JOHN Mestre, a police sergeant in Vestal, N.Y., near Binghamton, said he’d just spoken with Brent Bowers Sr., whose son was killed nearly 13 years ago. Mestre said the Bowers family had not seen the new Nike commercial. Not yet, anyway.
And we agreed that that was a good thing. If it made my stomach turn, what would it do to Mr. and Mrs. Bowers?
Brent Bowers Jr. and John Mestre’s son had played in the same Little League. In 1993, Mestre sent us a clipping from the upstate Press & Bulletin. It told of the March 7, 1993, death of 11-year-old Brent.
Brent had been hanging from the rim of a driveway basketball hoop. The pole snapped at the base. Brent landed on his head. Flown by helicopter to a hospital, he was pronounced dead. But there was more to it than that.
In 1993, the NBA, sneaker companies and SportsCenter, to name a few, were merrily and mindlessly fixated on video of players – high-school players, college players, pros; it made no difference – hanging on rims until the glass backboards shattered.
It didn’t much matter that playground basketball courts – here, there and everywhere – were suddenly being rendered slabs without basketball; the sell was on.
Rim hanging, rim bending, rim snapping and backboard breaking had become the rage. The NBA everywhere promoted glass-shattering slam dunks, from the league’s “Hoop” magazine to within its video game, “NBA Slam.”
And, in 1993, there was no greater commercial messenger of the shattered backboard than Magic rookie Shaquille O’Neal. He even had a song out in which he rapped, “I jam it, I slam it, I make sure it’s broke.”
Even Shaq’s stepfather got into the act, starring in a commercial in which he hung up a phone, shattering the glass-encased phone booth.
And there was no bigger Shaquille O’Neal fan than 11-year-old Brent Bowers.
On March, 7, 1993, Brent took one of those mini trampolines, set it in front of his driveway basketball hoop and enacted a Shaq attack.
Brent’s father told us that shortly after his son’s death he found Brent’s drawings of Shaq O’Neal smashing backboards. Brent was buried in a Shaquille O’Neal jersey. It was, his mom told us, what he’d wanted for his 12th
birthday, two months away.
Recently, Nike rolled out a basketball commercial that identifies the essence of the game as – what else? – the rim-rocking slam dunk. The NBA plays its role, as NBA footage appears in the ad.
The last moving images seen in that commercial are of a child, certainly no older than 7. He has ascended to the top step of a large stepladder. And he’s alone.
And if that doesn’t make anything close to minimal good sense, the kid’s safety is additionally imperiled because his hands aren’t free. In those hands, he holds a basketball. And he’s now eye-to-eye with a basketball rim.
The commercial ends with the child pushing off the top step of that ladder, ready to get an early jump on his slam-dunking career. There’s no telling where that kid is going to land, where basketball might take him. Get it?
But it was a commercial, thus we can logically conclude that it was shot in a controlled, adult-supervised environment, that there was an adult, or two, standing below to catch him or at least break his fall. The commercial also ends with the appearance of a small graphic, at the bottom of the screen. It carries the lower-case message, “do not attempt.”
Yep, that should absolve Nike, the “Just Do It” folks, of all accountability and liability. Just post a small disclaimer, to be read by first-graders and up.
“If they realize that it’s dangerous, that kids will copy it, and that kids shouldn’t copy it,” asked Sgt. Mestre, “then why is there a kid doing it in the commercial?”
Still, it was a good thing that Mr. and Mrs. Bowers hadn’t seen it.