A tired, limping football player heads down a stadium tunnel after a game. A small boy in the shadows offers him a bottle of Coke. The player, Pittsburgh Steelers defensive tackle “Mean” Joe Greene, drinks it in one go, then smiles, tosses the kid his jersey and says the line the ad is named after: “Hey kid, catch!”
The commercial debuted on October 1, 1979, during the Major League Baseball playoffs. It was written by Penny Hawkey at McCann Erickson and directed by N. Lee Lacy, with young Tommy Okon as the boy. It aired again around Super Bowl XIV in early 1980, just as Greene’s Steelers were winning the championship, which only added to its fame.
Nothing in it is a joke and there is no clever twist. The story is a small act of kindness between a scary-looking star and a shy fan, and a bottle of Coke is what connects them. Viewers wrote tens of thousands of letters to Coca-Cola about it, and the company later remade the idea with sports stars in other countries, including Thailand, Italy and Brazil.
The ad won a Clio and a Cannes Gold Lion. Greene, who was a Hall of Fame player, received his Clio trophy decades later, on the ad’s 30th anniversary. It is still the standard example of how an ad can borrow an athlete’s tough image and use it to tell a warm story.
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