Has the Stogie Sensation Really Burned Itself Out?

I don’t know if you saw the story, but according to a new report, America’s cigar craze is over. Or at least semi-over. Or around death’s door.

Sales are off. Cigar bars have closed. Smokers are dropping like flies. They’re being caught with their Zippos down.

Sorry, Fidel.

I know Cuba has two things we want more of--cigars and right-handed pitchers--but by the time Castro reopens trade relations with the United States, supply could be greater than demand.

As a cigar smoker myself--sorry--I can’t help but wonder if this really is the end to a trend.

If so, maybe I’ll quit.

I only smoke to be cool. It’s a filthy habit. It chaps my lips. It makes my breath smell like a marathon runner’s feet. It gets into the walls, the halls, the chairs and the stairs. It turns my lungs a lovely shade of gray. It makes me cough like Doc Holliday. I don’t really need two filthy habits (already being a member of the media).

Plus, it’s expensive.

“How much do these go for?” I asked my cigar store guy a while back, holding one the size of a cucumber.

“Twenty-five,” he said.

“A box?”

“Apiece.”

I looked at the cigar, then asked: “How much just to rent one?”

*

To be fair to tobacco peddlers here, it isn’t as if their customers were leaving in droves (which is better than leaving in hearses). Sales in the U.S. are not down, technically.

In fact, they increased a reported 0.4% during the last year, possibly due to the fact that some people like me can only afford two-fifths of a cigar.

Cigars sold in 1998: 3.33 billion.

(I received approximately 0.33 billion myself, just as Christmas gifts. Why do people who love me keep trying to kill me?)

So it’s not as though the cigar business is going the way of the Hula Hoop business. You don’t sell 3.33 billion of anything and file for bankruptcy.

It’s just that in 1997, sales rose 16.4%.

And in 1996, they were up 17.7%.

Everybody seemed to be smoking cigars. Women were smoking cigars. Fitness freaks were smoking cigars. Siegfried & Roy’s tigers were smoking cigars. I saw so many healthy celebrities on the cover of Cigar Aficionado magazine, I kept waiting for issues featuring gracious-living goddess Martha Stewart, exercise queen Kathy Smith, gymnast Kerri Strug and amphibian Kermit the frog smoking cigars. I half-expected a cover of John Glenn, lighting up inside a space helmet.

Janet Jones and Wayne Gretzky did a cover. She’s a dancer. He’s a hockey player. Your perfect cigar spokespeople.

I admit it. I acquired the habit.

My smoking days had previously been confined to my teens, when I smoked Parliament cigarettes (because I liked the plastic filter tip) and Hav-a-Tampa cigars (because I liked the wooden filter tip). I refused to smoke unfiltered tobacco, because if I wanted to taste a leaf, I’d go lick my rain gutter.

I quit quickly, though, because when your pipe-puffing grandfather gets lip cancer and your Camel-dragging father gets emphysema, doggone it, you ought to wake up and smell the lilies.

Then came the ‘90s cigar boom.

I’m not sure when or why. Celebrity role models? Oh, I’m tired of blaming all of the world’s problems on them. I grew up watching George Burns, Milton Berle, Groucho Marx and others chomping cigars, but I doubt if that ever influenced me.

(During the week George Burns died at age 100, the TV show “Saturday Night Live” joked that it was “yet another example of the harmful effects of tobacco.”)

This generation has had Michael Jordan and Arnold Schwarzenegger among its more recognizable cigar smokers. Yep, there go a couple of really unhealthy individuals.

I bet those guys don’t even have to ask if their cigars cost more than $25 a box.

*

A few days ago, they took down the Marlboro Man billboard that has been hovering above the Sunset Strip since the early ‘80s.

They had to, I guess. He was beginning to cough up cardboard.

The poor Marlboro Man could have lasted a few more years if he had taken up cigars instead. He’d still be out there on the range, with his horse’s nostrils full of secondary smoke.

For now, I will cut back on my own intake--maybe just sneak 0.4% of a cigar a week. And I’ll make it a small cigar, not one of those expensive ones.

Size doesn’t matter.

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053. E-mail: mike.downey@latimes.com