399: Roller Hockey International's San Jose Rhinos - With Brad Porteus
What do you get when you mix Gen X slacker spirit, a startup sports league on wheels, and a 25-year-old Deadhead-turned-front office exec? Welcome to the wild world of Roller Hockey International (RHI) — and the improbable story of the San Jose Rhinos.
Brad Porteus, former GM of the Rhinos and author of the rollicking new memoir "Roll With It: A Trip Back to the '90s - Gen X Style," joins us to unpack one of the most absurd, glorious, and ultimately short-lived chapters in modern American pro sports history.
RHI burst onto the scene in the early 1990s during the inline skating craze, promising a legit summer hockey league full of high-speed thrills and low-rent spectacle. What it delivered was equal parts innovation and chaos.
Porteus was there from the beginning — drafting players who could barely skate; marketing a new team, league and sport on a shoestring budget; and helping San Jose win an unlikely Murphy Cup championship in only its second season (1995).
But Roll With It is about more than sports. It’s also a love letter to the analog '90s, a memoir of coming of age in an ascendant Silicon Valley, and a tribute to the resilient, underdog ethos of Generation X. Porteus brings us into a time before social media, when careers were launched on little more than a mixtape, a road map, and the blind faith that you could figure it out.
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