Dartmouth T-Shirts Come Under Fire

“I can’t believe you have an Ivy League degree.”

This is just one drop in a veritable ocean of hate mail received by the founders of Hard Guy Tees, a line of t-shirts inspired by Dartmouth frat life and launched this summer by two Dartmouth alums.

The shirts, which feature slogans such as “Hard Guy Gambling: Five bullets, six chambers” and “Hard Guy Dating: Having a girlfriend and not even liking her,” have drawn a steady stream of criticism. Robert J. Zangrilli, who founded the company with David C. Grey, maintains that their critics just don’t get the joke.

“[It’s] based on ironically imitating dudes who think they’re alpha males,” Zangrilli, who graduated from Dartmouth with Grey last spring, writes in an e-mail.

“The...philosophy is extremist, primitive, and self-destructive, but it’s still pretty damn funny,” he adds.

But judging from the company’s inbox, not everyone agrees.

“It bothers me that these ideas in any way, shape, or form would be associated with gender identities at Dartmouth,” Molly D. Jenkins, who graduated from Dartmouth in 2004, writes in an e-mail to The Crimson. “They need to get over their glory days. Irony is no excuse.”

According to Zangrilli, the mother of a customer threatened to get Mothers Against Drunk Driving involved after her son bought a shirt emblazoned with the slogan, “Hard Guy Golf: One beer a hole, loser drives home.”

Ironic or no, Hard Guy Tees have been catching on. After peddling t-shirts in Hanover, N.H. last year, Zangrilli and Grey launched a website over the summer and report strong sales.

Zangrilli credits the success in part to a guerilla marketing campaign that has included a “Book-Burning Party” the night before Dartmouth’s Commencement last spring.

“The main premise has been to market our product in a ‘Hard Guy’ fashion,” writes Zangrilli. “The most recent stunt I performed involved paying a DJ at a bar in San Francisco to stop playing music, standing on top of the main bar, yelling ‘Hard Guy Tees!’ and proceeding to chug a handle of Jack Daniels.”

The bottle in fact contained iced tea, and Zangrilli maintains that despite such a tough facade, Hard Guy Tees has a similarly sweet core.

He cites the company’s recent Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, known as the “Campaign for Lawlessness.” Ostensibly going to benefit “lawlessness and anarchy,” the company has sent a t-shirt to the Red Cross in New Orleans for every shirt ordered on its website.

“Yes, we’re making a joke about looting, sniping helicopters, and staying home when a category four hurricane is bearing down on you,” Zangrilli writes, “but people are missing the larger point—we’re actually trying to help out.”

The Hard Guy Tees website also includes testimonials, purportedly written by real “Hard Guys,” that portray college guys as drunk-driving, pizza-throwing, date-rape-drugging party animals. Zangrilli admits that he posts the stories himself, and adds that he isn’t too concerned about readers taking them seriously.

“Trust me, if people were driving cars into redwoods on behalf of Hard Guy Golf, I’d fold the company myself,” Zangrilli writes. “And yes, some people are taking the Hard Guy mentality too seriously, but I would say that’s what the slogans reflect, not the other way around.”