So what if Coke deal makes Spieth a pop star?
Well, no doubt they have a point. Sugar-crammed soft drinks and junk food, along with lack of exercise, are driving the modern epidemic of childhood obesity and poor health later on, and a responsible agent might have advised the 22-year-old Spieth to choose something less obviously hot-buttonish to promote.
Like a cable company or an investment firm? How about a luxury carmaker, those greenhouse gas emitters that are hastening us to our global demise?
I’m guessing very few of the critics would have turned down what Coke was offering Spieth on the basis of correctness. Or what Papa John’s pizza is paying Peyton Manning or what Tim Hortons (god save him: doughnuts!) paid Sidney Crosby.
Anyway, athletes have rarely been good role models when it comes to the products — or for that matter, the causes — they promote. We should quit expecting them to be role models for kids, a lot of whose parents are failing in that regard and want someone else to blame.
To New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady, Coca-Cola is “poison for kids,” but Donald Trump is a peach of a guy. Choose one or believe neither. It really is up to you.
Do I ask Wayne Gretzky for his thoughts on Syria or Kobe Bryant’s opinion on global warming? Nope. And I’m not buying 2016 model year golf clubs because Dustin Johnson or Jason Day is trying to sell me on the 2015s being old technology.
Old-time ballplayers routinely shilled for beer and whiskey purveyors and cigarette manufacturers (Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig). Even much later Mickey Mantle and football star Frank Gifford were selling smokes. Did their influence cause parents to switch brands and kids to start smoking? Maybe, in some small way, though I bet the fact that their parents smoked played a larger part.
Of course, those were the dark ages. We’re smarter than that now. But guess what? They’re still selling and we’re still buying, but it’s not as though we are, or ever have been, powerless in the equation.
Professional sports would be lost without beer advertising. Does it work? Maybe, on some.
McDonald’s might as well be a title sponsor of the Olympics, so ubiquitous is its presence at the quadrennial festivals that are supposed to celebrate glowing health and athletic excellence. And at every Games, athletes have been lined up alongside reporters to eat quarter-pounders and chicken nuggets and fries. We’ll all go straight to Hell.
Pro players endorsing junk food and sugary drinks are so commonplace these days, whole studies are being done on the horrible message being sent, and granted, no one ever lost money betting on the suggestibility of consumers when celebrities are talking up a product’s virtues.
Karras later made up for his Mongo offences by playing a gay bodyguard in the genderbender Victor/Victoria, so he was redeemed. Blazing Saddles likely could never be made today, making fun of Jews, AfricanAmericans (definitely not called that in the movie), Irish, Chinese, women, politicians and drunks.
So perhaps Spieth, when he inevitably is overcome with guilt, will sign a contract endorsing broccoli or Brussels sprouts or something gluten free or made from soy, and the children of North America will no longer be slaves to the Coca-Cola conspiracy, lured there by a golfer’s magnetism.