Nike bends time and space to brand Ernie Davis' shoes

By Matt Hinton

There are those rare brands in the world you know on sight, almost instinctively. Insidious logos that imprinted themselves on your brain before you could speak, that transcend the linguistic and cognitive middle men and lunge directly for your MasterCard as your neurons are still gearing up for "blink." The Golden Arches. The Coca-Cola script. The AT&T Death Star. Uh, MasterCard.

But only one monolithic, world-dominating corporate logo has developed the capability to travel backward in time to imprint itself on people and objects that existed years before its conception. So, the Nike swoosh, created in 1971, showing up on Syracuse's new statue honoring Ernie Davis, who died of leukemia eight years earlier, in 1963, is all just a big mistake, is it?

No, it wasn't a marketing deal, Syracuse athletic director Daryl Gross said. The sculptor simply made a mistake.

"Easy fix," Gross said in an e-mail today. "The sculptor is on it and will make it perfect."

What fool deigns to believe he can remove The Swoosh from its chosen apparel, modern, bronzed, anachronistic or otherwise? Do you believe Bruno Lucchesi simply made a mistake, or took liberties with the old photograph of Davis he was working from to create the statue? Don't you see? The Swoosh was already in the photograph. Soon, it will be in every photograph, on every sculpture, beckoning the nude angels in every fresco to "Just Do It." The Swoosh conquered the present easily, too easily, and it has conquered the future. But as for the past, the first black Heisman Trophy winner is only the beginning.

Soon, every athlete who ever lived will bear The Swoosh.

The Swoosh will control governments.

It will control art.

It will be the defining symbol of humanity, until it becomes history itself!

Yes, with Ernie Davis, you have only begun to understand the eternal omnipotence of The Swoosh.