Clemson Fans Can Take Heart - More Spiller Heisman Posters May Be on the Way

Photos by fotoman

by David Hood - Senior Writer - Sun Jul 26 22:21:12 GMT-04:00 2009

So, you weren’t one of the lucky ones that managed to get your hands on one of the life-size C.J. Spiller Heisman promotional posters? Take heart, because another batch, might, the operative word being might, just be around the corner.

The poster, of which 4000 were distributed last week on a first-come, first-serve basis, were gone within minutes at each of the area locations, and fans have been scrambling since that time to find one, even going as far as searching on EBay.

Sunday afternoon at the ACC Football Kickoff meetings in Greensboro, the poster was one of the main topics of conversation, and Spiller himself was surrounded for much of his interview sessions as he was asked over and over about the poster and his thoughts on the Clemson campaign.

Florida St.’s Dekoda Watson even went as far as to “interview” the poster as Seminole quarterback Christian Ponder held it up, but mentioned that getting his hands on the more elusive flesh and bone Spiller will be as hard as it has been for Clemson fans to find a poster

Spiller, however, is taking everything in stride, even taking good-natured ribbing from friends and teammates while also trying to juggle requests for copies.

”Guys have been making fun of size, my smile, my height,” a grinning Spiller said. “To me, it is a pretty smile. I think it is a nice picture. But I have had a lot of emails and phone calls, and people asking me to sign it, but I can only sign so many. I didn’t get that many, I only got like five, and then I was all out. But at the end of the day, that doesn’t guarantee a successful campaign, and we still have to go out and work hard and prepare for the season.”

Clemson Sports Information Director Tim Bourret said that there were actually 4700 initial posters, but his office reserved 700 copies for distribution to the national media, and he knew that the Spiller posters would go quickly.

“Not in the least,” Bourret said when he was asked if he was surprised by the fans’ reaction. “I will give you an empirical reason why: In 1984, we did the same thing for William Perry, and we made 4000. 2000 went to the media, and in 1984 you could sell them, so we made 2000 available for sale. We were just hoping that we could sell the 2000 by the end of the season and get our money back.

”We made them available in mid-October at the Clemson and Duke Homecoming game, and we sold them all that day. I knew that if we could sell William Perry posters, that if we were giving away pictures of C.J. they would go crazy.”

Bourret also said that there may be hope for Clemson fans that didn’t get on in the first go-round, something that might slow the number of requests coming through his office from people all over the world.

”Hopefully, another sponsor or two will step up for a re-print,” Bourret said. “To print the 4700, we got them for about $2.10 apiece, but if were able to print 6000, we could have gotten them for about $1.80 apiece. But I have gotten a lot of student assistants emailing me that I had forgotten about. I knew I was going to get some of those, and we tried to set some aside.”