Oversized badger tracks painted in white on the asphalt outside lead shoppers in through the portals toward the wonderland of Badger paraphernalia. But it takes a little while before you see a "W" sweat shirt or Badger hat.
First, you have to get by the red, white and blue Reebok banner hanging overhead, and the Reebok flags flanking the shelves, and the Reebok signs adorning the walls along with the distinctive Reebok "Vector" symbol.
The only way to miss them is to cast your eyes downward to the green wall-to-wall carpeting, and even then you are greeted by the sight of a three-foot welcome mat emblazoned with a single word: Reebok.
Wisconsin, it seems, is part of the Reebok "planet" that the athletic footwear company touts in its multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns, and Reebok doesn't want anyone to forget it.
"It's exposure, and whether you're dealing with Shaquille O'Neal or the University of Wisconsin football team you have to view it as an advertising thing," said Dave Fogelson, a spokesman for Reebok International Ltd. in Stoughton, Mass.
But to people like David Ross, a classical studies professor at the University of Michigan, where Reebok archrival Nike parades its "Swoosh" symbol on football Saturdays, it is symbolic of something else.
"It's representative of this whole crass commercialism of college sports," Ross said. "I'm not a sports fan myself, but I think it's a terrible thing. It's a sellout."
Perhaps, but it is a sale involving millions of dollars for big-name schools nationwide, part of a relatively new phenomenon that finds the nation's better-known universities accepting huge payments from the shoe companies.
And it is merely one facet of the booming new footwear and athletic apparel business that is spreading over the fabric of American sports like the shadow cast by a size 16 high-top.
From high school hallways to the negotiating rooms of professional athletes, shoe companies exert a greater influence today than ever before, and they are just getting started.
Consider these scenes from a world in which canvas-and-rubber shoes have been replaced by $100-plus, high-tech, gel-filled, cushion-soled, form-fitting footwear:
-- 20-year-old amateur golfer Tiger Woods leaving Stanford University to turn pro. The reason? Nike gave him 40 million of them.
-- NBA star Shaquille O'Neal, refusing at an official Olympic press conference to talk about the $120 million deal that sent him from the Orlando Magic to the Los Angeles Lakers. The reason? He wanted to save the news for later in the day, when he would be appearing at a Reebok press conference.
-- Or four football players from the University of Southern California being suspended from playing in a game this season against the University of California. The reason? They had traded their school-issued Nike football shoes in at a Nike Town store for other apparel.
With untold riches stemming from the profits available from shoes and related items, the world of athletics is being altered by the greatest force since the advent of television.
And anyone who doubts it need only look at the numbers.
For instance, Nike, the Oregon-based giant of the industry, reported last month that its quarterly revenues had just topped $2 billion for the first time. That is $2 billion in a three-month span. Phil Knight, Nike's chairman and chief executive officer, is consistently ranked as one of the most powerful figures in sports.
Nike has led the field in innovations from apparel to the controversial deal with the National Football League's Dallas Cowboys to its sports marketing group, which represents athletes. But shoes still are the engine driving the vehicle; 65 percent of Nike's revenues come from footwear.
With shoe companies competing for such huge sums, shoes and the ability to market them in every possible fashion are serious business.
Hence, the Nike Swoosh adorning the uniforms of football players at Michigan, the Reebok Vector draped from the sidelines of Camp Randall Stadium or peeking out from the sides of the shoes worn by Olympic volunteers in Atlanta.
Shoe deals and endorsement contracts are hardly new, but since Nike inked its $7.2 million deal with Michigan nearly two years ago the field has changed dramatically.
The Michigan deal helped mark the dawn of contracts involving entire athletic departments or schools, eclipsing the years-old practice of signing individual contracts with coaches from different sports.
Since that deal, which calls for Nike to provide shoes and apparel to the nearly two dozen sports at Michigan, numerous other schools have signed similar contracts.
Schools sign such agreements for obvious reasons in these days of difficult budgets and rising costs: money. Such deals typically provide about $1 million a year to the school, plus apparel and footwear for the athletes.
In return, generally, the school allows the shoe company logo to be plastered over certain parts of the university and its sports stores. Even some high schools in the East are entering into deals with shoe companies, a new area that may signal yet another expansion of the influence of such firms.
But there is more to it than simply getting free media exposure, the firms say.
"It is an opportunity to have your product worn by the best athletes in their sport in the country, which is very important to us," said Jim Small of Nike, which controls 42 percent of the market. "It's not just a matter of getting the Swoosh on television."
And the deals are not always as simple as they sound.
At Wisconsin, for instance, the $7.9 million Reebok deal has run into intense controversy and talk of legal challenges, in part because of a Reebok clause that called for the university to keep employees and coaches from publicly disparaging its products.
Reebok withdrew that clause because of objections from students and faculty, but the controversy lingers on the campus with such strength that some are reluctant to talk about it.
Men's track coach Ed Nuttycombe, for instance, was one of three coaches who originally questioned whether the school should commit to Reebok, and he was hesitant last month to relive the controversy that had engulfed the campus over the issue since last year.
"It was a huge deal," Nuttycombe said. "I got tired of reading my name in the paper. Basically, I made one comment back in the winter and it got played over and over and over again."
The comment, simply, was that the athletes did not want to be told what kind of shoe they should wear to best compete.
"What happened is that we in the track community had been involved with Nike," he said. "What we'd been involved with was a situation where the athletes could wear what they wanted to wear and be provided by the university whatever they thought was the best shoe.
"And signing with a company of any sorts was, for us, going to change that and eliminate that option for the athletes," he said. "It's resolved in the fact that we signed with Reebok and that's the end of the issue."
Reebok says it has taken the controversy in stride, noting that a traditionally liberal area such as Madison and its campus was bound to generate protests.
"It's just that each campus has its own interesting and unique personality, and I guess the Madison campus has an activist history," Fogelson said. "We feel this is a very beneficial relationship."
It is similar to the relationships Nike, Reebok and other companies have forged with other universities nationwide. And each deal has spawned new manners in which the shoe companies try to get their names or trademarks before the public.
Nike has positioned black Hummers outside stadiums, and Reebok is planning an alcohol-free tailgate party at the UCLA-USC game next month. Stadium scoreboards and sidelines typically carry the shoe company insignias, as do the uniforms, shoes and other equipment.
"We're not looking to manage any of these athletic departments, we're not dealing with the coaches on a regular basis or asking them to recruit certain individuals," Fogelson said. "And we don't pretend to say this is altruism on our part. It is business. We are spending a lot of money and we don't make any apologies for that."