Uni Watch Profiles: Derrick Dumont

In late July I got a note from longtime reader Richard Craig, who’d stumbled upon an interesting uni-related attraction in an unlikely place:

Last weekend I was cruising through the wine country out here in California, doing a few tastings but mostly just enjoying the scenery. Driving along the Silverado Trail in Calistoga, I was just about to sail on past the Silver Rose Winery when at the last moment I noticed a little sign near the driveway. I did a double-take, hit the brakes and went inside.

It turns out that the guy who runs the winery has a private collection of football helmets that he’s recently put on display in the lobby of the winery. He’s got old leather helmets and NFL “helmet evolution” sets (check out the Redskins, Eagles, and Giants progressions at left). He also has helmets from the USFL, the CFL, the Arena league, even the XFL.

It was a surprise to find this in a winery (though if you own a winery, I’m sure you can afford a helmet collection). I got the guy’s contact info in case you’re interested in talking to him.

And that’s how I recently found myself speaking with Derrick Dumont, who, I think it’s safe to say, is the only vintner in America who also has a world-class football helmet collection. Here’s how our discussion went down:

Uni Watch: You’re obviously a football fan. Did you play football when you were younger?

Derrick Dumont: I did play Division II college, back I the early ’80s. Always loved the sport.

UW: What position?

DD: I was a receiver. Even after college, I was always looking for flag football leagues to play in. I think the last time I played in an organized flag league was about 12 years ago, when I was 37.

UW: How long have you been in the winery biz?

DD: We’ve had the property since 1985, and I joined the family business in ’93. We’re what you call a resort winery — we have a small hotel on-site with 20 guestrooms, as well as a small winery where we produce less than 2000 cases a year.

UW: And how’d you get into the helmet thing?

DD: Prior to joining the family business, I had another job that involved a lot of travel, and — well, actually, to tell the story properly, you have go back to fourth grade, when I was on my first team and my dad helped me paint all the helmets so they all matched.

UW: A Pop Warner team?

DD: This was actually just organizing our own little group to play against another elementary school. Even in our pick-up games when I was a little kid, I’d paint my own jersey out of a T-shirt so I could pretend to be a particular player.

UW: So you were thinking in uni-related terms very early on. Was that important to you, to have your helmet be just so?

DD: Yes, definitely.

UW: And when your dad helped you paint your team’s helmets, did you ask him to help you, or was it his idea? Like, was he saying that you kids needed to look good out there?

DD: No, it was me asking for his help, because I wasn’t very good at spray-painting. I designed a little “A” for our logo, because our school was called Addison. So we made a stencil, sprayed it on, and sprayed a stripe. He showed me how to do that.

UW: It must have killed you when the paint got chipped or got dirty during the game, right?

DD: No, it held up fine. Our collisions weren’t that intense.

UW: Do you still have that original helmet?

DD: No. But that’s how I got started.

UW: Did you also collect the little mini gumball helmets?

DD: Yeah, I had those for a while. And football cards. I don’t know what happened to all that stuff. Then, a few years after I got out of college, I went to visit one of my old roommates. And he had his high school helmet, plus our college helmet. And I said, “Wow, how did you get that? That is so cool!” And I thought, “I’ve gotta do that. I need to make replica helmets for all the teams I played for.”

UW: So he had made these helmets himself? He hadn’t gotten them from the schools?

DD: Exactly, he did it himself. And I thought that was the greatest thing, so I started with that, making my Pop Warner, high school junior college, and college helmets, and from there it just kinda went crazy.

UW: So all the helmets that you have displayed at the winery — you made all of those?

DD: A few of them were bought. But 95% of them I’ve made. Some of them were beat-up old helmets I found garage sales and flea markets. And when I was traveling for my old job, whenever I was in a town I’d look up the oldest sporting goods store, tell them about my project, and we’d go down in the basement and find these brand-new helmets that were 20, 30 years old.

UW: And you’d buy those?

DD: Sometimes they just gave them to me! Most of the time they’d charge me a little, almost nothing, because they didn’t know what to do with ’em. And they knew I wasn’t going to be using them on my head, or on anyone else’s head, so they felt comfortable letting them go like that. So then I’d sand them down, repaint them, and then I either painted the logo, made the logo, or was able to obtain the logo.

UW: When you say “obtain,” you mean you got a decal?

DD: Yeah. Because those are usually pretty readily available. And I’ve always tried to keep things matched up, so that I’m using the right helmet for the era of a particular logo.

UW: In other words, you wouldn’t use a 1990s Riddell helmet for a 1960s Redskins design.

DD: Exactly.

UW: And I can see from the photos that you obviously keep the facemasks era-appropriate as well.

DD: Yes. So, slowly but surely, I’ve been able to keep the collection growing, adding the USFL designs, and then the WFL from the ’70s, and the XFL. And since I was born in Canada, I’ve added the Canadian Football League, back to the ’60s. Now I’ve gotta look at this new UFL. I haven’t done any of the girls’ leagues yet.

UW: I’ve gotta get you talking with Bill Jones. He’s this guy in Texas who’s the king of gumball helmets — he makes them himself, and he’s found every obscure league you can imagine. Like, if there’s a women’s over-50 league in Australia, he’s done their helmets. And he’s always looking for more — it’s like an addiction with him. I think that’s where you’re headed.

DD: Possibly, yeah.

UW: How many helmets do you have displayed there at the winery?

DD: About 250. And I have a few hundred helmets on hand that I can make into new designs. I still have some gaps to fill — I don’t have all of the 1960 designs from the AFL, for example, and I’ve only done about half of the arena league. So it’s still a work in progress.

UW: What’s the story with the leather helmets?

DD: Those aren’t replicas — those are old, original helmets that I’ve managed to acquire. I’ve got one for every decade that leather helmets were used.

UW: When did you start displaying your helmets at the winery?

DD: In early June.

UW: Oh, so it’s a very new thing.

DD: Yes.

UW: So up until now, you’ve just been pursuing this privately, in your basement or whatever.

DD: Exactly.

UW: Did you have them displayed, like in your rec room or something like that?

DD: Some of them. But most of them were just sitting in boxes until we decided, “Well, we need something to attract people to our winery.” You know, we’re a small operation here in Napa Valley, and we need a reason for people to come to our tasting room instead of all the other ones out there.

UW: So you saw a way for your collector obsession to be put to use as a bit of marketing.

DD: Yeah, that’s what we’re hoping. Actually, we’re going through a bit of a transition here, because our goal is to become more of a wine sports bar.

UW: Does your helmet museum have an official name?

DD: Right now we’re just saying, “Silver Rose Presents 100 Years of Pro Football History.”

UW: You don’t charge admission for this, do you?

DD: No.

UW: Have you tried to promote via the local media?

DD: One of the local papers wrote something, but I haven’t really had a chance yet to publicize it. But we’ve updated our sign out front — originally it just said, “Football Helmet Museum,” but now it includes a blue helmet.

UW: So how has the response been so far? Has anyone come in specifically to see the helmets?

DD: There have definitely been people who’ve come in because they saw the sign. And a few of the locals came by when that article ran in the local paper.

UW: What about people who were coming for the wine and didn’t realize that they’d be surrounded by all these football helmets?

DD: It’s been amazingly great. People are pretty impressed — they think it’s cool. Some of them are a bit confused, they’ll say, “Why football helmets?” And we’ll just say, “Well, we want to be different than everyone else.” Other wineries might have some fancy artwork or Ansel Adams photos, but we’re kind of bucking the trend with our sweaty football helmets.

UW: I guess it really is bucking the trend, or even somewhat counterintuitive, because the standard perception is that the intersection of football and alcohol begins and ends with beer. You think of football fans drinking beer, sports bars serving beer, and obviously there’s lots of beer advertising during NFL games. When you think about football fans, you don’t usually think about wine. For that matter, when you think of wine, you don’t generally think about football.

DD: We haven’t had any problem in that regard. When people see how many helmets we have and the history behind them, they appreciate it. And I’ve put together a catalog that has a picture of every helmet on our wall, the story behind it, what style it is…

UW: Oh, you’ve put together a guide to the museum, sort of a program?

DD: Right. I’ve put together a catalog, in a binder, so people can take a look and get more information about the helmets.

UW: What about women? I’d think that the wine demographic has a higher concentration of women than you’d normally find among football fans. If a couple comes in, does the guy get all excited when he sees the helmets and then the woman is sitting there rolling her eyes?

DD: Not really. I mean, maybe a couple of times, but overall it’s been really well received. A lot better than I expected, in fact. That’s what’s been so exciting.

UW: You were worried it might not go over so well?

DD: I wasn’t 100% sure how people would take it. But I’ve been very pleasantly surprised. It’s made me proud of what I’ve accomplished.

UW: You should be! What about your family, what do they think? Are you married?

DD: Yes, and I have four boys. They all play football. In fact, everyone in the family is a football fan, including my wife.

UW: And what has she thought of your hobby over the years?

DD: She’s been pretty supportive. She’s just glad to have a little more room in the house now that I’ve moved the helmets over to the winery.

UW: What about your kids? Do they share your passion for getting a uniform just right?

DD: Yeah, when they’re getting ready for game, they have their little rituals, just like I did when I played.

UW: What sort of rituals did you have?

DD: When I was in high school, I always had to tape my shoes so they looked nice and white. I’d tape ’em up and then repaint the stripes on ’em. And I always used knee pads for my hip pads, before they got a little stricter about the padding. If I could’ve gone without padding, I probably would have.

UW: How much money would you estimate you’ve spent on this hobby over the years?

DD: Hmmmm… [Long pause.]

UW: Ballpark.

DD: I’d say I average about $30 a helmet. So that figure, times 250 helmets, means about $7500. Actually, it could have been a lot more — I’m kind of a stickler about price, so I’ve turned down some helmets that I’ve seen for sale, because I thought they were overpriced.

UW: And do those helmets now haunt your memory?

DD: Yeah. I passed up some beat-up old Riddell helmets, and now you don’t see those anymore, even on eBay.

UW: What about college football helmets? You have lots of pro leagues represented in your collection, but not much in the way of college.

DD: I’ve done a few college helmets, but only ones were I really liked the logo or the history, like the Michigan and Texas. Air Force, too. But I’ve really concentrated on pro football.

UW: What if you want to expand the museum? How much more room for on the walls do you have?

DD: I still have some open hooks…

UW: Yeah, how’d you come up with that hook system? It looks ingeniously simple.

DD: I saw something similar somewhere — where was that? Anyway, I saw something where they just had the hook in the earhole, and it gives it just a little tip especially when you’re looking up, so it works really well. I haven’t counted exactly how many open hooks I still have, but my guess would be about 20 or so.

UW: And you mentioned that you wanted to have a wine sports bar. Would that be in this same space, where the helmets are now?

DD: Yeah.

UW: And do you envision expanding that concept, where you’d have maybe a chain of these wine sports bars or something ike that?

DD: That is a possibility — replicating this concept. Especially when you have companies like Helmet Hut creating such amazing helmet product. I think I’m pretty fussy, but I think the Helmet Hut product is absolutely perfect.

UW: Do you know those guys personally?

DD: No.

UW: They’re really amazing people, and they’re such sticklers for historical details.

DD: Yeah, I’ve bought some of their helmets and have really been blown away by how authentic they are. And it’s great that they sell the old facemasks, and even the old clips for the facemasks, because those can get brittle and break, so it’s great to have a place to buy those. For someone like me, it’s a dream come true. And, actually, it’s helped me start my own custom-helmet business, which is called Your Helmet Your Way.

UW: And how is that different from Gridiron Memories?

DD: They aren’t taking the logo thing as far as I am. If someone wants to do a replica of their high school or Pop Warner helmet, I’m willing to do just one, as long as they can get me a photo. No one was really doing that, so I’ve got a little niche there. I started that a little over a year ago.

UW: And how has that gone?

DD: Surprisingly well, considering how the economy has gone. Some corporations have actually hired me to do helmets for them.

UW: You mean, like a company’s logo on a football helmet, as a promotional item, even if they never had anything to do with football?

DD: Right.

UW: Wow, you’re gonna be way past the wine business before you know it. That’s really interesting. And do you promote this operation of yours within the museum at the winery?

DD: I do have one small display for the business, yes.

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Faaaaascinating. Big thanks to Derrick for sharing his collection, and to Richard Craig for tipping me wise to this great story. But I’m still sticking with beer.

Uni Watch Stirrup Club Update: Comrade Robert Marshall has just returned from the front lines of the stirrup revolution. He offers this report of the proceedings:

1) Our third-party supplier fed me some misinformation. Turns out the cardinal stirrup is not a “standard” design but a special order, and as such it takes four weeks to produce, not two. When this is coupled with the upcoming Uni Watch vacation, we need to offer up the next selection before our current order arrives in order to stay on our monthly schedule.

2) My disappointment with our previous dealer (for numerous reasons) has led me to take steps to ensure we have a direct connection with Twin City Knitting. How will that affect things? First and foremost, it means cheaper hosiery for all, and I should also be able to accommodate a wider variation of size requests. But most importantly, it means I now have TCK’s ear, and I am already trying to work on new offerings to better satisfy the people. No matter how abstract the message may sometimes be here, do not doubt my commitment to the spread of right proper hosiery through direct action.

3) This months choices are pure chicago, with four separate offerings. That’s right, we were able to handle two, so I am going to try to offer four per month from now on. So what with the increased choices, and the previously stated changes, I beg of you, even if you think you know what to do, please read the abbreviated instructions carefully, and follow the directions precisely.

Raffle Results: The 10 winners of the Bill Henderson MLB jersey guide are Brennan Barber, Eric Buettner, Bryan Duklewski, David Frost, Rob Ullman, Chris Stoppel, Bill Sour, Chris Milea, David Jackson, and Jerry Meyerowitz. All of you should contact me asap with your shipping addresses. Thanks!

Uni Watch News Ticker: A New Jersey politician doesn’t like the Nets’ new road jersey (with thanks to Timothy Collins). … Oooh, check out the cool cartoon on the cover of this year’s Patriots media guide (with thanks to Yancy Yeater). … New Bobcats unis visible in this video clip. Apparently they’ll have pinstripes. … New logo for the 2009 FIVB Men’s Club World Volleyball Championship, to be played in Qatar in November (with thanks to Jeremy Brahm). … The Red Sox had to buy a vowel over the weekend (great find by Tom Mulgrew). … More slop from the UFL here (with thanks to Marc Altieri). … It’s tough to see for sure, but Gabe Greenbaum says this minor leaguer is wearing stirrups with no sannies! … Are you an artist? Wanna create something for the Marlins’ new ballpark? Then you’ll wanna take a look at this page (thanks, Kirsten). … Ray Emery’s new mask is a tribute to Philadelphia boxing (with thanks to Enrico Campitelli Jr.). … Great article saluting single-bar facemasks here (big thanks to Larry Kurtze). … Here’s one guy’s assessment of the best Steelers by uni number (with thanks to David Potter). … The saga of the A’s helmet decals continues. Looks like Adam Kennedy is back to the old helmet style, plus his decal appears to be sitting a bit low (good spot by Brandon Davis). … The Massachusetts lottery has introduced a new Patriots-themed scratch-off ticket, and Bob Kraft presented a jersey to Massachusetts State Treasurer Timothy Cahill with a “Massachusetts” NOB and the number 351, for all of the cities and towns in the state (with thanks to Scott Davis). … Excellent spot from Brent Hardman, who notes that Bengie Molina appears to have a small pocket, or something like that, sewn into the chest of his jersey. … Brent also sent along this great shot of himself and his son at Falcons training camp. “One fan dressed in full uniform (old logo) in the 90-degree heat, while the actual team was practicing in helmets and shorts,” he says.

Nineteen days isn’t so long: Beginning tomorrow, Uni Watch will go on summer hiatus through the end of August. We’ll be open for business again on September 1st. No need to send Ticker contributions during this period, although college football news is very welcome. I’ll have at least two ESPN columns running while the blog is inactive. If you want to stay up to date, sign up for my mailing list, which will keep you in the loop.

Enjoy the break — see you in a few weeks.

165 comments August 12th, 2009

Uni Watch Profiles: David Frost

Way back in March, I conducted an interview with David Frost, who’s one of the more accomplished DIYers out there. Then I was lazy about transcribing the tape, and then David sent me a bunch of additional material that was sort of overwhelming, and then, as many of you know, my life got very complicated in May and June. So the whole thing got back-burnered, which was embarrassing for me and no doubt very frustrating for David. Now I’ve finally put the whole package together, and I think you’ll agree that it was worth the wait.

You can see a bunch of David’s jerseys here, here, here, and here. And he’s provided some tips and step-by-step insights into his DIY process here.

Here we go:

Uni Watch: How old are you, where do you live, and what do you do for a living?

David Frost: I’m 35. I’m originally from Milwaukee, but now I live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. What brought me here is that I worked in minor league baseball for 13 years. I was lucky enough to build a couple of different ballparks and be part of a front-office staff. Basically, if a town was building a new ballpark, I was on the list of “Guys who can help you get your franchise started.”

UW: So are you a minor league executive, or a consultant..?

DF: I was until about four years ago. But then I got married and had a family, and working minor league baseball hours wasn’t going to cut it in terms of having a family. So I got out, and now I’m in real estate property management.

UW: Now tell me about all these jerseys you’ve made. As I’m sure you’re aware, yours are much more professional-looking than some of the other DIYs we’ve featured on the site. That doesn’t mean they’re better, but they do have a more polished look.

DF: Thanks, I appreciate that — that’s what I strive for. In college I worked as a buyer at a sports store, so I knew a little bit about uniforms and manufacturers, and that helped me get into working in minor league baseball, where I really cut my teeth in merchandising. I also have background in art, so I’ve also designed some minor league and college logos. But when I say, “designed,” I was more of the drawing guy, and then I had a friend who could put the drawing on the computer and make it look better.

Anyway, as a jersey collector, one of my biggest frustrations is that I always wanted one of the early Milwaukee Brewers jerseys. So about five years ago, I asked my mother-in-law to teach me how to sew. She’s a quilter, and at that time I just wanted to sew a patch on a jersey. So she showed me how to do that, and then I started looking at the jerseys in my collection, and I’m thinking, “OK, that’s a zigzag stitch, this is this stitch…”

UW: Oh, so she showed you on a machine, not just by hand?

DF: Right.

UW: Do you have a machine of your own now?

DF: Well, my wife has a machine that had never been used. So I’m looking at all my jerseys and now the wheels are really turning. I’m thinking to myself that if I can just get my hands on some twill and some piping, I might be able to make the Brewers jersey myself. So that was the very first jersey I tried, and man, it was a grease fire. I should have been practicing more on other materials first.

UW: You were like the guy who runs a marathon without stretching first.

DF: Exactly. So I really practiced a lot. Believe it a not, I was stitching underwear.

UW: I believe we’re veering into the realm of too much information, David.

DF: Right. Anyway, I got a bit more confident, and I started calling up some of my old friends in the [sportswear] manufacturing world — places like Rawlings, AIS, or what have you — and said, “Hey, I’m just looking for scraps.” So I might get a box that had a piece of twill, and I’d start pinning it up the way I wanted it. The heat press I’d bought for the local minor league park 10 years earlier was still there, and they let me use it. So using that method, I was able to complete my collection, and I’ve also been able to create new jerseys that I put up on eBay. And I’ll say in my listing, “If you have a jersey you want me to make, shoot me an e-mail.” And I thought I’d get people asking for their old high school jersey. And I did get some of that, but what I really got a lot of was, “Hey, Mitchell & Ness doesn’t make this specific year of Padres jersey — can you do that?”

UW: So you just get jersey blanks?

DF: Yes. I used to spend a lot of time looking for blanks on eBay, but then I realized I could call upon my old relationships with vendors and salespeople. And they provide me with the blanks. So if I need, say, a white jersey with navy pinstripes, I can just call up this one guy, and I’m basically like one of his regular accounts. I get a great rate, I know it’s going to be a quality jersey, and that’s basically my canvas.

UW: What about logos and patches and things?

DF: Anything tackle twill, I cut by hand.

UW: I’m looking at a photo of a Braves jersey that you did, and the Braves script almost looks embroidered.

DF: I made that by hand. What I do is, I get the logos from Chris Creamer’s site. And all I know how to use is Adobe Illustrator — I don’t know CAD or anything like that. So I tweak the logos as needed and then I print them on card stock to make a stencil.

UW: And what about sleeve patches?

DF: Some I make, some I do the Willabee & Ward thing. See that gray jersey that has “Socks” on it? That pair of socks is basically a logo that I ripped from Creamer and then I cut all the pieces individually.

UW: So that’s not a stitched patch — it’s pieces of tackle twill?

DF: Exactly. Like on that Braves jersey we were just talking about, the tomahawk is all twill. I went in there and added all the little red pieces, all the gold pieces. And then for some of the border, I set the sewing machine for a really thin setting, almost like a chain stitch, and went from there.

UW: And what about heavy-duty things, like this Milwaukee script baseball jacket?

DF: That’s tackle twill as well. The jacket itself is something I found on eBay for $11. It was some kid’s high school letterman jacket — it had a swimming patch on it and all this other crap, which I removed. But it fit me perfect. I mean, that’s a jacket I wear every day. I just went home to Milwaukee, and people were stopping me, saying, “Where did you get that jacket?” And I’m like, “Well, if I told you I made it, would you believe me?” and they just laugh. And I say, “If you want, look me up on Facebook or eBay.”

UW: OK, so now I’m looking at this early Astros jersey, with the shooting star. Now, on the original version that the team wore back in the 1960s, the tails or streamers on the star were all chain-stitched, which I gather is something you were not able to do.

DF: That is correct. About 99% of what I do is tackle twill. I have dabbled with felt a little bit lately, but I’m very upfront in saying I use today’s materials. So sometimes I’ll get someone who says, “I want an old White Sox jersey with a zipper,” and I’ll say, “Well, I don’t know how to do zippers — yet.” For some people, that’s a dealbreaker; for others, they don’t care as long as you can give them the basic look. And the look is definitely something I can do.

UW: What about something like the captain’s stripes on the Pilots and Brewers jerseys?

DF: Oh, that’s actually a good story. To make those, I take a gold piece of twill, and then the blue is a piece of 3/8″ braid. I have a stencil that I use for this, to make guide marks on the twill, and then I use Liquid Stitch to glue the braid onto the twill nice and straight. It dries overnight, and then I stitch it to the twill. And then the twill has the heat-adhesive bottom, so I can position it how I want it and then stitch it onto the sleeve.

UW: So you started doing this about five years ago. How many jerseys would you say you’ve done in that time?

DF: Probably 80 or 90.

UW: Do you wear these around, or keep them in the closet, or what?

DF: My personal collection is about 50 jerseys, and I made about half of those. I’ll wear them when I’m playing cards with the guys on a Saturday night or something like that.

UW: And mot of the others you made either in response to specific customer requests, or just to put up on eBay?

DF: Right.

UW: What do you charge?

DF: It depends on the jersey. I just got an inquiry from a guy who wants a 1943 Senators jersey. And that’s basically just putting one row of horseshoe piping or braid around the collar, a navy “W,” and the “Health” patch, which I can find on eBay for maybe $7. So a jersey like that, I’d say maybe $85. Now something like that Braves jersey, that’s much more intricate. That would be $260, which is the most I’ve ever charged.

But the main thing is that I enjoy it. It’s turned into my late-night hobby, which I like. My wife will be sitting on the couch watching The Bachelor, and I’ll be next to here cutting out letters. So that’s gonna be a big part of our quality time together. Wait, don’t write that, Paul. Seriously, though, I watched the World Series last year, but I didn’t actually watch much of it — I mostly just listened to it.

UW: A lot of Uni Watch is written under similar circumstances. You’re taking it to a different level than most of the other DIYers, because you’re using real blank jerseys instead of a long-sleeve tee from Wal-Mart, plus you’re using real braid, and so on.

DF: I have some customers who’ll send me their old shirts, and I’ll reproduce them. Being from Wisconsin, for instance, I’ve made a lot of older Green Bay Packers jerseys.

UW: Right, with the padded elbows and all.

DF: Right, and that guy sent me a J. Peterman sweatshirt — you know, Peterman, the guy Elaine worked for on Seinfeld — and he dyed it himself, because he was really anal about the color. And he said, “If I dye it, will you do the rest?” And I said, “I’d be honored.” I’ve now done five more jerseys for him, for his kids.

UW: Were you surprised to see other people making their own jerseys?

DF: Very much so. But the thing is, I’m not just making them for myself or even for my customers. With my kids playing travel ball, I’m kind of like the team mom. There was this tournament a year or two ago where they had to have a sleeve patch, and the coach said, “OK, we need to have this patch on all the jerseys by tomorrow — who can do it?” And he’s looking at all the moms. And I just raised my hand and said, “Give ’em to me.” And he says, “Does your wife sew?” And I say, “Just give ’em to me.”

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Thanks for all the info and photos, David — and thanks also for your patience. Sorry it took so long to get your story out there. And again, if you missed the link near the top of the entry, there’s a step-by-step example of how David creates a jersey here.

Research Request: My Page 2 colleague Patrick Hruby is going to be spending a day with one of the Smithsonian’s curators and checking out their sports collection. “I’m going to focus on strange and unusual stuff, and also the stories around and behind acquiring and preserving items,” he tells me. “For instance: they have a condom with Mickey Mantle’s picture on it (reason #1,021 why the Mick was fortunate Deadspin did not exist in his era). I’m just wondering if you have suggestions of things to look for or ask about.”

I’m not all that familiar with the Smithsonian’s collection, but maybe some of you folks are. If so, please feel free to contact Patrick directly. Thanks!

Uni Watch News Ticker: FSN Florida was in such a hurry to salute Mark Buehrle’s performance yesterday that they made a rather unfortunate typo when describing his accomplishment (brilliant screen capture by S. Finch). … Speaking of yesterday’s perfecto, this article includes the nugget that Buehrle and the home plate ump in yesterday’s game, Eric Cooper, both wear No. 56 (with thanks to James Huening). … Big kudos to Brandon Davis, who pointed out something I’d forgotten about: Rajai Davis wasn’t the first one to wear those A’s logo stirrups. Esteban Loaiza wore them back in 2007. … Meanwhile, I heard from A’s equipment manager Steve Vucinich, who explains the situation as follows: “Rajai needed a new pair of stirrups and saw the logoed stirrups and decided to try them. He had four RBIs — a Rajai record! — which cemented the thought of wearing them daily the rest of the year. Loaiza might have been the first to wear the logo stirrups.” … And sure enough, Davis was wearing the logo-emblazoned hose again last night (screen shot courtesy of Chris Gordon, who also notes that Mark Ellis was wearing a gray-underbrimmed cap). … Bryan’s latest cycling crash? Nope, it’s a shot from the 1930 Tour de France. Lots of additional pics here (nice find by Vince LoBosco). … I may have linked to this in the past, but just in case: Here’s a nice site devoted to Phil Neel, the artist who drew all of Auburn’s program covers from the 1950s through the ’80s, along with ticket art and other graphics. Great, great stuff (big thanks to Jeff Hunter). … Reprinted from yesterday’s comments: According to this game report, Manny wore civvies under his uniform on Wednesday. Key passage: “‘I was just trying to get a good pitch to hit,’ said Ramirez, who arrived at his locker and peeled off his Dodgers shirt and white pants to reveal street clothes.” … Very cool NFL lunchbox available here (with thanks to Marc Swanson). … Jesse Gavin checks in with lots of observations from the Iowa State Softball Tourney, including teams wearing basketball-style tank tops, tie-dye-ish jerseys, pinstriped shorts (ugh), bizarro piping with a sublimated clipper ship, and odd helmet striping, plus a player wearing No. 02 and a facemasked pitcher. Also, Jesse didn’t mention this, but it looks to me like the baserunner’s helmet in this photo has a molded ponytail channel. I’ve seen ponytail holes before, but never a separate channel like that. … Good article on the Vikings’ equipment manager here (with thanks to Brian Schulz). … Remember, Doug Keklak is putting together a western PA Uni Watch outing to a minor league ballgame. If you want in, contact Kek pronto. … Speaking of Kek, he was watching a documentary about Barrett Robbins and noticed that Robbins and his TCU teammates all had first initials on their NOBs in the early 1990s. … Shortest hockey pants ever? Could be, could be (with thanks to Gabriel Manga). … “Green is the new pink,” says Kenn Tomasch, who reports that the Chicago Red Stars will go green this Sunday. … Reprinted from yesterday’s comments: Next year’s MLB All-Star Game logo has been released. … Tons of awesome baseball photos in the University of California archives (with thanks to Mike Hersh). … With AC Milan and Chelsea set to play a match in Baltimore, The Baltimore Sun has posted a tremendous slideshow of Baltimore soccer history (with thanks to Coachie Ballgames). … My Page 2 buddy Jim Caple muscled in on my act yesterday by writing a story about Ebbets Field Flannels outfitting the Iraqi baseball team. … The Mets announced that they’ll deny press-box access to New York Post reporters in retaliation for the Post having published nude photos of Tony Bernazard. As soon as this news came over the wire, all the other NYC papers promptly published the photos too so they could avoid having to cover the Mets anymore this season.

220 comments July 24th, 2009

Uni Watch Profiles: Terry Proctor

For months now I’ve been running contributions from sporting goods maven Terry Proctor, who worked in the biz for decades and probably knows more that industry than the rest of us put together. I interviewed him way back in November but it’s taken me until now to get around to transcribing the tape. With apologies to Terry for the lengthy wait, here’s his long-delayed Uni Watch Profiles moment.

Uni Watch: You live in the Rochester area, right?

Terry Proctor: Yes, just below Rochester, just west of the Finger Lakes.

UW: Did you grow up in that area as well?

TP: Yeah, I did. My family lived here in Livonia for well over 200 years. We came over from New England in the late 1790s. We’re still trying to research and figure out exactly when.

UW: How did you end up working in the sporting goods business?

TP: Well, I graduated from college in ’67…

UW: Where’d you go to college?

TP: Rochester Business Institute. It’s a two-year school — I got an associate’s degree in accounting. And I went and interviewed with Eastman-Kodak, Xerox, all the major companies around here. But none of them were hiring. And of course that was right at the height of Viet Nam, so a lot of companies didn’t want to take a chance on younger guys, because they could get drafted. So anyway, I was working part-time at the local hardware store and I got a call from a friend of mine who ran Ruby’s Sporting Goods in Rochester. One of the employees there had had a heart attack and couldn’t work, so he asked me if I wanted the job. I said yeah, and that became my life’s work for the next 23 years.

UW: Were you already a big sports fan at that time?

TP: Oh, yeah. I got hooked on sports when I was about 10 years old. The first World Series I followed was the Braves and Yankees in ’57. And I got hooked on hockey, too, because they’d show Saturday-afternoon games from Madison Square Garden on TV. And we’d get Celtics games on Sunday afternoon, and for football we’d get Giants and Cleveland Browns games. Everyone around here picked one or the other — I picked Cleveland.

UW: So you were happy to get a job in sporting goods.

TP: Definitely. Believe it or not, beginning around 11 years old I was doodling little drawings of uniforms. I wasn’t as good as Ricko, and I didn’t keep any of them, but I’d mark all the subtle changes in the uniforms and all that.

UW: So you were a uniform aficonado from way back.

TP: Yup. In fact, way before there were these online uniform-builder things that you see now, I used to draw things up for potential customers at Ruby’s, so they could see how a certain design would look in their colors, and then my boss or I would present it to them. We got a lot of orders that way! I wish I had these digital tools back then — would’ve made my job a lot easier. But I enjoyed doing it, as a hobby and for my work.

UW: What kind of store was Ruby’s? Can you describe it?

TP: It started out as a full-service sporting goods store. We sold a lot of skiing equipment, in addition to team sports gear. The different stores in Rochester sold different lines — we had Spalding, MacGregor, Russell Athletic. But if you wanted Wilson or Rawlings uniforms, you’d go to one of the other stores. Each store protected their own lines. Now every hardware store and five-and-dime has the same stuff.

UW: So in your 23 years there, did you become a part-owner or manager?

TP: I was the manager toward the end. Then I had a stroke in January of ’88 and was on sick leave. I was getting ready to go back to work in May, but then I had a bigger stroke, the big one, and went on full disability after that. But I never lost my interest in sporting goods. So when my friend Tom started a health club and athletic center in the mid-1990s, he got a lot of calls for uniforms, because he had a full basketball court and soccer field down there. I still had the contacts, so we started a uniform operation. The athletic center’s closed now, but we still have the uniform division, and we make more money now than we ever did with the athletic center.

UW: So you’re still doing that today?

TP: Yes.

UW: What’s the business called?

TP: Livingston Athletics Gear.

UW: You obviously know your uniforms. Do you have a similarly encyclopedic knowledge of other aspects of sporting goods, or are you mainly a uniform guy?

TP: I know a lot — we’d sell football helmets, baseball bats, baseball gloves — but uniforms were always my area of expertise. Whenever a new catalog came in at Ruby’s, I’d grab it and start reading it like other people would read a magazine. That’s why I’m so interested in these old catalogs that you post on the site — brings back some really good memories.

UW: You’ve told me that you primarily worked with local school teams, but you also outfitted the local hockey team, the Rochester Americans.

TP: Ruby’s did the Amerks from the 1957-58 season through 1969-70. ’Course, I was still a little kid for the beginning of that. The team’s first season was 1956-57, and they got their uniforms from Champion Sporting Goods in Rochester. And then the next season they moved over to Ruby. Leo Ruby, who founded the company, and who was just the nicest man — you talk about an encyclopedic knowledge! He taught me how to string tennis rackets. Anyway, at first he got the Amerks’ jerseys from a place called Hardin Knitwear in New York City. And then in 1959, when they started wearing the jersey with the crest on the front, similar to what they wear today, they got those from King-O’Shea of Chicago — a Wilson subsidiary. Then they switched to General Athletic out of Greenville, Ohio, for the 1965-66 season.

UW: Does Ruby’s still exist?

TP: No, it closed up in 1990, two years after I stopped working there.

UW: They couldn’t survive without you!

TP: I don’t know about that, but my boss sold the business because he was getting up in years. The guys he sold it to, they ruined it, kind of pissed it away.

UW: How would you describe your tastes in terms of uniforms?

TP: Pretty conservative. I don’t like these new Nike and Reebok templates, they look so crappy. Everyone looks the same! There’s no originality. And of course I can’t stand the way the guys wear the uniforms today. The football uniforms don’t even look like football uniforms — I wish they’d bring back the sleeves and get rid of all the stupid inserts. Advances in equipment are great, increasing protection for the players is great, but it doesn’t look like football anymore — it looks like that movie, what do you call it, uh, Rollerball. And basketball uniforms are too big and baggy, baseball pants, I can’t stand those ugly pants the way they wear ’em today. I’m like you, I love it when you can see the striped socks.

UW: So when you’re outfitting a team, do you try to influence what they’ll wear based on your own tastes, or do you leave it completely up to them?

TP: I try to keep things distinctive and classy, not too outlandish. A lot of teams now go with a stock template and fill in the blanks, sort of like color-by-numbers. We always try to get something different in there, some sort of distinctive detail.

UW: Nowadays, uniform outfitting is controlled by a few big corporations. But back in your day there were lots of little companies competing for attention, right?

TP: Oh, yeah. Of course the majors were Spanjian (they were bought out by DeLong, who closed the uniform plant this past year), Powers, MacGregor. Then you had Russell Athletic, which was a little less expensive but still good-quality stuff. Sold a lot of Russell football stuff over the years — they made great football jerseys. You could never kill ’em, man, they wore forever. Anyways, yeah, then you had your little cut-and-sew houses in New York City, like Felco, Post, Empire. There were a couple in Philadelphia too, like Oliver Brothers.

UW: So what would all these companies do to curry favor with a retailer like yourself?

TP: Nothing, really. It was all about the tastes of the market. There’s probably 120 high schools in the Rochester area, so you pretty much had something for everyone, depending on how much money they had to spend or what their tastes were. Pittsford, which was a very exclusive suburb of Rochester, they’d go with Powers, because that was basically the Cadillac of uniforms….

UW: But the different companies, wouldn’t they try to wine you and dine you or anything like that? And would they just mail their catalogs to you, or would a sales rep show up and present the line to you in person?

TP: Yes, we got to know some of the sales reps very, very well. Freddie Clark was our sales rep for Russell — in fact, we toured the Russell plant with him in the ’70s. We flew down to Atlanta, drove to Alexander City, Alabama, went through the plant. We were sitting in the office with the plant’s general manager when a kid runs in with a pair of pants for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers — the pants had a 28-inch waist but were 32 inches around the thighs. It was some little running back who had legs like tree trunks. They had to make a special pattern to make them. Anyways, the companies all treated you well. Unfortunately, they all made you stock a lot of football stuff, because down South the schools would get new football uniforms every year. In Rochester, football was popular, but not as popular as basketball or baseball, so we always ended up eating a lot of football inventory. So we’d call up the city school district guys, take ’em out, get ’em drunk, and then afterward, when they were half liquored up, we’d take ’em back to the store and get them to buy ’em for the local high schools.

UW: Would you ever end up with sample sets or prototypes?

TP: Yes. Remember when they added the horns to the Rams’ jerseys, on the shoulders? We saw that ahead of time. And a lot of times they’d sell you sample sets for maybe half off. I wish I’d kept some of those — I had a full set of the ABA’s Los Angeles Stars uniforms. The socks were great, you would’ve loved them. Anyway, at the end of the year we’d sell off all the samples — we’d set up a little table outside our store, sort of like our own flea market. People in the neighborhood would come by, pick ’em up for two or three dollars. If I only knew, I could’ve made some money on eBay from all this stuff. Some of them were beautiful, too.

UW: What do you think of the changes in fabrics over the years?

TP: Most have been very good. I was always a leader with that, trying to get teams to change fabrics. A lot of high school basketball teams still wear dazzle — it’s so heavy and absorbent when you sweat. So we encourage teams to go with flat-back mesh, which is like what the NBA uses. I was a big proponent of pro mesh back when that came out in the 1970s, although the whites turned a bit gray after a few washings. But the colors held up really well, and the fabric was very durable, almost indestructible. Yeah, I like the fabrics they’ve got today. Although some of the Lycra stuff, I don’t care for how it makes the football pants look like leotards. Those are too lousy. But by and large, they’ve done a good job

UW: Have you saved a lot of uniform-related memorabilia over the years?

TP: I wish I did. I had so much of it, but when I sold my house and moved, a lot of it just got tossed. I really regret that.

==========

Nicely done, Terry. Thanks for sharing your stories and expertise.

Incidentally, Terry was pretty serious when he said he was a Browns fan. Here’s what he wrote to me after the Super Bowl: “The damn Steelers sucked one out Sunday. Being a lifelong Browns fan the Steelers are still and will always be a joke to me. And may the Baltimore Crows NEVER win the Super Bowl again as long as that lying SOB Fast Artie Modell owns them!” Good to see Terry isn’t slowing down in his old age.

We’ll have an ad from Singer Sewing Machines any day now: Greg Riffenburg checked in with a DIY-ish story yesterday, although it’s really more about uniform modification, not making a uniform from scratch:

When I started playing JV football in high school, I was moved from the offensive line to tight end. As an avid football fan, I started noticing that skill position players were wearing their jerseys tight (especially at the sleeves), to minimize what the defenders had to grab.

Since our jerseys were the basic baggy, big-holed mesh, I knew I had to do something to them. So I had my mom take me to the local sewing shop to pick up some elastic to put in the jersey’s sleeve and bottom hem. She set up the sewing machine but had me do the actual sewing. It turned out looking like this (I insisted on having number 86 but there was no white jersey in that number, so I had to improvise and cut up a friend’s freshman practice jersey of a friend in order to make an 88 into 86). A handful of my teammates saw what I had done to my jersey and either had me or their moms do it to theirs.

By the time my class reached the varsity squad, we were excited to be getting some real, good-looking football jerseys, but they gave us these baggy jokes. As a backup in my junior year, I didn’t do much about it other than roll up my sleeves. But as the season wore on, I decided to do something about it. So I took my jersey, turned it inside out and sewed a new gusset/underarm seam line down the length of each side of the jersey. This gave it a much tighter silhouette and less for the defenders to grab. We wore the same jerseys during my senior year, and many of the juniors on the team asked me to do the same thing to their jerseys. I ended up modifying about a dozen of my teammates’ jerseys to various degrees.

There’s a really important lesson here. To wit: If you learn a useful skill, everyone will just sponge off of you, so don’t bother. Kids shouldn’t be allowed to watch sports on TV, because they end up imitating the worst aspects of what they see.

Raffle Results: The winner of the Sports Propaganda raffle is Mike Menner (and if he chooses this design, I will personally go to his house and fix the apostrophe with a Magic Marker). More raffles coming in the next two weeks, providing everyone with more chances to not win, wheee!

Uni Watch News Ticker: We all know about this famous typo. Now someone is selling an intentionally misspelled Gretzky jersey — from the Kings, not the Rangers, which makes no sense — on eBay (with thanks to Greg Wyshynski). … Interesting intellectual property issues addressed here and here. … Here’s another long-sleeved basketball player: Maria Moore of Texas Tech. Thanks to her high socks and low shorts, she looks solid white when she isn’t running (with thanks to Matt Mitchell). … RNOB. Ben Traxel took that shot at Tuesday’s UNC/Maryland game. Then he went to the UNC basketball museum, where he saw this and this. … MLB has confirmed for me that the all teams will once again be wearing the “portion of the proceeds” caps on July 4th, along with the recently announced ALS-awareness patch. As previously reported, the patch will read, “4_ALS,” but the actual design isn’t being made public yet. … Yesterday I mentioned that this helmet logo seemed stenciled on. As it turns out, reader Jason Taylor won that very helmet at auction and has some details to share: “The logo is indeed stenciled. In fact, one of the first things that struck me about the helmet when I was looking at the auction listing was that the logo didn’t look like an ABC job. (ABC’s the company that made MLB’s helmets back then, as you know.) In fact, the paint didn’t look original either. I had a hunch that Charles Finley’s rep as the cheapest owner in baseball factored in here somehow. Long(er) story short, I’m pretty certain that this was once an old KC A’s helmet from ’67 that was repainted by the team in ’68 or ’69. You can see its original green color where parts of the yellow paint’s been chipped away. [Dave] Duncan [whose name is inside the helmet] was with the team each of those years.” … So much to like in this photo. Those are the Rochester Royals in the striped shorts (with thanks to Brad Keppler). … When the light is just right, you can see that the Oklahoma women’s hoops uniforms have really ugly spots (Matt Mitchell again). … My friend Steven Tatar sells vintage sweaters. Check out the cool graphics he used for his latest ad. … Tremendous article plus slideshow on Marquette basketball’s uniform history. … Drew VanNess says Gonzaga will be wearing black jerseys against Memphis tomorrow. … Tim Lincecum dropped the ceremonial first puck at last night’s Sharks/Hurricanes game and was given a Sharks jersey for the occasion. “The sleeves were cut short, just below the stripes, turning them into 3/4 sleeves,” reports Brendan Tarpey. “Combined with his silly hat, the fact that he looks like he’s 15, and his collared shirt under the jersey (always a bad look, and even more so with laces), he looked downright comical. The pictures don’t do his outfit justice.” … Here’s a close look at one of the No. 44 jerseys that the Globetrotters wore on Inauguration Day. … Andy Altemus notes that Mike McKenna was called up by the Lightning the other day and started against the Penguins on Wednesday night wearing his Norfolk Admirals pads and mask. … Jon Lester showed up at spring training in an old World Series shirt (with thanks to Tom Adjemian). … As you know, Santonio Holmes’s gloves were named the Super Bowl’s MVP, and now they’re being auctioned off for charity. … Has there ever been a more appropriate NOB? … According to a small item buried within this Q&A, the Diamondbacks have no uniform changes in the works (thanks, Phil). … Also from Phil: More ski-cross uniform controversy.

182 comments February 6th, 2009

Uni Watch Profiles: Andy Hyman

You’ll often hear me say I’m doing a raffle or some other promotion in conjunction with “our friends from Distant Replays.” Chief among those friends is DR founder/owner Andy Hyman, who’s been a Uni Watch charter advertiser for two years now. He’s always been enthusiastic and supportive, and I like to think I’ve been the same toward him, but we’d never really had a substantive conversation until early October, when I got the following note from him:

I love many of the drawings that folks send in to your site, so I thought you might get a kick out of these that I did back when I was a kid. Found them in my garage and framed up for my three-year-old’s bedroom. I have more of this cool stuff, if you’re interested.

Naturally, this is precisely the sort of thing I love, plus it basically explains how Distant Replays came into being, so I told Andy to crank up the scanner and send me everything he had. It took him a little while to find the old drawings and such (and he says there’s still a lot more that he hasn’t located yet), but it was worth the wait. After he sent me the scans, I gave him a call to go over all the particulars. Here’s how it went down:

Uni Watch: When did you start doing these drawings?

Andy Hyman: Probably when I was about nine.

UW: And how old are you now?

AH: Forty-eight.

UW: So it would have been the late ’60s.

AH: Right. I realized I loved sports when I was nine — the year of the Jets/Colts Super Bowl.

UW: And where were you growing up at the time?

AH: Huntington, New York.

UW: Ah, you were a Long Island kid, just like me! But you’ve previously told me you were a Colts fan, right?

AH: I was. Because my cousin Larry, who was six years older than me, was a Strat-O-Matic football fanatic. He loved the Baltimore Colts and he brainwashed me to love the Colts. So he had, like, these 8-milimeter films of Bubba Smith, and Mike Curtis ripping off Roman Gabriel’s head, and that was it — I was hooked. Even though I was from New York and the Jets were, you know, the thing. My sister loved Joe Namath and had pictures of him all over her wall. And when the Colts lost that Super Bowl to the Jets, I cried, and I tried ripping down those pictures. And she beat me up.

UW: Was she older than you?

AH: Yeah, by six years.

UW: So, getting back to the drawings, you just started doing them, the way kids start doing things?

AH: Yeah, it was all about the colors. I just loved the way the uniforms looked.

UW: Did you have color TV at that time?

AH: I did not.

UW: So how did you know which colors to use?

AH: I went and bought Sport magazine and Sports Illustrated, and I went over to my friend’s house — he had a color TV.

UW: Did you use colored penvils, or crayons..?

AH: Everything. Magic Markers, Crayola –

UW: Man, wouldn’t it be great if Crayola had a line crayons in team-based colors?

AH: That’d be awesome.

UW: So did you show these drawings to friends, or bring them to show-and-tell at school, or were they just squirreled away in your bedroom?

AH: It was just me, my cousin, and a couple of our friends who were in this little world of ours. So we kind of passed them back and forth to each other. But I just liked to draw.

UW: Why did you use the same pose for all these early drawings? Was it based on a particular photograph?

AH: No, it just seemed like that was the most basic thing. I was very into lining things up and making things straight, and I think that’s why I did it like that.

UW: What about the maniacal grin on everyone’s face?

AH: It was just my style. I don’t know. It was just — I just don’t know!

UW: Now, part of the fun of uniform drawings is getting to replicate the team logos. But you drew all these football players facing head-on, so you couldn’t do the full logos. Wasn’t that frustrating?

AH: I didn’t really have the skill, or didn’t really want to put the effort into getting the logos just right.

UW: Ahhh, so that’s like when you can’t draw hands or fingers very well, so you keep drawing people with their hands behind their back.

AH: I guess. The only one I really wanted to do in full was the Colts — that one I always did from the side.

UW: – Were the drawings supposed to be specific players? Like, you’ve got a Cleveland Browns guy wearing No. 44, who would have been Leroy Kelly back in that era — except you drew him as a white guy.

AH: Some of them definitely were specific players. And for some of them, I don’t know why I did what I did. Sometimes the Magic Markers would blend and the guy’s face would turn out green. There are things like that that I wish I could go back and change.

UW: Yeah, there are some interesting color choices here. Like, there’s this one drawing where it looks like you’ve got the Eagles wearing yellow. Is that a situation where the colors just faded over the years?

AH: Yeah, probably.

UW: OK, let’s move on to another one of your early projects: Your Strat-O-Matic newspaper.

AH: Yes, that was The Strat-O-Matic Tribune. Basically, I played hundreds of games. Every day, that’s what I did, I played Strat-O-Matic.

UW: Against your cousin and those two friends you mentioned earlier?

AH: Well, you can play Strat-O-Matic solo. I played the majority of the games solo. I would just go crazy — I’d be there at the dining room table screaming, “Oh my god, back-to-back home runs!” or “A no-hitter!” or whatever it was. But my mother’s at work while I’m doing this, so nobody knows, and I’m thinking, “Gosh, if only someone could know the excitement I’m going through here!”

UW: So that’s what the newspaper was for — to share the excitement?

AH: Well, yeah, it was. And keep a little box score for each game write a headline for it, and I’d do that for each game. Or I’d create a game recap, like a news account, complete with a photo. And I played literally hundreds and hundreds of games. And then I’d go, “How can I…” — uh, how did you just put it?

UW: Share the excitement?

AH: Right! So I’d be thinking, how can I let my cousin know, let the world know? And that’s why I did The Strat-O-Matic Tribune.

UW: And how many issues of this do you produce?

AH: I probably did 30 or 40 issues — of the regular one, which was a one-pager. But then I did The Strat-O-Matic Tribune Special, which there were like 10 of. Those were eight pages long, and that’s what I haven’t been able to find, and it’s killing me. I had color drawings, and I’d take photos out of magazines and paste them in, to make believe those photos were happening in the game I was playing.

UW: Would you xerox these?

AH: I wouldn’t. I’d just make one.

UW: An edition of one?

AH: One, yup, one copy. I’d let my cousin read it. Of course, nobody else in the world would care — it was just me and him. So I’d send him one of the issues…

UW: You’d send it — so he lived somewhere else?

AH: He lived in Scarsdale.

UW: So you’d mail these to him?

AH: I’d mail them to him, yes. And he wrote The Strato-Gazette — that was his paper.

UW: Oh, he had one too?

AH: Yeah, but he didn’t come close to keeping up with me. He wasn’t as interested.

UW: So when you’d mail these to him, would you want them back?

AH: I did, yes. And one of them came up missing — issue No. 9!

UW: So this was a loan, like a library?

AH: Yeah, you could say that.

UW: Now I have to ask you about this “Certificate of Strato” — what is that?

AH: Basically, when we were gettin’ a little older — maybe 13, 14 — I got a few friends in my neighborhood to get into it, and we had this marathon of games, y’know? We’d have a sleep-over and we’d start at eight o’clock — or wait, we might actually start right after school, so maybe three o’clcok — and we’d play until we got bored or fell asleep. We did this several times. One time we played like 11 games, another time 15 games. It was intense.

UW: It was epic!

AH: It was epic! And one of the guys was Russian, another one was Polish, and I was Jewish, so we wrote “Polok Jew Russian United” on the certificate.

UW: Sort of a gesture of eastern European solidarity.

AH: Y’know, it was just about trying to make this cool-looking certificate as neatly as I could with my writing. I don’t know, we just had to make sure everyone knew we’d played this many games.

UW: It looks like you kept your records in a Strat-O-Matic folder..?

AH: Yeah, that’s where I kept all the stats.

UW: So this was like the Elias of its day.

AH: Exactly. And after seven games I’d have an All-Star Game. See, it takes months to play seven games for all 28 teams. That’s one thing that always bothered me: You’d get the new cards for the 1972 season, say, based on stats from 1971, and you’d start playing out the season, and in your dreams you could play a regulation 162-game season. But then the real baseball season starts — the regular one, that the real players are playing — and immediately it’s like, “Oh no, I’m falling behind.”

UW: Because they can play a dozen games in one day, which is a more than you can do.

AH: Right. So Richie Allen’s hitting .200, or whatever, but in my league he’s hitting .300 and it starts feeling old. So I’d do All-Star Games after seven games — I’d compile all the records and choose the players who were doing the best and get ’em in there.

UW: Tell me about this state report on the state of Maryland.

AH: Oh, the reason I included that with all this other stuff is to show how I was so consumed with the Colts. I don’t think I got an F on that — maybe a D.

UW: What grade was this?

AH: Third grade, I think. Maybe fourth grade. I basically put all of my efforts into drawing that Colts helmet, as opposed to actually doing the report, which I totally plagiarized on the last day. Because Maryland is about sports!

UW: Did you choose to do Maryland?

AH: No, it was assigned to me!

UW: Wow, you must have loved that! Hey, speaking of the Colts, what’s with this Bubba Smith image?

AH: That was a woodcut, or linoleum print — I did that in art class. I thought it was pretty cool.

UW: And what about this Larry Brown drawing? That’s a little more advanced than your earlier ones.

AH: I think I copied that from this book of Sunoco football stamps in the early 1970s.

UW: Yes, I had those! You’d buy the album, which had blank pages, at the Sunoco station, and then you’d get the free individual player stamps to paste into the album. That’s something I really wish I’d saved. I’d kill to have that back [although it turns out there's plenty of them available on eBay, which I may have to pursue now that Andy's reminded me about it].

AH: I made my mom go to every Sunoco and get the stamps, because I had to have every damn one of ’em.

UW: I remember I’d draw the ones I didn’t have. I specifically remember drawing Vic Washington, who was a running back on the 49ers. I didn’t have his stamp, and of course I had to have the complete 49ers page filled in, because they were my favorite team, so I just drew his stamp and put it in there. It was a really bad drawing, too. Anyway, that’s where you took that Larry Brown pose from?

AH: Yeah, and I ended up doing it over and over until I had it down. I could do that right now, in fact. Instead of writing rock bands on my book covers, I was doing drawings like that one.

UW: I understand you were a big boxing fan, too.

AH: Again, that was because of my cousin was a big Smokin’ Joe Frazier fan, and one day I thought to myself, “Hmmm, let’s do Strat-O-Boxing.” And I kind of invented it all on my own. I used the same principles, with the three dice and all, and I had a lot of fun with it.

UW: Did you ever send a letter to the Strat-O-Matic people to tell them you’d invented a new game?

AH: I never did. But my wife, when she saw all this, she said, “You should send this to Strat-O-Matic.” So I might just do that.

UW: Now what about this hockey illustration — is that paint-by-numbers?

AH: Right. I did a lot of that. But they kind of annoyed me because the colors they specified for the ice never looked real. So I struggled: Should I paint this the colors they want, because that’s what the rules say? Or should I color it the way I want, because I think their colors look like crap?

UW: That’s pretty much the dilemma of life in a nutshell right there, right?

AH: It also bothered me that most of the color-by-numbers goalies didn’t have masks, and this was right around the time most goalies were wearing masks, so it looked wrong.

UW: I had one of those tabletop hockey games — and old one, because it had belonged to my older brothers. The players were made of metal, not plastic, and the goalies didn’t have masks. But by the time I was playing the game, every goalie in the league wore a mask except for Andy Brown of the Red Wings. So I draw little masks for each goalie, cut them out, and taped them to the goalies’ faces — except for the Detroit goalie, who I left bare-faced.

AH: Man, when we were done playing Strat, we’d play that game too!

UW: So do you have more of this stuff, or has it been thrown out, or is it in storage, or what?

AH: You know, a lot of it I can’t find right now. But I know it’s around — it’s just a matter of finding it after moving so many times over the years. My mother still has some of it, I think.

UW: Speaking of your mom, what did your parents think of all this at the time?

AH: They were as happy as they could be.

UW: They didn’t say, “Why are wasting you time on this stuff”?

AH: No, never. I mean, sometimes they’d say, “You can’t play until you do your homework,” but that’s all. They totally were supportive of it.

UW: Were they sports fans?

AH: Not really, no.

UW: Were they happy that you were drawing, because it meant you were being artistic and creative?

AH: Yeah. My dad is an amazing watercolor artist, my mom’s a great artist, my brother, too. He did the murals outside the Distant Replays store.

UW: Oh, so the artistic thing runs in your family.

AH: Yeah, I’m the least talented one.

UW: And now, of course, your career is based on vintage sports graphics.

AH: Yup. And my mom likes to say, “I always knew keeping all those records and statistics would help you one day.”

UW: So you were born to do this.

AH: I think I was, yeah.

UW: Do you still play Strat-O-Matic?

AH [somewhat sheepishly]: I don’t.

UW: Why did you stop?

AH: I went to college and, you know, other stuff took over.

UW: Did you play sports as a kid, in addition to playing Strat?

AH: Yes. We played youth football, and I played lacrosse all through junior high, high school, and college. There’s a good picture of me, showing my afro, on the Distant Replays site.

UW: Whoa — dude, that’s, uh, really something. What about your pee-wee football days — did you have cool uniforms?

AH: My first year we were the Browns. White helmet with a brown stripe, boring. My next year we were the Vikings. We had gold jerseys with yellow and white stripes on the shoulders, but again, white helmets with a purple stripe and maybe a “V” on the helmet.

UW: Did you wear your uniform just so, with everything tucked in just right and all that?

AH: Of course. I wanted, head to toe, to look like Bubba, so I had the hand pads and the arm pads. But the frustrating thing is that all the helmets had the two-bar quarterback facemask. How could I look like a defensive lineman with that kind of helmet?

==========

How indeed. Such equipment-based annoyances notwithstanding, Andy’s artwork ranks alongside that of Marty Hick (profiled here) and Tyler Kepner (profiled here) in the homespun uni drawings sweepstakes. Totally charming, totally inspired. Good on ya and all that, Andy.

Uni Watch News Ticker: I don’t usually crow about non-uni vintage clothing acquisitions, but I’m all jazzed about this 1960s Norfolk jacket I picked up over the weekend — complete with belt and rear box pleat. The fabric is this gorgeous brown/hunter/burgundy herringbone pattern, and I don’t mind saying that the thing looks pretty damn swank (but yes, I really need to clean that mirror). … Some great old 1958 Giants/Lions footage available here. … Pete Carroll has finally confirmed what’s long been rumored: USC and UCLA will both wear their colored home jerseys this Saturday. And there was dancing and happiness throughout the land. … In a vaguely related item, Idaho State and BYU had a went color-vs.-color last Saturday (with thanks to Frank Mercogliano). … And there’s a good clip here on Shea Stadium’s construction, featuring Casey Stengel holding forth on a variety of topics. … Craig Bates recently found an old Oilers helmet lamp (and yes, it still works). … Missing letter, or just a fold in the fabric? (As spotted by Matt Edwards.) … Last year we noted that several of the Cowboys were wearing Strap-Loks (that little white plastic clip on the high strap). Now Matt Powers has noticed several of the Broncos wearing them as well. … Harvard’s women’s hockey team debuted new black tops and socks on Saturday (with thanks to A.J. Frey). … Here’s something you don’t often see: high school throwbacks. That’s Steinert and Hamilton, both of New Jersey, playing the 50th installment of their rivalry. Additional pics here (with thanks to Robert Carabelli). … Yesterday I noted that some Thousand Oaks players had white helmets while others had green. Here’s the explanation, courtesy of Thousand Oaks grad John Hartman: “The tradition of the ‘green helmet at Thousand Oaks goes back to the ’70s. It’s actually an award given out to players who excel on defense (no offensive equivalent). The tradition was lost a few years ago when all the white helmets were changed to green, but somebody made the right decision this year to go back to white, thus the ‘green helmet’ was reborn. The running joke we always heard from other teams was ‘What’s the matter, you guys can’t afford matching helmets?’ They quickly shut up when they were lit up by a green helmet recipient.” … Last week I linked to a shot of Jim Abbott bunting. Andy Chalifour reports that the flip side of that card shows something almost as rare: Abbott on the bases. … Tons of old Nebraska bowl photos, some dating back to the 1940s, here (with thanks to David McGee). … Good article here about NC State using the new Xenith helmet (with thanks to Wayne Koehler). … “This isn’t uni-related, but The Price Is Right decided to paint the Big Wheel purple,” writes James Leroux. “The result was so ugly, it’s only being used for one week.” … Benjamin Page notes that Chester Taylor of the Vikings wear a “C. Taylor” nameplate, even though the Vikes haven’t had another Taylor since Travis Taylor in 2006. “However, they start three Williamses on defense (Kevin, Pat, and Madieu), none of whom has a first initial,” he adds. … Louisiana-Lafayette will be wearing throwbacks tonight. The “USL” insignia refers to the school’s previous name, University of Southwestern Louisiana (courtesy of Chris Mycoskie). … Japanese ballplayer Hichori Morimoto was recently given a pay cut — a rarity in Japan — and here’s how he reacted at a press conference (with thanks to, of course, Jeremy Brahm). … Are those rosary beads on MJ’s right wrist or what? …Notable sights from last night’s Jags/Texans game: Houston doused in cocktail sauce, Jack Del Rio in leather fetishwear, and Steve Slaton with a slight decal glitch. … The mighty Fleer Sticker Project site is taking its second annual look at endearingly kitschy Sears Wishbook catalog merch. Check it out here. … Anyone know why Texas A&M was wearing a jersey patch on Thanksgiving? … Reprinted from last night’s comments: Back in his college days at Michigan, Marty Turco wore mismatched leg pads.

237 comments December 2nd, 2008

Uni Watch Profiles: Tyler Kepner

If you read the Ticker on a regular basis, you’ve probably noticed the semi-regular contributions from Tyler Kepner, who’s the Yankees beat reporter for The New York Times (that’s him above, with his son Michael). I don’t recall exactly when he started writing to me, but I quickly realized he wasn’t like most other beat reporters. He’d start by passing along a uni-related observation about the Yankees, and then he’d add an opinion about his favorite NFL helmet, or his latest NBA pet peeve, or whatever. He had no shortage of opinions, and his observations tended to be good ones. I remember thinking to myself at one point, “Damn, good thing he’s already got a good job, or else he’d have mine.”

When I recently asked Tyler if I could interview him, I figured we’d talk about some of his uni-related faves and obsessions, some of his behind-the-scenes observations, and so on. But I didn’t realize there was also a completely amazing story lurking in his personal background — a story that would be interview-worthy all by itself, even if he wasn’t particularly uni-attuned. Check it out:

Uni Watch: How old are you, and where do you live?

Tyler Kepner: I’m 33, and I live in Wilton, Connecticut.

UW: How long have you been the Yankees beat reporter for the Times, and how did you get that gig?

TK: I started in 2002, so this is my seventh year covering the Yankees. Just to give you a quick résumé: When I was around 13 years old, I started a baseball magazine out of my home in Philadelphia. The Phillies were great to me — by the time I was 15, they let me start coming around to do interviews.

UW: What was the magazine called?

TK: KP Baseball Monthly. The “KP” stood for Kepner and then the other kid who started it with me, but then I just changed it to Kepner Publishing when he left. At the time I had no idea that it was an old army term, like being on KP duty. Kitchen patrol — nobody my age knew what that meant. We had a really cool logo, you would have liked it. My friends and I did it, but it was kind of my show. We got a lot of publicity, because people loved the idea of a kid following his dream and being in the clubhouse and stuff. I did that for 64 issues, up until mid-college or so.

UW: Every single month? You kept up a monthly schedule for that many years?

TK: Except for February. We’d do a combined Jan/Feb issue. On July 8th, 1990, ABC World News Sunday did a piece on us and said [switching to official-sounding newscaster voice], “Tyler publishes 11 times a year, except for February. It’s baseball’s off-season, and he has exams. Back to you, Forest.” We got covered in the Times too, and other places.

UW: Wow, I totally missed the boat on that. I wasn’t aware of it, never saw any of the media coverage you got. How many pages did this magazine usually run?

TK: Usually 22, maybe 24.

UW: You were a zine publisher! Did you have ads?

TK: I think we had one ad during the entire time.

UW: So it was a total labor of love. That’s great.

TK: Well, my parents basically footed the whole thing.

UW: How many copies would you typically print?

TK: Well, it grew. We got two big publicity bounces. One was on, like, November 13th, 1989, somewhere in there, when the Times wrote about us, and then Sports Illustrated for Kids wrote something. After those two articles, we got up to about 600 copies. We had a pretty good subscriber-retention rate, I guess.

UW: Was this, like, photocopies, or mimeographed, or professionally printed, or what?

TK: It was all photocopied. I didn’t know how to type until I was about 15 or 16. But I had very good printing, so I hand-wrote all the articles.

UW: Wow!

TK: It was fun, man. We always wanted color covers, but color printing cost a ton, so my little brother would draw a picture, and usually I would spruce it up a little bit. He was pretty good, I wanted it the way I wanted it. Anyway, then we’d color it in by hand.

UW: For all 600 copies?!

TK: Well, that was the thing. I’d have a bunch of my friends come over — maybe a dozen kids — and we’d have a ton of Magic Markers, and I’d say, “Okay, this is Cal Ripken, so everyone carefully fill in the logo, and the lettering…”

UW: So you had 600 black-and-white xeroxed covers…

TK: Right.

UW: So each one was individually hand-colored and unique and one-of-a-kind!

TK: Yeah. So we could never have a player depicted on Astroturf, because it would be too hard and take too much time to show the solid green. We had to show them on grass, because it was easier to just scribble up and down to show that.

UW: Sort of a textured green, instead of a solid green, because otherwise it would cut down on your efficiency.

TK: Exactly. One time my best friend came over, and I didn’t realize he was colorblind. And I’m like, “Why is Robin Yount’s hair green?” So a couple of people out there have an issue of KP Baseball Monthly with Robin Yount’s green hair.

UW: So even though the colors were wrong on those couple of copies, you still sent them out.

TK: We had orders to fill, man!

UW: Right, the show must go on. And now those copies are collector’s items.

TK: We had some famous subscribers, too. I always wanted to be a sportswriter, so I would just mail copies out to sportswriters. That’s how we got in the Times — I never asked for publicity, but I sent copies to George Vescey because I used to read his column in the school library. And he passed it along to his editor, who thought it would make a fun article. Anyway, I got a lot of really important advice from people who then decided to become subscribers. George Will somehow got hold of a copy, and he gave it to the commissioner, Fay Vincent, which was a big thrill for me, and he ended up subscribing. Bob Costas, Jayson Stark — I’d been reading Jayson’s stuff for years, and he became a great friend, giving me lots of advice, telling me about the business. He told me, “You’ll never wear No. 32 for the Phillies, but this job is the next best thing,” and he was right. Bill Lyon, who wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer once sent me a $100 bill and wrote, “Consider this my subscription for life.” I still have that bill, actually — it’s the spare money at my house, in case I have to pay for something and don’t have any cash.

UW: It’s your “In case of emergency, break glass” money.

TK: Yeah. The only person who never responded was Chris Berman. I probably sent issues to him for a year, and he never wrote back. But everyone else was so kind, and so encouraging. And the Phillies were so good to me — I’ll always be grateful. In 1990, I probably got 10 or 12 day passes. By ’91, I would pretty much ask for a pass for a whole series, and after that they just gave me daily passes and then a season pass. And by ’95 I worked for them, getting back to my résumé. I stopped the magazine in January of ’95 and wanted to get an internship, but the strike had just happened and teams weren’t doing internships, so I couldn’t get one. But the Phillies said, “We can’t pay, but if you wanna come down and work for free…” I was living at home, so I said sure. I worked for the Phillies that summer. And they’re such a class act, they ended up paying me a bit anyway. The next year I got a Boston Globe internship, which was very valuable. Same thing the next year at the Washington Post. Then I covered the Angels for a California paper, from September of ’97 through September of ’98. After that I moved up to Seattle and covered the Mariners until December of ’99. Met my wife out there. Then I moved back to New York, joined the Times, covered the Metsies for two years, and now the Yankees.

UW: When you were doing your magazine, were you aware that you were part of a larger self-publishing movement, the zine movement?

TK: No, I had no idea.

UW: But you know what a zine is now, right?

TK: Are they online magazines or something?

UW: No. They barely exist now, because they’ve largely been supplanted by blogs, but they’re basically just self-published, do-it-yourself magazines. They’re usually not about mainstream topics like baseball. That’s how I got started writing myself. They were originally inspired by punk rock — you know, just like anyone can start a band, anyone can start a magazine. And back in the day, a lot of them were hand-lettered. That’s why I really got excited when you said you hand-wrote your magazine — that’s so old-school zine-stye!

TK: I didn’t really know anything about that. I eventually started typing the articles. But even then, I’d still do the headlines by hand. I’d try to make each headline in a different style that matched the team. Like, if one article was about a guy on the A’s, I’d try to do the headline in A’s-style lettering.

UW: Did you have uniform-related coverage in this magazine?

TK: Well, I was very precise about the uniforms on the covers. That was my thing — I wanted to make sure they were accurate. I did a few articles here and there where I’d rank the coolest hats or the coolest logos. And we did a “How to Draw Team Logos” thing. Remember when you were a kid, there were those things like “How to Draw Huckleberry Hound”? It was like that. All my doodling in school and stuff was team logos, so I became an expert on most of them. [I also found this "Create Your Own Uniform" item, and there's some uniform news on this page. -- PL]

UW: Do you still have those doodles?

TK: I dunno. My mom saves everything, so she might still have them. Anyway, I knew, just from doing them, how to draw the logos in stages, and I could tell people how to do them.

UW: My impression is that you’re for more interested in uniform details than the average beat reporter. Would you agree with that assessment?

TK: Yeah. Marty Noble, who works the Mets beat, notwithstanding.

UW: Right, he’s very uni-aware.

TK: But yeah, most other guys don’t pay much attention to it, I don’t think.

UW: When did you first become interested in uniforms? Like, did you play sports as a kid, and if so did you take particular care with your own uniforms?

TK: Oh yeah, yeah. I played baseball all the way through the end of high school and summer leagues and stuff, and I was always disappointed because I never played for a team that had belts and button-front jerseys. Always the pullovers and the elastic waistbands. The best thing was making the all-star team, because then you’d usually get your name on the back, and the uniform would be more satin-y, like a double-knit kind of thing, instead of just a glorified T-shirt. I loved the stirrups, and I was always pissed when they’d give you the ones that were just one racing stripe.

UW: The dreaded ribbon stirrup.

TK: Right. That didn’t do anything for me. And they’d usually come off, out the back of your shoe, so I’d tape them onto the bottom. Anyway, I always tried to get the uniform number I wanted, usually 20 for Mike Schmidt or 32 for Steve Carlton. One year I got No. 3, which I didn’t like, because I was a pitcher, and pitchers don’t wear single digits.

UW: Josh Towers!

TK: Well, that’s true, but I didn’t like it. So I tried to make my 3 into 31 by creating a 1 with some green tape.

UW: You added a numeral with tape? Now, surely it must have bugged you that the resulting 31 was off-center.

TK: It was a little off-center, and it was just a plain, straight-up 1 — it didn’t have the little fringe on the top or anything like that. [I believe he's referring to serifs. -- PL]

UW: What level was this?

TK: Middle school.

UW: And what did your coach think about you modifying your jersey like this?

TK: He didn’t care. Anyway, it kept peeling off, so I gave up. I figured Dale Murphy wears 3, so that’s cool.

UW: You interact with big league ballplayers every day. What would you say is the typical ballplayer’s attitude toward his uniform, and especially regarding the types of details we discuss on Uni Watch?

TK: I think most of them are very interested in the fit.

UW: Freedom of movement and so forth?

TK: Yeah. And at least half of them have their own sense of style. You see a lot less of that with the Yankees, though, because there’s so much less room for improvisation. Basically it just comes down to the length of the pants and the kind of socks. I got a kick when Matingly and Guidry were coaches and they wore stirrups, because they played in the stirrup era. I asked the clubhouse manager and he said, “Yeah, we carry the stirrups, but nobody ever asks for them.”

UW: I’ve discovered, as I’m sure you have, that people can sometimes react negatively, or at least with some confusion, when you bring up uniform-related issues with them. Do you every find yourself wanting to ask a player why he wears his uniform a certain way, but then you think, “Nah, I’d better not ask him that” because you’re worried he might think it’s a stupid question?

TK: Nah. Some guys do act a bit puzzled when you ask them why they wore stirrups or whatever, but I’ll still ask.

UW: What about your editors? Do you ever present uni-related material or story ideas to them, and they don’t get it?

TK: No, they like offbeat stuff like that. Last season we did that little article about Matsui’s toe socks and that got a lot of attention, they loved it. I always think I should come up with more ideas like that, but then more pressing things come up, like Joba’s rotator cuff.

UW: Hey, get your priorities straight, man! I gather newspaper blogging has made it easier to cover these sorts of topics, since there are no space limitations. If you don’t have room for it in you newspaper article, you can just put it in “Bats” [the Times's baseball blog].

TK: Yeah, that makes it a lot easier for topics like Mike Mussina’s 1980s T-shirts.

UW: What about other writers? Do you guys ever sit around talking about stirrups, or are you the only one who notices?

TK: That’s pretty much my category. That and ballpark scoreboards are the big thing I’m known for in the press box. I’m always railing against the scoreboards — there’s only a small handful of them that keep a running line score at all times. If someone hits a home run, or if they’re showing commercials between innings, they’ll take the line score down. It drives me nuts. Fenway shows it at all times, and Seattle. Yankee Stadium. I’m always telling the Yankees, “Please, you’ve gotta keep a dedicated line score.” The most important aspect of any scoreboard is to have a SCORE available, but people don’t seem to realize that.

UW: Do you ever mention something like that in the press box, and everyone else kind of looks at you?

TK: Yeah, there I go again.

[At this point Tyler went off on a long-ish rant about the scoreboards in Kansas City (he likes), old Vets Stadium (he misses), and just about every other park (they mostly suck). Too involved to reproduce here, but let's just say he has some v-e-r-y strong feelings about scoreboard protocol.]

UW: Who is the most uniform-cognizant player you’ve ever encountered?

TK: Great question. Let me think. Gary Sheffield would drive the clubhouse people nuts. He had I think 32 pairs of shoes. And then he wanted gray shoes on the road, so he head 32 pairs of those too. He was always getting alterations to his jersey, and they were so subtle, you couldn’t even notice them. He’d want the sleeve brought up a little, or let out a little…

UW: Take a quarter-inch off the sleeve length, that sort of thing?

TK: Yeah. There’s this guy from Riddell or one of those companies — he’s always around the clubhouse, wonderful man. And if a guy gets traded to the team or needs changes or whatever, he fixes them up. And Sheff would give him all this work to do, and it would all get turned around in a day. Sheff, he was the most particular in terms of needing everything just so.

I remember Sean Henn, when he was on the Yankees a few years back, told me how the Yankees had this minor league director or coordinator named Rob Thomson who would go around to all of the Yankees’ minor league affiliates, and everyone knew that they had to look exactly right if he was coming, because he was a stickler. All the minor leaguers had to wear stirrups that showed the white in the front. They were also required to have pant legs that stopped six inches above the top of the white under the stirrup. And the pants had to be pulled up, then folded over and bloused, not bunched up. Also, no facial hair at all, no sideburns below the ear, cap on straight, and only Adidas shoes. Or shoes with blacked-out logo if they weren’t Adidas.

UW: Wow.

TK: Sometimes you can tell little things about guys when they come in. Like when Kenny Lofton joined the Yankees, I remember he had “K-Lo” written all over his shoes and everything. I mean, who calls him K-Lo? I always thought that was funny. Then you’ve got the guys who just stock up on equipment, and you wonder why. Like Jason Giambi, he’s got like three dozen bats just strewn in there. Guys’ locker etiquette is interesting, too — some guys are messy, other guys are very precise.

UW: You mentioned earlier how you’d tape down your ribbon stirrups to keep them from coming loose. Do you see things like that in the clubhouse, things that the average fan wouldn’t know about but that the average Uni Watch reader would love to see? Taping this, buttoning that, or whatever?

TK: They all wear different T-shirts under their jerseys. Someone will say something like “Attaboy” during batting practice and the next thing you know someone’s made it into a T-shirt and everyone’s wearing it under their gamers. When LaTroy Hawkins came in during spring training, he wore a “Joba Rules” T-shirt, just like the fans — I thought that was really cool.

UW: You cover the Yankees, and the Yankees are always talking about the “mystique of the pinstripes.” Even their players talk that way, especially when someone gets traded and he says, “Ooh, now I get to wear the pinstripes.” Do they really feel that way, or are they just blowing smoke?

TK: I think that’s real, actually, because the tradition is unmatched. They take it pretty seriously. It can get taken too far, though, like when you see a writer write something like, “Xavier Nady wore pinstripes for the first time..,” except it was a road game, so he wasn’t really wearing pinstripes. You’ve gotta be careful with that kind of stuff.

UW: Do you think it bugs the Yankees players that they don’t have their names on their jerseys?

TK: Nobody’s ever mentioned that. I think they think it’s kinda cool.

UW: When the Mets removed the player names in 1999, some of the players reportedly didn’t like it.

TK: Well, the whole Mets uniform thing is…

UW: Let’s not even go there.

TK: When I was in Seattle, Ken Griffey basically ran the clubhouse. So unless you were a veteran starter like Jamie Moyer or Jeff Fassero, Griffey would decide what uniform they wore. Once Freddie Garcia got to 10 wins, he was allowed to decide, too. But if it was someone like Ken Cloude, Griffey would be the one who’d tell the clubhouse guy, “OK, we’re wearing blue today,” or whatever.

UW: What are you favorite uniforms?

TK: So much of this is wrapped up nostalgia, but I always thought the Padres’ brown uniforms were so cool. The Brewers’ old logo, which they still wear on Fridays or whatever, that’s great. And I loved the original Expos cap, which looked like a beanie — I always liked that. The Braves have screwed up their look so much, with the red jersey and all, but their plain white one is nice, with the double lines down, uh, what do you call that?

UW: The placket.

TK: Yeah, the piping down the placket. I don’t like much about the Braves, but I do like that uniform. The Dodgers are classic. You can’t go wrong with the Detroit Tigers. Oh, and the Pirates’ vest — I love that, and those great numbers they use.

UW: It’s such a sad-sack franchise that nobody takes them seriously, but they look sensational, I agree. What about least favorite?

TK [unhesitatingly]: The Blue Jays. The Blue Jays are a disgrace. And I’ve gotta watch them 19 times a year. It just drives me nuts! And I was friends with this guy who worked for them when they changed over [to their current look], and I’d say to him, “You can’t go black — you’re the Blue Jays! You can’t have black Blue Jays, it doesn’t make any sense!” And he’d say, “Oh it’s marketing, people like to buy stuff in black,” and all that. And the numbers are weird, all tilted, and the lettering on the back is silly. I’m not crazy about the Brewers either, because the name on the back is hard to read, and the uniform is so boring compared to what it should be, which is just the old version that they now use as a throwback — they should wear that every day. But the Blue Jays are by far the worst. Are they gonna wear those weird gray ones anymore?

UW: No.

TK: Well, that’s good. But I could go on about the Blue Jays — their look just really offends me. Any team that wears black unnecessarily. Oh, and the worst example of that is probably the Oakland A’s, with that black jersey.

UW: Especially since their basic look is really good.

TK: Their basic look is so nice. Oh, and I hate that logo with the elephant wearing sunglasses, because the single greatest logo is the one with the elephant on the ball with the bat in its trunk.

UW: Is that one you can draw really well?

TK: Yes, I can draw that one perfectly.

UW: And can you tell other people how to draw it?

TK: I don’t know about that. It’s a tough one. A lot of steps. But that is my all-time favorite logo, and I wish they’d use that more, because their basic logo is so boring — that brings nothing to the party. And right near the press elevator, they have the elephant logo, but instead of standing on a baseball, he’s standing on a globe, and it says, “World Champions 1989,” and I think it’s the coolest championship logo.

UW: What about other sports?

TK: I’ve always liked the Boston Bruins’ uniforms, for some reason, because they’re so simple. I’m a Flyers fan, but they really screwed up by going to black. My favorite helmet is the Bengals. Coolest helmet ever, if you ask me. Which you are. The stripes are so neat. When it came out in ’81 or so, I was just starting to follow sports, and I didn’t even know they used to have a helmet with just the word “Bengals” on it. Very stark-looking helmet. I don’t know why they ever would’ve gone that. Their uniform is a bit weird now, but I love the helmet. Football helmets are even cooler than baseball hats, because it’s like an open template to do whatever you want. You know what’s really neat, when the 49ers wear the Montana-era jerseys. You look at them now, and it doesn’t seem like it would look that different, but then you compare them side-by-side and the Alex Smith-era jerseys are so ugly. I liked in ’94, when they wore that throwback uniform all the way through to the Super Bowl. That was kinda gutsy. I was gonna say, “ballsy,” but that wouldn’t be good.

UW: That’s OK, on my blog you can say that.

TK: It was cool — “We’re winning with this, we’re gonna keep wearing it all the way to the Super Bowl.”

UW: Only Super Bowl winner not to wear TV numbers.

TK: Really? Wow.

==========

Well, at least I got to slip in one factoid Tyler wasn’t already aware of. Big thanks to him for making time for me in his busy schedule, and for sharing some old copies of his magazine — really, really special stuff.

Raffle Reminder: I’m raffling off a copy of the excellent new book Remember the AFL. Details here.

Uni Watch News Ticker: Two good spots by Andy Chalifour: First, here’s Jim Essian wearing not just a brimless helmet, but a brimless helmet with the A’s logo. And speaking of logos, look at the batting glove on Ozzie Guillen’s left hand — much older than the uniform design he’s wearing. … David Stoops reports that Youngstown State (DI-AA) has new uniforms this year. … “The SEC has either required or requested that schools put the round SEC logo on their fields,” notes Patrick Campbell. “The logo is placed on both 25 yard lines, just inside the numbers. The interesting thing is that instead of using the SEC colors (light blue and yellow) for the logo, the conference is allowing the use of school colors for each field (much like MLB allows team colors for their logo on MLB caps and jerseys): Auburn used navy blue with an orange border and white letters, Mississippi State’s logo is maroon with white border and white letters, and Alabama has crimson with white/crimson border and white letters.” … Good restroom sign at Citizens Bank Park in Philly. Note the stirrups (with thanks to Matt Brukman). … There was a quick helmet modification during Sunday’s Steelers/Browns game, as a Pittsburgh staffer remove the stripe from a helmet and inflated the helmet’s inner bladder. Ryan Connelly captured the sequence here. … John Muir reports that the Oilers’ rookies have been wearing 30th-anniversary patches on their shoulders. The same design is at center ice. … Jon Cannella notes that the Charlie Manuel’s Wikipedia entry includes the following: “At a game against the Lotte Orions on June 19, 1979, he was hit in the face by a pitch from Soroku Yagisawa. The pitch crushed his jaw. … To protect his bruised jaw, Manuel wore a helmet equipped with a football face mask.” Intrigued, I poked around and found this and this. … Tulsa will be wearing throwbacks this weekend (with thanks to Tod Meisner). … Craig Bates has put together a slideshow of photos of his jersey collection (a mix of football, baseball, and a bit of hockey). Lots of good stuff, including some close-ups of interesting tags and patches. … The new Ernie Davis statue at Syracuse depicts Davis wearing a swoosh-emblazoned jersey, even though Nike didn’t even exist when Davis played (with thanks to Jeff Landset). … Odd observation from Jared Simon, who writes: “I’ve noticed in the last two Packers games that Mike McCarthy has had a red pen tucked into the back of his hat during the first half and then it switches to a blue pen when he comes out for the second half. Has he always been doing this or has it been just a coincidence?” … Brian Bennett was cleaning up around the house and came across some uni-related posters from the early 1990s, apparently produced by Kellogg’s. There’s a small slideshow of the full posters and some detailed views here. … Ugliest rugby uniforms ever? Could be (with thanks to Dave Inman). … And people wonder why I don’t like purple (courtesy of Tom Konecny). … Latest schools switching to the System of Dress: Oklahoma State (with thanks to Brian Ray) and Illinois (here’s another view). … Remember Jason Hillyer, who wanted (and received) a Uni Watch membership card as a wedding gift from his bride, Alison Cherubini? The two of them recently took a behind-the-scenes tour of Cooper Stadium in Columbus (aka “the Coop”), which is soon to be replaced. They took a buncha pics of banners, jerseys and other stuff (you can see a slideshow here), the most interesting of which was this one. Jason explains: “The modern day ‘Safe’ and ‘Out’ signals were developed for the player seated just to the left of the man with the bat (kind of in between front and back row), William Hoy. He was deaf, so when looking to the umpire for the call for a play at a base, the ump would motion Hoy off the field with his thumb if Hoy was out, or tell Hoy to stay there by making a palms down motion with both hands apart, a motion that morphed into the ’safe’ sign we know today.” … Here’s something I’ve never seen before: an audio style guide of the triple-A Oklahoma Redhawks’ new logos and uniforms, narrated by the designer. Further details here. … It was gray vs. gray again at Miller Park yesterday. … Tom Hedrick notes that Delwyn Young’s uni number on his helmet was upside-down last night. … “What looks more rinky dink than having a SNOB (sponsor name on back)?” asks Caleb Borchers. “Having such puny corporate sponsorship that each player gets a different SNOB.” … The Pedro porthole was closed last night (with thanks to Phil Hecken, who also came across this really cool old Bruins photo — anyone know the players and/or year?).

231 comments September 16th, 2008

Uni Watch Profiles: Jay Kaplan

For most of the baseball world, Dock Ellis is “that guy who threw a no-hitter on acid.” Here at Uni Watch, he’s “that guy who wore curlers” (more on that here). But to Jay Kaplan, Ellis is a lot more.

Kaplan (who I learned about from reader Matthew Ronay) is the man behind “Ellis, D.: The Dock Ellis Experience,” a group of 15 amazing poured resin paintings based on Ellis’s life, many of them featuring some awesome uni-related content. It’s a really interesting project for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is this: If you start with one of the paintings and then click on it, you get a bunch of thumbnails showing Kaplan’s source material and visual references. It’s like getting a peek inside his creative process.

Kaplan was already planning a trip to NYC when I contacted him last month, so I got to interview him in person instead of over the phone. Even better, he brought several of the paintings with him, and they’re even more impressive in person than they are on the web, full of depth and saturation and texture. It also becomes much more apparent that the paintings’ dimensions are the same proportions as a baseball card.

Those photos were taken on June 6th, shortly after Jay and I spent some time chatting over a few beers in my back yard. Here’s what we talked about.

Uni Watch: Let’s start with you. How old are you, and where do you live?

Jay Kaplan: I’m 35, and I live in Sudbury, Massachusetts. But I’ve only been there for a year. Before that I lived here in Brooklyn for 14 years.

UW: Why’d you move?

JK: We have two kids, and it was getting tricky. I was getting sidetracked from doing my art. So now I’m, like, in the woods.

UW: Do you make a living as an artist?

JK: I’ve done so many different things to make a living — art’s been one of them.

UW: I know you grew up in Port Washington [Long Island]. Were you a sports fan growing up?

JK: Yeah. And I still am.

UW: Did you play sports?

JK: I played Little League and played baseball up through my junior year in high school. And I played soccer and a little hockey. Some basketball, but I wasn’t very good.

UW: Were you interested in art back then as well?

JK: I played music, and yeah, I did some art. We had a lot of art in our house. My great-grandmother was an interior designer, so she had bought a lot of stuff, and my parents hung work, like, salon-style, so there was art everywhere. And my grandfather was a painter.

UW: And did your interests in art and sports ever overlap, like they have with this Dock Ellis project?

JK: Here and there. When I was about 12, I took an oil painting class and I made a painting of Denis Potvin. I was a big Islanders fan, and that was right in their heyday.

UW: Have you done other sports-oriented art projects as an adult, prior to the Dock Ellis work?

JK: I did a silly thing. I really got into art in college. In high school, I’d been into writing, but then in college I took an elective — a welding elective. It was actually an African-American Studies welding class. And in that class I made a giant sculpture of Patrick Ewing. So that one and the Potvin painting were probably my two sports pieces.

UW: What led you to do that?

JK: At the time, I was so into just the act of welding, and I didn’t really know much about art, so I’d just weld anything that popped into my head. And I was really into the Knicks at the time. It’s at my parents’ house now, along with a lot of my work. The Ewing is a source of embarrassment for me now. A lot of my friends really like it, but I don’t know if they’re just making fun of me.

UW: Okay, so tell me about your fascination with Dock Ellis, and how that fascination led to this project.

JK: I was doing a lot of self-referential art…

UW: How do you mean?

JK: I used to do these performance pieces and photograph them. I made a piñata in my own likeness, and I hung it from a tree and had someone take pictures of me beating it while wearing the same clothes as the piñata, with red paper on the inside. Another time, I ate a box of crayons. And I took a Krazy Glue dropper and basically had a drop of Krazy Glue about to go into my eye.

UW: Was it actually, like, real Krazy Glue?

JK: It was, yeah.

UW: Did it go into your eye?

JK: No. I just kept it right there for the shot. Another time I filled a bottle of Glass Plus with blue Gatorade, went to a supermarket, and placed it on the shelf. Then I took it off the shelf and chugged it. So I’d done all these pieces with me in them, and I was looking for something with more of a narrative, a story. And I remembered this urban legend that someone had taken LSD and pitched a no-hitter. Then I did some research and learned that there was so much more to Dock.

UW: When was this that you began this process?

JK: Probably two and a half years ago. I’d started making these paintings using resin. I started with abstract stuff, geometric shapes. Then I went to the next logical place, naked women. And that’s when I decided to do the narrative. It took me a year to do the whole series.

UW: You said that you learned there was so much more to Dock Ellis than just “the guy who pitched a no-hitter while doing LSD.” Such as..?

JK: He was almost a black activist. He was outspoken, he had this lively personality. He was a character. He was controversial.

UW: The poured resin seems so particularly well-suited to someone who was tripping on acid, and also for the colors and design style of that time period. Was that one reason you thought he’d be a good match for this medium?

JK: Yeah, definitely. It all seemed to fit together so well. [You can see a slideshow documenting the making of this painting here. -- PL]

UW: Have you done LSD yourself?

JK: Um… I, uh … No comment.

UW: Did you do LSD specifically as “research” for this project, in the course of making the art?

JK: No.

UW: You’ve got some great uniform depictions in there. When I saw the Reggie Jackson painting, with that Oakland A’s uniform, that’s when I knew I had to get in touch with you. And hey, did you know that those early-’70s Pirates pullovers were the first pullovers ever worn in major league baseball?

JK: No.

UW: Yeah. Whether you realized it or not, you were documenting a really transformative period in baseball — striped waistbands replacing belts, pullovers replacing button-fronts, polyester replacing flannel. Were you aware of any of that?

JK: Not really, no. But I did do a lot of research to make it somewhat accurate to the era. I was hoping to capture the ’70s, when he pitched.

UW: What sort of research?

JK: Just looking at tons of pictures. There’s so much on the web now.

UW: Did you collect baseball cards as a kid, and did you go back and look at them?

JK: I did, yeah.

UW: I’m a little older than you, and I got interested in baseball around 1971, ’72, so I grew up watching precisely this period we’re talking about. Like, I remember watching Dock Ellis pitch. But you grew up after this period. So as you were doing all this research, were thinking, “Damn, I wish I’d been around to see that”?

JK: I have a lot of ’70s nostalgia in me, because the house I grew up in was really tricked out ’70s-style. So I sort of feel like I was there for it.

UW: You also have a piece showing Ellis in his curlers. When did you learn about that episode?

JK: There this great book, Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball…

UW: Right.

JK: So I read about it there, and in other articles about him. I just thought it was an interesting thing to do, to wear curlers on the field. And he even used that to show racial bias, because the commissioner said, “You can’t do that, can’t wear curlers,” but he let white ballplayers wear wigs or hairpieces.

UW: I love how, if you click on one of the paintings, you get all those smaller images. Are those the source images?

JK: Those are some of the inspiration behind each painting. Sometimes I feel like maybe it gives away too much. But at the same time, I don’t know — if you just see the paintings, you might not get as much of the story.

UW: So it’s sort of like footnotes.

JK: Yeah.

UW: And for the painting called Side Show, the source images are mostly these mustachioed ballplayers. What was that all about?

JK: Well, he pitched the no-hitter against the Padres. So the main image was based on the original San Diego Chicken, which was a radio gimmick. I wanted to draw a parallel between the chicken, which was a side show to the game, and a mustache, which I think of as a side show to a face. And mustaches were so prevalent back in that period.

UW: Right, because the A’s started that whole thing. And of course they also started the Technicolor-uniform trend.

JK: Yeah, I was so excited to do that Reggie Jackson piece, just to match that green and that yellow. I knew that in the resin, it would really pop.

UW: You nailed it, too.

JK: You probably can’t tell from the image on the web, but I actually did his glasses frames in inlaid metal, to accentuate them.

UW: Yeah, I noticed you used some unusual media, like Ping Pong balls. What’s that about?

JK: The Ping Pong balls were from this story when Dock fell from grace and drugs kind of overtook him later in his career. He finally went to rehab, and he was in such a bad state that he would actually sniff Ping Pong balls to try to get high.

UW: Really? What did he think he was gonna get out of that?

JK: I don’t know, but when I drilled holes in them and filled them with resin to make the eyeballs for that painting, they were really stinky. I think they’re made out of some kind of crazy plastic.

UW: No no no, they’re made out of reed or something, aren’t they? Definitely something organic.

JK: Really? Huh. [Actually, Jay was right: They're made of celluloid, which is a thermoplastic. -- PL]

UW: Anyway, so you did that not just because it was visually appropriate, but you were referencing an incident from his life.

JK: Yeah, I just took all this information about him and processed it through my head and tried to come up with images to go with them, and tried to make it work. But it didn’t have to be super-precise or literal.

UW: Let’s get back to the Reggie Jackson piece for a second. Why did you include him?

JK: Dock had a little history with Reggie in, I think, the ’76 All-Star Game [actually 1971 -- PL]. At mid-season he had a really good record. Like he was 11-0 or something, and Vida Blue was having a great year too, and Dock said, “They’ll never start two black pitchers, two brothers in this All-Star Game.” And it became a big thing in the press, and it turned out that they both did start. And during that game, Reggie Jackson hit that famous home run off of Dock, the moonshot that hit the light tower in Detroit.

UW: But Reggie wasn’t wearing that green jersey in that game — he was wearing a vest.

JK [sheepishly]: There might be a few, uh, holes in the story.

UW: Well, that’s OK — artistic license and all. Didn’t mean to be such a stickler. I was just sayin’.

JK: Yeah, my audience is an art world audience. They’d never know the difference. Anyway, Reggie stood there watching the home run, which infuriated Dock.

UW: Nowadays, it happens practically every game. I mean, Manny Ramirez does it twice a week. I guess Reggie was kind of a pioneer there.

JK: But it really pissed off Dock.

UW: Which is kind of interesting. Because culturally speaking, the whole “standing and admiring your home run” thing is part of a demonstrative or hot dog-ish approach to sports that’s very black, very much part of the black approach to sports. And the people who don’t like it and criticize it are almost invariably white fans and white media people. So it’s interesting that Dock Ellis, being a very racially aware athlete, frowned upon something that was, in essence, very black.

JK: I don’t think he judged people based on color. He loved Pete Rose, for example. I think he just didn’t like being shown up, by anyone.

UW: Yeah, but what I mean is, you and I say, “showing him up,” but a lot of black fans and athletes would say, “That’s not showing anyone up — that’s just my style, that’s being an entertainer,” blah-blah-blah. And what white fans call “classy,” black fans often consider just “boring.” I’m not coming down on either side; I’m just saying the same thing can be perceived differently by different groups. It definitely speaks to a cultural gap.

JK: Yeah.

UW: Anyway, that soured him on Reggie?

JK: Definitely. At one point a bunch of major leaguers were going to do a tour of Viet Nam, and Dock didn’t wanna go because Reggie was going. The next time he faced Reggie again [which was several years later, because Ellis didn't pitch in the American League until 1976 -- PL], he hit him in the face. Intentionally. Broke his glasses and I think broke his jaw.

UW: And that was years after! Wow, note to self: Don’t cross Dock Ellis.

JK: Exactly.

UW: Have these pieces been shown in a gallery yet?

JK: No, I’m trying to find a place for them now. I’ve got some hopefuls. I’m feeling positive about it.

UW: Assuming you find a gallery, will you show the source images, the backstory, the way you have on the web?

JK: I don’t think I would, unless I maybe did it in the catalog.

UW: So it’s a very different kind of exhibition on the web than it would be in person. I mean, obviously, duh, everything’s different on the web, but what I mean is that the quantitative amount of material you’d be showing would be different.

JK: Yeah. At one point I wanted to get video of the no-hitter, and I contact all these different people, but it turns out that game wasn’t televised. There was some home video that someone shot from the stands — Bob Costas showed some of it on his show one time — and I tried to get that, but I couldn’t. The Hall of Fame sent me some other footage of Dock pitching, and I thought of doing something with that, but I decided not to.

UW: In the course of this project, did you make any attempts to contact Dock himself?

JK: I didn’t. I thought about it, but I wanted it to be based on just the story. Like I said before, at first I kind of treated it like an urban legend. I didn’t want to get too close to it.

UW: Did you contact Donald Hall, who wrote Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball?

JK: No.

UW: If this project eventually ends up in a gallery and gets some media, it’s certainly conceivable that Dock Ellis could become aware of its existence. If he were to come into a gallery, or even just visit your web site, what do you think he’d make of all this?

JK: I don’t know. It’s an interesting question, because I spent so much time thinking about him. I was completely absorbed by him — it’s like he’s become a big part of my life somehow. I’d hope he would like it. I know he has a good sense of humor. I read something where he was signing baseballs with some sort of LSD reference. I’d hope he wouldn’t be offended, and that he’d be happy that someone was glorifying his life and accomplishments.

UW: Let’s say you get a gallery, and they do a big opening reception. Would you want Dock to attend the opening?

JK: That would be great, yeah — I’d be into that. He’s actually a drug counselor now, in California, and one of the galleries I’m looking at is in L.A., so yeah, that would be cool.

UW: I know artists hate to be asked this type of question, but do you have a favorite piece among the 15?

JK: I like Kool-Aid and Kools. It’s so iconic, and the idea is so clear to me. It sort of expresses this contradiction that was a big part of Dock’s personality, that he could be angry and loving. Dock smoked Kools, and Kool-Aid can be spiked with acid, so it all kind of fit together.

[That was all the questions I had, so I turned off the tape recorder. But we kept on chatting and drinking, and at some point the talk turned back to sports, so I turned the tape back on. -- PL]

JK: Lately I’ve gotten into NASCAR.

UW: Interesting. Do you know any other artists who are into it?

JK: Actually, I’ve got two friends who started their careers based on their interest in NASCAR.

UW: How so?

JK: They were both interested in the aesthetics of it. This one guy, my friend Nathan, he did a lot work that almost looked like the way the patches are everywhere [on the jumpsuits]. And this girl Kristin Baker, she was into the way a car looks when it’s crashed, and her paintings were abstract, but they kind of had this crashing vibe. This was back in the ’90s — I think they’ve both gotten away from it now.

UW: Have you ever thought of a NASCAR-related project?

JK: There’s this one driver, Travis Kvapil, who drives the No. 28 car. For a while he didn’t have a sponsor, so he just put “11 million” on the hood of the car, because that’s what it would cost to sponsor him.

UW: Sort of like “Your Ad Here.”

JK: Exactly. So I saw that, and I thought that would be great if I, as an artist, could sponsor that car and just do some artwork on that car.

UW: So let’s say you’re a gazillionaire and you go ahead and do this. What would you put on the car?

JK: Maybe some kind of op-art thing that’s forms a vibrating pattern, so other drivers get mesmerized and crash when they’re coming up behind you. Or you could just do a minimalist thing, or just something ridiculous, like popcorn all over the car. And at the end of the race, the drivers always mention the sponsor — like, “Yeah, this Office Depot car really came through for me today.” So it would be incredible to hear them say, “This Jay Kaplan art car was was just great.” It would be a great juxtaposition between corporate America and art.

UW: Have you ever discussed this idea with anyone?

JK: I did work for Jeff Koons at one point…

UW: Well, he certainly has enough money to do it.

JK: Definitely. And it was so great when he put a float of his rabbit sculpture in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade. I still know him and his wife, so I mentioned the idea to his wife. I e-mailed her about it, thinking maybe she’d tell him and he’d do it.

UW: Any response?

JK [laughing]: No response.

UW: Are you aware of the recent taxi art project here in New York?

JK: No.

UW: It started last year, I think. Lots of New York cabs got outfitted with these big floral decals. It’s not quite the same thing as what you’re talking about, but it was an interesting project.

JK: Was it cool?

UW: I didn’t like the designs, frankly, but I really liked the idea of using taxis as a means of creating public art, especially since so many taxis also carry advertising.

==========

And that’s where we left it. Jay hasn’t yet found a gallery for the full 15-painting set, but he’ll be showing four of the pieces, along with some non-Dock artwork, in this group show, which will have an opening reception this Saturday from 6pm-10pm. He’ll be on hand, and I’ll be swinging by as well.

Uni Watch News Ticker: New York’s sanitation workers are getting new uniforms (with thanks to Neil Berger). … The Arkansas Travelers, double-A affiliate of the Angels, are changing from blue caps to red after winning the first-half division title (with thanks to John Evans). … Reprinted from yesterday’s comments: Novak Djokovic, an Adidas-sponsored athlete, wore Nike sneakers at Wimbledon and whited-out the swooshes. Details here. … While looking for something else, I came across this photo Ted Williams and Dom DiMaggio. Note the connective strap on Ted’s stirrup. … Also came across this shot. Look closely and you’ll see that the ump is wearing his cap backwards, even though it has a abbreviated brim. Not sure I’ve ever seen that before. … Super-detailed guide to spotting fake NFL “authentics” here (nice find by Drew Wagner). … Good photos here, here, and hereof the Tigers’ one-year tiger-head style from 1927 (with thanks to Doug Mooney). … Early Astros prototype? Marc Swanson isn’t saying. … Thinnest stirrups ever? … Slow news day in Denver. … Chris Flinn reports that baseball-snagging guru Zack Hample snared a few BP balls at Shea a few days ago and was surprised to discover to find that they were All-Star Game balls. (As an aside, I had no idea there was a “baseball-snagging guru” out there, but the guy actually has a blog devoted to the topic — cool.) … “Many UFC fighters have started wearing tape wraps around their gloves to match the corner they’re assigned (blue corner has blue tape, red corner has red tape),” reports Mike Miller. “Probably helps the judges tell the fighters apart for scoring.” … Good gallery of USA Olympic basketball jereys here (with thanks to Erkki Corpuz). … Did you know the MLB logo was designed by DC Comics artist Jim Sherman? That’s what this page claims (with thanks to Dave Sikula). … Pesky Pirates patch problem persist for Jack Wilson. He must really love that one undershirt (with thanks to Bill Blevins). … Kudos to the U. of Minnesota, who’ve told Victoria’s Secret not to include them in Vicky’s pink collegiate product line. Details here (and nobody’s happier about this than Minnesota resident and scourge of all things pink Minna H.). … Mariners and Padres will be wearing 1978 throwbacks tomorrow night. … Nice photo gallery here of Cal football uni history — a history to which these are now being added. … I’m an architectural intern in Philadelphia and each summer there is a softball league comprised of architecture firms, contractors, and real estate firms,” writes Eddie Layton. “In general the league is very laid back and unorganized, although a few teams do have a semblance of uniforms or others (like ours) just try to all wear the same color T-shirt. This past week, however, we played a firm that had some pretty classic uniforms. I’ve attached a couple of pictures that my fiance took while we were playing.” … Reprinted from last night’s comments: Why did Bruce Boisclair (one of the least baseball-y names ever, by the way) pose for a photo with an aluminum bat?

221 comments June 26th, 2008

Uni Watch Profiles: Mark Penxa

Last month I got a note from reader Anthony Giaccone, who wanted to let me know about an interesting baseball-related art project he’d found on the web. I followed the link he provided and found myself at “Stealing Signs,” a series of 100 old-timey baseball paintings, sequenced with musical accompaniment, by an artist named Mark Penxa.

As I clicked through the paintings, I quickly fell in love with them. Some had accompanying text, some had little rows of statistics, almost all were hauntingly beautiful. And of course I loved the uniform depictions.

I got in touch with Penxa, who readily agreed to an interview. Our conversation was interesting, because I tend to think and communicate in very linear terms, while he doesn’t (which is why I’m a writer and he’s an artist). But before you read the transcript, I urge everyone to click through the whole “Stealing Signs” presentation — the cumulative effect is even greater than the considerable sum of its parts.

Uni Watch: Let’s start with you. Where do you live, how old are you, and what do you do for a living?

Mark Penxa: I’m 31, I live in Detroit — well, in the ’burbs, actually, in a village called Plymouth — and I’m a painter.

UW: So you live off your art..?

MP: Yeah.

UW: Wow, that’s really excellent — congrats. Now, “Stealing Signs” is comprised of paintings and sketches about baseball, but what about your other work? Like, do you use other media, do you tend to focus on a particular type of subject matter? In short, how would you describe your art as a whole?

MP: I’m not sure I can answer that. Some of my work is really abstract. I’ve always been involved in art — I did my first drawing when I was three. But my primary focus for years was music, and I did that professionally.

UW: What do you play?

MP: Guitar, piano, a lot of stuff. It’s in the bloodline — both of my parents are musicians. So it was always there.

UW: Were you in bands?

MP: I was in a punk band called Telegraph. We toured around, got to see the world for free, sold some records. But art was always plan B, because the music thing was never gonna last forever. So I started painting and working myself into that — I never went to school for it or anything.

UW: So you’re self-taught, self-trained.

MP: Yeah. Basically, our band left on our first big tour a few days after I graduated high school. And I’ve always been a bit of a worrier, so I was worried about what was gonna happen when this was done. So I would just read Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop manuals while we toured. And when I was home, I’d practice. Then I started painting and getting into that medium. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I don’t really know how to sum up my artwork, because I haven’t been formally trained.

UW: I’m sure artists hate being compared to other artists, but would I be wrong in saying I see a certain Raymond Pettibon influence [additional Pettibon examples here and here -- PL] in your work?

MP: Yeah, that’s pretty accurate. That comes from coming up in punk rock — Raymond, you know, he was everywhere. His work is something that just sticks in your head. I don’t know much about him other than his covers for the Black Flag records. And I know that he’s sometimes touched on baseball [I'd completely forgotten about that myself -- PL]. So when I started this, I was a little worried about that.

UW: How so? Like your project would seem too derivative, or you’d be viewed as ripping him off or something?

MP [laughing]: Yeah, I usually go right to the worst-case scenario, so I was kinda worried about ripping him off.

UW: I didn’t mean it that way when I brought up his name — I just meant that you’re in good company.

MP: Yeah, that’s how I took it — it’s very flattering.

UW: Have you always been a baseball fan?

MP: Yeah, absolutely.

UW: What about other sports?

MP: I’m primarily a hockey guy.

UW: Who do you root for?

MP: I’m a homer, so I root for the Tigers. And I follow the Wings, because it’s easy to do that, but I actually grew up as a Maple Leafs fan. That’s because my father was always a Canadiens fan, so I kinda did it to piss him off.

UW: Are you an athlete yourself, or were you when you were growing up?

MP: I did the Little League thing. I wasn’t really any good. But I did go 4-for-4 once against the fat kid. And I’ve always been into skateboarding.

UW: Oh, so that explains skateboard art that you’ve done. Alright, but let’s get to “Stealing Signs” and how it all came together.

MP: It sort of started out as an accident. It was a doodle I did of Al Kaline, and when I stopped and looked at it, it looked a bit like a stencil. Something graffiti-like. I thought about it and said, “Yeah, I should do some of these for my grandfather.” I was going to do 10 of them and give them to him as a birthday gift.

UW: This initial doodle of Al Kaline, was it based on a photo of him?

MP: Yeah, it was based on his Hall of Fame induction photo. I was going to do the various phases of his career, because he’s basically the be-all and end-all for my grandfather. No one else existed. So it went from that, and I started adding paint to the drawings, messing around with dye, and soon I had about 20 Al Kalines — the same damn drawing.

UW: So you were doing, like, different treatments of the same drawing.

MP: Yeah, I was just playing with it. I’d make photocopies of the drawing and try different things.

UW: This was all done physically, not on the computer, right?

MP: Yeah, this is all pen, paper, and paint. And this was a few years ago, when the team had turned around and suddenly gotten good, and I started thinking about how the city had changed because of baseball. People weren’t mugging each other anymore. That sounds harsh, but it’s very real here. Normally, if you’re walking down the street in Detroit and someone approaches you who you don’t know, you’re immediately on the defensive. You assume something bad is going to happen. But when they were making that first playoff run in 2006, people would stop you in the street and ask if you knew what the score was. I mean, everyone here’s out of work, the economy is garbage, and baseball was sort of fixing everything. It was very interesting and cool to see.

UW: So how did that play into the project?

MP: It’s hard to explain, but it just got me thinking, and I kept doing more pieces, and soon I had about 60 of them. And when I finally realized where I was going, I tore those up and started over.

UW: And where is it that you realized you were going?

MP: Ah… [Long pause.] I don’t think I’ve figured that part out yet. And maybe because it’s not done. There could be more, I’m not sure. It sounds kind of hokey and hippie-ish, but I think I was kind of playing therapist to some of these guys.

UW: Some of the guys you were painting?

MP: Yeah, the players themselves. Some of them. See, some of the players I painted are completely fictitious. And some of them are very real — Hall of Famers. Grover Alexander, Cool Papa Bell. It’s hard to explain, exactly.

UW: Is that what the title “Stealing Signs” refers to? Like, you’re intercepting the stories of their lives?

MP: Sure. Yeah. You’re the first one to catch that.

UW: What about the subtitle, “Memories from My Past life, 1927″?

MP [chuckling a bit nervously]: That’s a little weird. I’ve always had this strange connection, or nostalgia, for the 1920s and ’30s. That was sort of the subtext. The muted sepia-tone colors, especially, play into that.

UW: But not all of the images are based on photos taken in 1927, right?

MP: No, not at all.

UW: So why is 1927 part of the subtitle?

MP [chuckling again]: It was just sort of the year I put on it. It’s, it’s really, uh, I don’t know if it lessens the whole thing or what, but it just sort of spilled out of me. It felt right. I don’t know why.

UW: I realize I’m asking specific questions about things that may not have specific answers, and that you may have made an artistic choice simply because it felt right to you. And that’s fine.

MP: Paul, this is very weird, because this is actually the first time I’ve talked out loud about the project, and the first time anyone’s asked me any questions about it. So some of these things you’re asking me, they’re things I haven’t really thought through yet. So just bear with me.

UW: No problem. Now, are all of the paintings based on photos?

MP: Most of them. Probably about 75%.

UW: The ones that aren’t, did you just do them out of your head, or are they composites, or what?

MP: Most of those came straight out of my head. There’s one — “My World Still Spins Without You” — that one started with the words. And there’s a couple where I worked some of my friends’ faces into the paintings.

UW: When choosing a photo to render as a painting, were your choices driven primarily by the original photo’s aesthetic qualities, or by who was depicted in a photo, or what? What were your criteria? Were you looking for photos and then basing the idea for a painting around that, or did you already have an idea and you’d go looking for an appropriate photo?

MP: I wasn’t really looking for photos at first. After the Kaline pieces that I was doing for my grandfather, the next batch was completely out of my head. I just started making up all these characters in this soap opera. But once I got an idea of what I wanted it all to look like, those earlier ones didn’t make sense anymore. So then I started referencing photos and things like that.

UW: Were there specific boundaries on the time frame these photos came from, or was it all just “early baseball photos”?

MP: I tried to keep it within the late ’20s, when possible. When I was almost done with the whole thing, someone sent me a link to the Chicago Daily News photo archive. It’s, like, tens of thousands of old negatives. So I started going through that, and I almost — almost — scrapped the whole thing and started over with that. They’ve got some pretty amazing stuff. Prison leagues, prison league football. It’s incredible.

UW: What is it about that particular 1920s era that fascinates you so much?

MP: That’s when my grandfather was growing up, so that’s my connection to it.

UW: OK, now we’ll finally get to some uniform questions. The uniforms from that era had a lot of elements that would look unusual to us today. Some jerseys had pockets or point collars, belt buckles were usually worn off-center, sleeves were often very long, there were sweaters instead of dugout jackets, umpires wore neckties. Were you already aware of all that, or were you surprised to discover these details as you painted them?

MP: I’d always known about that stuff. But I changed some aspects of the uniforms, and in some cases I got a little mischievous and changed the teams that the players played for. There were quite a few that didn’t make the final 100 where they’re wearing those big warm-up sweaters — those didn’t really translate well. The thick-gauge knit looked like popcorn. [Mark's being too hard on himself. After our interview was over, he sent me some original paintings that didn't make the cut, including this one. As I think you'll agree, the sweater came out just fine. -- PL]

UW: The uniform fabric was different back then, too. Your painting style, with its thick lines, really meshes well with the thick wool flannels of that period.

MP: Thanks. I think that’s why the colors worked so well. Just that sweaty, dirty-wool thing, like they were never quite clean.

UW: Yeah, I’m assuming all your reference photos were black-and-white, which freed you to impose your own color palette. And I love that muted sepia feel that you got. It’s almost like a color version of black-and-white.

MP: Yeah, if I did have a color photo to work with, I just took the color out of it. There’s not much red, white, or blue in there.

UW: Has this project changed the way you look at baseball, and the way you react when you see a baseball uniform?

MP: It doesn’t change the way I watch a game. But it’s increased my appreciation for the game.

UW: Some of the images have accompanying text, and some don’t. What’s that all about, and how did those choices develop?

MP: Like I said before, it has to do witt that therapy aspect. It’s what I thought these players were saying to me. That sounds so weird. Creepy. At first I looked at it as, “For some reason this came into my head, so I’m writing it down.” Like, “Roy Campanella wants me to say this.” I don’t know. Really, it was my own therapy.

UW: Well, that was my next question — how much of this was therapy for you?

MP: Oh, probably a lot. I mean, I can try to hide behind these guys, but I’m gonna be exposed sooner or later. I mean, a lot of it is about my own, uh, junk. But it’s everyday junk, the junk we deal with. It’s just those things that go unnoticed and get passed off as not being a big deal — bleeding hearts, mild addiction, and stuff like that.

UW: Are there any particular players you chose to depict who might not be household names but who you chose to depict because you found them to be appealing characters in some way? I know there’s one where you listed the guy’s first and last games, and they were just a few weeks apart, for example.

MP: He died soon after his first game. I found him on baseball-reference.com.

UW: Who was it?

MP: Couldn’t tell ya. I didn’t document it. I just noticed it was some player from the ’20s, whoever he was. I like that I can’t remember who he was.

UW: Because his name isn’t as important as the circumstances defining his career?

MP: Yeah. I mean, he got to go to the big game. That’s what matters. It’s sweeter that way. He died, but he made it. His wife was proud of him. It’s a success story.

UW: What about the ones that have stats in the background?

MP: They’re always in reverse order. Don’t ask me why, I just did it that way.

UW: You mean with the player’s final season shown at the top, instead of at the bottom?

MP: Yeah.

UW: Is your grandfather still alive?

MP: Yes, barely. He’s holding on.

UW: What does he think of all this?

MP: He doesn’t. He’s seen it, but he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. His dementia’s getting really bad.

UW: I’m sorry. Does he understand on some level that you did all this as a gesture to him?

MP: Yeah. He knew about it before it was finished. As I was working on it, I let him know, “Hey, this was meant for you, but it’s kind of taken on its own life.” He got the gist.

UW: Is the project being exhibited in the physical world, or only digitally?

MP: Only online. I tried, I shopped it around to galleries and art spaces, but I kept getting turned down.

UW: Well, hopefully I can help change that.

===========

Can’t even begin to say how much I love Mark’s work. Big, big thanks to him for sharing his thoughts with me, and for creating something so special. And if anyone out there runs a gallery, get in touch with Mark pronto.

Raffle Results: The winner of the helmet raffle is charter member Joel Keller, who has already chosen this helmet as his prize. “I’m a Giants fan,” he says. “This helmet reminds me of the era when my dad became a fan, so I might give it to him. Then again, I might not.”

As for the rest of you, don’t despair — I should have another raffle to announce next Monday or Tuesday.

Uni Watch News Ticker: Lots of readers wrote in to let me know that big-shot designer Michael Beirut has penned an ode to my favorite object, the Brannock Device. … I’ve written several times about Johnny LeMaster’s “Boo” NOB (details here). According to this item, he was fined $500 for that stunt, which I hadn’t known until now. … More Japanese all-stars wearing “E” and “W” (for East and West, natch), courtesy of Jeremy Brahm. … The Pro Football Hall of Fame has some new exhibits — here’s a bunch of pics. Of particular interest: another padded-crown helmet (with thanks to Brandon Yarian). … Not many coats make it to the Museum of Modern Art. And now one that recently did make it has died — literally. … Reprinted from yesterday’s comments: In the 1986 Fiesta Bowl, Michigan’s Mike Hammerstein had a double-decker FNOB, while teammate Tim Schultz had a single-line version. … I think we’ve all seen illustrations of the new Iowa State football togs by now, but I believe this is the first photo (with thanks to Andrew Cinnamon). … Great hockey jersey collector’s site here (with thanks to Casey Barcomb). … Vince reports that Braylon Edwards said the following during a live web chat yesterday: “I am already mad at Rich Rod because he gave the No.1 jersey to someone other than a WR, which is breaking tradition. But I think he is a great coach and will lead Michigan to a turnaround.” … Fun piece here about players in the “wrong” uniforms. I once did something similar, but there’s always room for more (with thanks to David Cline). … I’ll be partaking of non-uni culture with the ’rents this afternoon, so everyone play nice while I’m gone.

156 comments May 14th, 2008

Uni Watch Profiles: Karen Hibbitt

Paul here. Bryan’s busy with a bike race today, so I’m on weekend duty for a change. And while I realize some of you are probably expecting an entry relating to the NFL draft, I’ve decided to use the day to publish an interview that’s been languishing waaaaaay too long.

Last summer, shortly after the membership program started, I received a check in the mail from Karen Hibbitt. She was signing up at the Satin Piping level, which means the check was for a very generous $500. “I’m joining at this level because it is comparable to the support I give to other activities and organizations that give me great enjoyment,” she wrote, which was one of the nicest, most humbling thing anyone had ever said to me about Uni Watch.

And how did I repay Karen’s kindness? I conducted an interview with her (one of the benefits of a Satin Piping membership) — and then sat on it for months. Karen, who’s the self-deprecating type, said she didn’t really care about the interview anyway, but that’s no excuse — I was simply too lazy to transcribe the tape, and the longer I put it off, the more embarrassing the situation became, so I kept putting it off even longer. Shame on me.

Here, finally, is Karen’s long-overdue Uni Watch Profiles interview. Karen (who’s shown above in her Uni Watch membership T-shirt alongside Screech the Nats’ mascot), I’m really sorry about the delay. Hope it was worth the wait, and thanks again for your support and kind words — means a lot to me.

Uni Watch: Where do you live, and what do you do for a living?

Karen Hibbitt: I live in Arlington, Virginia, and I’m a registrar at the National Archives.

UW: What does that mean?

KH: I work in our exhibits office, and basically everything that goes on exhibit passes through my hands.

UW: So you’re like a gatekeeper.

KH: Sort of, yeah. The curator is the more glamorous job, but museums would just crumble to the ground without registrars.

UW: That sounds like a common registrar’s lament.

KH: Yes, we can be a little touchy about our profession.

UW: I think I need to get myself a Uni Watch registrar, for my collection.

KH: Definitely, you need someone to tell you if you need mylar sleeves, or acid-free folders, or whatever.

UW: How did you discover Uni Watch?

KH: I read your column on Page 2 a bunch of times, and I felt like we had a similar aesthetic. You complained about a lot of the same things I complained about.

UW: I don’t just complain, you know.

KH: Well, yes, but basically I agreed with your tastes. And then I started reading more and more of your stuff, and became notorious among my friends for having lots of useless things to say about uniforms.

UW: What kind of sports fan are you?

KH: I grew up in Rhode Island and always loved the Red Sox. I spent a year after college working for my father, whose company was in Pawtucket, and I must have gone to about half of the Paw Sox’s home games that year. Baseball’s my favorite sport.

UW: Are you still a Red Sox fan?

KH: Yes.

UW: And how do you feel about their uniforms?

KH: I like them. I pretty much like the classic looks. As much as it pains me to say so, I think the Yankees’ home uniform is probably one of the nicest ones out there.

UW: How did you feel about the Red Sox’s solid-red alternate jerseys?

KH: I don’t like them. There are certain teams that shouldn’t have alternate jerseys, like the Original Six NHL teams. I feel like the Red Sox fall into that category too.

UW: What are your other favorite teams?

KH: Having lived in Washington for about 15 years now, I love that we have the Nationals. It’s great that we have a team. And that they’re so incredibly hapless.

UW: And how do you like their uniforms?

KH: They’re OK. I don’t object to them too much. There’s nothing fabulous about them, but there’s nothing objectionable about them. I haaaaaate teal, sort of the way you hate purple, so I’m just glad they didn’t go with teal.

UW: Any other uni-related pet peeves, or things you really like, the way I like striped socks?

KH: Again, I like a classic look — high cuffs in baseball, no biker shorts in football. Classic. Probably one of my favorite uniforms is the Toronto Maple Leafs.

UW: Why?

KH: Well, starting with the name. Nothing inspires fear in an opponent’s heart like vegetation. “Oh my god, it’s a leaf! It’s gonna fall on me!!” And then it’s Leafs instead of Leaves. And their uniform is so simple — it’s that classic thing again. For a more modern uniform, I like the Carolina Hurricanes. The line of hurricane flags, or whatever they are, along the bottom of their jersey is one of the nicest things I’ve ever seen.

UW: So do you have one of those jerseys?

KH: You know, I have this fake reproduction Hartford Whalers jersey that I wear to the games, and I get more compliments on that than for anything else I own.

UW: That’s the same franchise as the Hurricanes!

KH: I know! Everyone loves that jersey. You know, I lived in Hartford for two years, and it’s the biggest armpit of anyplace I’ve ever been — horrible.

UW: Are you aware that the Whalers are one of the two NHL teams that wore Cooperalls?

KH: Yes, thanks to Uni Watch. Which was the other one?

UW: The Flyers. When people refer to Cooperalls, they’re usually thinking of the Flyers. The Whalers get sort of overshadowed.

KH: I didn’t even know what Cooperalls were until I started reading Uni Watch.

UW: You know, a surprisingly large number of people tell me that the Whalers logo ranks among their all-time favorites. And what a lot of them tell me is that they especially love how the negative space forms an “H.” Frankly, I hadn’t noticed that myself until a reader pointed it out to me back in Uni Watch’s early days, around 2001 or so.

KH: It really is a good logo. Nice and simple. A lot of these new logos are too busy — my brain can’t cope with all that. And I like how 1970s it looks. People complain about some of the stuff from that era, like the Padres and Astros, but I like a lot of them. I mean, I’m not going to paint my bedroom yellow and brown, but they had something going on there.

UW: You know, I went to college in Binghamton, in upstate New York, and back then they had the Binghamton Whalers, which was Hartford’s top farm team. They just turned the logo on its side, but they lost the negative space aspect of the design.

KH: So here’s a question for you: What’s the etiquette for wearing jerseys?

UW: You mean for fans?

KH: Yes. I have strong opinions on this. Like, nobody should ever wear a basketball jersey, because it doesn’t look good on anyone except, like, Gilbert Arenas.

UW: What if there’s a T-shirt under it?

KH: Maybe, but it still looks hokey. You look like the fat kid at the pickup game. Even if you are Gilbert Arenas.

UW: What other rules do you have for this sort of thing?

KH: Anyone can wear football or hockey jerseys, but only at the game. You can’t just walk around town in them.

UW: What about in your house?

KH: Oh, you can wear whatever you want in your house.

UW: What if you have friends over?

KH: It’s okay to wear the jersey if you’re watching a game, like if that’s the purpose of the friends coming over. Or maybe also if you’re going to a bar to watch the game.

UW: What about baseball?

KH: Similar rules, I guess. The thing is, I think most people look a bit pretentious in a baseball jersey. Unless you have that nice, trim physique, the buttons aren’t going to look good.

UW: Now, for football and baseball jerseys, should they ever be tucked in? The players tuck them in, after all.

KH: True. But no. Not unless you’re showing up in baseball pants, stirrups, and cleats. And the only ones who should do that are Little Leaguers. They’re the only ones who should bring their glove to the ballpark, too.

UW: Hmmmm, I might beg to differ on that one.

KH: If you’re there to catch a ball, you’re not enjoying the game.

UW: But that is part of enjoying the game! And it shows you’re paying attention to the game, instead of just jibber-jabbering with your friends.

KH: Or yakking on your cell phone. Holy moses, don’t even get me started on that.

UW: So when you go to a Caps game, you wear that Whalers jersey?

KH: Yes. But I don’t put it on until I actually get to my seats.

UW: So you pull it out of your bag or something?

KH: Yes. I’m kind of embarrassed at the idea of wearing it while riding the Metro or something like that.

UW: What about cap etiquette?

KH: You can wear a baseball cap anytime, anywhere.

UW: You know, getting back to baseball, you chose No. 49 for the back of your Uni Watch membership card, because, as you put it, “Tim Wakefield has been my baseball boyfriend for quite some time.” What’s that all about?

KH: Just a little joke between me and my friends. Everyone has their baseball boyfriend.

UW: Got a little crush on him?

KH: For years. I love the knuckleball. I love how it’s unhittable when it’s on, how it messes up people’s swing for days.

UW: Have you ever tried to throw one?

KH: Yes, I have.

UW: How’d that work out for ya?

KH: Not so much. The only pitch I can throw with any skill is a curveball. I marvel at what baseball players can do.

UW: Have you ever written a fan letter to Tim Wakefield?

KH: I have not.

UW: Have you ever considered it?

KH: No. Speaking with you right now is about as close as I’ve ever gotten to someone I was a fan of.

UW: Awww. Now, over at the Archives, you folks had that exhibit about Presidents in their formative years, which included lots of photos of young Presidents-to-be playing sports. Did you help put that together?

KH: Yes, in my registrarial capacity.

UW: Ooh, good adjective, “registrarial.”

KH: It’s mostly photos, but we did have some original items, like Gerarld Ford’s letter sweater.

UW: And when you saw that, did you think, “Ooh, this’ll be good for Uni Watch”?

KH: Yes.

UW: You’ve mentioned to me that you read Uni Watch “at the end of your morning routine.” So it’s sort of like your morning dessert?

KH: Yes. There are a bunch of sites I check before getting down to work each day, and Uni Watch is usually the last one.

UW: How do your friends and family feel about all this? Do they Get It™?

KH: Well, my family has no idea.

UW: And what about your friends?

KH: They’re exceedingly amused. I have this core group of friends, and I’m the one who’s into this kind of stuff. They don’t quite Get It™, but they respect it.

UW: That’s good.

KH: Once I was at a Caps game, and I said, “Look, Ovechkin’s skate laces are yellow — I wonder why?” This was long before you’d written about it on the site. And then you wrote about it and it turned out that his skates are made by a Russian manufacturer that uses yellow laces or something like that, right? So I told that to a friend, and she told one of her friends, “Look, Ovechkin’s laces are yellow, because they’re made by this Russian company.” So this information does get passed along.

UW: Like a virus.

KH: Mmm-hmm.

UW: If you were the commissioner of the NHL, or MLB, or whatever league strikes your fancy, what uniform-related rules would you institute?

KH: I don’t have any big issues with the NHL. They don’t do much in the way of customization or accessorizing.

UW: What about white-at-home vs. dark-at-home?

KH: Oh, I prefer white at home. So yeah, I’d do that. And for baseball, it really bothers me that the players look so different. If the team wants to go with a baggy, pajama-style trouser, then everyone should do it. If they want to go with knickers and striped socks, then everyone should do it. The uniform should be uniform.

UW: I hear ya.

KH: You know, I’d like to see more of the 1960s and ’70s cartoon-y logos. Like the Padres’ swinging friar, and Mr. Met, Mr. Redlegs — totally cool. And some of those minor league teams have such great logo characters, too. I’d like to see more of that. Totally charming.

======

Indeed. Thanks again to Karen for her support, and for her patience.

OK, I’m outta here — be nice to Bryan and Vince next week while I’m gone.

61 comments April 27th, 2008