The Billiken's Bluff

In Nike’s new commercial six athletes are outfitted in ominous-looking masks that correspond to their personalities and athletic attributes. I'll let the NY Times tell it:

The game faces presented in a 60-second commercial that began running yesterday on networks including CBS, ESPN, Fox and MTV are in the form of stark, even startling, masks that are intended to personify the transformation of six professional baseball and football players from mild-mannered men into steely competitors.

The mask worn by Torii Hunter, centerfielder for the Minnesota Twins, gives him the look of a Venus flytrap. The mask worn by Brian Urlacher, linebacker for the Chicago Bears, is made of barbed wire and encases his entire head. And the polished-wood mask worn by Albert Pujols, the St. Louis Cardinals slugger, evokes a baseball bat - not to mention the creepy face coverings worn by some of the cast of "The Masks," a particularly spooky episode of "The Twilight Zone" from 1964.


LaDainian Tomlinson fast like a gazelle.

The intensity of the commercial is notable, even in the testosterone-drenched realm of sports marketing, as evidenced by its title: "Warriors." The purposefulness is dialed up to 11, to borrow a line from the film "This Is Spinal Tap," in linking the qualities of Nike's Pro line of performance apparel with the qualities of winning athletes. The mental and physical game-day preparations by the players - who also include Mariano Rivera of the New York Yankees and the football players Ben Roethlisberger and LaDainian Tomlinson - are depicted as if they were readying for battle.

The commercial runs the risk of turning off consumers who may deem it far too fierce or dislike the idea of associating athletes to warriors when the world is racked by war.

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It also runs the risk of scaring the crap out of the average television viewer. I first saw this commercial while watching the Philly/Atlanta playoff game on Sunday. Some of my impressions included:

-Sado-Masochistic.
-The Gimp from Pulp Fiction.
-Some crazy Silence of the Lambs/Red Dragon, cannibal oral-restraining mask.
-A menacing-looking set of orthodontic braces circa 1940.
-The foreboding rabbit from Donnie Darko.
-Stanley Kubrick’s ritualistic Venetian Masks from Eyes Wide shut.



At no point during the commercial did my thoughts turn to the high-performance skin-tight nylon undergarments that Nike was peddling in the advertisement. I’ll post more pictures of these 6 athletes and their masks once I come across them.