
Learning about the Hotshots didn’t stop after that meeting. Linebacker Steve Beauharnais, a New Jersey native, had never heard about them before. After getting the background from coaches, he sought more information. He watched “Only The Brave.“He read what he could. He learned about picks, Pulaskis and fire shelters.
He wanted to keep learning and keep sharing their story. Beauharnais wore custom cleats with images of the Granite Mountain crew for the team’s franchise debut. Sean Misner took the field after all.
The banner with the 19 inside a shield hung for the remaining home games, and players had a decal with the number on their helmets.
But the brand of the team was never meant to always be so somber. They played the raucous song “SHOTS” by LMFAO and Lil Jon after every touchdown. They blasted music throughout the night and cut to fans dancing on the jumbotron between plays. They were still a football team that wanted to win and wanted to celebrate.
That was all fine with Parker. “They’re going to have a team whether you like it or not,” he said back in March.