The Bastard Sponsor Comes Home

by Brian Cook

It’s official: rampant over-commercialization has come to Detroit. For those of you who have no clue about what’s going on in the world around you (read: Daily editors), Comerica is paying 66 million dollars to bastardize the new Tiger Stadium. For a period of 30 years, anyone who pays the slightest attention to the Tigers must simultaneously pay attention to the wonderful checking options offered by your local Comerica branch. Thirty years from now, 66 million dollars will buy you dinner and a movie, and Comerica gets to have a stadium.

That doesn’t seem very fair to me, mostly because when Joe Falls and the other old men who attends the Tigers’ games die, Comerica will essentially advertise to the ghost of Al Kaline. Nevertheless, this represents the last straw for me. My commercial tolerance meter now reads zero.

Years of passive acceptance of such blasphemous entities as the FedEx Orange Bowl, 3Com Park, and the “Carquest-Micron PC - Pepsi - Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints - Outback Steakhouse with New Greasy Onion Thing, 50% Off for a Limited Time, Hurry In Now Bowl” ends now. They even got the Rose Bowl. It’s bad enough that Keith Jackson decided to retire and we have to tolerate Brent-freaking-Musburger as the voice of college football, but now even the Rose Bowl is sponsored? As they say on the Diag, I’m whiny as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.

So I urge you who read my column (read: the Review staff and Mom) to boycott these companies. Close out your Comerica Bank accounts, ship with UPS, and for the love of the Rose Bowl, avoid AT&T at all costs. The time has come to take back our bowl names, our stadiums, our airwaves. We will always have commercials; they constitute a necessary part of getting free stuff like television and those supermarket samples. Every American treasures his free stuff only slightly less than he treasures his First Amendment rights. But what benefit do we derive from the new Cellular Phone Company Dome? None. My latest calculations show that the average American family of four can only afford to go to a professional sporting event if they sell the child who “they love just as much, really” to Malaysian slave traders.

Meanwhile, the NBA players still complain that they can’t afford vintage cars for all 37 illegitimate children they’ve spawned. Sergei Fedorov bought the Kremlin with last year’s 28 million dollar salary. Quarterback Scott Mitchell makes more money sitting on the bench looking stupid than the average Lions’ fan will see in his entire tortured existence.

I’ll tell you what the professional sports world could really use: a fans’ union. Currently, labor disputes revolve around who enjoys the more ridiculous profit margin. Imagine, if you will, a fat, shirtless man with one of those foam fingers and a $12.50 beer busting in on Billy Hunter and David Stern and demanding a 50 percent cut in ticket prices. They’d have to capitulate, because the fans’ union would wield the ultimate hammer: income. If no one watches, if no one bothers to care, the leagues will shrivel up faster than a Michigan State grad’s career opportunities. The power rests ultimately with us.

However, we fail to exercise this power every time the leagues present us with an opportunity. This cause has no leader, no organization, no momentum, though I know it is much more important to the average American than the falsified tragedies half a world away that are currently the “cool” causes. We need to build a “new, militant movement” and sweep the nation with the plight of our cause. Because even when the lockout ends, we are on the outside, looking in. Fans of the world, unite. MR

This article was published in the 20 January 1999 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 17, Number 6).
For questions or comments, see the Contact Information page.