Who Are You Wearing?
by Steve Rushin
From Blue Jeans to White Tuxedos, the colorful fashion at the NBA Draft gives the Green Room a Red Carpet Feel
I’m no clothes horse. Real horses — occasionally groomed and sometimes re-shod — are more fashion-conscious. The soup-stained sportswriter Oscar Madison was not just my earliest literary influence, he remains my sartorial spirit animal. If I’m ever asked, “Who are you wearing?”, the answer will most likely be Harlan Sanders, Samuel Adams or E.L. Fudge. Most likely all of them at the same time.
Like you, I watch the NBA draft with envy, though not for the usual reasons (cash windfall, athletic glory). No, I watch the draft wishing I had the confidence, wishing I was cool enough, to wear what that guy’s wearing, the guy shaking hands with Adam Silver. In short, as I’ll say several times on draft night: “I wish I could pull that off.”
From the beginning, the NBA has been on fashion’s leading edge. Before Michael Jordan was endorsing Hanes, George Mikan advertised Munsingwear Double-Strength Briefs with exclusive “Stretchy Seat” technology. It takes balls, metaphorically and otherwise, to model tighty-whiteys, but it also takes a certain self-possession to wear the canary leather suit and silk Hawaiian shirt — turf and surf; part bovine, part beach bum — that Wilt Chamberlain rocked in the ‘70s.
Around that time, Rick Barry, with his jaunty knotted neckerchief, was the inspiration for Fred on “Scooby Doo.” Or perhaps Fred was the inspiration for Rick Barry. These men, plus Clyde Frazier (resplendent in roadkill) and Larry Brown (in patchwork bib overalls) were the basketball style mavens of my childhood. I knew, from an early age, that I could never pull that off.
Today, of course, the NBA is full of man rompers, tiny backpacks and gratuitous eyewear worn to postgame pressers. But it was the NBA draft, broadcast on television, that first assembled multiple basketball players on a single stage that quickly became a kind of catwalk, Derrick Coleman meets Derek Zoolander.
The draft was first televised in 1980, on the USA Network, Lou Carnesecca broadcasting in a blazer decommissioned from the Century 21 real estate group. What had been a bureaucratic exercise — commissioner Larry O’Brien writing names on a whiteboard — was suddenly a showbiz spectacle.
And even so, as late as 1982, Terry Cummings of DePaul could be the second pick in the draft and enter the league (as a San Diego Clipper) wearing civilian clothes — a polo shirt tucked into his jeans. Who am I wearing? Levi Strauss. Civvies would seldom be seen again.
Only two years later, as the top pick, Hakeem Olajuwon wore a tuxedo collar and cuff links. Chuck Person’s red cummerbund upped the ante two years later, and seemed to promise a future succession of monocles, opera glasses, pocket watches and sock garters. (Think the man on the Monopoly card, but with more money.) Instead, the ’90s were best remembered for suit jackets with more buttons than an elevator in the Burj Khalifa. I sat envious in front of the tube, two-buttoned and forlorn.
Even among other sports, the NBA draft was and remains ahead of the game. No one looks dignified pulling a Florida Panthers jersey on over a shirt and tie, as is the custom in hockey. In 1991, Brett Favre was photographed on NFL draft day in a T-shirt and jorts, learning his fate by telephone.
And while the NFL draft has become a year-round industry, the sense of occasion occasioned by the NBA draft is still unparalleled. And so LeBron James entered the league in 2003 in an all-white ensemble — suit, shirt, shoes, tie — looking the way God does in the movies, pristine and all powerful.
It’s not sacrilege to suggest that this is the way one might dress for a christening, for what is the draft if not an initiation ceremony, a baptism of sorts, a joyous rite of passage?
Longtime Sports Illustrated writer Steve Rushin’s memoir, Sting-Ray Afternoons, will be published July 3. You can follow him on Twitter at @SteveRushin.
