I turned on the pregame at noon expecting football and got a runway show. A young man I am told is a starting quarterback in this league walked from a black SUV into a tunnel, and three different cameras tracked him doing it. The chyron said TUNNEL TIME. There was a logo for Tunnel Time. Tunnel Time is sponsored by a watch company.
The cardigan, I was informed by a sideline reporter wearing her own coat indoors, cost $4,200. It was oatmeal-colored. He paired it with sunglasses, which he was also wearing indoors, and a small leather bag that the analyst called “a moment.” Eight minutes. Eight minutes of network airtime on a man walking sixty feet in a sweater. They went to commercial and came back to a slow-motion replay of the walk.
Coach DiMaggio at Lincoln High wore one windbreaker for nineteen seasons. It had a coffee stain shaped like Florida on the left sleeve. When he walked into the field house on a Friday night, the look he was going for was “man who has somewhere to be.” Nobody filmed it. Nobody needed to. The look told you everything.
I called Ray Kowalczyk during the second commercial because I needed a witness. Ray was a defensive coordinator at three different junior colleges and once chewed me out for ordering a salad at a steakhouse. I told him about Tunnel Time and the cardigan and the bag, and Ray said, “Duke, you’re making this up.” I sent him a screenshot. He called me back forty seconds later and said one word that I cannot print and then hung up.
The thing they don’t understand — the producers, the brand consultants, the twenty-six-year-old social media manager whose job title is “vibe architect” — is that the uniform used to start at the locker. Coat and tie if your coach was old-school. A clean polo if he wasn’t. You were going to work. Now they’re walking the red carpet to work, and the work is getting sacked four times by a defensive end from Mississippi who, I will note, did not have a tunnel segment.
Petey Corrigan played fullback for the team my father coached in 1973. Petey wore the same Carhartt jacket to every game for fourteen seasons, including the three he played for money in Canada. When the jacket finally fell apart his wife sewed a new lining into it and he wore it nine more years. Petey would have looked at a $4,200 cardigan and asked who died. Then he would have asked if the funeral was catered.
The QB, by the way, threw for 142 yards. Sacked four times, two interceptions, fumbled once on a sneak. The cardigan trended on three platforms. The hashtag is still going. There is a TikTok where a man my grandson’s age explains the “silhouette” of the outfit and uses the word “silhouette” eleven times in ninety seconds. I counted because I had nothing else to do during the actual football game, which the network kept cutting away from to show a graphic of which player wore which designer.
I’m not saying men can’t dress nice. Tom Landry wore a fedora. Madden wore whatever fell off the truck and looked great doing it. What I’m saying is that we used to celebrate the thing the man did on the field, and now we celebrate the thing the man wore to the field, and somewhere in that swap we agreed that the sweater is the story. The sweater is not the story. The man got sacked four times. That’s the story. We’re just dressing it up better.
Anyway, Ray’s coming over for the late game. He’s bringing the good chips. Denise is making chili. She says the recipe’s from a podcast.