The House that Hooters Built
The Coastal Carolina Chanticleers call Brooks Stadium their football home, so let's learn a little more about the venue's namesake.
Welcome to the first subscriber-selected column of Assigned, What’s In A Name. This series will look at the names of stadiums, trophies, and other non-human entities in the sports world; it won our first subscriber poll last week, and it will continue until some unspecified point in the future when I feel like the idea has run its course or needs a break. Want to participate in the decision-making process next time around? Become a paid supporter of Assigned today!
Traditionalists probably find colorful artificial turf in college football stadiums fairly tacky. Boise State’s famous blue field goes back nearly four decades, but most other alternative surfaces – Eastern Michigan’s concrete gray, the Inferno at Eastern Washington, and the purple-gray stripes at Central Arkansas, to name a few – popped up much more recently.
If you hate those, you assuredly cringe at the sight of Coastal Carolina’s teal turf.
Consider, however, that Coastal doesn’t play in South Bend or Ann Arbor or Norman or any of the other Storied and Hallowed Places of College Football. The Chanticleers lace them up twenty minutes from Myrtle Beach, and if you can’t have a little bit of delightfully tacky fun in Myrtle, what, exactly, are you doing there?
Besides, without tackiness, the man who gave Coastal two million dollars to help build a football stadium would never have amassed a restaurant fortune in the first place. The venue is Brooks Stadium, the man was Robert H. Brooks, and the restaurant, which he helped take worldwide, is Hooters.
We should establish a few basics about Bob before getting into the stadium that bears his last name.
Bob, who passed away in 2006, did not attend Coastal Carolina. He graduated from Clemson in 1960 with a degree in dairy science and grew up about half an hour away from Coastal in Loris, South Carolina.
Bob did not create Hooters. The restaurant began the way all smart business plans do – as the brainchild of six guys living in St. Petersburg, Florida. Bob gets a lot of the credit, however, for expanding Hooters from a local joint that combined sexiness and chicken wings to an international franchise that combined sexiness and chicken wings. For instance, last summer, I saw John Daly inside a Hooters location … in Liverpool after he missed the cut at the Open Championship.
Bob also pushed Hooters into new directions outside of the restaurants, like Hooters Air, which operated for three years, and the Hooters Tour, a developmental golf tour that the company sponsored for seventeen years. And, at least in part because he loved the area, Bob managed to put the headquarters for both the tour and the airline in Myrtle Beach.
When Coastal first unveiled the Brooks Stadium name, some outlets said the building was being named for Bob, but the school made it clear that, in fact, the stadium name honored Bob’s two children, Coby Garrett and Boni Belle. It’s not unheard of for a rich benefactor to have something named in honor of someone besides themselves, especially if the person being honored has a connection that the benefactor doesn’t. So let’s learn a little bit more about the Brooks children to see if they have any Chanticleer ties.
Coby Brooks, like his father, graduated from Clemson. In the same year that the stadium name was announced, Bob designated Coby as his successor at Hooters. As CEO, Coby appeared on an early episode of Undercover Boss, where he watched a manager force his waitresses to partake in a “eat a plate of baked beans without using your hands as quickly as possible” competition.
(I haven’t watched The Bear, so please let me know if speed-eating beans is just part of the high-stress world of working in a restaurant.)
Bob’s death triggered some contentious estate wrangling that eventually led to a sale of the wing giant’s majority ownership. In a twist that was half irony, half all Myrtle Beach politics are local, Hooters found itself controlled by a company named Chanticleer Holdings LLC, run by a former Coastal Carolina baseball player named Mike Pruitt. Within a few months of new ownership taking over, Coby found himself forced out of the company.
Did corporate expulsion or televised discomfort push Coby to a new field? No! He immediately started working with Twin Peaks, the Hooters competitor that asks whether your sexy restaurant experience has been sufficiently outdoorsy. Hooters wound up suing Brooks and some other former executives for taking sensitive and confidential business documents with them on the way out, but the suit fizzled. We may never know what incredible scientific advancements Hooters lost to Twin Peaks!
While Coby was a full-grown adult when he learned his last name would be on Coastal’s football stadium, Boni Belle wasn’t even in grade school yet. No academic wunderkind awaits you in this story; I hope you know that if Boni Belle Brooks graduated from Coastal at the age of four, I would have led with that information.
Boni Belle’s name doesn’t just show up on Brooks Stadium. Since 2002, Clemson’s performing arts venue (the Robert Howell Brooks Center, because the man wasn’t gonna name everything after the kids) has presented the Boni Belle Brooks Series. There’s also the Boni Belle Practice and Hitting Facility, which opened in 2011 for the Coastal Carolina baseball and softball teams. And remember Hooters Air? The airline’s inaugural flight took place on a Boeing 737 named The Boni Belle.
Without blowing up a private person’s spot too much, I’m reasonably certain Boni stayed in South Carolina for her undergraduate education but didn’t attend Coastal.
As for Hooters? Two private equity firms acquired the company in 2019, and the company just closed 40 locations this week but insists “this brand of 41 years remains highly resilient and relevant.” And, again, I can confirm from personal experience that Liverpudlians still have regular access to Hooters, as do the people of 23 other countries outside the United States. If you live in Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, or Wyoming, you’ll need to travel to another state, however.
Chanticleer football and Brooks Stadium have changed plenty in the two decades since the name announcement. The team put together some good runs in the FCS playoffs under head coach Joe Moglia (who has his own unusual corporate backstory) before moving to FBS in 2017. The teal turf wasn’t an original feature either; that got put in before the 2015 season. But the name has remained unchanged.
Brooks Stadium boasts a name that honors two children of a captain of Hooters industry, though neither they nor their father spent a day as a student at Coastal Carolina. Let that be a lesson to any of you sitting on vast sums of wealth. With the right amount of money, you can get your name on a building. You can also get someone else’s name on it, just because you feel like it.