Flak Magazine: Kick Out the Sports! 10.27.03

If you watched the World Series on Fox, you probably noticed that its commercial breaks — between the "Joe Millionaire 2" clip with the Eurobimbo singing, "And the best part is, he's ri-ich," and Ron Silver going into full Al Pacino hoo-hah mode screaming, "HIS FATHER! IS THE DISTRICT! ATTORNEY!" — featured one of the years' oddest pharmaceutical ads.

The ad is for Levitra. A forty-something guy with distinguished gray hair and a still-cut body is working on his impeccable yard at his suburban estate. On his way to the shed to get his leaf blower or something, he comes upon a football. Apparently he hasn't picked it up for some time. He grabs the football and throws it toward a tire swing — and misses the hole. But as the announcer starts talking more about Levitra, he starts flinging the pigskin dead center through the hole, throw after throw, upon which his wife, who appears to be at least 15 years younger, gives him a look like, "Come take me now, Dan Marino!"

The ad doesn't say what Levitra is, or specify the ailment it's intended to treat. Otherwise, it would feature a comical listing of side effects. (My favorite example of this is a commercial in which a pleasantly voiced female cyborg warns of "anal leakage" and "frequent bowel movements and the inability to control them.") Nonetheless, the symbolism in the Levitra ad clues you in: It's for the dreaded erectile dysfunction. Without Levitra, the guy doesn't play; even if he did, he couldn't hit the hole, if you catch my drift. With Levitra, he's playing and hitting the hole with more frequency than Gene Simmons. Really, the ball, if it had been sitting that long, should have been deflated, but maybe the folks at Levitra thought that was too over the top.

It used to be that if you watched or listened to sports, you got a lot of ads selling you the fantasy that, if you drank the right beer, you'd be swamped with chicks. Now the ads seem to go out of their way to tell sports fans they're losers.

The Levitra ad is bad enough. But sports talk radio is even worse. Here's the ad rotation: quick weight-loss products, poor-eyesight therapies, balding cures, career assistance, credit counseling, Viagra and its alternatives and penile enhancement treatments. Apparently, the average sports talk radio listener is a fat, blind, bald, unemployed, broke guy who can't get it up. Even if he could, it'd be hard to locate.

Aging baby boomers are blamed for everything from killing shame to nominating a lame Paul Simon song for an Academy Award and turning lawn mowers into mini-SUVs, so let's blame them for these ads, too. Various surveys show baseball has the oldest fans, with a median age of 45. When you factor in baseball TV viewership, the median ages rises to 50. The Census Bureau says the nation's median age in 2000 was 35.3, the oldest ever, with 4 percent fewer 18-to-34-year-olds and 49 percent more 45-to-54-year-olds than 1990. This is not a crowd that believes that the right beer gets you the babes. Even if they're still physically capable, they do not want to party with the Coors-chuggin' Kid Rock and… and… TWINS!

The introduction of prescription penis pills, coinciding with the aging boomer population, has left us with images of middle-aged driver Mark Martin hitting NASCAR tracks in the Viagramobile and the Texas Rangers' Rafael Palmeiro hinting in advertisements that he doesn't need help to put pop in his bat, but he does need help to put pop in his pickle. Levitra, released after Viagra, paid big bucks to become the official "Men's Health" drug advertiser of the NFL.

Those ads feature a stunning image of manliness gone limp — tough-guy Mike Ditka. The image is disturbing enough to give Bob Swerski another heart attack.

Then again, sports fans, demographically speaking, look and feel more like Da Superfans than hip, young things, so ads talking about the troubles, not the dreams, of men may well take up more space. It's kind of depressing, the contrast between the finely tuned athletes on the field and the broken-down fans off it. It's enough to make you want to turn off the game so you can go in the back yard to try to throw a football through a tire swing. I hope mine hasn't deflated.

E-mail Bob Cook at bobc@flakmag.com.