The Sports Curmudgeon

Since today is Bastille Day, I think it is perfectly appropriate to rant about some people who ought to be put under a jail somewhere. I’m talking about team owners who have gotten to the point that they will sell anything about their franchise to anybody in order to make a buck. Case in point - - the Chicago Bears.

The Bears were not permitted to sell the naming rights to Soldier Field because Soldier Field is a national landmark. I’m more than comfortably confident that getting this stadium on the list as a national landmark took some political shenanigans in the Congress and the Federal bureaucracy, but it happened. So it looked like the poor owners of the Bears were going to be screwed out of dipping their beaks in a standard NFL revenue stream.

But they retaliated by opening up a whole new area of “whoring a franchise”. Now they will be the Chicago Bears presented by Bank One. And let me say for the record that if I owned even one share of Bank One stock, I’d go to the annual shareholders meeting and raise Holy Hell about spending whatever money it took to become the “john” in this relationship. The Bears’ president said that Bank One will be bringing new opportunities and enhanced services” to the Bears’ fans. What kind of nonsense is that? If they have good opportunities and enhanced services, they need to make them available to all their customers and to all their potential customers. Why would they limit them to Bears’ fans? The idea is to attract customers - even if they are Packers’ fans. Talk about corporate ineptitude…

This situation stinks and when the Bears stink this season it will be easy to point out that Right Guard instead of Bank One should have brought the Chicago Bears to you. Oh, and pity the poor right guard for the Bears is they stink and he gets pilloried just because of the position he plays. Too bad…

I hear you. This is a one-time thing and it is just the Bears’ way of getting some money from a naming right that was denied to them because of the landmark status of their home field. Would that it were so; the problem here is a disturbing item I came across in the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. According to that paper, Vikings’ owner, Red McCombs, is intrigued by all of this and wants to pursue the concept of a “presenting sponsor” for the Vikings. If any other team does this, it will start a landslide movement and the NFL will be awash with “teams presented by”. So just in case that happens, here are some tie-ins that may work.

[DISCLAIMER: Remember, I’ve told you all a thousand times that I never had a career in advertising and would have been a miserable failure in that field.]

The Cleveland Browns presented by UPS. What can Brown do for you? Now they can change the question. What can The Browns do for you? If you are a Cleveland fan, you might want a playoff appearance - or at least a winning season from the team. It has been a while since this team has delivered…

Since Ford makes Broncos there is a natural tie-in here. The Denver Broncos presented by Ford. Denver hires OJ Simpson to be a consultant and then he can ride into the stadium in a white Bronco at 15 mph. After two laps of the stadium he can get out of the vehicle and shake hands with Broncos’ legend, John Elway. Elway and Simpson share a bond. OJ took a famous ride in a slow white Bronco; John Elway was a slow white Bronco. Ba Da Bing! Ba Da Boom!!

The Broncos better hop to it and get this deal done because if the Falcons think about it for a minute, they can capture the “retro market” and become the Falcons presented by Ford.

Obviously, the Jets presented by Boeing is a natural connection. Same goes for the Chargers presented by Die Hard batteries. The Giants and Titans can duke it out to see which team will be presented by SlimFast. And the most obvious one of all is the Cincinnati Bengals presented by Hoover Vacuum Cleaners.

But there might be some other – less obvious – sponsorships. If the Eagles were more specific about their name and called themselves the Bald Eagles, it would be easy to imagine the Philadelphia Bald Eagles presented by The Hair Club for Men.

How about the Dallas Cowboys presented by Billy Bob’s Bail Bond Service?

Why not have the World Wildlife Fund present any of the teams that are named after big cats – Panthers, Lions, Jaguars?

Why not have the Pittsburgh Steelers brought to you by some steel company? Oh yeah, there aren’t any steel companies in the US anymore…

The Buffalo Bills brought to you by the New York State Legislature. We pass lots of bills and create bills for future generations to pay because of the provisions in many of the bills we pass. Ergo…

The Oakland Raiders brought to you by Interstate Van Lines.

The Arizona Cardinals presented by Lysol Air Freshener.

The Ravens presented by … uh … nevermore.

But why stop with teams? You can put naming rights of parts of teams too. Jason Sehorn has gone to the Rams with his coverage skills as a DB in serious question. So why not have Jason Sehorn brought to you by Kingsford Charcoal Briquettes – since he gets burned so often?

For the coach who is sure to be fired you can have Joe Flabeetz brought to you by Century 21 Realtors.

Michael Vick would be a natural to be presented by Vicks Vapo-Rub.

Bill Parcells brought to you by Miss Clairol?

Al Davis presented by the American Trial Lawyers Association?

Terrell Owens brought to you by Nathan’s Coney Island Hot Dogs is perfect. All they need to do is figure out he can autograph a hot dog with a Sharpie.

But, no matter how big this idea gets, I can’t see the NFL as a league getting deeply into it. You’ll just never see the Super Bowl presented by Preparation H… Unless the money is right.

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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I thought I was just being my normal cranky self when I found myself getting more and more exasperated with the TV commercials that populate far too many sporting events. But then FOX started airing their promos for the All-Star Game and that annoyed me more than it ought to have and so I started focusing on bad commercials. And as Popeye the Sailor used to say, ‘I’ve had all I can stands; I can’t stands no more!”

Let’s look at the FOX promos. They give us a collage of players and highlights and tell us, “This time it counts.” No it doesn’t. As long as fans with Internet access who can stuff the ballot boxes select the All-Star teams, it doesn’t count for much of anything. As long as the All-Star teams are comprised of mandatory attendees from the Tigers and/or the Padres, these are not baseball’s best players fighting for home field advantage in a World Series that these specific players might actually participate in. If in fact it really counts this time, you’d see only a couple of pitchers in the game for each side and the “ballot mistakes” made by the fans will be out of the game ASAP and replaced by the best players in the respective leagues.

Memo to FOX: Maybe you were the motive force behind this “home field advantage silliness”; maybe you weren’t. But this is not something important; so please stop insulting our intelligence with your stupid promos.

By the way, since you are trying to convince us that this matters so much, can you tell us what the contingency plan is for a rainout? Or will you play this critically important game in any weather no matter the potential for injury to these players that will be hustling their buns off? Please don’t say it can’t happen; it has happened.

But the worst upshot of these promos for me personally is that I have now been focused on the TV commercial stupidities and these have generated stomach acid that I just did not need. Back at the time of the Super Bowl, I said that I welcomed the new ad campaigns that would start with that event and specifically I figured it would mean the end of the “zoom, zoom, zoom kid” in the car commercials. Boy was I wrong; that goof is still hanging in there and collecting residuals and annoying the hell out of me. This kid has a great future ahead of him as a hat stand – if someone does not knock his head off first.

Just for the record, I am most definitely not gellin’ like a felon looking to score a melon. Tell me; how low an IQ would someone have to have in order to participate in that kind of conversational banter and still think that it was even marginally interesting? Let me try to put it in terms that should be clear to everyone. If someone were that stupid and they added three more points to their IQ, they would qualify as a sewer pipe.

How stupid does the guy in the SUV have to be to get angry at the Michelin bobblehead doll? When was the last time you experienced that kind of “road rage”? If your answer is that you have ever done this to some inanimate object in your car then you really need to see someone about some medications that will mellow you out. You are only permitted to be that angry at an inanimate object in your car if it is your radio and you can’t find any station to listen to other than NPR and they are in the middle of one of their twelve-minute feelgood-stories about the various ways that people deal with their nostril hair. Oops, I need to relax now and focus on my happy place…

The ad where a foxy lady named Alex is waiting in the bar for a blind date named Brad is dumb. Blind dates never look like Alex; blind dates – on average – are for blind people and for good reason. Brad is the typical blind date; he is someone who would be lucky to get a date if he walked through a women’s prison ward with pardons taped to his sleeves. First, I have to believe that Alex would have to agree to be set up on a blind date, which is not easy; and then after she is saved from that horror she would settle for some guy who seems not to have been able to find his razor for the past week. She could probably have any guy in the bar if she wanted to. Puhleeez.

The Taco Bell commercials that urge you to think outside the bun were silly on the day they hit the airways. Now they are just downright annoying. Taco Bell ads were much more interesting to watch when they urged you to make a run for the border because you could check out the food they were offering and you would realize that it would certainly cause you to make a run for something – even if it wasn’t the border. Those ads glorified the danger associated with eating a Taco Bell meal and then going on a long drive somewhere.

But there must be a conspiracy afoot somewhere because the worst commercials all seem to belong to telephone companies. [Come to think of it; maybe some goof at an ad agency thought Taco Bell was the Mexican phone company and that is why they have such dumb ads. Very interesting…] The guardian angel who pops into and out of commercials for 1-800-COLLECT is a monument to stupidity. But those commercials are significantly better than the ones for 1-800-CALL ATT for one simple reason. The people at ATT have accepted Carrot Top as their celebrity spokesthing and he is so annoying that he is probably the real life inspiration for “Brad” in the blind date commercial I talked about a couple of paragraphs ago. For Carrot Top to be in a meaningful relationship, he would need for two things to happen in this order:

1. He needs to win the $200M Powerball lottery.

2. He needs to bump into Anna Nicole Smith.

What have Terry Bradshaw and Mike Piazza done to offend the people who rule the world of TV advertising? They share the stage with ALF. Is there anything whose time has come and gone and never came back again like ALF? Piazza can’t need the money; even with Bradshaw’s multiple divorces, he can’t be so needy that he would want to sully his reputation by associating with a talking dust rag. Please make this stop.

But the one ad campaign that is the worst of all is so simple to describe. It is annoying to the max; it is dumb; it would be considered a violation of the Geneva Convention if it were shown to prisoners of war. I can describe it for you in five simple little words:

Can you hear me now?

But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…

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