It’s A Show-Me-The-Money Thing

If fate is kind, “Show me the money!” - the overused catch phrase from “Jerry Maguire” - will soon be replaced by some other inescapable slogan.

Now, if only someone could rid us of the sentiment.

Laurel, Md., resident Karen Feeney would love to. The trim office manager doesn’t look like the type who’d yell at a stranger in an athletic store.

Blame it on the money Michael Jordan is showing Nike.

Feeney says she arrived at a suburban Washington Foot Locker 15 minutes before it opened last Wednesday, ready to show salesclerks the $140 her son, 15, had saved since Christmas.

The cash was for the new red-and-black Air Jordans, produced in the usual limited numbers, no store reorders allowed. Some 20 people - many of them kids who’d skipped school - paced outside the store’s gate. A salesman recorded everyone’s name and shoe size.

When the store opened, Feeney says, she saw her name on the only box of size 11 shoes. But before she could pay for them, a beefy guy asserted that he should have the pair, saying he’d waited longer. After a loud debate, he got the shoes. Feeney found a pair at FOOTACTION in a size 11, but so what? Every athletic store at the mall, and many across the nation, had virtually sold out in a half-hour.

Was Feeney’s fury avoidable? Sure, if she hadn’t wanted a good kid who saved his money to get what he most craved. Was it awful that kids skipped school to buy shoes? Absolutely. But they probably don’t have moms, like Feeney, who can take an early lunch.

“I’m mad at Nike,” says Feeney, 39. “They have all these commercials urging kids to get these shoes. They hype it up where children are so ready for them. … Then they make a limited amount.”

Now, some may feel Nike, under fire for questionable labor practices in Asia, has enough problems. Others just won’t get it. They don’t know any kids who can recite a new shoe’s cost, release date and the words to every ad pushing it. They don’t know how important shoes have become to them or how anyone could pay such sums for them. I live with such kids and I don’t get it.

But Nike - and Reebok and Converse - get it. They pray for reactions like last week’s and use sophisticated ads and research to provoke it. They get rich off it.

Why would Nike release its best-selling shoe on a school day, knowing that kids who stay in school - or whose parents can’t make mall runs - will miss out? Why a $140 price tag for a shoe pitched to kids, many of them poor, by the world’s most charismatic athlete?

Nike says it’s because it’s the world’s best shoe, although the company’s upcoming Penny Hardaway reportedly will cost a staggering $180.

I say it’s because we’re showing them the money.

The Air Jordan is “the pinnacle of innovation and quality, inspired by the greatest basketball player in the history of the game,” says Erin Patton, Nike’s product marketing director. Nike’s top priority is “figuring out how to create a product … that’s the absolute best.

“We don’t encourage people to not go to school,” he says. “If a kid is not in school, he can’t accomplish his goals.” Unless, of course, that goal is to own a pair of Jordans.

Patton adds that Nike is releasing cheaper Jordan-endorsed shoes, such as the Jumpman Pro. It will cost a mere $115.

As a kid, Patton, 27, was into cars.

“We used to know every one, which was the nicest, when it was coming out,” he says. Shoes “are the reality for this generation. … We’re not disconnected from the ills that plague our youths. … We are in business, but we aren’t disconnected.”

It seems useless pointing out that boys of 14 who once dreamed of Corvettes didn’t have pals in school driving them.

It’s worthless, asking why Nike can’t release the Jordans on a Saturday, when everyone would get a shot at them, or suggesting that $115 is still a fortune for many kids to whom Nike feels so connected. Like Patton said: Nike is a business.

I can point out to kids the insanity in thinking that buying Jordan’s shoes links you to his genius. I can remind them that every athletic “hero” approves the price of the costly shoe bearing his or her name or that cool isn’t about what’s on their feet.

But they’re too mesmerized by images of the guys who get the money to hear me. And although I own no luxury cars and won’t wear designer-logo clothes, I’m hardly immune to the madness.

Everyone wants to be shown the money, or at least to show off what it can buy. Our creeping, creepy obsession with having the right stuff snuck up so silently, no one remembers when we fell into its clutches, though that’s where we are.

But if money is the most important thing people can show us, then we all should be shown the door.

xxxx