Talk to the ShirtSM
Here's a familiar scene. You're in line for the ATM, where there's nothing to do but wait, and there's a good-looking man on line behind you. You would like to start a conversation. You hope he will start a conversation. Your turn comes to go to the machine and get cash. You complete your transaction and as you pass him on line, you smile and he smiles back. Nothing is said by either of you. You walk to your car and drive away. You kick yourself for not saying something to him. You file it with the hundreds of other times you have seen someone you might like to get to know and didn't… not just at the ATM.
Let's replay the scene. This time you are wearing or he is wearing a piece of sports clothing with a team or a player's name on it. Let's say a Philadelphia Eagles jersey with the number 5 on it. One of you recognizes the other as someone who has an interest in sports. You or he says something like this: “I see you like Donovan McNabb. I wonder how he’ll come back after his injury?" (Donovan McNabb is a star quarterback for the football franchise in Philly and was injured most of the 2006-2007 season.) If you opened that conversation or respond, the man now knows you are friendly, and you know something about football and particularly McNabb or the Eagles. If he is a football fan, single and looking to meet a lady, you've just broken the ice for both of you and started a conversation. You also have just won more points with that man than you could have in most other traditional ways. You now have something in common with him. It's a subject in which he is totally comfortable and probably knowledgeable about. Perhaps he answers your question and you go on from there. Perhaps the conversation survives both of you getting cash from the ATM and continues to your car. There's a good chance, if you send out a signal that you enjoy speaking with him he might want to continue to speak with you and the rest, as they say, is history.
This ability to discuss sports, based on you wearing apparel or your ability to identify sports apparel on others, enables you to either approach someone or be approached more easily to make some "Incidental Contact". That's what it means to "Talk to the Shirt".
Here’s a real life example of one of my many experiences Talking to the Shirt. I like to call it:
The Mystique of the Yankees Hat
The blood feud between baseball fans who root for the Yankees and those that root for the Red Sox is legendary. Even after the 2004 baseball season, when the Red Sox won the World Series following 86 years of futility, the Boston mantra remained “The Yankees Suck.” Why? Because after the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1918, their good fortune of winning the World Series ended. Add that to the facts that the Yankees win a lot; they have a swagger about them; they are owned by a guy who never met a star he didn’t want to hire and puts his money where his mouth is. During the ensuing decades, as the losses mounted for the Sox and the Yankees started winning over and over, an entire industry sprung up in and around Boston with “Yankees Suck” memorabilia: shirts, hats, banners, mugs, key chains, etc. Children wore this stuff. Never mind what that says about their parents but you can see how deep the hatred goes when you realize that children grow up in and around Boston learning this stuff from an early age.
My brother lives in the Boston area. He moved there to go to college and decided to stay, start a career and raise a family. That was all well and good. But… he left this planet as I know it and switched sides from rooting for the Yankees to the Sox. We had grown up in the metropolitan NY area and were Yankee fans. We knew the feud very well. We knew that Boston fans thought that the 1918 Babe Ruth trade started a “curse”, which doomed Boston’s chances and seemingly began a decades’ long run of good fortune for the Yankees. When I visit him we occasionally end up at a Red Sox game during the season and the first time he took me there, I wanted to wear my Yankee hat, as I always do when I go to a baseball game; no matter where I am. My brother asked that I not wear the hat because he didn’t want to have to get into a fight with guys, drunk or sober, who would pick a fight with me, thus forcing him to defend me. I couldn’t believe it but I capitulated out of love and fear. Since then, I hide my Yankee colors when I go to Fenway Park where the Sox play.
You realize that if a tussle happened it wouldn’t have resulted from me saying anything or doing anything. It would have happened because of the deep seeded feelings brought about by the mere wearing of a piece of sports apparel. When Sox and Yankees fans spot each other outside of Boston or New York, the stares, glares and comments happen anyway. No fights break out, at least on the street or in polite company, but you need say nothing about yourself when you have on one of those hats or a player’s jersey. Someone immediately knows an important fact about you and can start a conversation just because of what you’re wearing.
This is Talking to the Shirt in it’s most graphic form. But it’s told here to prove a point. Those of us who wear sports apparel WANT YOU TO KNOW who we are. I enjoy getting into debates about the Yankees/ Red Sox rivalry and Boston fans do too. Recently I attended a World Baseball tournament at which baseball players chosen from all American teams played on the same team under the banner of the USA. At the bar in the stadium prior to the first game I came face to face with a Red Sox fan with his cap on. I wore my NY cap. We looked at each other as we each got a beer, laughed out loud, clinked glasses and said: Go USA. We were actually cheering for the same team that day and who would have thought that would happen. We then got into a discussion about a recent trade of another famous Red Sox player to the Yankees. It carried over to a plate of wings. The rest is none of your business….. but, I can tell you that I had a great time at the game because I shared those great moments with knowledgeable fans who I got to know because of mutual love of the sport of baseball; oh yeah, and the baseball hats most of us wore.
When you Talk to the Shirt, you are addressing the name of the team or player and it sends a message that you are a fellow fan. It overcomes the usual problem of starting a conversation. I believe it because I live it. But for Yankee fans out there...be careful around Fenway Park will you please?