Shoe miscue

Converse plays dangerous game in effort to court urban youth

"It's a shoe we're talking about. I don't think there'll be any confusion..."

That's what David Maddocks says. He's a marketing guy for Converse, the venerable sneaker company that lost its way and got squashed by the Nikes of the world before recently being acquired by the very corporation that made its footwear all but irrelevant to anyone under 40. He was talking about Converse's new shoe, Loaded Weapon.

That's right. The company whose All Star style made basketball shoes chic is now introducing a product with a name so vile, so desperate, so stupid that it boggles the logical mind.

Let's envision the lack-of-brainstorming meeting at which a bunch of Converse folks tossed around names for their new shoe -- its inaugural product under Nike, which this summer picked up what was left of the company (its brand, really) for $305 million. When "Loaded Weapon" popped out of someone's mouth, didn't anybody say, "Hmm, maybe we don't want kids walking into stores asking for a LOADED WEAPON!"?

Even if no one in the room had the sense to stop this knucklehead train from leaving the station, how did the term pass muster with all those presumably smart folks at Nike without someone suggesting that perhaps Loaded Weapon was not a good name for a product targeted at kids?

If I were Conspiracy Brother -- the character from the film Undercover Brother who believed every bad thing that happened to him was due to The (White) Man's insidious plot against black folk -- I'd think the Converse and Nike folks actually thought Loaded Weapon was a great name. Why? Hey, don't those kids all worship the hip-hop gangstas who brag about "poppin' a cap" on each other?

But I'm not Conspiracy Brother, so I'll just chalk it up to the kind of insulting naivete that too often pervades marketing campaigns aimed at the urban youth market. Maybe they were just dumb.

"We have no second thoughts about the name whatsoever."

That's Maddocks again, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle just a few days after the name was unveiled.

Perhaps someone should send several copies of Bowling for Columbine to the Converse offices in North Andover, Mass. Director Michael Moore's Academy Award-winning documentary brilliantly outlined the absurdity of America's gun culture -- and its deadly effects. For no logical reason, there are thousands more gun murders in the U.S. each year than in nations such as England, Germany and our neighbor to the north, Canada. Any attempt to explain the disparity -- our violent history, our wide rich-poor gap, or even our ethnic diversity (yes, Conspiracy Types, some in the film tried to blame it on us!) -- was easily dispelled. Each of those countries, in fact, had a violent past, a wide chasm between its wealthy and impoverished classes and various degrees of ethnic diversity.

The film offered no clear answer but leaves the viewer to think: What are we doing to ourselves? And, more important, what can we offer our children to help stem the cycle of gun violence?

How about a basketball shoe called Loaded Weapon? There's one for the Director's cut.

"Sports is loaded with battlefield terminology," said Maddocks. "This is merely the name of a shoe."

Thirteen years ago, I worked on a story that was published in Sports Illustrated in reaction to a new wave of violence among young men who were killing each other over sneakers. It was the height of the frenzy over Air Jordans. The story began with a sad tale:

On May 2, 1989, 15-year-old Michael Eugene Thomas, a ninth-grader at Meade Senior High School in Anne Arundel County, Md., was found strangled. James David Martin, 17, was charged with first-degree murder. He allegedly took Thomas' new Air Jordans and left Thomas' barefoot body in the woods near school.

There were others. So many similar deaths, in fact, that even Jordan himself was shaken. "I thought I'd be helping out others and everything would be positive," he told SI at the time. "I thought people would try to emulate the good things I do, they'd try to achieve, to be better. ... Everyone likes to be admired, but when it comes to kids actually killing each other ... " Jordan paused. "then you have to reevaluate things."

And now, all these years later, Converse is giving kids a Loaded Weapon. Here's hoping that David Maddocks and his team indeed reevaluate things and change the name of their new shoe.

The company that created the All Star deserves better. Our kids deserve better.

Roy S. Johnson is an assistant managing editor for Sports Illustrated. His "Pass the Word" column appears on SI.com every Friday. Catch Johnson on CNN Headline News every Thursday at 3:40 p.m. ET.