The NBA recently announced that a dress code would be going into effect for the new season. The new code says that basically, whenever an NBA player is seen in public, he can't be wearing doo-rags, shorts, T-shirts, jeans and in a code I think needs to be adopted here at AU, no sunglasses indoors.
Naturally this is going to put a lot of guys in a tough predicament. Now, closets of old-school jerseys are going to go unused, and the trendsetters of fashion, Allen Iverson and others, will no longer be able to model the tight new styles that white kids in the suburbs will want to wear.
Further, NBA players won't be allowed to wear "chains, pendants, or medallions worn over the player's clothes." Stephen Jackson, a forward for the Indiana Pacers, called this part of the dress code racist. I agree. I think this should only apply to white guys, so that you don't have people like Keith Van Horn or Mark Madsen with 10-pound platinum crosses on their chests. They'd look ridiculous.
Of course this is not the first time that the decisions from a major league office have caused controversy. When Johnny Unitas died in 2002, Peyton Manning was going to wear black cleats, just like Unitas did, in his next game. Not only would the league not allow it, but it said it would fine him if he did.
Why? Why not celebrate one of the best there ever was for the sake of uniformity on the field? It's times like these when you wonder if all the NFL's success has turned Paul Tagliabue into a heartless miser, sitting like Howard Hughes in some lofty office building with Kleenex boxes on his feet, totally paranoid about any change to his precious NFL.
Then there was Major League Baseball's ill-fated decision to try to make some pocket change by putting advertisements for "Spider Man 2" on the bases during the movie's opening weekend in 2004. Fans were outraged. How can they destroy the sanctity of the game by doing that, selling out to make a few bucks?
After this firestorm, baseball pulled the advertisement campaigns. "Good," many fans thought, "now we can go back to our innocent baseball stadiums, with our Viagra signs behind home plate, named after infamous companies where everything is sponsored by someone, like 'This game is brought to you by Smuckers, the official strawberry jam of Major League Baseball.'"
As for the new dress code, I don't think it would really matter one way or the other. The only bad thing would be for young kids to gain a poor fashion sense early in life by seeing what NBA players are wearing. Now black cleats on the other hand, that's a REAL menace to our society. Won't someone PLEASE think of the children?
