Boy oh boy: Henderson teen drawing attention in national contest

Kimberley McGee

Monday, Nov. 13, 2000 | 9:32 a.m.

He's the boy next door. He regularly baby-sits for the neighbors, has a part-time job, attends classes at the local community college and becomes shy around a pretty girl.

And he has his own slick trading card.

Nick Bohr, an 18-year-old Henderson resident, is one of 363 males between the ages of 12 to 22 posted on the Boy Crazy! trading card game website, and is vying for the interests of teenage girls to vote him Boy of the Year.

"I'm just me, I guess, but girls have gotten to know me from the website and it's cool," Nick said on a recent afternoon as he prepared to campaign by distributing colorful fliers at his job as a day-care worker at Anthem Country Club.

The Boy Crazy! trading card game features boys' mug shots and personal data from around the country. Girls can trade the cards or play a match-maker game. The website, boycrazy.com, offers an online game and a chat room (carefully monitored by company personnel) where the girls can talk about relationship issues, vote for their favorite candidates, post messages and send fan mail.

Nick was selected off the street for the contest by a team of teenage girls in September 1999, and became the Boy Crazy! Boy of the Week in July. From Nov. 27 through Dec. 10, the hunks campaign and the girls vote for Boy of the Year. The winner receives a $10,000 scholarship, Volkswagen bug and a one-year modeling contract with Boy Crazy!

"It was a weird thing, really, just an accident," Nick said.

Decipher Inc. searched malls and city streets and had teenage girls point out boys they thought were worthy of their adoration. Nicholas became a candidate when he was plucked out of the crowd on a busy Boston street.

Nicholas was on his way to a Red Sox baseball game while on vacation in Boston and had just finished a lobster lunch when a Boy Crazy! girl asked him and his friend to fill out application forms.

"I thought it would at least be fun, and I had time before the game," Nicholas said.

He filled out the form. Favorite book: "Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Favorite food: lobster. What he likes in a girl: sense of humor. Then he went off to the game and other vacation pursuits.

The Red Sox won against Philadelphia in extra innings, that he remembers. But the application became a faint memory. His mother, Karen, was shocked three months later when she opened the mail to discover her son was to be featured on a website.

"I was really excited, but I had to check it out. You never know," said Karen, who is confident that company's intricate screening procedures weed out any potentially threatening visitors to the site.

Karen allowed her son's photo and statistics to be posted on the site and sat back to see what would happen. Immediately, e-mail messages from around the world began piling up for young Nicholas asking the "cute boy" about his hobbies, if he had a girlfriend, what musical band rocked his world, and trumpeting his trading-card popularity.

"He used to lack self-esteem and this has really raised his confidence," Karen said.

The world opened up for her son, she said.

"He is so much better at speaking to people, it's amazing," Nicholas said. "This has really helped him that way."

Nicholas enjoys working with children and volunteers for his neighborhood Safe Key program. Tikes tend to speak to Nicholas' lighter side, he said, something that the adoring Boy Crazy! fans find, well, adorable.

"I can relate to little kids and their free spirit," Nicholas said. "It's fun, it keeps the kid in me alive."

Karen said that her sports-obsessed son has also been exposed to other cultures through the international e-mail messages he receives, and has expanded his horizons through those electronic conversations.

"He is singing more around the house," she said. "He kinda feels like a celebrity, even though he knows this is a long way from being a celebrity."

Nicholas' schedule my rival that of Justin Timberlake, member of the popular boy band 'N Sync.

He attends classes at the Community College of Southern Nevada from 8-11 a.m. where he is working toward a degree in communications. He fits in time with community efforts or baby-sitting before work from 3-6 p.m. and hops on the Internet after 8 p.m. to keep up with his fan mail -- he receives 40 messages a week -- and is in bed by 11 p.m.

He does take a day of rest. Sundays are sacred and reserved for family and his obsession -- football.

Yes girls, he's single, but sports are his constant love.

"I love basketball and I'm a huge Vikings fan and Arizona Suns fan," Nicholas said.

As a child he would mute the television during a heated basketball game and run commentary for his family.

"Al McCoy is my favorite," Bohr said of sports commentators. "I want to go into sports commentating and I think this (Boy Crazy!) will help."

Karen said the experience has been positive for her once-shy son.

"I have always told him, 'You can do anything you want to do' and this has helped him to understand that," Karen said.

Her son aspires to be a sports commentator and she said that this will hopefully expose him to that industry, where a pretty face and witty banter can help make a career.

The folks from Decipher Inc. want the similar success for the boys, but also feel that teenage girls can benefit from the local-boy-turned-idol focus of the game and website.

Monica Jones, marketing director for Decipher Inc., said the game is geared toward young girls so that they may gain self-esteem in the barrage of glamour media they are exposed to on a daily basis.

"The politically correct fairy tale revolves around the princess waiting for a white knight to come and choose them," Jones said. "We want girls to know they can pick and choose what they like."

The game consists of cards (sold for $3 for a pack of nine), which are examined by one girl who chooses her favorite boy. She writes down why she thinks a certain boy from the card stack is the one for her and shuffles the card back into the deck.

Her friends look at the displayed cards and try to find the guy she chose and guess why he is the hunk of her dreams. Every girl who figures out her friend's dreamboat is receives a point and the dealer also gets a point for each pick that is right.

"This gives girls a chance to realize what they may look for in a guy," Jones said.

The girls can then hook up on the Internet and find out more and possibly communicate to the boy whose card they are holding.

The game's critics -- and there are many -- have said that this encourages girls to concentrate on boys as objects and that the young women should focus their energies toward studies, sports and other activities that may empower them.

Florence Henderson and Ashe Blake of the now-defunct NBC "Later Today" show tore up the cards on national television in protest.

In its research, Jones said, Decipher Inc. found that trading cards aren't leading girls to go boy crazy -- they already are.

"Don't ignore the natural developmental phase," Jones said. "I think it's an inherent stage of development and parents can use the cards as a way to talk to their daughters about boys and relationships and what interests them."

Nicholas has found the same thing -- girls do like boys.

Girls have recognized Nicholas while he's out and about and have approached him with slight awe. The girls report any Boy Crazy! sighting on the website. He has had a handful of girls around the country asking him for autographed cards and champion him as a winner for Boy of the Year.

"It feels good to be noticed but I don't go out of my way to tell people," Nicholas said.

He is still the quiet boy next door.

And, he said, the girls like him as an award nominee -- they really, really like him.

"I don't know if I'll win," he said as he pondered his future and what the nomination may mean to him as he enters the work force. "It might be nothing, but it's been fun."

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