Nike became a lightning rod for all sorts of criticism

[xinqixiang]

Some consider Nike--with its swoosh popping up on uniforms, on the lapels of college basketball coaches, even as bus-size renderings on walls of stadiums--responsible for the over-commercialization of sports. Nike is certainly not the first or only corporation to wield considerable influence in the sports world, but it is the most brazen and visible. "Nike is the prime representative of the way we overmarket and overadvertise and overdo everything these days," says Todd Boyd, a professor of critical studies in the USC school of cinema and television. "The market is saturated to the point where it can be sickening. The problem is, we now have people going gaga over a commercial, as much or more so than they do the sport itself. Enough already."

For a time, Nike became a lightning rod for all sorts of criticism. The Nike Air Max 90 Damen Pink company came under fire in the early 1990s when there was a spate of shootings and knifings in American inner cities by teenagers coveting Adidas Yeezy 350 Boost Herren Nikes, which were just then pushing the $100 mark. Newspaper columnists decried "Just Do It" as a nihilistic slogan that justified or even begat these crimes. Nike was accused of focusing its ad campaigns on children in the ghettos, although, ironically, athletic shoes are the most cross-cultural of commodities.

Then, in the 1992 Olympics, the company hit its public relations nadir when the Nike endorsers on the Olympic basketball "Dream Team" refused to wear the official Olympic warm-up jerseys on the medal stand because they bore the logo of archrival Reebok. Nike was perceived as demanding that its athletes put shoe company before country. The incident became a symbol for those concerned with Nike Air Huarache Femme the inexorable and rapidly advancing influence of money in the world of athletics, obscuring or even warping the purity of the Games Nike Air Max 90 Femme themselves.