BAAH TO HUMAN BILLBOARDING!

BAAH TO HUMAN BILLBOARDING!
By Dick Meister

We’re most of us human billboards, eagerly donning shoes, shirts, jeans and
so many other items conspicuously labeled on the outside with the
manufacturers’ names. But now comes the National Football League to say it
doesn’t have to be that way – at least not for some of us.

For seven years, NFL coaches have prowled the sidelines dressed by order of
the league in casual clothing that displays the big and bright logos of
Reebok, under a 10-year, $250 million contract between the sporting goods
firm and the NFL.

This season, however, is different for two coaches. For them, Reebok has
generously waived the contract requirement that coaches wear Reebok stuff.
The two coaches will dress in proper suits and ties, as they requested, in
order to honor the earlier generation of coaches who dressed that way long
before Reebok came along.

It’s only a slight blow against human billboarding, true. But it’s
nevertheless a move in the right direction, and you have to start somewhere.

It wasn’t easy. It took a two-year campaign by the San Francisco 49ers
coach, Mike Nolan, and heavy pressure from 49er fans to convince the NFL and
Reebok to agree. Nolan wanted to honor his ailing father, Dick, who coached
the 49ers in coat and tie from 1968 to 1975.

Also granted permission to dress as in the good old days was Jack Del Rio of
the Jacksonville Jaguars. There is a little catch, though: Nolan and Del Rio
can dress the old-time way only during home games.

And, oh yes, there’s a new NFL rule that requires on-field photographers to
wear bright red vests featuring logos for Reebok and camera maker Canon.

Players also have to be careful of their attire. Chicago Bears linebacker
Brian Orlacher will tell you that. The league fined him $100,000 for
wearing a cap during Super Bowl Media Day this year that promoted the sports
drink Vitaminwater, rather then the NFL’s officially authorized drink,
Gatorade. What’s worse, Orlacher actually drank from a bottle of the
unauthorized liquid, right there in front of reporters from all over the
world.

Football, of course, isn’t the only sport with human billboards. Think of
race car drivers, plastered head to foot with product logos, and golfers and
basketball players, professional and college, soccer players and others,
even Olympic athletes bearing the ubiquitous Nike swoosh and other
commercial symbols.

Although Major League Baseball has been relatively free of player
billboards, there have been serious attempts to bring the National Pastime
into line with the other sports, and it seems certain they eventually will
succeed. Team owners already have slapped ads on just about everything else
– outfield fences, backstops, scoreboards, even dugout walls and foul poles.

It isn’t just money-grubbing capitalists who do it, either. You probably saw
the photos of Fidel Castro recuperating in a hospital bed that were
released last Fall by the Cuban government. And what was Cuba’s
Marxist-in-chief wearing but a red, white and blue jacket, apparently part
of Cuba’s Olympic uniforms, with an Adidas logo plastered on the front.

And it’s not new. Mark Twain satirized it a long time ago in “A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.” His 19th century novel had
jousting knights wearing ads on their body armor, such as “Use Peterson’s
Prophylactic Tooth-Brush – all the go.”

So what’s next, if we don’t stop it soon? Could be animal billboarding.
There’s a company in the Netherlands that’s already doing it. For the
edification of passing motorists, it has put jackets emblazoned with the
company name in large white letters on a flock of sheep that’s been put out
to graze alongside a rural highway .

Baah!

Copyright © 2007 Dick Meister

Story ID:	2826
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Musings, Essays and Such
Location:	San Francisco CA USA
Year:	2007
Person:	Mike Nolan