'Everybody wants to take pride in their team’s uniforms, including, of course, the team itself. But fashion is tricky that way. One individual’s bold and beautiful is another’s basic and boring,' Gordon writes.
Yellow and black, with big, block script and numbers.Where’s it written that a team’s uniform cannot be transformed, that a team’s colors cannot evolve or that they can’t be jarringly changed or that they can’t be big and blocky?It’s as though the basketball jersey, the tank tops and shorts, which look more like underwear than any other kind of clothes item, are some kind of reverent emblem, a flag to be hoisted and honored, an ensign for the team and the community.
I was one of the complainers when the NBA decided to allow corporate logos to be attached to the unis, considering that out of line, even though every other aspect of the league’s teams, games and broadcasts are as much a commercial as they are a competition. Everything about pro basketball now has the appearance of a NASCAR racer.But fashion is tricky that way.Beauty, they say, is in the eye of the beholder.
Part of the Jazz’s motive for the change is precisely what part of every decision is: How will it affect the franchise’s bottom line?How anyone can make the argument that purple is preferable to yellow and black is curious at the least and confusing at the other end.
But what clearly matters more than any other aspect of the laundry — and the stuff on the new courts — is what the team does in those jerseys and on those floors. If the Lakers can popularize the colors of the Easter Bunny, purple and gold, or if you want to call it Forum blue and gold, go ahead, then anything works — as long as the team wins.That, then, is the Jazz’s challenge — look good to play good to feel good to be good to win good. And vice versa.And they will be beautiful to every eye that bets on … errr … beholds them.