It's OKTO Blog: Pro Shopping

We Americans love us some NFL jerseys.

I went with my brother to Pittsburgh a few years back for a regular season game against the visiting New England Patriots. Now Pittsburgh is a fine town, albeit with some unusual rules about drinking. My brother and I spent Saturday day and night on Carson Street, which is across the river from Hines Field, PNC Park, and our hotel. Carson Street's claim to fame is that it has something like 100 bars on a 1-mile stretch of the street, so my brother and I went to investigate this claim. We believe this claim to be true.

As in California, Pittsburgh has a 2am last call. However, they run it a little differently in the 'Burgh. First of all, they don't set their clocks ahead 20 minutes and start pressuring you to move toward the door and finish your drinks at 1:35 so you'll be out of the bar and on your way home well before two. Rather, you have until 2am in real time to order your last drink, and you can stay until 3am to finish it. You also aren't limited to buying one drink at 1:59; you can buy a six-pack if you want and sit there for an hour and drink it. If you don't finish, you are allowed to take the unopened beers with you. In fact, there didn't seem to be any liquor stores per se (or if there were any then they closed much earlier in the evening) - so if you wanted to keep drinking after the bars closed you had to buy beer from the bar. If I recall, your limit was a six-pack per person. My brother and I bought a twelver for the walk over the bridge back to the hotel, and this made for a much more interesting trip. When it comes to last call, I like Pittsburgh's style.

I've always been a little reluctant to wear sports jerseys. Of course, I wore them in high school when I was actually on a team (with a t-shirt underneath my basketball jersey since my guns weren't quite as developed then as they are now):

But seeing as how I'm not actually on any pro teams at the moment it doesn't usually make much sense to me to wear a team's jersey. Don't get me wrong, I can see why people would buy certain jerseys, like this one, this guy's jersey or this guy's jersey. But I'd rather go for something in the team's colors with an understated logo. At my age, I am too old to be wearing jerseys, and this way it is much easier to hide if your team loses - you don't need to get into fights all night with drunken fans of the other team, or have to go home and change. In San Diego, I've even seen a dude try to fight a chick wearing a Minnesota hockey jersey after Maine or Michigan or Boston College or some other insignificant college beat Minnesota in the Frozen Four, which is apparently a March hockey tournament. "Hockey" is apparently a sport that involves ice skates, a large stone and a broom.

On the morning of the game in Pittsburgh, I was getting dressed and was all prepared to wear jeans and a button-down to the game, it being a crisp fall day and all. However, my brother had a dilemma - he had brought 5 or 6 jerseys and couldn't decide which one to wear. The Pats being on the road, they were going to wear their white jerseys, so this narrowed the choice down to three. In the end, he chose his authentic game jersey. I was a little concerned for his safety, as I had heard Pittsburgh fans are pretty fanatical, so I went ahead and put on one of his spare jerseys, a Tom Brady replica model. I left the hotel feeling a bit foolish, but I was going to stay with my wingman - it is harder to kick the crap out of two fools than it is one.

On the way out of the room and down the hall to the elevator, a member of the housekeeping staff (hey, it was three hours earlier for us and we had been out late) told us to be careful dressed like we were. And we soon found out why - before we left the hotel we saw about 20 people wearing various Steelers jerseys. These people had already had a few cocktails, and they began hurling various insults, the most common being "Hey Marsha Brady!" I no longer felt foolish; I maybe even felt a little threatened, except that my brother and I are two of the tallest people in Pittsburgh, and we're both pretty big dudes. Sure, there were plenty of big fat guys out there that could give us some trouble, but by the time they caught one of us they'd be too tired to fight anyway.

So, I'd say on an NFL game day, in the immediate Heinz Field area the population of Pittsburgh consists of about 60% jersey wearers. That was the most common accessory, with the second-most common being the porn moustache, running at about 40%. The 'staches were probably split about 85/15 between guys and chicks. So, in flyover states such as Pennsylvania, where there isn't all that much else to do, wearing jerseys is widely accepted.

Despite a few minor altercations (Steelers fans throwing cans at us in the parking lot, starting a "Here we go Patriots" chant in a bar during the early games and getting shouted down by the entire bar, me returning to the wrong seat in the stadium after a beer and bathroom break, trying to kick a Steelers fan out of my seat, and having beer, popcorn and pretzels thrown at me as a result), we were treated to one heck of a ballgame. After the Steelers scored the tying touchdown late in the fourth quarter, I was surprised by the reaction of Steelers fans. There was 1:21 left in the game, and the prevailing attitude was "Crap. We left Brady with too much time. We're going to lose." Can't blame them though - they were right, as Tom Brady drove the Patriots to a game-winning field goal as time expired, which in turn drove the Pats fans to a night of celebration in Pittsburgh. Man, I hate it when the other team comes to my city, beats my team, and parties it up in my city afterwards. As a fan of the Cal Bears, this used to be a common occurrence, especially when it came to USC and UCLA fans. Those beautiful, arrogant f*cks.

But back to the jerseys. Seeing as how I hooked up (in the SoCal/young female definition of the word) with a Steelers fan after the football game, I'd say jerseys might even be the preferred attire - one of the reasons I hooked up with her was that "I looked so cute in my Tom Brady jersey." For the record, she looked just fine in her Hines Ward jersey mid-hookup, as Tom Brady ended up screwing the Steelers a second time that day.

When Doug Christie played in the NBA, I guess he made a lot of hand signals and the like during games that were special little "I love yous" to his wife Jackie. He got a lot of crap for this from teammates, and a reality show was made of the couple's relationship. That show has the distinct honor of being the only reality show in history to fail, even though dude was pretty well whipped which should have made for good TV. Formerly talented ESPN columnist Bill Simmons used to write (and probably still does, since he hasn't had any new material since the first Gulf War) about buying a Doug Christie jersey for your friends who are whipped by their girlfriends, as kind of a funny insult. Such a jersey was in fact purchased for a friend of mine (let's call him "Squishy") at one point. I wasn't around the couple very much, but I understand he was pretty whipped. I do recall a time that she logged into his account during our fantasy draft and they were typing back and forth to each other in the draft chat room, so I'm willing to take others' word for it.

In a similar vein, I am a Pats fan and some friends decided to purchase a jersey for me they deemed appropriate. At the time, there was a cornerback on the Patriots who wore #21. He was named Randall Gay. These pranksters decided that a "GAY 21" jersey would be perfect for me. The reason that it would be perfect for me is that I am gay. I'm really not, but that was the running joke for about 36 years and counting now. This was just after a woman accused Michael Vick of giving her herpes, and he apparently had sought herpes treatment under the alias "Ron Mexico." The Atlanta Falcons jersey "MEXICO 7" became a very popular item, and the NFL cracked down on the customization of its jerseys. So my friends couldn't order me a "GAY 21" jersey since this was not permitted by the NFL, even though there was an actual "GAY 21" player. I understand the NFL eventually started selling that jersey, though by that time my friends had moved on to other endeavors - they have the attention spans of hummingbirds on crack.

I checked out the NFL.com website to see what can be done with customized jerseys. I tried to create an Atlanta Falcons "MEXICO 7" jersey. Turns out you still can't create that jersey, or any jersey with "MEXICO" on the back, regardless of the team or the jersey number - you come up with an error that says "Your current entry cannot be processed. Language deemed inappropriate, derogatory, or profane will not be accepted. Please create a new entry."

So I decided to test how sophisticated the NFL's Inappropriate, Derogatory and Profane Detector really is. Facebook supposedly has a sophisticated BS Name Detector, though my friends Dee Monk and Pats Flamer might disagree. I discovered the following jerseys can be ordered without the NFL so much as batting an eyelash (no Photoshopping here - these images comes from the NFL Shop website, having been deemed a "Great Choice! To purchase your customized jersey, click on "ADD TO CART"):