sponsorship

('And to think, my parole officer said I'd never amount to anything.')

Affliction co-founder Todd Beard has added another restraining order to his impressive resume. MMA Payout reports that the convicted felon/pregnant woman-puncher/elderly person-swindler Beard got into it with the CEO of Silver Star Casting, Luke Burrett, who then went out and got the restraining order (which can be viewed here) to stop Beard’s “harassment.”

If you’re not familiar with Silver Star, they make clothes that are very similar in douchieness to Affliction’s, only slightly more ‘consumer-friendly punk rock meets mall food court’ and less ‘appropriated symbols from other cultures meets skulls and shit,’ which is Affliction’s domain.  Silver Star also sponsors several MMA fighters (check out their comparatively cheap Rashad Evans t-shirt, for instance), and used to work together with Affliction until the companies had a dispute that led to Silver Star trying to make nice with the UFC.

Things supposedly got worse after UFC 94, which featured the man sponsored by both Affliction and Silver Star, Georges St. Pierre, who had previously been given permission by Affliction to wear Silver Star into the Octagon.  Preliminary reports indicate that no one outside the two companies noticed or gave a damn.  But leave it to Todd Beard to make an issue of it.  

That guy seems to know only one solution to every problem, and it involves threatening someone.  Should we be surprised that this is the kind of mind partly responsible for spawning Affliction?  We should not.  But hey, wait a minute, didn’t Beard supposedly resign from Affliction?  Maybe it’s just a coincidence that he’s now harassing the CEO of a company Affliction’s been having problems with lately.  Could be that was part of his normal, every day harassin’, and didn’t have anything to do with his business harassin’.  You gotta keep those separate, you know.

(Something's wrong here. I only count three skulls.)

In an attempt to broaden their fanbase, Affliction is shelling out the dough to appeal to a normally untapped potential audience: Nascar-lovers. Mike Skinner's car is turning into a moving billboard for the clothier-turned-promoter at the Pepsi 500 this weekend in San Bernardino, Ca.

Looking at the artist's rendition of the car above (courtesy of Yahoo's Steve Cofield), I'm totally pumped to see some skulls go screaming down the track. So pumped, in fact, that I may even watch Nascar (no I won't).

What's interesting here is that this whole stock car ad campaign makes a few assumptions that may or may not be valid. One is that there are enough Nascar fans who know enough about MMA already to even recognize what this is an ad for. You have to either know what Affliction is, or know who Arlovski and/or Barnett are for this to even make sense. The "vs." gives it away that there's probably a fight going on, but aside from that all you've got is a date and some skulls. Maybe the thinking is that if a date and skulls aren't enough for you, then Affliction doesn't want your money anyway (yes they do).

Just out of curiosity, any Nascar fans out there? As in, for real? I gotta be honest, this is as close as I ever came. And, to a lesser extent, this.

The first time I ever got drunk it was thanks to Mickey's Fine Malt Liquor. At the time I was fifteen and didn't know that the phrase "Fine Malt Liquor" made no sense at all. Some friends and I got the big mouth bottles and drank them as fast as we could in the vacant lot behind the supermarket. Needless to say, we soon threw up and had horrible headaches, but the point was we did it. The fact that it was awful only made us feel more like men, which of course we weren't. It wasn't until a few months later when I saw a homeless man drinking a forty of Mickey's in the street while holding his pants up with his free hand that I realized maybe we had been using the wrong metric by which to gauge our manhood.

Mickey's lost me as a customer back then, but that doesn't mean they're giving up. They've apparently decided to go the Coors Light route, and instead of investing money into coming up with a better product they're simply going to do weird stuff to the container. The newest weird thing: putting Tito Ortiz on their limited edition cans.

There's something that's just too perfect about seeing Ortiz hook up with Mickey's. They were both once beloved by the UFC until the organization found something better, and they're both responsible for regrettable pregnancies. Too far?