Shill Game

As for the products themselves . . . well, as carefully as Mays might vet them, some get decidedly negative reviews. At http://infomercialratings.com, there are some favorable appraisals of something called Hercules Hooks, which gets an average rating of four out of five stars from customers. But the verdicts on Zorbeez cleaning cloths are scathing. "It's a 5 cent piece of felt that I spent 14 bucks on," wrote one unhappy customer. Another wrote: "do. not. waste. your. money."

The Awesome Auger fared no better, earning a mere 1 1/2 stars -- more than 70 buyers have weighed in -- with lots of complaints about performance and exorbitant shipping fees.

"What a RIPP OFF," fumed Ray of Texas, who was apparently too angry for the spell-checker. "I called their customer service line for three days and at least 10 times a day and always got the same recorded message, "All our repersentivies are busy, TRY YOU CALL AGAIN LATER, GOOD BYE."

Sobo, who runs the company behind the Awesome Auger, said he stands by the product and noted that anyone who doesn't like it can return it for a refund -- though that refund would not include shipping and handling fees.

"At the end of the day, there are going to be a certain number of people who like an item and a certain number of people who don't," Sobo said. "That's true of any product, no matter where it's sold."

Now, How Much Would You Pay?

Mays doesn't just swear by this stuff. He uses it, too. In fact, his home is kind of an as-seen-on-TV showroom.

"I have all the cleaning products, I have the Samurai Shark, Mighty Putty underneath my bathroom sink," he says. "I have Handy Switches in my garage. I have Hercules Hooks. Zorbeez is the chamois I use to clean up messes."

Mays has enough ego to refer to himself now and then in the third person, but he comes across as the unaffected dude he plays on TV, only much quieter. He occasionally will leap into his sales voice during an hour-long conversation, like a NASCAR driver demonstrating how to floor it. He's bummed about being sidelined by the hip surgery on this particular day, but his inclination is to look at the bright side of everything, even convalescence.

"I'm in the best shape of my life," he says, seeming to mean it.

A former high school football player, Mays dropped out of West Virginia University and worked for his father's hazardous-waste trucking company. In 1983, he ran into a high school friend who was heading to Atlantic City to sell Ginsu knives on the boardwalk, then the pitchman capital of the United States. "He said, 'I'm on my way to Atlantic City, want to come?' " Mays recalls. "I went home and grabbed my suitcase."

He's done nothing but peddle miracle mops, chamois cloths, kitchen choppers and hundreds of other products ever since. Mays first worked for a company called International Housewares, which in the '50s basically pioneered the form, content and style of the gadget pitch that would later evolve into the TV infomercial. (Ed McMahon also put in some time at this boot-camp-cum-graduate-school of the hard sell, moving vegetable slicers to put himself through college.) Mays worked for Cris Morris, the son of the company's founder, and the first product he sold was WashMatik, a hose that could pump water from a bucket without being hooked up to a faucet. You could wash your car without being near your house.

"We called him Bucket Billy because he was doing demonstrations with a bucket for five or six years," says Morris, on the phone from the Wisconsin State Fair, where he was setting up a handful of sales booths. "All the pitches he does on TV now are just like the ones he did in Atlantic City."