America At Large:Five days before Super Bowl XLI back in January, several thousand cameras were clicking away as the members of the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears turned out, in their game uniforms, for an annual ritual known as Super Bowl Media Day.
Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher inspired a major contretemps that day when he topped off his game-day togs with a baseball cap advertising an energy drink called Vitaminwater, which he wore throughout a 45-minute interrogation session with the press.
In as much as Vitaminwater was not among the National Football League's "official" sponsors (and presumably competes with, say, Gatorade, which is), the league was not pleased. Before the day was out, Urlacher had been fined $100,000.
Maybe it's just another sign of inflation, but in a similar episode 21 years earlier, another Bears player, quarterback Jim McMahon, had been fined $5,000 by then-NFL czar Pete Rozelle for wearing a headband with the logo of another non-sponsor, Adidas, on the sideline during a playoff win over the Giants.
The following week McMahon showed up for a playoff game against the Rams wearing a headband that said "Rozelle". Then, when he got to New Orleans for Super Bowl XX (which the Bears, unlike Urlacher's team, won), McMahon was asked about having been disciplined by the NFL commissioner.
"Actually," McMahon deadpanned his reply, "Mr Rozelle has been dead for several years now."
Vitaminwater, in any case, offered to pay the 100 grand the league docked Urlacher, but the player, for reasons which are only beginning to become clear, declined. He donated that offending cap to charity, and Ebay bidders were at last report up to $15,000. Imagine what it might have fetched had the Bears gone on to beat the Colts, which they did not.
Until that episode I'd never heard of Vitaminwater, and I still haven't tried it. Viewers of televised American sporting events have, however, been inundated by Vitaminwater commercials over the past several months, and several of them are downright clever. In one of them, Houston Rockets forward Tracy McGrady, wearing a kilt, competes in the Highland Games, where, presumably spurred on to his prodigious feat by an infusion of Vitaminwater, he wins the sheep-tossing event with a record throw.
In another, Urlacher and Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz compete in a badminton match against a pair of Chinese Olympic players. The voice-over in this one is delivered in a sophisticated British accent meant to convey a BBC sports telecast; the verisimilitude is hopelessly fractured when the announcer uses the American pronunciation of "vitamin".
The game ends when Ortiz, at match point, delivers an overhead smash that buries a shuttlecock, nose-first, in the leg of one of the Chinese opponents. This commercial was filmed in Florida during spring training, and took five hours to shoot. Ortiz, who had never played badminton before, told one of my colleagues afterward a shuttlecock was considerably more difficult to hit than a knuckleball.
The message seemed to be Vitaminwater is even more effectively performance-enhancing than steroids - and legal, too.
You'll have to admit it has been an ingenious bit of marketing, particularly since its manufacture does not require the sophistication of, say, a meth lab. The LifeScience columnist Christopher Wanjek noted last week that after analysing the ingredients, were one so disposed, one could "make Vitaminwater at home for a fraction of the cost by starting with a vitamin and water and adding eight packets of sugar."
New York Mets third-baseman David Wright is also featured in a spot for Vitaminwater, and the gangsta-rapper 50 Cent (pronounced "Fiddy Cent") will shortly be seen in another, in which he conducts a symphony orchestra in a classical performance of his timeless composition "In Da Club". Mr Cent's connection to the world of sport might seem somewhat tenuous, but he is in fact a former member of Mike Tyson's posse, and a few weeks ago in Las Vegas he led Floyd Mayweather into the ring for his fight against Oscar De La Hoya.
Fiddy Cent needed no inducement to perform in a commercial for Vitaminwater. It turns out he was an original investor in the company and had a 10 per cent stake, but we were left wondering just how much the people who make the beverage had to pay the sports stars to participate. Tracy McGrady, after all, makes $14.5 million a year, Ortiz $13.5 million. The Bears pay Urlacher $4.3 million a season. Wright is a third-year player, but still makes $1.25 million a year from the Mets.
And even before last week's windfall, Forbes Magazine estimated 50 Cent's net worth at $100 million, placing him sixth among rappers behind only P Diddy, Jay-Z, Eminem, Ice Cube and Master P. In at least one documented instance, no cash changed hands for the Vitaminwater endorsement. David Wright confirmed last week that in lieu of reimbursement he had accepted a 0.5 per cent stake in the company's stock.
"We sat down, and them being a Queens company and the Mets being from Queens, they wanted to develop a long-term relationship with me," Wright explained to the New York Post.
One half of one per cent might not sound like much, but when Coca-Cola paid $4.1 billion to purchase Vitaminwater last week, Wright's share was suddenly worth 20 million dollars.
We're just guessing Urlacher, Ortiz and McGrady have similar arrangements. What we do know is that 50 Cent's ten per cent comes out to slightly more than $400 million. And in gangsta parlance, that's four thousand Bentleys.
Eat your heart out, Barry Bonds.
