On July 2, the St. Louis Blues traded traded T.J. Oshie to the Washington Capitals for a pair of players and a draft pick, severing ties with a homegrown winger who’d grown into a popular “face of the franchise” type athlete. Across town on that same day, siblings Rocky and Libby Lu Manno were playing NHL 15 on Xbox, until a squabble ended with Rocky turning off the game, setting young Libby Lu into the early stages of an emotional tailspin.
Along came the pair’s mother, Kelly, bearing the news that Oshie had been traded by the Blues, a conversation that she felt might rattle Rocky. Instead, it was five-year-old Libby Lu who endured the worst of it, as she fled into a closet in her room. Kelly, sensing that upset, began to roll video. Within the span of a minute, she'd created the viral video that was still showing life late last week.
“Libby was bawling her eyes out,” says father Jimmy Manno. “Kelly’s a photographer in her day job and is used to capturing our kids. She turned on the phone to capture this and Libby was not happy about this. We were really surprised that she’d put it all together and realized that he would be coming back with another team.”
Jimmy Manno has toiled in a variety of media worlds, currently working in advertising, though he made his bones as a producer of the long-running ‘Steve & DC’ morning show. That’s where he met Kelly, initially on the program’s staff as an intern. Together, they’ve spent amount of time working in media circles, though they couldn’t believe that their daughter’s angst—tragic and comic, all at once—would change the last few weeks of their lives so dramatically.
“She texted me the video,” Manno recalls. “‘Look at this. Your kid is crazy.’ Right around the time she texted it to me, she’d posted it to her Facebook page. We’ve had all kinds of craziness from our kids on our walls and it’s not unusual for her to take funny pictures of the kids, or videos, as we have family all over the place. When I shared it, too, we didn’t think much more of it, though we knew friends and family would like it. But we’re friends with a bunch of people at Channel 2. I don’t know who at Channel 2 saw it and sent it to their web division, but they reached out to us and asked to feature it on their website. Family and friends saw that and got back to us and we thought that was the end of it.”
A day later, “We’re at Rocky’s baseball game and we’d turned our phones off,” says Manno. “We go back on and there’s a note from ESPN. At some point in that day, the video had been picked up by CBS Sports, Yahoo, Sports Illustrated. It’s like ‘what the hell is going on?’ At the same time ESPN was reaching out, the Washington Capitals PR guy had contacted us, saying that T.J. had seen the video and was very touched. ‘Can he call your daughter? Can he talk to your daughter?’ ‘Yeah, that would be cool.’ ‘We’ll line it up and get back in touch.’”
As it turned out, “the media department of the Capitals called back. ‘T.J. is going to call your daughter, but we’ll do it on SportsCenter.’ We chatted about it and thought ‘what the heck?’ If nothing else, it’ll be a cool memory for our daughter. The whole deal was that she didn’t want to do it on her own.” Jimmy joined her at the Channel 9 studios for the taping and it went well, though “she was a little freaked out during the interview. They’ve got her wearing earpieces, all that stuff. The producers in Bristol are giving her instructions and she can’t see them. It’s just weird, that whole arrangement, when you’re five. She’s already very shy about the video, but when T.J. called in on the phone, she was grinning ear-to-ear.”
Though looking very obviously like a shy kid caught in a strange situation, she was able to ask Oshie a couple of questions. One: whether he had a pool. And whether he had a diving board. It was amusing stuff, hardly earth-shaking, but Manno did catch some flack, noting that, “at no point were we trying to exploit our kid. We post things all the time with our kids acting goofy. I’ve been raked over the coals, people thinking this was set up. She’s way too independent to take that kind of instruction. Or that ‘she’s crying out of need.’ She crying because her favorite hockey player got traded!”
By the time that July 4 rolled around, the Mannos were heading up a large, extended-family party, and everyone invited was told not to discuss the situation with Libby Lu, to give her a break from had remarkably now become the number one trending story on both Facebook and Twitter. Not confined to the U.S., it’d gone international, capturing mentions on Russian and German websites, among others.
Along the way, something curious happened: the youngest Manno child had lost her last name, now just appearing as Libby Lu.
“The first few times that it happened, I just assumed that they were trying to protect her anonymity,” Manno figures. “When Channel 2 ran it, she was Libby Lu Manno. Since the second round of media, everyone’s been referring to her as if Lu’s her last name. I realize that it’s an odd name, but it’s what we’ve always called her, what she’s gone by. I haven’t gone and tried to get any of that changed, but it’s just odd to see that.”
As he notes, there was a second round of media coverage, this time involving a large care package that arrived from the Capitals, featuring everything: an autographed mini-helmet, a jersey, a t-shirt, a purse (which Libby Lu re-gifted to sister Luci), an action figure of their mascot, “pencils and pens and stuff,” Manno notes. “And T.J. had included a handwritten note to her, a really nice one. ‘I hope this makes you feel better. I hope you’ll be a Capitals fan from now on.’ We’ll have that one framed.”
Remarkably, the pics of young Libby Lu opening that package resulted in a second spike of social media, with another trending rush to the top on both Facebook and Twitter, essentially meaning it was the most-popular, passed-along story in the land. Not once, but twice. All from a video that lasted 50 seconds.
“What’s interesting is that I worked in media and went into PR,” Manno says. “All I try to do for the companies I work for is to try to get stuff to take off. I could never do what’s just happened. In today’s day and age, it’s so unpredictable as to what sticks, what lasts, what gets the attention. The shareability is just so different, compared to back in the day. And it just keeps happening. Good Morning America reached out a couple hours ago. Being on Channel 2 didn’t seem that out of the ordinary. But when you turn off your phone at your son’s baseball game and realize the story’s not just in St. Louis, or even Washington DC, but in Canada… that you’ve got voicemails from people saying it’s the top-trending story on Twitter... what the heck? Here, we post all these crazy stories about our kids on Facebook, but you see that they’re writing about you in German and Swedish (or Finnish, I can’t tell the difference) and you see it go worldwide, it’s just crazy. We’re just a little family up in Hazelwood with a daughter who cried about her favorite player.”
