We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Steve Wright. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Steve below.
Steve, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you tell us the backstory behind how you came up with the idea?
As I sat at an outdoor restaurant in Palm Springs in the heat of the summer enjoying the cool mist vapor cooling the patrons, I had an aha moment that altered the next 10 years of my life. Knowing that our pre-season games in the LA Colosseum would be 80+ degrees without a breath of cool air stirring, I asked the manager how the system worked thinking I would ask Coach Shell if we could try this on the Raiders sidelines. It worked better than expected and everyone loved it. A ball boy gave me someones business card from the stands with a note they wanted to meet me after the game, so I had my first business meeting still in uniform that turned into a large sale and things took off from there.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Steve Wright, a playful and innately curious soul, enjoyed an eleven-year professional football career with the Cowboys, Colts, and Raiders, yet these years did not define him.
Driven by his entrepreneurial instincts, he created an innovative misting company, Cloudburst, that cooled professional sports, the US military, NASA, and the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics.
His motto to leave people, places, and things better than he found them also led to his work on behalf of Globall Giving to provide gently used sports equipment to over a million children across thirty countries and counting.
Forever a lover of adventure, Steve joined the cast of Survivor for thirty-one days of starvation where he embraced the jungle of Nicaragua and emerged more passionate about life. His journey of continuous growth includes an unparalleled passion for physical and mental fitness which he practices and shares with his community in Malibu, California.
Steve now brings his voice to the public debate on healthy masculinity and more broadly humanity through his memoir, Aggressively Human, inspiring others to embrace empathy and kindness as a complement, not a challenge, to aggression.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
The Dallas Cowboys signed me to a Free Agent contract in 1981 along with 120 other top players from around the country. Over the next six weeks, 117 of the 120 were cut as the Cowboys kept only me and two others. I went on to have an 11 year NFL Career, three times the normal length of the average.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
No goal or mission driving my creative juices, just being very present and aware. My Mist & Cool company, a low pressure cooling retail product employed 100+ employees working around the clock in the peak of the summers. This consisted of up to 40 SKU’s in over 1,500 Home Depots, Home Base, Target, CostCo and many more outlets. My Cloudburst high pressure mist cooling equipment cooled the 1996 Atlanta Summer Olympics, NASA, Plastic Extruder factories, Burlington Northern, a US Aircraft Carrier, and much more.
Contact Info:
- Website: wrightauthor.com
- Instagram: stevewrightnfl
- Facebook: AggressivelyhumanFB
- Linkedin: aggresivelyhuman
- Twitter: aggressivelyhuman
- Threads: stevewrightnfl
Image Credits
Las Vegas Raiders