The birth of a bubblegum empire: Big League Chew’s unlikely Portland origin

Rob Nelson had graduated from Cornell University and was playing professional baseball in Cape Town, South Africa, when his dad sent him a collection of newspaper clippings from America. One stood out in particular: an open tryout for the Portland Mavericks baseball club.

That was enough for Nelson to pack his bags and move back across the world, beginning an adventure that ends not in professional baseball glory, but in a bubblegum empire. Now 70, Nelson's legacy is the invention of Big League Chew: a pouch of stringy bubblegum that mimics the chewing tobacco once ubiquitous in Major League Baseball games.

Since 1980, Big League Chew has sold an estimated 800 million pouches of bubblegum. Back in 1977, Nelson was still a left-handed pitcher for the Mavericks. He was sitting in the bullpen, watching players spit chewing tobacco on the field.

He started talking with fellow player and former New York Yankees star Jim Bouton about dip. Neither was a fan.

“I’d only tried it once for about 30 seconds it never made sense to me,” Nelson said. “But I did chew a lot of bubblegum.”

A few innings later, Nelson brought up an old idea he’d once had: “Suppose we shredded bubblegum and put in a pouch? We could look cool and wouldn’t make ourselves ill,” Nelson recalled saying.