I was flipping channels last night and stumbled upon the Pacers/Celtics game. Boston was wearing its sleeved grey alts (which I hate) and Indiana wore its Hickory throwbacks (which I love). Since I’m, you know, the Uni Watch guy, I immediately recognized both teams, but I wondered if a casual or less uni-obsessed fan might have come upon the game and wondered who the hell these teams were. The fact that the action was unfolding on Boston’s famed parquet court just threw the weirdness of the scene into higher relief.
It’s one thing if the two teams in a given game are both wearing throwbacks, or both going G.I. Joke, or something along those lines, because then at least there’s some thematic consistency. But when one wears an alt and the other wears a throwback (especially a throwback with mismatched jersey and shorts colors), that’s jarring. Did the Celitcs and Pacers plan it this way, or did it just end up this way?
It’s also interesting that the Pacers are wearing the Hickory uniforms on the road, as well as at home. That was the plan all along, so it’s not a surprise, and I like that they’re sharing this look with fans outside of their home arena. But it makes odd spectacles like last night’s game possible, because most other teams only wear their “special” uniforms at home.
Contest reminder: In case you missed it yesterday, I’m running a “Redesign the Rams!” contest over on ESPN. Full details here.
And speaking of the Rams: According to a Washington Post poll, a majority of fans would prefer the Rams to go back to the uniforms they wore from 1973 to 1999. But when asked in this Q&A piece about going back to the old L.A.-era uniforms, team exec Kevin Demoff was non-committal. He said:
I think the philosophy on the uniforms is a microcosm of the philosophy of the project. Yes, we have a rich tradition and history in Los Angeles. We have colors that people identify with. We have historic players. You want to carry some of that forward.
But, we’re also about to enter a world-class stadium that should be one of the best. ”¦ Yes, the Rams are coming back. It’s not the Rams from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s. This is Stan’s vision and Stan’s stadium [referring to team owner Stan Kroenke]. We want to make sure we represent best in class in every aspect while we borrow from the Rams’ legacy. When I look at the Rams’ return to L.A., that’s what people are excited about ”” it’s modern NFL mixed with the team they grew up with.
Sounds like they might go back to the old colors but with a contemporary template, eh?
Meanwhile, with all this Rams uni talk in the air, this is a good time to dust off the interview with former Rams equipment manager Todd Hewitt that first ran here on Uni Watch back in 2011. As you’ll see, the interview wasn’t conducted by me, but it’s full of great info and should be an enjoyable read for those of you who are in a Rams mindset at the moment (or just for anyone who wants to read a good interview with an NFL equipment guy). Enjoy.
T-Shirt Club News ”” Second Chance Shop Now Open: Did you miss out on any of the Uni Watch T-Shirt Club’s limited-edition designs from 2015? You now have a second chance to Get Itâ„¢, as we’re making all of the 2015 designs available for the next two weeks at our Second Chance Shop.
A few notes:
• With one exception (which I’ll get to in a sec), the fronts and backs of these shirts are exactly the same designs we offered during 2015, but they do not have the sleeve patches.
• For the November design (tequila sunrise) we’ve created a new screen-printed design with truncated stripes, instead of the sublimated wraparound design that caused so many problems.
• For the April design (Jackie Day), I will once again donate my share of the proceeds to the Jackie Robinson Foundation, and ESPN will once again match my donation.
• Sorry, you can’t use these Second Chance shirts to retroactively qualify for the 2015 year-end “Collect ’Em All” bonus prize.
• Last year’s Purple Amnesty Day shirt was not part of the T-Shirt Club program and is not being re-offered. That was a one-day thing, and it’s gone for good. There’s a decent chance that we’ll have a new design for this year’s Purple Amnesty Day, however.
I think that’s it. Again, these Second Chance editions are available here from now through Jan. 27. There will be no third chance! Thanks for your consideration.
Membership update: A few new designs have been added to the membership card gallery (including Steve Jacobson’s card, shown at right, which is based on the Pacers’ old FloJo design), but we still need several new orders to fill out the current batch. If your New Year’s resolution was to finally sign up already, there’s no time like the present.
As always, you can order your own custom-designed membership card here, you can see all the cards we’ve designed so far here, and you can see how we make the cards here.
PermaRec goes to the World Series: The latest old letter in my “Hoge Brush Company Files” series concerns a request for 1954 World Series tickets. Get the full story over on Permanent Record.
Mike’s Question of the Week
By Mike Chamernik
With the Rams moving to L.A., my mind keeps coming back to St. Louis football fans ”” what do they do now?
Has your favorite team ever moved? How did it feel when it was made official ”” were you angry? Sad? Wistful? Did you continue to root for your team in its new city? Did you choose a new team to root for? If you were a season ticket holder, attended games frequently, or even just spent a measurable amount of time watching your team, how did you fill the void? What did you do with your old merchandise and memorabilia, if you had any?
When I was little, my favorite team was the Montreal Expos. Loved their uniforms, their underdog plight, and, most of all, how outstandingly underrated Vladimir Guerrero was at the time. Even as a 13-year-old, I would even keep track of their prospects (anyone remember Matt Cepicky?). Since I’ve never been to Canada, much less Montreal, the Expos’ move to DC wasn’t particularly rough on me, and I started rooting for the Brewers soon after. Love the Brewers, but I do look back fondly on the Expos years.
More recently, my favorite NBA team, the Bucks, was involved in a relocation saga. This was a little different, because I had been to the arena several times, and I really liked having them in Milwaukee. Though I never got too worried about them moving, I did run through the contingency plans, like which new team I would root for. Fortunately, the Milwaukee situation never got too dicey.
As always, post your responses in today’s comments.
The Ticker
By Mike Chamernik
Baseball News: A bunch of teams are bidding for free agent slugger Chris Davis, so this article shows Davis with different caps Photoshopped onto him. The matching team jerseys and undershirts were a nice touch (from Andrew Cosentino). … Several Mariners players will have new numbers this year. Tim Dunn notes five players: Taijuan Walker (32 to 44), Mayckol Guaipe (53 to 48), Steve Baron (10 to 28), Jesus Montero (63 to 10), and Franklin Gutierrez (30 back to 21; he gave up 21 to Lloyd McClendon when he was manager). … New jerseys for Marshall (from Brice Wallace). … Miami has jerseys and caps with Olde English lettering (from Jason Gray). … New cap for Ole Miss.
NFL News: I know we’ve seen this before (I just don’t remember when) but I found some photos of the 1981 Browns playing basketball. … This is different: ESPN ran a graphic showing helmets with visors. … An employee of GoPro inadvertently owns the @LARams twitter handle. … Packers WR James Jones’s infamous base-layer hoodie is actually sleeveless.
College Football News: Yesterday we linked to a story on a new helmet that absorbs contact like a car bumper. Here’s a little more detail on the Zero1 helmet, and even a neat GIF of it in action, with the Zero1 on the left (from Andrew Cosentino).
Hockey News: Are the Maple Leafs soft-launching their new logo? The leaf is similar to past designs, just without text on it. … Mike Wissman owns a hat with an unusual NHL logo on the reverse side. It’s a Flyers New Era 5950 hat from 1993. Anyone ever seen it before?
Basketball News: The Cavaliers will give away Timofey Mosgov winter hats on Jan. 23. … ESPN’s mobile Gamecast screen shows Nets players (or, at least Thad Young) with an outdated Nets logo (from Gabe Billig). … Northeastern will give away jerseys to students at tonight’s game (from Matthew Duprey). ”¦ Weird horizontal striping on LaSalle’s shorts. … The Nets wore black at home for last night’s game against the Knicks.
Soccer News: Manchester United defenseman Chris Smalling tore his jersey after jostling with a Newcastle opponent on Tuesday. “I think that they would have made him change his jersey if he didn’t have a red long sleeved shirt underneath,” writes Jean Labbe. … Also from Jean: Norwich City wore a horizontal striped jersey yesterday against Stoke City, who was in vertical stripes, and Chelsea has two defensemen that wear masks: Nemanja Matic and Cesar Azpilicueta. Actually, many Chelsea players have worn masks over the years.
Grab Bag: “The Adelaide Strikers of the Australian Big Bash cricket league are sponsored by the West End brewing company,” says Graham Clayton. “Due to his Muslim beliefs, Strikers player Adil Rashad requested that his shirt would not feature the West End logo. The team agreed, and so the front and the back of his shirt above his number do not feature the West End logo.” … Ultimate frisbee’s most popular frisbee design is getting an update.
Some quick thoughts about David Bowie: A lot of very thoughtful and very interesting things have been written this week about David Bowie. I haven’t added to them until now because, frankly, I was never a huge Bowie fan. I like a bunch of his ’70s hits and have a few of his LPs, but I never really felt him as an artist. He always struck me as too dramatic, too theatrical, and his grand concept albums left me cold. His stated goal, after all, was to make musical theater (rock and roll just happened to be his idiom in pursuit of that goal), and musical theater has never been my thing.
I’ve been struck, though, by how many people — including quite a few people I know — have really been affected by his passing. Over on Facebook, many of my friends have posted something along the lines of this: “When I was a teen-ager, I was such a weirdo, such a freak, and Bowie helped make that okay. He helped me survive that period.”
I was not a weirdo teen. I was a nerd, a dweeb, socially clueless, and lots of other things that felt painful and confusing at the time, but that’s not the same as being a weirdo. I was a geek, not a freak. I remember the kids who were weirdos, though, and it occurs to me that my response to them at the time was almost precisely the same as my response to Bowie: I thought they were too dramatic, too theatrical. That always bugged me about them.
I now realize that a lot of those kids were simply wrestling with the reality of being gay, or bi, or gender-confused, or something along those lines, and that a lot of what bugged me about them was that I was simply too immature and too cloistered in my own geeky little bubble to understand or even conceive of any of that, much less have any compassion for what they were going through. Bowie, meanwhile, was famously androgynous and sexually fluid, and he always had a huge gay following — maybe that’s part of what bugged me about him as well, whether I realized it or not.
Of course, there are all sorts of ways to be a weirdo without being gay, and I don’t mean to suggest that Bowie’s appeal (or my resistance to it) was rooted wholly in sexuality. Listening to some of his stuff this week, I still find much of his work to be too dramatic, too theatrical. But I’m now thinking this probably has as much to do with my own limitations as with his. I’m going to try to learn from that. RIP.
I have NBA color on color fatigue already. JUst go back to home white vs. road color.
I don’t get the infatuation many have with “home white.”
To me, home color is much better. It reflects the team’s identity. It’s something everyone rallies around. White is neutral and is fitting for a visitor to not have the dominate look on the playing surface.
Depends on the sport. In a basketball arena, players in white stand out. Against white ice, hockey players need color to avoid blending in to the background.
White at home in basketball is the way it should be. Period.
I’m with John. Enough with the costumes and eyesore games.
My only experience was with the Minnesota North Stars. I was never an NHL die-hard, so it wasn’t as bad as if, say, the Vikings or Twins had moved, but with the move to Dallas, they *immediately* became my least-favorite NHL team and, really, least-favorite team in the four main sports. To me (granted, I was a freshman in high school at the time), they’d betrayed their fan base, even though I didn’t understand the particulars of the Twin Cities arena situation. I held out on rooting for an NHL team until the Wild arrived, while in the interim hoping for the Jets and Whalers to come over (ironic that I was now hoping another fan base would lose its team for my fandom).
I do still have a pennant at home from the North Stars’ ’91 Stanley Cup run, and having a new team in the Wild helped salve the proverbial wound. However, I still to this day refer to the former North Stars as “them” (I can’t quite bring myself to verbalize “Dallas Stars”), and was bummed when they won the Stanley Cup in 1999. Oh well, the years have faded the passions, and I’d argue the Twin Cities have a better “NHL situation” with the Wild than the North Stars. That being said, I would LOVE a Wild-North Stars Winter Classic with each team wearing a home/road version of the ’70s/’80s-era North Stars jerseys. And even better, I’d hope one day to see the Wild beat Dallas in the Western Conference Final… :-)
Even though I am from Ohio I still loved having the North Stars in the NHL and Minnesota. I wish they could have kept the name and Dallas had to rebrand with a new identity. Winnipeg getting back the Jets was huge! If we can get the Whalers and Nordiques back we are almost complete.
I’m on the other end of that move. I was never a huge hockey fan but I moved to Detroit during the Yzerman led Red Wings’ resurgence and had a great time rooting for the hometown team. After a couple of years I returned to my hometown–Dallas–the city without a hockey team. I continued pulling for the Red Wings until 1993 when the Stars moved to town.
Initially it was hard to pull for a team just because they had suddenly appeared in town and my allegiance to the Red Wings continued. But then the Stars started to get good, the fans and the city got on board, and I am a Texas boy. It took a couple of years for me but eventually I was staying up until 1AM watching west coast overtime playoff hockey with MY team in it.
There are no North Stars’ team banners in the rafters at the AAC; no 1991 Campbell Conference banner. But there are banners for retired numbers, the three retired in Minnesota sporting the North Stars’ logo alongside the Dallas Stars’ branded Mike Modano one.
Stars fans don’t get especially worked up over the Wild–Detroit is the toughest ticket to get–but I do think a Wild-Stars Winter Classic played at UM’s home stadium would be a great matchup.
I can honestly say thank you for sharing your team and the Stanley Cup with us! Never big into hockey until the Stars came to Dallas. Living in Houston we had the Aeros and let’s just say IHL or whatever does not compare to NHL! Dad’s company had great seats behind the players (the owner was big into hockey and even started the Allen Americans). That 1999 cup season I was known to leave work south of Houston at lunch, drive to Dallas, and meet my dad on a corner in downtown Dallas to watch a playoff game… and then drive back home that night to be able to get to work the next morning! Go Stars!!!
The Minnesota North Stars leaving Minnesota was one of the most soul-crushing things I’ve ever experienced. Hearing the name Norm Green still makes me angry. Luckily, after they left, I could still fall back on Gopher Hockey to get me through the winters.
After Norm crushed my 12 year old soul, I hated the Stars, and that tradition has continued. I did my best to find a new team to cheer for, and eventually settled on the Blackhawks, which is something that I’d have thought to be impossible, considering the rivalry between the two teams. That didn’t happen until much later, though, after I had all but given up hope that the NHL would ever come back to MN.
When MN was granted an expansion team, I was slow to embrace the Wild, and the Blackhawks thing caused some riffs with my friends, but the Wild slowly grew to become my team.
Through the whole process, however, since the move, professional hockey has always taken a back seat to College Hockey in my book. While I’m a fan of the Wild, I generally don’t care a whole lot about it until the Stanley Cup Playoffs, which tend to start right after college hockey is done for the year.
Go to hell, Norm Green, you dick.
Proofreading:
“just through the weirdness of the scene into higher relief.”
“But when one wear an alt and the other wears a throwback”
I happened to see some of the Celtics-Pacers game last night, and it looked ridiculous. The Celtics have a truly classic set of uniforms, and there’s no reason to dilute that with alternates, especially when the numbers are unreadable.
Fixed.
re: QOTW….I was born in Baltimore and I lived and died with my Baltimore Colts while growing up in the 60s and 70s. I was working nights in 1984 and was just getting home when my wife told me to sit and watch the Today Show as they reported on the trucks that had rolled out of the Colts headquarters during the night.
I was angry and bitter for a long time. Just seeing the Colts on TV in their new city made me sick. I tried rooting for the Oilers and even made a stab at being a Ravens fan but that didn’t feel right. But gradually time (and adopting the fledgling Texans) helped me put the Colts’ move behind me. So much so that I ended up rooting for them in their Super Bowl versus the Bears.
I have lots of Baltimore Colts memorabilia and I kept it all. It’s still a big part of my collection.
Clevelander, here. I recall sitting in a Ruby Tuesday restaurant at lunch with a friend of mine who had recently relocated from Baltimore. Even he was mad. He said something to the effect of “I still remember how it felt when Irsay moved the Colts and it tore me apart.” Watching Art Modell and (especially) Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening gloating on the dais was maddening and bordered on the absurd. It hurt even more for my family since my mom and sister both worked for the team.
The “New Browns” came along and I jumped on the bandwagon. It was exciting as hell… till reality hit at the end of the first game where the archrival Steelers pummeled our beloved expansion team. I’d been faithful to the original Browns. Had years worth of season tickets and the games I didn’t attend, I watched every last minute on tv. I was the same way with the new Browns. Until this year. I’ve finally reached the point where they’ve lost me. I’ve grown apathetic to their incompetence. They won’t get me back till they can manage to win 8 games (in the same season) and turn this franchise around. I’m hoping that will be the case with new coach Hue Jackson, but I’ve had that hope before with guys like Butch Davis, Romeo Crennel, Eric Mangini and Mike Pettine.
Not that it made your pain any less I suppose but I was very jealous that Cleveland had the gumption to pursue (and win) the ‘rights’ to the Browns ‘identity’ and history. I wish Baltimore had done the same.
Although, to be honest, my issue with being a Ravens fan was that I knew they had come to Baltimore in much the same way the Colts had left. I’m really not sure how I would have felt if the ‘Browns’ had become the ‘Colts’ when they got to Baltimore.
When the Browns moved, I was angry. I didn’t even follow the NFL that closely at the time, but as a Clevelander I know what they mean to those fans and that city. I knew that Art Modell was a terrible businessman because he wasn’t making money and he had my very favorite team, the Indians, over a barrel because of the way that the Stadium’s lease was structured. After they moved, I basically ignored the NFL for three years, but I am a much bigger fan now that they’ve returned.
I’m not sure how anyone who was a fan of the Baltimore Colts can cheer for the Baltimore Ravens. For more than a decade, their fans justifiably complained that their team was stolen from them “in the dark of night,” and then they turn around and cheer for a team that their city stole from someone else. It made me so angry that the Ravens’ original Ring of Honor banner for Earnest Byner included his years with the Browns. They recently removed them during a remodel. Had the Browns returned via another relocated franchise, I could not root for them.
I was a huge Baltimore Colts fan and I worshipped Johnny Unitas. Still have a picture he autographed for me when I was 8 years old. I was crushed when they left. It’s ridiculous to expect Baltimore not to support the Ravens.
I understand Cleveland’s hurt and their loathing of Art Modell. But they were without a team for only 3 years compared to 13 and they got to keep their colors and logo.
Burn in hell bob irsay!
Dutch….I don’t expect Baltimore to not support the Ravens. There’s a good chance that if I had still been living in Baltimore when they arrived I’d have jumped on board with both feet. Heck, if they had been able to hold on to the ‘Colts’ identity and then reeled in the Browns and made them the new Baltimore Colts I’d have likely put aside my feelings and been at the head of the parade. But I was long gone by then and from here in Houston it just never felt right.
The Rams helmet depicted is a bit skewed. The horns do not come down far enough toward the jaw, and are covering the ear hole.
And the ones shown are a bit rounder than IRL.
Paul, your feelings about Bowie’s death are similar to mine when Kurt Cobain died/killed himself. I didn’t get why the world was wailing and sobbing. I still don’t.
Just me, I suppose.
Well, he *was* one of the most popular musicians in the world at the time of his death, after all. (You may not understand why he was popular, but the connection between his popularity and people’s reaction seems simple enough to understand.)
Many people around the world were “wailing and sobbing” when Kurt Cobain died because they had an emotional connection to the man and his music. Apparently you did not, which is fine.
What’s not to get?
I didn’t get exactly what you stated…. the “emotional connection to the man and his music”.
I was merely noting that Paul’s apparent feelings/whatever for Bowie, were similar to mine for Cobain. I’m not nay-saying those who DID/DO feel strongly about either of these guys. Just noting that it is not uncommon to be “out of the emotional loop” when someone popular (for whatever reason) dies.
I’ve been IN “loops” that most others weren’t also. It’s neither right nor wrong. Just paralleling one experience to another.
True enough, although the way you phrased it was perhaps a little dismissive towards those who were in that one particular loop.
Not my intention, Chance.
The hazards for commenting on the interweb.
Indeed. Context and intent get easily lost in these few characters.
When the football Cardinals left St Louis, I was left without a team and have not been much of an NFL fan since. I prefer to follow college football now. The Rams coming to St Louis was okay, esp winning the Super Bowl, but I’ve never gotten back into following the pro game. This doesn’t help. First the Bidwills and now Kroenke. Total pond scum.
Testify!
paul,
why did you feel the need to post about david bowie? it’s curious that you had to let everyone know his music didn’t “do it” for you even though it’s known around these parts that you have an indie-leaning taste in music.
i don’t think there is anything to gain from your direction-void post. you thought david bowie was too dramatic and identity categories are empirical? ok
I was trying to explain that Bowie’s death, and people’s reaction to it, made me reflect on certain things (including the connection between certain types of art and certain types of people), and that I was going to try to learn from that. If I didn’t do a good job of communicating that, then that’s on me. But I certainly wasn’t pissing on his grave or anything like that. On the contrary, his death has taught me something that I hadn’t learned from his life, and for that I’m grateful.
I posted it today because it’s been something that’s been on my mind this week, and I often post things that have been on my mind. Sorry you didn’t care for it, but not at all sorry for having posted it.
I thought it was a thought-provoking post, Paul, and improved my day, seeing as I had poured hot coffee on my hand immediately before reading it. So much of how we react to the world around us and to the people around us is in relation to how we construct our own place in the world. We spend so much time worrying about and dealing with our own insecurities that one way to cope with such insecurities is to “other” those who are most different from us. I appreciated your post as it led to some reflection on my own.
improved my day, seeing as I had poured hot coffee on my hand immediately before reading it.
That’s a pretty low bar you set there!
Seriously: Thanks for the kind words. And I hope your hand is OK.
I think your response was more interesting than many of the tributes I’ve read over the past couple days.
We should all be so willing to examine and challenge ourselves.
“response” to his death, that is.
That that was your takeaway from what he posted reflects more on you than him, methinks.
Well, yeah. Paul stated that flat-out. Did you even read it?
Oh, nevermind. I, for whatever reason, thought this was the original poster again. It reads a little differently now. :)
Sorry about that scottrj.
IMHO, the Bowie section was some of most thoughtful and touching writing Paul has ever shared with us.
I came around to Bowie relatively late in life (that is to say, in my twenties) and recall having a similar visceral reaction to him. My heroes at the time were more feral and a bit on the obvious side (Zep, Sabbath, BTO, the Doors). But the more you like music, the more music you like, and my palette broadened as I became an adult. The likes of David Bowie, Elton John, and Culture Club made rock fans confront uncomfortable realizations about sexuality and androgyny. I have to accept that reasonable people can have a gag reflex to displays of homosexuality and effeminacy, as understanding as they try to be. I can’t bear a grudge. But Bowie helped me to realize there is beauty in strangeness.
And anyone who doesn’t appreciate the parallel between high school cock rockers looking askance of a geeky student who digs David Bowie and hardcore football fans looking askance of a geek who digs the uniforms fails Irony 101.
I find it odd that one of the first looks at a new Toronto logo would be from a Mitchell & Ness hat. I find it more likely that the logo on the hat is a throwback to the shoulder patch of the early 70’s jersey.
link
I couldn’t help but think of the shoulder leafs from 1970-1992 as well. Though I’m not aware of the textless version of the “modern” leaf being used by itself on merchandise before.
I was thinking exactly that. Owing to timing, I think of this as the archetypal Leafs’ sweater, and changes (even back to something more traditional) as unwarranted. But, also an example of the white sweater being better than the blue.
Only worry I had was 1988 (I was 14) when the White Sox either got a new ballpark or they’d up and move to Tampa. I stayed up with my radio next to me, listening and hoping they would ratify a bill to keep them.
Never wanna go through that again.
I still dont get Addison as their intended Illinois stadium alternative, outside of the fact DuPage County had a lot of political pull in the ’80s.
When I think of LA, I think of glitz and glamour. What color represents glitz and glamour the best? Gold. LAFC just unveiled its logo and color scheme and most people seemed to love the gold in it. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Rams stick with gold in LA.
Growing up in SoCal I had been a Rams fan from the day I listened to Dick Enberg’s play by play calls on my mighty sony transistor radio. I watched them play in the LA Coliseum and on CBS’s KNXT Channel 2, incredible as it seems today, in black and white and did not complain.
I think fondly of those Blue/White Rams unis of those 60’s teams and the great players / coaches they had, and then I am reminded painfully about the one big elephant looming over my shoulder. Those teams could not beat Green Bay or Minnesota when it counted in the playoffs – cost George Allen his job and made football in Washington relevant for the first time in decades. Fate can be cruel, those teams could have won it all, but did not for whatever reason you care to conjure up.
Waxing nostalgic is one thing. Going back to a uniform color scheme that was never worn by a champion (pains me to say that, but there it is.) because it’s new to you, or so teen fresh that you gotta buy a uniform to feel good about yourself (thank you marketeers) is weird. Pretty much why you probably will never see the Steelers in those awesome bat-cape jerseys.
I would not mind seeing some derivation of the blue white look, but just so you know, it was there all the time when the changed to the white Ram horn sleeves in the early 70’s.
The Rams have traditionally been a variant of Blue and Gold for most of their NFL life and will continue to IMHO.
Nice to read that no Uni-watcher has even thought about changing the helmet logo for which we owe a great debt to Fred Gehrke for getting it right the first time… and for giving us all something to quibble about endlessly.
link
scottrj,
“That that was your takeaway from what he posted reflects more on you than him, methinks.”
and what exactly is that reflection?
Nope, not going to let this turn personal.
2ndtimelongtime didn’t like what I wrote, which is his prerogative. Scottjr thinks he missed the point, which is *his* prerogative. The end.
Discussions of what I wrote are fine; personal invective about same is not. Thanks.
My experience has been with the Hornets/Bobcats/Pelicans/Hornets in the NBA. I grew up in the Charlotte area, playing basketball for the Junior Hornets club, getting to meet Muggsy Bogues, Larry Johnson, Alonzo Mourning, Vlade Divacs, etc. When the Hornets moved, I didn’t have trouble pulling for them, and that grew when I spent a year in New Orleans and got to take the kids I worked with to several Hornets games. My problem now is I don’t know whether I am a fan of the Pelicans, the FRANCHISE I always supported growing up, or the new Charlotte Hornets, the NAME I grew up supporting.
Interesting! I wonder how many people had to make the same choice. I guess if you rooted for the Hornets/Pels over the Bobcats, then the continuity of the franchise trumped the connection to the city.
That’s sort of been my lean; same players (at least initially with the name change), same city, building, means same team.
I’m from Cleveland, and although I was only 10 when the Browns left, I remember being upset about it. Recently watching the NFL Network special “Cleveland ’95” brings a lot of those feelings. However, the sorrow was tempered because we had another quality option for sports: the Cleveland Indians.
From 1995 to 2001, the Indians were a great baseball team. I just didn’t care about football while the Browns were gone (’95-’99), I had better sports to follow.
The effect of not having a pro-football team during those 5 years essentially turned me into much more of a baseball & basketball fan as I grew up.
I feel for St. Louis, I would never wish the loss of a franchise on any city. However, they still have two quality sports teams in the Cardinals and the Blues. Hopefully some of the football fans migrate to some hockey games.
I didn’t personally experience a team leaving, although had Miller Park not been built we ran the very real risk of losing the Brewers, but my dad did have this experience. When the Braves left Milwaukee in ’65, he turned his fandom to the Twins. He could pick up the games on 830 WCCO and the Twins were one of the best teams in the AL at the time. He is now, however, and has been since ’70, an avid Brewers fan, though there will always be a soft spot in his heart for the team that got him through the five (mostly) baseball-less years in Milwaukee.
Interesting to hear about a Twins fan from Milwaukee – I had never thought about that being a possibility in those years in between the Braves and the Brewers. It used to go the other way for NFL fans – before the Vikings existed, a lot of the old timers here in MN were Packers fans. When there was fear of the Vikings leaving a few years ago, I’d occasionally hear discussion of what football fans here would do. Some people, especially those who remember the old days, argued that we’d eventually revert back to being Packers fans, particularly since Packers games would likely all be televised here given the number of transplanted Packers fans in MN, and just the geographic proximity. I can’t see any hardcore Vikings fans making that switch. I think they would have picked other teams (maybe the Chiefs or Broncos), or just become true bandwagon jumpers for whatever team was good at a particular time. Personally, my plan was to use the departure of the Vikings as the impetus to finally cut ties with the NFL, since increasingly I found myself following the league in spite of myself. Of course, now that the Vikings are officially here for another 30 years, I suddenly became willing to continue to look past the constant heartbreak and embarrassment.
I live in Québec City and I was 12 when the Nordiques left. That broke my heart and I still have hard feelings toward the situation 20 years later. What’s worse is that they won the Stanley Cup as the Avalanche in their first year away from Québec City. Here in Québec City, we talk about the return of an NHL team on a weekly basis in the media and hope that it will happen soon, specially when we see 4,000 people in the stands in Florida and Arizona. Here it would be a sellout every night. Thanks for sharing your heartbreaking stories and my thoughts are with the St.Louis Rams fans.
Any more news on a possible relocation back to Quebec? I was following the construction of the new arena, but now that it is done I haven’t read as much. The NHL in Las Vegas is the dumbest idea yet….suicide for the NHL. Would love to see the return of the Nordiques! Stay strong and keep fighting to bring them back!
link
“LAWLESS: Where are you on expansion?
BETTMAN: We are going through a process. You know we have two applications, one from Quebec City and one from Las Vegas. The executive committee is doing its due diligence in evaluating the issues that you have to evaluate. Expansion is an important business decision. You don’t take it lightly.
LAWLESS: Is it more now about the league than about the applicants?
BETTMAN: It’s both. People have this notion of, ‘Why wouldn’t we expand for $500 million dollars?’ and then we have the money. But that’s not true. When you expand, you take league national revenues and if you expand by one team you divide it by 31 ways as opposed to 30; if you expand by two teams, you divide it 32 ways and that has an economic cost. When you factor in the value of money and the diminution of your shares and existing teams in the national package, there is a cost to expanding. You want to bring in an owner that’s a good owner, that’s going to be a good partner. You want to bring in a building that is state of the art. You want to bring in a market that is a good market that can support the club and you want to make the league somehow stronger – enhance the league. Those are the factors that you look at.”
Thank you for linking that. I for one would rather see Arizona or Florida head north than expand at this point. Both teams struggling at the gate, why continue to support hockey there.
Francois, I feel your pain as well as everyone elses pain that had a childhood team torn from their lives. Being a CT resident, the Whalers were the only pro team in town, and when they left, I couldn’t go into the XL center (Then Veteran’s Memorial Coliseum), for almost 3 years. I still remember going to the old WHA games, and then the NHL games. As soon as I was able to afford it, I was a season ticket holder. I am not sure which is worse, Carolina winning the Stanley Cup, or Whalers’ merchandise being in the top 10 sold to this day. Bring back THE WHALE!!!!
And you know that Roy would never have been traded to Quebec from Montreal. . .
Back in ’93 when I had a different hat for every day of the year (plus) I think I’ve had that hat logo on my head. Cant remember where exactly but many off brand places in malls sold hats in kiosks before places like LIDS & the like sold them or moved in to my local mall(s).
The Cleveland Browns basketball team came to my school back in the late 80’s, wish I could remember the exact year, but I was probably 7 or 8. I will need to talk to my parents and see if I can find the old photos. I will also have to dig out an old scrapbook and see if I can find the program. It was a pretty cool event that you will never see duplicated in today’s sports scene.
They came to my school as well… one of those awesome childhood memories. It was something seeing pro athletes perform in our little farm town, on a court usually graced by a bunch of slow farm boys struggling (and many times failing) to reach a combined score of 100 pts.
I also didn’t feel a strong connection to Bowie as a performer or a particular artist. But I have always liked his music precisely for his theatricality even though that’s not normally my thing. It’s like, for me a good folk/country song tells a story, and a good rock song creates an emotional space. Somehow, Bowie’s best work, and in his case “best” contained an exceptional percentage of his work, achieved an operatic quality that told vivid stories within powerful and dynamic moodscapes. If he was anything less than near-perfect in his song-crafting, his work would have left me completely cold. But Bowie was just that good, and his work overcame my personal aesthetic resistance to the operatic.
It’s funny the artists we form personal bonds with at a spectator’s distance. I can still get emotional about Warren Zevon, and today’s passing of Alan Rickman has hit me kind of hard. Bowie, not so much, purely for arbitrary lack of a feeling of personal connection. I know people – guys! – who can still be brought to tears by Kurt Cobain’s death, and others – also guys! – who get teary-eyed remembering where they heard about Jerry Garcia’s passing. Yet I’ve never met a person who was so moved by grief for both Cobain and Garcia, who died within about a year of each other.
QotW: Teams rarely move without warning. And usually that warning consists of some period of morally repugnant attempts at extortion against the public purse. I’ve had several of “my” teams come close to relocation, and one that actually moved. In every case, I’ve largely turned against the team over the course of its campaign of threats leading up to possible relocation. I’m a fan of a sport first, any particular team second, so if a team I root for behaves like a bad citizen, I have an easy time withholding my affection and loyalty to that team. By the time the North Stars moved, my attitude was “good riddance to bad rubbish.” I got close to that level of disdain several times with the Twins when they threatened relocation in failed bids to extort more public subsidies, and my Vikings purple pride has never really recovered from the mid-1990s brush with relocation.
Something I noticed about the Rams:
The endzone paint switched to the block “RAMS” in white the past couple of seasons. The endzone used to be the wordmark. The new endzone reminded me of the LA Rams for some reason. Just an observation.
AND the Rams have the easiest uniforms to do throwbacks with. All they need to do is change the helmet decal from yellow horns to white. Not sure how simple it is to do that, but it’s defiantly a possibly and it wouldnt look bad at all.
Why are people sympathizing with St. Louis over the loss of their transplant Rams? I don’t remember people sympathizing with Los Angeles fans when they lost not one but TWO teams in the same year. No one cared.
No one cared.
You don’t know that. And the reason you don’t know that is that the internet was in its infancy in 1995. Social media didn’t yet exist, and neither did comments sections like this one we’re using right now. That’s why comparing public reaction to news in 1995 vs. now is like comparing apples and soft-shell crabs — the internet has changed the way we communicate.
Plenty of people cared – I remember news reports interviewing outraged Angelinos at the time. Heck, it seemed kind of outrageous even from the distance of the Upper Midwest for LA to suddenly have no NFL teams.
Still, I suspect that my own response were I a St. Louis fan today would be significantly muted by the fact that the team is returning to LA. Like, say if the Washington Nationals moved to Las Vegas, I’d be upset and vocal about it. But if MLB relocated the Nats back to Montreal, I wouldn’t feel like I had any legitimate grounds for complaint. It’s always kind of pained me that getting “my” home team required other fans to lose “their” home team.
The Rams move to St. Louis was set up by their move from the Coliseum to Orange County a few years earlier, so in a way they had already bailed on L.A. Unfortunately, that move to Angel Stadium involved ruining a great little stadium for baseball, turning it into a makeshift concrete monstrosity that turned out to be not great for football, anyway. So that, combined with a unlikable ownership, made it hard for many (myself included) to bemoan their transfer to St. Louis.
I don’t watch football any more, but I grew up in the 60s in Ohio rooting for the Browns. Then I went to college in St. Louis in the late 70s and adopted the Cardinals as my NFC team. So…. yeah.
I actually cried when the Browns left, even though I hadn’t lived in Ohio in 20 years and wasn’t really following football by then.
Question about the Pacers throwbacks: the shorts appear to be shiny, solid (non-mesh) fabric. Given that every uni launch includes reams of bumph on the latest space-age lightweight anti-gravity materials being used, are the Pacers suffering from playing in these shorts? Greater fatigue? Water retention? Schweddy balls?
Couple of things:
1. I am about the same age as Paul and I never “got” David Bowie or his music either. “Too theatrical” is exactly how I felt about his music then and now but I can appreciate that others feel differently.
2. I grew up a Browns fan even though I wasn’t from Cleveland. When the Browns went to Baltimore, I still followed the NFL but with much less interest. When the new Browns re-emerged in Cleveland I didn’t have the same loyalty, in part, I think, because I didn’t have that “hometown” connection. Long story short, I moved back to Cincinnati about 20 years ago and became a Bengals fan which imparts its own sense of misery.
Thanks for the words about Bowie. I, like you, was a geek and not a freak, but have enjoyed Bowie’s music since I discovered it when I was 15 or so. Although I was not a freak, I certainly felt a type of alliance with that crowd. After all, high school was an uncomfortable time for a lot of people. I always thought the geeks and the freaks were some of the people in high school that questioned a lot of what high school in America is and challenged the assumption that literature class and homecoming and the senior prom were all somehow more important than your favorite music or football uniforms or whatever your passion was.
The geeks, freaks, and Bowie all made me think and challenge my assumptions. Your words about Bowie have done the same. What more can I ask out of anyone or anything?
That gray Celtics vs Hickory Pacers game is pretty cognitively dissonant. But the all time winner (loser?) in that regard is Bulls in St. Patrick’s green against the Celtics in their normal whites.
I was at that game and, I shit you not, there were a few moments where I forgot that I was rooting for the team in green.
It was like a dagger through the heart of the city when the Winnipeg Jets left town. It was made even worse by them having to stay for the lame duck 1995-96 season when they were supposed to leave the previous year. They even had a farewell ceremony for them in the old arena after the 94-95 season. I cried during the television broadcast.
The pain eventually dulled but it was like a city being reborn when the Thrashers moved here in 2011. Too bad it wasn’t the Coyotes. Justice would have been served.
I was also a big Expos fan but, like when the Jets moved, I couldn’t root for them in another city.
It must make it worst when a team in a hockey-crazed location leaves for the apathy of the desert or the Southeast. So dumb.
I don’t know – the city got over it pretty quick. With salary escalation of the 1990s and the low dollar, and the inability to resolve the arena situation, there was pretty much an air of inevitability over the team leaving.
I think Winnipeg accepted at the time that it wasn’t capable of supporting an NHL team.
I’ll be honest, i worry about the Canadian teams right now. I don’t know how well Winnipeg does with a sub-70 cent dollar. The Flames have a serious arena problem and sub-30 dollar oil is killing the city. We could be back to 1995 again pretty soon.
My parents are from north east Ohio and I was 10 years old living in St. Louis when the Browns left Cleveland. My memories of my dad being devastated are still fresh. That same year the Rams came to St. Louis, and I finally got a team that I could claim as mine. It was great until 5 years ago when Kroenke took over. During the last two years I’ve wondered who I could root for, and the natural fit for me was the Browns. STL played the NFL game and still lost its team, and that’s a first that I can remember. The whole situation makes me angry, sad, and disappointed. Now, that it has happened rooting for another team doesn’t seem natural. My disdain for the league and my hatered for kroenke is so deep that I will most likely root only against the Rams. Go Cards! Go Blues!
Paul, how dare you write an opinion that’s different that mine on your blog? (Did everyone get the sarcasm). People need to chill and just let people talk. I don’t always agree with why I read here, both on the uniform side and sometimes on other subject, but it’s not my site. But being exposed to different opinions helps us grow.
It took me a while but after reading many many article on this site about the Redskins I came to understand how people can be offended by the name and ultimately agree it needs to change.
On a uninote, not a good move by the Leaf (or the Leafs) if this is one of their new logos…way too close to the Jays (or the Blue Jays) BP Leaf cap. That hat is pretty visible here in Toronto and fans have made the connection with the empty leaf with the Jays I think
I don’t get why you like the Hickory jerseys.
Its a fictional high school team from an 80s movie on a real life NBA team.
I don’t get how that qualifies as a throwback.
It isn’t a throwback. It’s a “Pride” uniform.
Paul called it a throwback
We all make mistakes, Kyle.
I want to see:
The Washington Redskins wearing Washington Sentinels jerseys the next time they play the Ravens in Baltimore.
Loved Paul’s piece on Bowie – very thoughtful. I listened to a lot Bowie in high school, drifted away from his music after that. Still like the Diamond Dogs album. But mostly have the utmost respect for the man as he was talking about stuff from the early 70s forward that is still unpopular and uncomfortable for a lot of people today.
Montreal Expos. Quebec Nordiques.
(I do know how to pick ’em; thanks for noticing!)
Though I’m a lifelong Habs fan, I was saddened by the Nordiques move to Colorado as one of the NHL’s greatest rivalries was being taken away. It kinda-sorta came back little bit with the whole Tremblay vs. Roy thing after The Trade, but wasn’t quite the same.
As for the Expos, it turns out they moved to Washington the same year that I did, so I figured “why not keep cheering for them?”
Not that watching their last home game on TV wasn’t painful, though.
The Nordiques were my #2 NHL team, and Expos #1 National League team around the time of their moves.
Miss the Expos and have felt rather neutral about the Nationals from the start; no strong feeling either way for the team. With Buhner retired from Seattle, and the Expos gone my interest in MLB baseball became virtually non-existent at that time period. Basically only followed the World Series with any real interest – even that wasn’t a guarantee unless the Yankees were there to root against.
When the Nordiques left, I had zero interest in the Avalanche and at least a moderate dislike of them; while Patrick Roy was with the Avalanche my dislike of the team was cranked up a few notches. Turned from following the Sabres and Nordiques to just the Sabres.
I remember my mother crying at the kitchen table when the Giants announced they were moving to SF.
I liked the person Bowie more than the music but I did love some of his tunes. My wife was so sad on Monday. She said Bowie changed her life. Made her realize there was more to the world than Columbus, Ohio and that were other people who were a bit “outside”.
I met Bowie. Long story. The one word to best describe him when I met him was…”charming”…he really was charming and attentive. Looked me right in the eye and gave me his full attention. I was lucky to meet him.
To me, it seemed that the Giants and Dodgers leaving New York and Brooklyn was especially rough, because those teams were so ingrained in their communities. Can’t replace that.
Most of this is pure speculation on my part, but it could have been a way to acknowledge the contribution of Brad Stevens to Indiana basketball. It would be weird to honor the opposing coach during one of the Hickory home games.
re Smalling’s Manchester United jersey rip, He actually conceded a penalty on the play where his jersey was ripped.
I grew up in the 80’s in LA and rooted for the Raiders. I was devastated when the Raiders left town and it was made even worse that I didn’t have the Rams to fall back to. I had a cousin from Chicago so I decided to join him in rooting for Bears. I guess you could say I was lucky the Bears sucked so nobody thought I was jumping on a bandwagon.
I’ve worn my old Raiders gear a couple of times like when I went to a Raiders-Chargers game I donned my T. Brown jersey.
I now live in San Diego so I’m looking at losing a third hometown team in my lifetime. I guess I better not move to Jacksonville.
As for the Rams coming back to LA, I’m just excited that my dad might start following the NFL again.
The real question is what I do with my 3 year old son. I was planning to raise him to root for his hometown Chargers. If Chargers leave maybe I’ll just tell him what teams he’s not allowed to root for.
Small nit in the soccer section. Chelsea’s Nemanja Matic is a midfielder, albeit a defensive midfielder, but not a defenseman.
When I was a kid in Denver I was a huge hockey fan and lived for the Colorado Rockies. I was 10 when they moved to New Jersey and remember feeling crushed. I remained a huge hockey fan, but could never make a real connection with any one team after losing the Rockies. When the Avalanche came to town I no longer lived in Denver, but still thought of it as my home town and I was all in on the Avs. I did feel for the people of Quebec City, as I remembered how it felt when I lost my team, but my team won the cup in their first year in Denver, so it was easy to get over those feelings.
QotW: When I was a kid, my hometown lost the Flames. A few years ago, it lost the Thrashers. Piled on top of the first loss, the second departure felt like a sickening thud for the ages. And it couldn’t have happened in a more Atlantan fashion: a cabal of on-the-make hucksters lining its pockets and prettifying its spreadsheets at the expense of something that threatened to make the city feel like a community, rather than a long-term marketing project.
I never transferred loyalty anywhere else, even though I now live in S.C. and the Hurricanes would seem like a natural fit. Simply happening upon an NHL game inspires the sickening feeling mentioned above; I’m done with the league altogether. Occasionally, I’ll buy tickets to watch the local ECHL team play.
QOTW: I think everyone here is well aware of the pain and frustration of Oilers fans, the hatred for the owner, and complete dislike of the Titans. There have been times I liked a player on the Titans team and held a tiny bit of love for them and was able to hold the hatred for their owner at bay. But in general, hate the team!!! And feel a certain pride for any past Oiler who says no thank you to the Titans’ ring of honor or whatever they call it.
QOTW:
I grew up in a suburb of LA and the Raiders were my favorite team. The Raiders’ win over Washington in the 1984 Super Bowl with stars like Howie Long, Marcus Allen, and Todd Christensen was one of my very first football memories. I had Raiders posters in my room growing up, a Raiderettes poster on my wall that I received for free at the LA Auto Show, and I even knew all the words to the terrible “Silver and Black Attack” rap song that the team did.
My family would never venture out to the LA Coliseum to take me to a Raiders game (it didn’t seem safe to take a kid to the Coliseum), but they did take me to a couple Rams games in Anaheim and I have fond memories of my “second team” with Eric Dickerson, Jim Everett, and Flipper Anderson.
Football was never my favorite sport – even in high school when I played football – so when the Raiders and Rams left LA it didn’t hit me too hard. If the Dodgers or Lakers had left I would surely have been heartbroken. I paid a lot less attention to the NFL after the teams left and focused more of my rooting energy on UCLA football, but as an adult I have gone to see the Raiders at home in Oakland and on the road in San Diego. Living in Orange County, I don’t see much (if any) support for the Rams. Most people here – especially young kids – seem to be nominal Chargers fans as they are the closest team and for TV purposes we are part of the Chargers’ market.
Whether the Raiders stay in Oakland or move to somewhere else like San Antonio, they will always be my number one team and I’ll watch them when they are on TV and make an occasional trip to see them in person, but with the Rams within easy driving distance I bet the figurative distance between my number one and number two teams will decrease since I’ll be able to see the Rams on a more regular basis and be inundated with news on the Rams in the local press.
I actually liked the IND/BOS unis last night from a curiosity standpoint. It definitely made me pause and watch the game for a bit. I has seen pics of IND’s unis, but had not yet seen them in action (love them) and Boston’s unis made me look closely to see if they were sleeved or if everyone was wearing t-shirts underneath (the UCLAish stripe had that effect). So if the NBA’s goal with these costumes is to get attention from casual viewers, mission accomplished por moi.
Also, as others have noted, I know soccer is not a big deal on this site, but it’s “defender” not “defenseman” and goalies in soccer are “goalkeepers” or just “keepers” not “goaltenders” (I know that term wasn’t used, but just continuing the soccer vs. hockey terminology clarification). And I have heard US broadcasters call soccer goalies “goaltenders”.
I’m a lifelong Oakland Raiders fan. When they moved, I was a kid, so being an LA Raiders fan was fine. I was, like a lot of LA natives are now, excited when the Raiders came home. If they were to move again I’d find a different team. Once was forgivable.
The Oilers leaving was devastating. And it made absolutely no sense. How do you move a team out of Texas? No suburb around Houston could get something done? Why was San Antonio not given a chance? Or Austin? I’m still beyond mad. And to take our name and history? Earl Campbell never gained an inch in the state of Tennessee. The gall to “honor” the oilers with retired numbers. Sorry, he is OURS. The Texans…..meh. The titans need to give us our colors and name back. I mean if a thief steals your stuff but you know who the Scum is and where it is, you get it back. That’s usually what I call them too. The Tennessee thieves.
Growing up in San Diego, I was too young to remember when the Rockets left and went to Houston, but I was a teenager when Sterling moved the Clippers to L.A. As I recall, there really wasn’t a huge outpouring of sentiment over the Clips and, I believe, the reason for that was that everyone assumed it was a forgone conclusion that Sterling would eventually take them north. He spewed all sorts of lies as soon as he bought the club and various media types were pretty skeptical of him at the outset. Also, frankly speaking, there was so little fan support for them in that city that I don’t think many people really cared all that much. Let’s face it, San Diego just is NOT a good basketball city. Sure, there have been times when the Aztecs have been good, and it seems like fan support for them is at an all-time high. But, back in the ’80’s, basketball just did not draw significant support.
Having said all that (and acknowledging that I haven’t lived there for over 20 years), I will be pretty steamed if the Chargers do end up moving north. And I wasn’t even a Charger fan growing up! It just does not seem right. It’s one of those constants in the sports world that shouldn’t change. Admittedly, there were times as a kid when I rooted vehemently against the Bolts (my favorite teams were Miami and Houston). But, the childhood memories of seeing the Chargers on TV, going to a few games, the atmosphere at the Stadium, seeing the shadows in the late afternoon creep across the field, are all nostalgic images in my mind that I look back on fondly. And to think that they could turn their backs on a pretty loyal fan base, to me, is inexcusable. Sadly, it is an example of what the NFL has become. It gives me more fuel to dislike the current NFL, and would give me yet another reason to hate everything about Los Angeles. It’s just wrong.
For some reason, I really like the Pacers/Celtics uniform match-up! It feels like a 1980’s high school basketball match up. I normally hate the sleeved jerseys and will hate them again when this post is done, but I really do like the match-up in this case.
Plus, IT IS THE PERFECT UNI-WATCH MATCH-UP!!! Look at the colors – Burgundy, Gold, Green and Grey!!! It is the OFFICIAL UNI-WATCH GAME!!!
PS – Ty, don’t worry Los Angeles hates you too!
In regards to the Browns on the hardcourt, this thing was actually fairly common in Cleveland up until the early 2000’s to my recollection.
See, not only the Browns, but the Indians would send a few players over as well with their own custom jerseys. My Aunt’s 2nd husband was Garland Keiser, a relief pitcher for the tribe In the 90s, and we used to go to these event. Mainly used as a charity fund raiser, athletes from all Cleveland teams would face off in different events.
However it wasnt just basketball, they ran track events and other sports. Im just fuzzy because I was so young. My mom.does have PLENTY of photos of these events though, so next time I visit I’ll have her dig out those old albums.
Also, something like that would never happen today because of the risk of injury, which I think is bullshit. But I will be in touch when I fond those photos!
“It’s one thing if the two teams in a given game are both wearing throwbacks, or both going G.I. Joke, or something along those lines, because then at least there’s some thematic consistency. But when one wears an alt and the other wears a throwback (especially a throwback with mismatched jersey and shorts colors), that’s jarring.”
Y’know, it just occurred to me that there actually *was* some thematic consistency last night. The Hickory unis are not throwbacks, they’re “pride” uniforms. The Celtics were also wearing their “pride” uniforms.
“Did the Celitcs and Pacers plan it this way, or did it just end up this way?”
I suppose that’s possible, but I’m guessing not, considering that when the Pacers link about 3 weeks ago, the Bulls wore their regular home whites.
I should have said that I suppose it’s possible they planned it this way.
Re: Maple Leafs logo
I remember attending their games as a kid at Maple Leaf Gardens and the ushers wore blazers with that exact logo on the pocket of their blazer, it was in the 1980’s. Also that leaf was a shoulder patch on their jersey in that era.
Miami has jerseys and caps with Olde English lettering (from Jason Gray).
Bleah! Never use all caps in Olde English. What are you, a death metal band?
the Olde English M on the cap looks great and Miami has been using it “forever” (as long as I can remember) but the all-caps jersey wordmark is rather hard on the eyes.
yeah, it’s awful. And so much harder to read because the colors are already difficult to read.
I grew up cheering for the now Arizona Cardinals when they were in St. Louis. When they moved to Arizona, it didn’t bug me at all. My second team was the Cowboys so I just focused on them which has become harder to do these days for numerous reasons with number one being Jerry Jones.
My dad used to take me to one Cardinals football game every year. I remember Jim Ray Hart playing for instance at the previous Busch and the ride up to the top of the Arch when there every year.
These days I guess I have gotten more cynical in that the pro sports leagues seem to care less about the average fan. The average fan is priced out basically in lieu of having large chunks of seats bought up by corporations or brokers who re-sell the tickets to those who wish to go to games simply adding more cost. The prices of food and beverage are insanely expensive. For me, these days, I go to AA baseball games. Cheap, fun, decent baseball and can pick out the prospects that have a chance to move up to the big time. Football-wise, I haven’t been to a NFL game since the 80s and haven’t been to but 2 NBA games in the last 30 years. Hard to cheer for millionaires who whine about money and billionaire owners who whine even louder.
Regarding the question of the day:
Yeah, I was bummed and mad when the Rams left L.A.! I remained a fan the first few years they were in St. Louis, and when they finally won the Super Bowl in 1999, the first of my lifetime, I was totally psyched.
However, during the postgame show of that Super Bowl is when I decided I was no longer a Ram fan: That was when Georgia Frontiere thanked and congratulated their St. Louis fans, but totally ignored the fans in L.A. who had stood by them for years and years.
Besides, the Rams were hardly ever on TV in my area, we got stuck with the Chargers and Raiders all the time. (I don’t know what made TV executives think that people in L.A. wanted to watch a San Diego or Bay Area football team every weekend, rather than having a variety of games from throughout the league available.) From then on I basically dumped the NFL and focused on college ball.
Now that they’re back in L.A., all is forgiven and I can finally start following the NFL again.
“(I don’t know what made TV executives think that people in L.A. wanted to watch a San Diego or Bay Area football team every weekend, rather than having a variety of games from throughout the league available.)”
I also dislike when the networks do this. I moved to the St. Louis area in early 1994. When football season arrived I soon discovered that my weekly viewing choices were the Chiefs and Bears. No variety whatsoever.
Regarding the Rams return to Los Angeles, I am actually relieved that the whole thing is over. If I were a kid I would have different feelings but as a 56 year old, I am not the least bit upset.
Coupla quick thoughts, tangentially related to today’s post & ensuing discussions:
1. “This is Stan’s vision and Stan’s stadium.” Damn do I wish there were some way to require that this quote be carved into the facade of the new stadium. Regardless of the mythology that PR flacks have & will continue to churn out, this isn’t LA’s team, & it wasn’t St. Louis’s team — and neither are any of the other teams (GB excluded) the property of their fanbases. Bravo to Kevin Demoff for accidentally revealing what anyone who pays attention already understands. Appeals to “fan ownership” are done, as far as I can tell, for three reasons: to sell tickets, to sell merchandise, and to pressure cities to pony up tax dollars to prop up billionaires. Don’t know why this comment struck me as much as it did, but it did.
2. At a HS basketball game Tuesday night, I overheard a few kids behind me (I live in southern California) talking about how weird it sounds to say “LA Rams.” Always nice to be reminded that I’m old … :-)
Raptors Magic from London on now….colour on colour
Seems to be a running theme of teams leaving when fans were 10 years old, but that’s how old I was when the Colts left Baltimore. Absolutely devastating. Blue was/is my favorite color: “Blue and White, Colts colors.” I remember the snow, thinking I might get to stay home from school, but then seeing that my team had skipped town. I remember the local news anchor walking with the mayor from his house to his office conducting a very emotional interview.
I became a Raiders fan because my folks partly blamed John Elway for the Colts departure, and the Raiders were most likely to, in the words of Art Donovan, “wrap that guy’s fat lips around the back of his head.”
I was in college when the Browns moved to become the Ravens. It took me a while to warm to them since they had left Cleveland similarly to the way the Colts had left. I root for the Ravens now, solely because they play in my home city. Hard for me to get emotional about the NFL, though. Can’t forgive the league for jerking Baltimore and St. Louis around during the expansion…
Has Jim Vilk ever recovered from the Cavaliers being callously removed from Richfield?
Five years ago.
When the Sonics left Seattle, it made a lasting impression on me in how I view sports, politics, and business. I felt like something was taken from me, something that I had invested time, money and emotion into. I felt betrayed for my loyalty. When I started to reflect on this response, I came to realize just how absurd it was. I wasn’t owed anything. Howard Schultz and Clay Bennett didn’t need to think about me in their decision making. It was/is their team and they could/can do what ever the hell they want with it. I get to choose not to participate in there product.
Loyalty goes both ways and it should not be given in the hopes that the other party will reciprocate. It should be given to the few things in life that warrant it, primarily family and friends.
Indiana’s Hickory uniforms have always felt very jarring to me. The red and gold, themselves, are very nice hues, and I think that the fonts and arching are done very well. The red jersey, however, just leaves me craving for red to be repeated somewhere else on the jersey. I think red socks would greatly enhance the overall uniform.
However, when I look at pictures on Google Images, I find that I enjoy the uniforms more with short (mid-thigh level) shorts and don’t crave the repetition of red as much. So maybe my gripe with the modern Hickory uniforms is color balance. The modern Hickory uniforms have basically an equal balance of red and gold; whereas, the older ones used red as a primary color and gold as secondary. Perhaps that speaks to some innate preference (for me, at least) for designs with a single, dominant color with secondary, supporting colors over designs with no dominant color.
In short, I think that the modern Hickory uniforms could be improved with either long red socks or shorter shorts to change the color balancing. I like the concept behind them and the basic design, so I feel like I WANT to like them but just can’t due to the colors.
Does anyone else feel similarly about these uniforms?
Regarding relocation, I went through it twice in Seattle. NBA w/ the Seattle Sonics and MLB w/ the Seattle Pilots. As a 8 year old, it was tough to see the Pilots leave after just one season. But the more I understood, eventually one learns that whomever owns the team, can come or go as they see fit. Sadly, for those cities that have lost franchises, a bit of cynicism probably creeps in, and a fan (like me), may “show themselves to the door”. I haven’t watched an NBA game in 8 years.
The NFL Browns and AFL Bengals played basketball against one another in 1969 (possibly also in ’68) to promote their coming NFL post-merger Buckeye state rivalry. They played in Ohio high school gyms across the state and I was blessed to see them locally (in Lancaster, south of Columbus). I got autographs from Greg Cook & Speedy Thomas of Cincy and Fair Hooker from Cleveland and some others on a program sold for those games.
Have long since lost track of that program; wish I could have held onto that sweet piece of history. I still occasionally look for photos of those games or copies of that game program online but so far, no luck. If I ever do, I will definitely pass along that info to UW.
Think it’s funny the lady with the larams Twitter handle is a rams fan or atleast wearing rams merch.
I found it more entertaining that she wants to see the NORTHERN lights from Fiji. Good luck with that. There’s a reason the GoPro video of the Northern Lights was from Sweden. You can’t see the Southern Lights from Fiji either. GoPro employs geniuses, geniuses, I say.
The Sonics leaving Seattle really made me sad. I could go on and on about the details but I think it’s all been discussed before. Also, the fact that Chris Hansen was willing to pony up a lot of the money for a new Seattle arena is likely the reason it wasn’t popular with the other owners—they didn’t want that precedent to be set. Anyway, I live in Northern California now and have somewhat adopted the Warriors. Of course, they’ve made it easy by being a kick ass team. I’m still hoping that there will be another incarnation of the Sonics but the whole thing still really bothers me.
I was around 9 when the Oilers left Houston and even though I never got to go to any Oilers games, I was always raised to cheer for them (and hate the Cowboys) and I took it to heart. When they moved to Tennessee, my heart and loyalty stayed with them. Even after Houston was announced to get a new team, I stayed with my Oilers/Titans because that was my team and I don’t change my loyalties to my teams (like most kids nowadays). My wife and everybody else I know here in Houston love the Texans, but I’m still fiercely loyal to my Titans. They always want to claim the Oilers but refuse to realize/accept that they’re part of the Titans and not the Texans.
Having spent a large portion of my life in the Clearwater-St. Petersburg-Tampa area of Florida, it was not so much that I was heartbroken when a team did NOT relocate after months of threatening to do so.
Ranked in order of heartbreak:
1. No Tampa Bay Giants
2. No Florida White Sox
3. No Tampa Bay Mariners.
Owners using the Tampa dome as leverage was so awful for everyone involved (except the owners, of course).
What’s weird to me: seeing the basketball teams in their strange jerseys and Alex & Ani ads in the background.
I’ve just noticed something… every single time a team tweets out an image with new uniforms, there is ALWAYS at least one person who HAS to tweet three fireball emojis. It’s like some kind of unwritten rule. (look at the links for the Marshall and Miami baseball unis for an example)
Great responses, everyone! Lots of Clevelanders here, and I really enjoyed hearing from an Atlanta hockey fan.
I have some cousins in my family who grew up going to Milwaukee Braves games. Though the team left in 1966, they’re still big fans of the Atlanta Braves.
QotW:
I’m in St. Louis, so…. yeah.
We weren’t in St. Louis when the Big Red left in the ’80s, but I was 3 anyway (though I think there’s a baby/toddler picture of me somewhere w/ a satin creamsicle Bucs’ jacket, or at least that’s how I remember it).
I was pretty excited when the Rams moved here in ’95 though, truth be told, I was more of a Niners fan (mostly because of Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, & Steve Young); it worked out well that Young’s career was winding down when the Rams became good for the first time in over a decade & won their first Super Bowl.
For several years after that, as the Rams slowly descended back toward mediocrity, St. Louisans still packed the Dome. So Stan Kroenke is full of shit when he blames a lack of attendance or cooperation from politicians and other decision-makers here for *forcing* him to move. There’s not too many cities in America that would tolerate and sell out for a decade of crappy on-field performance.
The past decade here has been pretty dreadful. One poor draft after another, one poor hiring decision after another. And just when the defense is starting to get really good (and the offense still can’t do shit), it’s gone. So, to answer Mike’s question, I’m going to try to be as “done” with the NFL as possible. The greed of Kroenke, Jerry Jones, Daniel Snyder, Roger Goodell, and their cronies is disgusting. With that in mind, the only team I would remotely consider supporting would be the Packers and their community-owned approach.
Unfortunately, it’ll be damn near impossible to completely divorce myself from the NFL. I thoroughly enjoy reading this site daily, but there’s definitely a gargantuan chunk of NFL-related material on here.
I listen to the local ESPN radio affiliate on my way to and from work. I’ll probably quit listening to the national shows (Mike & Mike, etc.) since football’s all they talk from about July through April, even if the season’s half that long, but I get the sense that the local shows will find enough to fill the void created by not having to talk about those Male Sheep anymore. Luckily, baseball’s pretty popular around here, so that takes up plenty of discussion from February through October.
I don’t subscribe to cable or satellite, so I don’t have to worry about the NFL getting any of my money indirectly, through whatever package I purchase that just so happens to include Fox, CBS, NBC, & ESPN, or more directly, like w/ NFL Sunday Ticket on DirecTV. Likewise, I won’t even be remotely tempted to subscribe to any other service that offers NFL media in its package–their video & audio repositories, SiriusXM, etc.
I won’t spend my money on tickets for Chiefs or Bears games, and I won’t buy any more apparel (though I believe my most recent purchase was an Isaac Bruce jersey ca. 2001).
I haven’t shopped at Walmart in years, so the hairless heir (have you seen that toupee?) won’t get my money that way.
The tricky part will be in avoiding companies that are “official partners” and what not of the league. I usually buy store brands when available, but there’s still so much to consider. Unfortunately, this would probably be the most important point to hammer en masse; the 30-2 vote proved that the owners and their henchman Goodell don’t give a shit about fans unless they’re raking in cash, and evidently as much as they’re already making isn’t quite enough. When I start thinking about that, I’m kind of hoping the snake that is the NFL consumes itself.
Prior to the Rams, I remember the Cardinals threatening to find a place on the IL side of the Mississippi River that would build them a stadium when the city and state of their current residence weren’t quite as forthcoming in replacing Busch II. Not quite the same thing, though…
If it happened now and not in 1978, do you think the NBA owners would allow Irv Levin to move the Celtics to San Diego? John Y. Brown, the owner of the Buffalo Braves, opted to trade franchises with Levin, and instead of the San Diego Celtics we ended up with the San Diego, and now Los Angeles, Clippers. Had Levin insisted the Celts’ image and equity were crucial to success in SD, the way Walter O’Malley did with the Dodgers in LA, would the owners have capitulated? I’m inclined to say they would.
Seattle Supersonics? Idiot council who won’t get a stadium done? Nuff said
I am a native new Yorker that is too young to remember when the Giants and Dodgers left for the Left Coast. I never really thought that it was that big of a deal; “Why don’t you still root for them?” I’d ask older folks whenever the subject came up. It was my experience that Giant Fans did continue to stay Giant fans much more than the Dodgers fans who felt the “betrayal” much more vehemently. In football I was a Baltimore Colts fan, as football Giant games were blacked out. I worshipped the ground that John Unitas walked on! as well as the rest of the team. When they left Baltimore and THE WAY they left killed me. Seeing the Mayflower Moving trucks leaving the training facility left me feeling like I got kicked in the stomach and the balls at the same time! I now knew what those old Giant and Dodger fans felt like years before! I stopped watching football altogether, all the while hoping that the Colts would lose every game. Three years later I started watching Giant games and rooting for them, and I had a friend who had Giants tickets. We went to games together, and I became an ardent a fan of the Giants. As much as I came to appreciate Peyton Manning as a football player, I still can not root for the Colts! Although I wear a “Johnny U” jersey I rooted against the Colts in their last two super Bowl games.
The COLTS. They never really left Baltimore. Artie Donovan,Lenny Moore, Jim Parker, Andy Nelson, John Constantine Unitas and the rest are still in the hearts and minds of true Colts fans. Yes I love the Ravens and have since day one but as for the other teams and the NFL , a pox on all of them. The only team that supported Baltimore was the Eagles and when expansion came the commissioner told us to build a museum. Like Camden Yards in baseball, the Ravens stadium ushered in a new generation of gold mines for the NFL. Domes built before it in Atlanta,Seattle, Minnesota, Detroit and that berg in Indiana are all gone. You are welcome.
I’ve dealt with teams relocating in two ways.
1) Hartford Whalers
I lived in Bristol, CT, in the early 90s and lived in Pittsburgh before that. I was always a Penguins fan, but the NHL games I remember going to are all Whalers home games. In fact, the last NHL game I was at was in 1994 – a Canadiens – Whalers game. By the time the Whalers relocated to Carolina, I was back living in Pennsylvania, and able to watch Penguins games, so the Whalers moving wasn’t all that big of a deal for me. It’s sad that one of the greatest logos is relegated to history.
2) Montreal Expos
I otherwise grew up in Harrisburg, PA, and we have the Harrisburg Senators. They have been affiliated with the Montreal Expos / Washington Nationals. I went to a lot of Senators games in my teenage years, and hardly went to any games until I got back into going a couple of years ago. So it’s strange to see how different the Senators look because they now have an identity similar to the Nationals.
Other things about a team moving –
As I mentioned, I’m a Penguins fan, so I did have to deal with the threat of the Penguins going out of business before Lemieux was able to buy them, the threat of Jim Balsillie buying the club and moving them to Hamilton, the threat of the club being moved to Kansas City.
I’m also reminded that when Kevin McClatchy bought the Pittsburgh Pirates back in 1996, there was plenty of speculation that negotiations were going to fall apart and a potential buyer from Washington or Charlotte would try to come in and buy the Pirates and move them. Even when McClatchy bought the club, he said if he couldn’t get a stadium, he’d move the team to another city.
At least I don’t have to worry about the Steelers moving.