Promo Man: Some Sports Things

~ Are you ready for some sports… thiiiiiings!? ~ That’s how the tune goes right? I’m not a big sports game guy but over the years I picked up a few different merchandising tchotchkes. First was the Monday Night Football plastic cup from Data East that I got at CES 1992. For the longest time it held all my other tchotchkes from CES.

In 1995 I was working a high school job at Meijer and would look forward to visits from our Nintendo rep. She’d drop off posters and water bottles and keychains like this one (bottom) for Ken Griffey Jr.’s Winning Run on SNES. It was especially well balanced so if you had your pointer finger through the key ring you could swing the bat and ball back and forth in a satisfying twitch.

Four years later in 1999 Nintendo was promoting Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest on N64 with this baseball glove keychain (top) at E3 and other events. It didn’t feel good at all but held the oversized baseball from the other keychain almost perfectly.