Around 150,000 people will pack Bank of America Stadium on Friday and Saturday night to watch the Savannah Bananas. Thousands of others couldn’t find or afford tickets, which are going for hundreds of dollars on resale sites.
At the center of it all will be Gaston County resident and team owner Jesse Cole. He’ll be the tall, skinny guy in the yellow tuxedo, complete with top hat. It’s a trademark now, a way to stand out, that Cole adopted more than a decade ago before there ever was a Savannah Banana.
Cole’s entrepreneurial story starts in Gastonia in 2008. At age 23, he was the new general manager of the Gastonia Grizzlies, a collegiate summer league baseball team that was floundering.
He wasn’t dreaming yet of selling out stadiums from Anaheim, California, to Miami in what he calls “the greatest show in sports.”
“That would’ve been impossible,” he says. “The Gastonia team was failing. There were only a couple of hundred fans coming to the games. I had $268 in my bank account, so it was just about trying to find a way to make it successful and to get people to come to the games.”
Baseball alone wasn’t enough, says Cole. He found inspiration in his heroes, P.T. Barnum and Walt Disney. “We saw a better way.”
Cole started wearing the yellow tuxedo everywhere. The college guys still played baseball, but in the stands, fans were taking part in blindfolded pillow fights, kids were smashing pies in their dads’ faces and toddlers were racing turtles between innings while munching on garbage lid nachos and burgers with Krispy Kreme buns.
The rest is history. Cole’s “Fans First” mantra would become “Banana Ball.” The Bananas still play baseball, and he bristles at comparisons with basketball’s Harlem Globetrotters. Games aren’t scripted and outcomes against the opposing teams — the Party Animals, the Texas Tailgaters or the Firefighters — are not pre-determined. He says each game has between 10 and 15 new narratives or trick plays.
People pay attention to what’s going on in the field, but he and others are roaming the stands to engage fans all the way to the upper deck, he says. Cole says his mistakes have led him to sell out Bank of America Stadium, where the NFL’s Carolina Panthers play.
“Failure is just one step to getting better. Those failures just help us get to the next step, to get back up and swing,” he says.
Cole travels around the country, but calls Belmont home. He and his wife, Emily, became foster parents in Gaston County in 2020 during the pandemic, eventually adopting two children they fostered. They continue to be licensed foster parents in Gaston County, providing respite services. It started when Emily discovered there are 400,000 children in this country without a permanent home and has led to the nonprofit Bananas Foster, which raises awareness.
Foster families are a part of every Savannah Banana event. “It’s about bringing people together and bringing families together,” he says.
As for scaling his business, the Bananas and their affiliate teams will put on more than 100 shows this year. Next year, they’ll do even more and begin a Bananas’ League. He doesn’t want to talk about money, saying it’s not a part of his focus.
“We’re not interested in being a billion-dollar company, we want to create a billion fans,” he says. “I mean, we’re serving 2.2 million fans this year, so literally 2.2 million fans are buying tickets. How can we serve 3 million next year?
“If we take care of the fans, the revenue takes care of itself.”
The interview ends with a negative question. I ask Cole if he ever thought he’d be selling out Bank of America Stadium after trying to sell tickets at Sims Legion Park in Gastonia, a 1950-era ballpark where fans had to avoid pigeon droppings that often covered the bleachers. He doesn’t take the bait.
“I don’t remember anything like that,” Cole shoots back. “I remember the Flatulent Fun Night. I remember the Dig to China Night. I remember Midnight Madness. I remember the Grandma Beauty Pageant.
“I don’t remember anything with the pigeon poop. That must’ve been before my time.”