What's wrong with you? Why can't you be like your cousin John... or your brother Bob... or fill in the blank, whoever you were being compared to unfavorably. Who hasn't heard that line from mom? And I don't know about you but it never made me want to strive to emulate that person, it just made me resent them for making me look bad. Actually it made me want to sabotage something they did so that I could improve my standing relative to them without having to do any work.
Some things never change. This is not an option here. I'm referring to the sports fashion site who's logo you see above. I love Uniwatch too much to even consider negative thoughts about it. Anyone who reads this site knows that I often refer to Uniwatch http://www.uniwatchblog.com/ as a source of topics, material, or confirmation of facts, theories etc. It's a one stop shopping place for people with an extreme interest in sports fashion issues. It's the brainchild of one Paul Lukas from Brooklyn. The difference between Paul's site and this one are many. Paul lets the nature of the site be a source of amusement whereas around here the fashion facts are secondary to the laughs. And we go mostly for the cheap, crude or slapstick variety. Uniwatch is a classy date, we're the fun chick that puts out and is happy with a few beers at the local dive as opposed to a fancy dinner.
Uniwatch is also much more about facts, accuracy, databases, historical research and whatnot. Over this way it's rumor, innuendo and just plain making stuff up to keep ourselves and our two and a half readers amused. Paul covers every sport under the sun. Around here, if it doesn't concern an NFL gridiron we don't give a rats ass. Paul is a professional writer. In this neck of the woods grammar is a dirty word and sentences run on so long they need water stations.
Paul checks facts and verifies stuff. Here we assiduously avoid such time consuming nonsense.
By comparison Paul is a sports fashion newspaper, we are The Onion. Paul is the Daily News, we are Mad magazine. Paul is Bob Woodward. We are Dave Barry. Paul is Nightline, we are Monty Python. Paul lets a joke go, we beat them like rented mules.
I am a card carrying member of Uniwatch. I've corresponded with Paul a few times and he gave this site a mention in his column a while back which resulted in the most hits this site has ever had in one day so generally speaking I love Uniwatch.
In spite of all this I wound up with that "Why can't you be more like your cousin David" feeling this past week. It started when I was perusing his FAQ section and found that my Football Fashion Glossary was not, in fact, a first. My heart sank as I gazed upon Uniwatch's sports fashion glossary and I felt like that Polar explorer who braved frostbite, watched team members die horrible deaths in blizzards and pushed himself to the absolute limits of human endurance only to arrive at the pole and find the flag of the guy who had been there two weeks before.
Ok, maybe my FFF glossary didn't push me to the limits of human endurance but it did push me to the limits of my attention span that day.
So instead of admitting to being the second guy to the north pole, I'm going to take the cheap way out and try to differentiate. Paul's is an all sports fashion dictionary of terms, ours is all NFL. Paul never once manages to bring cheerleaders into the mix... advantage us. Do I feel better now? .... a little.
Then later in the week he took up the issue of NFL teams selling advertising space on their practice jerseys. One team already has and it's a terrifying development. There's a storm on the horizon alright. It's shapin' up to be either a fracas a brouhaha or a kerfuffle. To early to tell. But getting back to the point, Paul was eloquent, erudite, logical and convincing in his arguing against the NFL heading down that slippery slope. This is an issue so close to my heart that its like Dick Cheney's built in defibrillator to me. Just broaching the topic puts me at risk of seizing up. Inside my brain synapses fire all at once like the finale of the Macy's 4th of July fireworks extravaganza and thundering herds of words come charging down towards my mouth all at once only to jam up at the door the way Archie and Meathead used to. Consequently my voice never gets heard. Like that Captain Nixon in Band of Brothers who is on the front line all the way up through Nazi occupied europe but never gets to fire a shot, I feel unfulfilled. Just knowing I haven't done my part to stop the pernicious threat of advertising on NFL jerseys haunts me.
So I know this isn't going to come out as smoothly and convincingly as Paul's debate input but I'm going to try to put some of my thoughts on the topic down. Whether it hits the target or not, God Damn it, I'm going to fire a shot.
Here we go.
Until recently the NFL wasn't something I thought of as an entertainment product. Logically, I've always know it was, but to me it was more of a family tradition, a life tradition, an american tradition. Games and seasons have been intertwined with life events. Teams and loyalties were an integral part of friendships and even loves. Football was a part of growing up. We watched it. We played organized football with coaches and uniforms. We played pickup games at the local field. We played street touch games with cousins at holidays. We played "kill the guy" in the schoolyard. We'd move the furniture out of the way and play Nerf games on the living room carpet when the parents were out for the night. No sissy stuff either. I actually broke my younger brothers collarbone in one of those games. Believe me, that was tough to explain when the folks came home. When the topic of "what do you want to be when you grow up" was discussed my answer, for a time was "a football player"
The earliest existing class picture I have of myself has me sporting a white button down sweater with the NFL crest on the chest. I think it was from first grade and back then I don't think I even knew what it was but I do remember sitting on the couch next to my dad watching the Packers in one of their early super bowls. I don't even remember who the opposing team was but I remember the Packers won and I remember taking note of their cool uniform.
In spite of the depth of this connection with the league, as the years went by, I noticed that I was a little different than most of my friends in a very basic way. My closest friend back in this period (who also later went on to fame as Giantman) was, as you might expect, a die hard Giant fan. I don't remember how it came to be exactly but I was a Cowboy fan during the Staubach years. I loved the excitement of a scrambler and Roger the Dodger was just plain fun to watch. The scrambler theme continued as I went on to spend a number of years as a Vikings fan. The Viking years were, of course about Fran the man Tarkenton but I'd also become enamored of the awesome defense of the Purple People eaters. And in both cases the teams uniforms rocked. That helped.
When the Vikes lost their fourth Super Bowl my fan spirit was crushed and I walked away from my fandom a sobbing broken young man. Eventually I was coaxed back into the NFL fold by friends and encouraged to find a new team to root for if I couldn't face Minnesota again. This would lead to fan stints with the Saints and Giants before coming in for a landing with the Jets which is where I have hung my hat for the past decade.
Along the way, I've been forced by the lifelong fans to defend my philandering ways. Or at least that's how they view it. First off, I'd point out that it's not so much philandering as it is serial monogamy. But the gist of my argument/explanation always came down to this.
I won't just root for a uniform.
That is to say I always felt I needed to like the personality of the players on the team. Back when I started there was no free agency so players tended to stay put. If you liked the players on the team it was easy to stick with them for a long time. As free agency came into the picture and players became more mobile it made even more sense to me.
If my team played another team who had a player or players I hated and that player wound up on my team through a trade, I couldn't just change my opinion of that person because he now wore my teams uniform. If he was a douche the Broncos, he'd still be a douche in my teams uni.
I could always understand and respect the dedication and motivations of those who were lifelong fans of one team, especially if that allegiance was handed down from father to son but my dad loved football without having one die hard dedication to one team unless it was college ball and then it was Notre Dame.
So while I knew that that it was the norm to stick one team, I felt my method made just as much sense. If the team wasn't loyal to the players I liked, why should I be loyal to that team?
Unfortunately this line of reasoning was often rejected with extreme prejudice. I was excoriated by guys with such venom that it almost seemed like the married guy cursing out the bachelor not because he really judged him poorly but because he was resentful of the freedom and choice available to me following my philosophy. And to this day I relish getting together with friends to watch games knowing that at some point during the proceedings the topic will rear its ugly head and the words "carpetbagging son of a bitch" will come flying my way. It's become something of a tradition in itself.
Anywhooo, Paul takes the position that while he is ok with individual athletes like golfers and boxers wearing advertising because they only represent themselves, team sports like Football and baseball should be free of advertising because they represent cities and regions. They represent traditions and team histories. He makes the point that as a Met fan he generally dislikes the Yankees but if a massive trade put every player on the Yankees into a Met uniform, he'd still root for the Met's.
In point of fact, he does root for the uniform!
Again, I understand and respect this.
But here's what I believe both types of fans have in common.
The connection to a team, and from an even wider perspective a sport, needs to be more that just a run of the mill consumer purchase if it is to be enjoyed. Teams need fans to have passion to make the experience fulfilling for both the team and fan. I may or may not buy the same brand of peanut butter I did ten years ago but I'll never be passionate about it. While the Giantmen and Paul's of the world will still be rooting for the same team decade in and decade out I might not. However I will still be rooting for some NFL team. To keep the peanut butter example going I may love peanut butter as a food regardless of the brand but again, I'll never scream at the top of my lungs and jump around a room screaming and hugging other peanut butter consumers if peanut butter outsells hot dogs that year.
Because whether our allegiance is team or sport specific the requirement of passion makes it imperative that some aspect, this aspect, the uniform should remain free of advertising for the critically important reason of differentiating it from run of the mill consumer purchases. Passion is the lifeblood of the connection of fan to sport or team.
To me, if you constantly remind me that this is "just business" and that your going to bend me over till I scream, you are going to take the passion out of it. No passion, no fun, no fun, no fans, no fans no more football. The word fan is short for fanatic... you do the math.
So while our philosophies as fans are diametrically opposed we are solid as a rock together when it comes to our opposition to advertising on team uniforms
The inevitable example held up by bean counting MBA douche bags is European soccer or even the NFL Europe. Both of these precedents suck dog ass. I live in europe right now and to me equating the NFL to them is to equate being an American to being a Lichtensteiner. I hope people from Liechtenstein are proud of their land and traditions but I have no desire to emulate them. I like being different ! And as far as the NFL europe goes it never had any tradition to start with and was a rinky dink farm system at best, so if it accepted or needed ads on the jerseys, fine but don't dare say that means its ok to bring that shit to the real deal.
To mix another metallurgical metaphor, trying to squeeze every last nickel from the goose that lays the golden egg threatens to kill it. It also annoys the shit out of the goose. These last few nickels they want to squeeze out are a dangerous pleasure the owners are after. Much like David Carradine and Michael Hutchence they too run the risk of (metaphorically speaking) hanging from the back of a hotel door with their "business" in their dying hands wondering with their final fleeting thought if it was really worth going that far for that last little bit of profit pleasure.
Ken
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