You get what you pay for

Buy a cheap watch, it’ll break before what can say “What time is it?” Buy a Honda instead of an Audi, it’ll run just fine, but it won’t purr. That’s what you get for the extra 20 grand. Hire a shoddy plumber, you’ll need a really good plunger.

You absolutely get what you pay for. Truer words were never spoken.

Or maybe not, given a couple of (completely unrelated) recent events.

One: I just returned from a cruise in the Caribbean. They call it a cruise, of course, because you spend most of your time cruising from one buffet line to another. Or to the pizzeria. Or Johnny Rockets. Or Ben and Jerry’s. Or the midnight buffet. All of which were on this one floating city of neverending gastric overload.

Every time I saw another corn-fed sun burnt dude with a cut out tank top showing way too much of his hairy back pile another fried pork cutlet onto his pile of gravy-covered mashed potatoes, I winced and felt a pang of sadness for him and his family. In his case, he was looking to get more than what you pay for. But that’s my opinion; he probably figured, “I paid an arm and a leg for this cruise, and I‘m going to get my money’s worth.” Everything is relative, yes?

Two: Stephon Marbury. He’s getting paid 21.9 million bucks a year to wear the Knicks colors and sit his ass on the bench. When the Knicks signed him in 2004, they thought he was the final piece of the puzzle that created the right mix of veterans and youngsters to make a run at a championship (or two). He helped them into the playoffs that year. But you know the story since then. All bad, with our current unhappy ending.

Truth is, GM’s make their bets based on all kinds of assessments and the rest is a roll of the dice. A-Rod gets 250 million. The Redskins pay Steve Spurrier 25 extremely large. Becks gets his 250 mil to enjoy the LA lifestyle and the sidelines. None of them produced any more than some fun headlines for the pundits.

There will always be busts.

And as hard as it may be to find them, there will always be Sure Things.

Michael, Tiger, Mia, Peyton…world champion athletes and likeable people. Obviously, it costs more to sign them, but in their cases, the adage proves true. I know they were worth every dollar to Gatorade, and I’d bet Nike and Mastercard and Amex and Rolex, etc, would feel similarly. In each case, those brands got far more than what they paid for.

Quality people--loyal, sincere athletes--who are also winners are incredibly few and far between. They are, to borrow from one of Peyton’s commercials:

Priceless.