“Why I Love Ugly Uniforms” – Todd Radom

“Growing up in Yonkers, N.Y., I was, at best, an indifferent athlete. I washed out of Henry S. Richards Little League after a couple of unspectacular seasons. Later I joined the track team for a year in high school — mainly to socialize — and I still remember the uniform. In fact, I still have it. It is red and sleeveless, with white letters displayed diagonally, reading “Roosevelt.”

I watched games with great intent. I was focused on Reggie Jackson’s titanic home runs, but I was also mesmerized by the green and gold Oakland A’s uniforms.

I doodled sports logos on school notebooks and conjured my own teams — not so much for games as for creating logos and uniforms for them. I studied the cap marks of Major League Baseball teams and rendered them in painstaking detail with felt-tipped markers and cheap ballpoint pens.

I was fascinated by the visual culture of sports, and I still am, having devoted my life to sports design. Lucky for me, as a young baseball fan, I hit the lottery: My formative sports-aesthetics years came in the 1970s, the game’s most vibrant, colorful decade, with its smorgasbord of audacious and often garish uniforms. Bold graphics and sensationally showy colors were synthesized into some of sports history’s most memorable uniforms — a golden age of sports identity.”

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