I am a tool

I can’t believe I’m admitting it, but I succumbed.

A couple of weeks ago Rob asked me if he could have a Click Clack shirt. “What’s that?” I ask him, thinking maybe his kindergarten class had read Doreen Cronin’s sweet book. Oh, naive silly Mom. No, no — not that Click Clack, the sports Click Clack shirt.

Um, okay. He tried to describe it to me, but all I managed to understand was that the one he wanted was black. “And it fits like this,” Rob kept pulling his hands down from his chest over his tummy. Um, yeah…

The subject dropped for a couple of weeks until I took the boys to the soccer store to get new shoes (both guys’ feet grew a whopping size and a half over the winter!). While I was paying, Rob pulled a shirt off the rack, one of those tight-ish undershirt-ish ones that athletes wear under short-sleeved uniforms. “No, no” I tell him, “We’re only getting the shoes today.” He was fine with that and we went with new shoes to their first soccer practice (yeah, okay I waited till the last minute on the shoes).

But then this morning, Rob and Dan start in on the Click Clack shirts again. “That shirt yesterday at the soccer store, that was a Click Clack shirt,” Rob explains, as if talking to a small child.

“Why is it called a Click Clack shirt?” I venture.

“It just is,” they tell me in unison.

So I go online, type “Click Clack Sports Shirt” into Google. And discover this. Apparently, the Under Armour folks have been marketing these shirts with the phrase “click clack,” supposedly the sound that cleats make on cement floors. Big Sports Players (like A.J. Hawke, Dan informed me, and I’m sure he named others, but I stopped listening, I must confess) apparently wear them, or at least get paid lots of money to say they do. It happens that this campaign has created some level of hullabaloo because “click clack” (for those of you not in the hip hop know — if you’re an expert, feel free to skip this next sentence) is also a phrase used in rap songs to indicate the sound that a gun makes before it fires. As one of the three whitest moms in suburbia, this was not something I had heard. Nor was it something I felt terribly concerned that my boys understood. I mean there’s lots of stuff I get bent about, but I can’t work up much steam for this one.

I had actually wanted to get the boys some kind of shirt to wear under their soccer uniforms for cool spring and fall evenings. But idiot mom that I am, I thought we could find some kind of cheaper store brand shirt that would suffice for my boy’s Click Clack Craving.

So we go to Dick’s Sporting Goods. And my guys walk right up to the Under Armour Brand shirts and yell, “HERE they are!”

“See, they have the little thing right there,” Rob says, pointing to the insignia.

The shirts? $29.99 apiece. I gulp. I look at the guys as they frantically search the racks for the colors they want (Rob goes for classic black and Dan can’t be swayed from maroon.) And I know that somehow I will be hornswoggled into buying them.

My only defense is that I bought them big so that they will last well into the fall and maybe next spring. And they do wick moisture — which is really important for six and half year olds playing soccer, don’t you think?

Yes, children are starving in the world and I just bought my kids Click Clack shirts. They actually put them on in the car on the way to kindergarten and they were so excited. “Man, everyone’s gonna say, ‘I can’t BELIEVE you guys got Click Clack shirts,” Rob crowed to his brother. And Dan says, “Yeah, people are gonna want our autographs.” So I cautioned them against bragging and took them to school.

So…there it is…marketing to our youngest consumers and their weak and easily bought off kind and generous parents. Click, clack, click, clack, click, clack. Maybe they should be called cha-ching shirts.