I’m sitting in a bar and waiting for a friend who’s running late. On the TV overhead I watch some sort of sports show. A famous former heavyweight boxer grins before the camera with a jar of barbecue sauce in his hand. Apparently it’s his new signature sauce.
Another former boxing champion enters the screen to help promote the sauce. This guy spent a few years in prison for rape. His involvement is guaranteed to make the barbecue sauce a total hit with the ladies.
I watch the grinning pair and think about barbecue sauce. If I’m buying sauce, I want it to come from some unknown guy who spent his childhood in the backwoods of Mississippi slow-cooking beef briskets over a grill filled with cedar chips. I want him to have tinkered with a family recipe handed down to him from his father, who got it from his father’s father. I want his real name to be Skeeter or Cooter or something. I want the real deal.
What I don’t want is a sauce from a former millionaire who fell behind on car payments and then said “Crap, I need to find something to sell. Maybe I’ll have someone tweak Heinz 57 and then put my name on it.” Nope, I’m not buying a jar of Shot To The Head anytime soon, unless I need to unclog a toilet.
I don’t get why people buy celebrity-endorsed garbage. But then again I don’t understand why people follow celebrities in the first place.
When I was a kid, I wanted to eat Wonder Bread because the Range Rider told us it would build strong bodies twelve ways. He would never lie to us, right?
Childhood conditioning tends to grow along with us into adulthood. If we eat the right barbecue sauce, we will be just like the athletes who promote it!
Either that, or we’ll just get fatter. Whatever.
I agree wholeheartedly Tom! Sometimes the stuff they hawk makes me want to buy the competition!
In my experience, some celebrities are brilliant in exactly one area, usually the area where they first gain fame … and completely clueless about anything else in life.