Clothes make the student athlete

There’s something wrong with our cynical world when the
Daily Bruin’s Thursday sports columnist guy walks through
campus in near anonymity. No shout-outs, no raising-the-roof, not
even a “Westside.” I have my picture in the paper on a
weekly basis. What am I missing?

A uniform. Uniforms are sharp and authoritative. I need
something that says, “Hey, get off the sidewalk. Look at my
shiny badge. The taxpayers gave me the authority to kick you off
this sidewalk.”

Or, if one may be so bold, I need a uniform that says
“future NFL paycheck.” There, I said it.

I have a comprehensive theory I can’t delve into too
deeply in the confines of a “sports” column. Suffice it
to say, my friend Jon Abrams summarized it best with the term
“jersey chaser.” Women dig uniforms.

At the Daily Bruin sports office, I’ve been lobbying for
uniforms or, at minimum, an off-duty vest. Maybe I would get more
respect if I had a conspicuous, yet subtle sign of my influential
media role.

Take for example athlete backpacks. The players can’t very
well wear their jerseys everywhere; that would just look stupid. So
they have a special Adidas backpack as an affectation to
distinguish them from their slower, weaker classmates.

“Those backpacks are so elitist,” third-year
sociology student Brandon Tripp said. “Like, dude, yeah, we
know you’re an athlete, and now all the females in the room
do, too.”

Water polo Olympic medalist and senior on UCLA’s champion
team Natalie Golda takes a different view.

“We’re burning the candle on both ends. With
hardcore practice and class all day, we’re tired and shy, not
elitist,” Golda said. “It’s not like we have a
future playing water polo. We’re trying to represent our
school the best we can. The backpack is just part of the
sponsorship agreement.”

And the backpacks aren’t all sunshine cars running on
dream gasoline neither. They cut both ways, like a chainsaw.

“We don’t get nearly as much play as the male
athletes for our backpacks,” Golda said. “Normal guys
are intimidated by it.”

I called up Cal water polo standout and all-around stud Vincent
“Vince” Bevins to see if the UCLA backpack experience
was merely an isolated phenomenon.

“They totally give us those, too,” Bevins said.
“And they’re like for sports, but then every single
athlete uses them for class to separate themselves from regular
people. And yeah, girls do give me another look when I rock it. But
it supplements my game. It is not game itself.”

So while a sign of athletic excellence enhances a man’s
social standing, it decreases a woman’s? The ramifications of
this apparent double standard are mind-blowing. They should study
this in the introductory communication studies class after they
finish deconstructing the eight stages of flirting. Sexism is
bad.

Yet I won’t salt anyone’s game, even if that game
comes from a backpack; for you see, when life hands me a lemon, I
make my patented homemade lemon meringue pie.

For instance, just last quarter I was looking to complete one of
my remaining GE’s. I needed something science-ey, but, you
know, not. So there I am in scheduling limbo when I enter this one
class.

The online course description was too vague for my purposes
(science sans the math and science). But once I entered and espied
the copious number of athlete backpacks, I knew I was home, just
like Little Foot in 1988’s “The Land Before Time”
after he crosses the last mountain range and espies the Great
Valley and gets reunited with his grandparents since his mother
died earlier defending him from Sharp Tooth, the Tyrannosuarus
Rex.

And just like Little Foot, my course selection had a happy
ending. If special backpacks hadn’t existed for athletes, I
would have had to rely solely on the syllabus in judging the
course.

Besides, what’s the difference between a corporate sponsor
giving an athlete a backpack and the uber-cool Beverly Hills
hipster’s investment banker parents buying him a $50 ironic
vintage T-shirt? Both are equally elitist and equally absurd forms
of social distinction. While man continues to separate himself from
others on such arbitrary bases, our forefathers’ dream of
cosmic love unification will get further away.

In the cosmically unified love world, everyone will wear
star-spangled top hats and vests. E-mail Leano at
[email protected].