Years from now, Michael Powell hopes lacrosse fans will look back and consider this past year a selfless endeavor. Forget about the house he bought in Colorado or the Escalade he’s driving in the meantime. Soon people will be thanking Powell for what he’s done to advance the sport of lacrosse.

Signing a professional contract with Brine Inc., creating his own Mikey Powell products line, attending rock concerts for research purposes, overseeing his Web site, recording his an album and touring the country like a rock star with a company issued video camera and credit card. That’s also for the good of lacrosse.

But the four-time Attackman of the Year and arguably one of the best college players ever is having a hard time convincing the lacrosse world of that after refusing to play professionally this past summer.

‘People took that pretty negatively,’ said Powell, who ended his Syracuse career with his second national championship. ‘Four years of college lacrosse really weighs on you. It makes things tough. I just needed some time off to get my financial life straightened around and get everything in order.’

Lacrosse fans will finally get their wish when Powell begins his Major League Lacrosse rookie season with the Baltimore Bayhawks on May 28. Yet when the 22-year-old from West Carthage, N.Y., returned to Syracuse last week, playing on the field seemed the furthest thing on his mind.

Powell beamed with excitement as he personally greeted the 500-to-600 fans who showed up to Lacrosse Unlimited’s two-hour autograph session April 7. He did it again the next day at Gait Brothers Lacrosse, which was just another stop on his whirlwind tour to promote his new equipment and apparel line that debuted in early March.

‘Lacrosse has given me so much, and I’d love to give back somehow and bring this game mainstream,’ Powell said. ‘It deserves to be up there with football and basketball. Right now the main focus is getting the sport where it should be. If it means coming out here to Syracuse to sign autographs, I’ll do it. If it means me playing lacrosse, I’ll do it.’

Last summer, the No. 1 draft pick in the MLL didn’t consider playing lacrosse an option. Some people speculated whether it was because Powell wanted to play with his brothers, Ryan and Casey, on the Rochester Rattlers instead of joining the Bayhawks. But Powell said he was taking a year off regardless of who drafted him.

He could afford putting one childhood dream on hold for a couple others, as long as he found a lacrosse company that would allow him to design his own equipment and pursue his musical career.

It turned into a ‘recruiting battle’ as Powell called it, between Brine and Warrior Lacrosse – the company both his brothers joined after college. And that’s when Brine Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Mike Martin, made the sales pitch he’d been waiting to make from the moment he joined the relatively unknown company two years ago.

‘I said if you want to turn this company around, you have to get Mikey Powell,’ said Martin, who played lacrosse for Hobart in the early 1980s. ‘That’s how special I knew he was.’

Martin knew Powell possessed a certain lifestyle that young consumers could relate to, since he played guitar and listened to the same music they did. And on the playing field, Powell reminded him of one of his former clients from his days at Reebok, Allen Iverson.

Both athletes played at a fast pace and entertained fans with their creativity every time they got the ball. They had a flair for excitement and loved the big stage. In Martin’s eyes, if Iverson’s crossover dribble made fans out of young kids, then Powell’s split dodge could do the same.

Lacrosse never had a poster boy, someone who had the charisma and the talent to launch himself into pop culture. There had been some equipment lines, like Gait Brothers Lacrosse, but no one had ever started his own apparel line. And that’s where Brine and Powell sealed the deal, because they both wanted it to happen.

‘He’s the first lacrosse player capable of carrying his own signature line,’ Martin said. ‘If I was a Hollywood agent, I’d say (Powell) has that star factor. He’s got the look, he’s charming, he’s confident in the way he carries himself, and then when you transfer that attitude to the game he plays it on a different level. You don’t have to know anything about lacrosse to see that he plays the game at a different speed than everyone else.’

After taking his position as marketing specialist in August, Powell went to work on creating his signature logo – a symbol that represents the wing-shaped eye black he sported for every Syracuse game.

He created a shaft, a head, T-shirts, beanies, wristbands and belts. It would be months before the equipment hit stores, but Powell’s mind was racing as he wondered what he might be starting. Even Michael Jordan started out small when Nike introduced his signature line almost two decades ago.

‘I’m not comparing myself to Michael Jordan,’ Powell said, ‘but I thought lacrosse needed a big name to bring some of this apparel mainstream. That’s kind of my job, and it’s something I always wanted to do and dreamed of as a kid.’

Powell’s like a kid in a candy store and Brine is letting him buy whatever he wants. He’s in charge of researching new bands and songs to include on Brine’s second lacrosse game-time compilation disc, Countdown to Chaos II. Powell is also producing a solo album with Trevor Pryce of the Denver Broncos, who owns a $500,000 recording studio near Powell’s office. It will be a collection of songs Powell has written over the years, which he compares to the melodies of Jack Johnson.

Powell even put his own musical twist on his signature shoes, which will be on the shelves later this year, by slipping a guitar pick over the triangular logo on the tongue of each shoe. And this is all coming from the Syracuse student who never once visited the School of Management and rarely raved about his academics.

‘I never took a marketing class at Syracuse,’ Powell said. ‘It’s certainly something I wish I would have taken instead of child and family studies.’

He’s learning quickly, though. Within the next couple years, 20 to 30 Mikey Powell products will clutter lacrosse retail stores. And if the start is any indication of the future, business should be good, said Lacrosse Unlimited manager Bobby Errante.

‘He’s definitely helped our business from the standpoint of increasing sales,’ Errante said. ‘Him playing in the MLL will make his product line jump. Kids need to see him still playing out there, doing Mikey Powell things. By him playing in the league, it’s going to create more hype and be a huge success.’

Syracuse isn’t the only place where Powell’s products are flying off the shelf, either. One of Lacrosse Unlimited’s chain stores also hosted a Powell signing that attracted 300 kids, and that was in Madison, Wis., which isn’t known as much of a lacrosse hotbed.

Yet somehow they became Powell fans. Maybe they watched him score the game-winning goal against Navy in the 2004 national championship game. Maybe they saw him doing his renowned flip against UMass on SportsCenter’s Top 10 Plays. Somehow he caught their attention, and Powell thinks it’s that sort of showmanship that will continue to attract more fans.

‘If this game is going to go mainstream, it needs more people testing the boundaries of lacrosse,’ Powell said. ‘People look at me doing a front flip in a game and they think, ‘Wow, he’s being cocky.’ But you look at LeBron James doing a 360 dunk every night, and no one says anything about that.’

Brine liked the idea so much that on his Web site, mikeypowell.com, there’s a link of video clips with Powell doing the flip and many other new moves he’s created. But the thing that impresses Martin the most is Powell’s dedication to reading and responding to the thousands of queries he receives through the question-and-answer section on his site.

‘He’s a freak,’ Martin said. ‘He answers every freaking kid’s e-mail. I tell him you’re going to get burned out doing that, but he doesn’t.’

Powell cited burnout as the reason for sitting out a year, but the marketing side of things has pumped life back into his day. He’s working a 9-to-5 job, but he’s still goofing around with a lacrosse stick like he’s always done. Whether he’s tossing passes to himself in narrow Denver alleyways or getting chased by an enraged tractor-trailer driver after rifling a ball off the side of the vehicle, Powell’s obsession with lacrosse hasn’t dwindled.

His priorities are just on a more even plane – so much that his own father can’t confirm that Powell will be play professionally this summer.

‘Rumor has it, from what I’ve been reading on the Internet, he’ll be playing next year,’ Larry Powell said. ‘He hasn’t said a darn word to me about lacrosse. He’s having fun working for Brine right now.’

Powell will be out on the playing field, pushing the boundaries once again. His wallet will be a bit thicker and he’ll probably be the whipping boy for those fans who felt he let them down. But maybe one day they’ll realize what Mikey Powell did for the sport of lacrosse by creating a tidal wave of popularity that no other player was capable of producing.

‘People think me taking a year off is bad for the sport,’ Powell said, ‘but they don’t realize I’m making new products and trying to push the game and bring it to the next level. They think just playing is the only way to bring the game to where it needs to be. Hopefully, I can prove them wrong.’

Published on April 12, 2005 at 12:00 pm