Just for the fun of it, Nike also threw an after-working-hours party on Thursday for several thousand of its best customers in a hangar at the Fulton County Airport. Guests, who arrived in a convoy of chartered buses, were wined, dined and entertained by the Temptations and Martha Reeves, without the Vandellas.
While Nike was flaunting its riches, Ron Tannebaum, who sells sports memorabilia in Miami malls, was trying out a hydraulic stair-climbing machine in the New Products Show at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel five blocks away. A spin-off from the oversubscribed main event, the New Products Show is proof that the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well.
"Gimmickry is what's selling," said Dal Swain, marketing manager for Fliteline Industries, Inc., who affects an Elvis Costello look. "Bells and whistles are in, but frankly, most of it doesn't work." The Fliteline II climbing machine, with a suggested retail price of $1,200, is intended for home use and is virtually gimmickless. It doesn't even require electricity.
Tannebaum, as it turned out, was a browser, not a buyer. He was attracted only momentarily to the Fliteline II, he said, because the gym he frequents went broke recently and he misses his stair-climbing workouts.
The New Products Show had something for everyone: Spazz Ball, for example, a rubber ball with hemispherical knobs to make it bounce unpredictably; Sweet Sweat, a skin cream to make exercisers sweat all over instead of just here and there; Crazy Leggs, lightweight aluminum stilts; Wheel Right, roller skates with three wheels. Not every product was new, however. Sherman Poppen of Muskegon, Mich., used the show to reintroduce the Snurfer, a low-tech snowboard he invented in 1965. Poppen is recognized, though not financially, as the founding father of the sport of snow-boarding. To decorate his booth, he brought along the original Snurfer, its yellow paint scarred from hard use on snow-covered Michigan dunes. Poppen was sitting on a folding chair waiting for customers the day the show opened, he said, when a female passerby shrieked, "That's my board!"
"She ran over, picked it up and hugged it," said Poppen, smiling a shy-but-pleased-inventor sort of smile.
Elmo Morales, too, found something to smile about at the Super Show. On Friday afternoon, as wave after wave of people surged through Exhibition Hall F at the World Commerce Center, Morales stood in a line of fans waiting to approach Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at the L.A. Gear booth. Pookie and the Hot-shots were pitching the shoes and activewear in song, dance and pounding rock inside the booth. Outside, Abdul-Jabbar sat at a small desk, stern and splendid amid the foolishness, signing posters, rarely smiling, but looking each individual in the eye and nodding an acknowledgement.
Morales, a youthful 42, is a high school physical education teacher in Ann Arbor, Mich., but the business card he turned in his hand said: ELMO'S SUPER-SHIRTS, CUSTOM SCREEN PRINTING. On it he had written a personal note to Abdul-Jabbar. The T-shirt printing business is just a sideline, Morales said, "just a hole in the wall." Morales grew up in New York, where he and Kareem were junior high school friends. "He went to St. Jude's, and I went to P.S. 152," said Morales. "I lived on 182nd Street in Washington Heights, and he lived in the Dyckman projects. I was a runner, and he was a basketball player, but we were into jazz. We had a club called the Social Colleagues, about 18 of us. I think now it was a gang. We held dances at Africa House and charged 99 cents to get in. Kareem, he was Lew then, was sergeant at arms. He would collect the money at the door, and nobody would mess with him." The last time the two men had seen each other was in the spring of 1965, when Abdul-Jabbar paid a recruiting visit to the University of Michigan, where Morales was a freshman half-miler on a track scholarship.
The closer Morales got to the desk where Jabbar was sitting, the more nervous he became. "My heart was pumping," he said later. "I thought, What if he doesn't remember me? I told myself, I have to face this fear." When his turn came. Morales started to proffer the card, but before Abdul-Jabbar saw the card he saw the face and said, "Hi, Elmo." The old friends talked quietly for a few minutes while the people behind shifted their briefcases from one hand to the other.
"As soon as he said, 'Hi, Elmo,' I relaxed." said Morales. He was leaning against a wall, a little choked up still, but smiling.
The Super Show has everything a body could want except somewhere to sit. Seats are reserved for customers filling out order forms. Late in the day people wander like lost souls in a shopper's nightmare, senses dulled, curiosity sated, no end in sight. Acres of padded benches in the fitness equipment section look as inviting as feather beds.
If it hadn't been for late-afternoon exhaustion, nobody would ever have seen C.C. Alexander's Hoops Machine. Alexander was a late entry. He read about the Super Show in USA Today only a week before it opened, but somehow he pleaded his way in. He was too late to be included in the printed listing of exhibitors or in any of the show's promotional material, and he spent every dime he had in the world for what was possibly the worst location in the World Congress Center—the far end of the west wing, top floor, a spot a buyer wouldn't ordinarily find, even accidentally.
However, Alexander's spot was surrounded by upholstered seats, empty upholstered seats. Hearing the pong made by his coin-operated basketball machine—which has a nearly full-size backboard, net and ball—when an unerringly accurate Alexander put the ball through the hoop, a few people would look over in the direction of the sound. They would see those upholstered seats and some would make their way toward them, and before long, C.C. Alexander, 28, of Murfreesboro, Tenn., would have an audience.
To get its attention he would shoot a hundred baskets without a miss, then, with a promoter's fire in his eyes, he would talk expansively about his ideas for his Hoops Machine, which has a $4,995 price tag. "Put one in your shoe store so the kid who's trying on basketball shoes can do something more than walk back and forth in them," he says. "Put them in prisons, put them in hospitals where people need a little bit of physical activity."
The struggle for attention elsewhere at the Super Show was considerably more expensive. "It's the battle of the headliners here," said Mike Doherty, executive producer of the Nike extravaganza. Switching to the voice of an imaginary exhibitor. Doherty announced. "We've got George and Barbara Bush for our morning press conference and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in the afternoon,"
At this year's Super Show, that's a joke. Next year, who knows?
SUPER SHOW SET TO BID ADIEU TO ATLANTA AFTER 2000 EVENT
11.12.1998
While the SGMA Super Show will be held in Atlanta in
'99 and 2000, it "will likely" move to Orlando in 2001 and
2002, according to Maria Saporta of the ATLANTA
CONSTITUTION. Dan Graveline, Exec Dir of the GA World
Congress Center, called the loss "devastating." The show
brings 100,000 delegates to the city and has an economic
impact of $70M. The show has been in Atlanta since its
inception in '86, but has "outgrown space" in both the World
Congress Center and the GA Dome (ATL. CONSTITUTION, 11/12).