He called to apologise. The other side told him it was a great idea.

In 1992 a small aircraft maintenance and sales company in Greenville, South Carolina, Stevens Aviation, was advertising with the phrase "Plane Smart".

Then Southwest Airlines started using "Just Plane Smart".

Two companies, almost the same slogan, and the small one had been using it first. That is the whole dispute.

A marketing executive at Stevens, Steve Townes, wrote to Herb Kelleher, the Southwest chief executive, and suggested they settle it by arm wrestling. It was meant as a joke. He mentioned it to his own chief executive, Kurt Herwald, afterwards.

Then reporters started calling.

Herwald picked up the phone to Southwest to apologise. By his own account he was worried his company was about to be blamed for a stunt it had not planned.

Kelleher took the call. He told Herwald that the press leak had come from Southwest, and that he thought the idea was excellent.

That is the whole opening, and everything after it happened inside a frame neither man had set.

Kelleher rented a 4,500 seat wrestling arena in Dallas. He gave his Love Field staff, at Southwest's home airport in Dallas, the morning off, put on red wrestling shorts, and worked the whole workforce up like a crowd before a match. CNN, the BBC and the Associated Press covered it. On 20 March, Herwald, thirty-eight and lifting weights, beat Kelleher, sixty-one and smoking.

And then Herwald let Southwest keep the slogan anyway.

The retelling I have seen makes this a lesson about turning a dispute into a game. What I find interesting is the phone call.

I do not think Herwald made that call as a move. He made it because his company looked as though it had picked a fight with an airline, and that was probably uncomfortable. Explaining and justifying is a normal thing to do with discomfort. It is not good or bad. It depends on the situation.

The place I can be most certain about that kind of softening is in my own mouth, because I know what I was feeling when I chose the word. In almost every negotiation I have been in, a sentence has come out smaller than the thing I meant, and I could feel it happening.

What I cannot do is read the meaning off someone else's version of it. The apology is the signal. What it means is an assumption, and it stays an assumption until I test it.

Kelleher did not take the frame. He told Herwald where the leak had come from, and then he said the idea was a good one. Herwald had called about blame. Kelleher answered about the idea, and that is the moment the whole thing turns.

The second part is what Herwald did at the end. He took the contest and gave back the thing the contest was supposed to decide.

He had worked out what he was actually negotiating for. He judged the attention worth more to Stevens Aviation than owning the phrase, and he was still saying so twenty-seven years later. The arm wrestle decided nothing about the trademark. It was never the object.

Two things that get repeated about this story.

Most retellings give the idea to Kelleher, or to Herwald. It came from Townes, and Herwald has said so himself, directly, to correct the mythology that had grown around his own company.

And a figure circulates, that the coverage was worth six million dollars to Southwest. It traces back to no source anyone has produced. What is on the record is an estimate of three to four million, made by Stevens Aviation's own advertising agency. The agency was paid to get the company noticed, and the number is the agency saying how well it did. So it stays out.

Both of these openings were read by somebody else before their sender had any chance to explain them. A joke became a press story. An apology became a partnership.

What did our last opening look like from the other chair?

Be well,

Tina