Nine days ago I marked the Uni Watch blog’s 20th birthday. Today marks another milestone date: It was 27 years ago today — May 26, 1999 — that the very first Uni Watch column (shown above) appeared in the sports section of the alt-weekly paper The Village Voice.
I’ve told the backstory before, but once more won’t hurt: Sometime around 1997 or ’98, I got the idea of writing an article about baseball stirrups. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I could probably do a regular column about uniforms, not just a one-off stirrups article. I also had a girlfriend at the time who was tired of me constantly pointing at the TV and singling out little uniform details while we watched Mets games. “You know, Paul,” she said, “maybe you need an outlet for this.”
I was writing for several design magazines back then, so I could have pitched the idea to one of those publications as a design column about sports. But I felt strongly that I wanted it to be the other way around — a sports column about design. Unfortunately, I was busy with lots of other work and never got around to pitching the column. By the end of 1998, the concept had become something I talked about doing (with friends, fellow writers, etc.), instead of something I was actually doing. I became annoyed by my own procrastination and lack of follow-through.
So on Jan. 1, 1999, I did something I’d never done before: I made a New Year’s resolution. “This year,” I told myself, “I will create and sell a sports column about uniforms.” It seems silly in retrospect, but that resolution was the kick in the pants I needed to finally get moving on the idea.
I started with ESPN The Magazine; they said no. Then I went to Sports Illustrated; they initially said yes, but then they kept delaying my debut in favor of “more important” content. I could see that they weren’t going to prioritize what I was doing, so I decided to part ways with them and look elsewhere.
The Village Voice had an unconventional sports section (including a column devoted to NHL fights — a crazy concept at the time), so I contacted their sports editor, Miles Seligman. He happened to be familiar with my work and instantly understood what I had in mind. Granted, the Voice wasn’t a high-profile national platform like ESPN or SI, but working with an editor who Got It™ was a key step.
Our first order of business was to come up with a name for this new column. Miles and I bounced around a few ideas, none of which seemed quite right. At some point I suggested “Uni Watch” as a fallback or placeholder name; I didn’t love it, but we never came up with anything better, so we went ahead with it. I remember feeling a bit disappointed that we didn’t create more of a whiz-bang moniker. In hindsight, of course, “Uni Watch” was the perfect name all along.
For the debut installment, I decided to do a rundown of all the MLB uniform changes that had been rolled out that year — a precursor to what later became my annual Uni Watch MLB Season Preview. It seems bizarre that we essentially did the 1999 season “preview” in late May, but there was nobody else was writing about this stuff at the time, so late May was as good a time as any.
The Voice eliminated its sports section in the fall of 2003, essentially leaving the column orphaned. (I got the news while checking my answering machine messages from a payphone in New Mexico, where I was working on a travel story.) That could have been the end of Uni Watch — a serviceable four-year run — but I decided I wasn’t done yet, so I arranged to move the column to Slate.com. Although I was at Slate for only about eight months, that time period turned out to be a key juncture in Uni Watch’s development, because it was the first time I’d written specifically for the web, which allowed for photo links and other bells and whistles that improved the reader experience immensely and provided me with new ways of storytelling. (The Voice columns had been copy/pasted onto the Voice‘s website, but I wrote them for print, without links or anything like that.)
In the summer of 2004, I moved the column to ESPN.com. On May 17, 2006, the daily Uni Watch blog was born. (The full backstory on that can be found here.) I probably should have launched the blog on May 26, so the column and blog would have the same birthday, but I didn’t think of that, mainly because it never occurred to me that Uni Watch would become such a long-running enterprise.
When Uni Watch turned 25 — two years ago today — I stopped writing about uniforms and handed the baton to longtime weekend editor Phil Hecken. Last fall, a perfect storm of obstacles made it seem like we might have to shut down operations altogether, but Uni Watch has limped along since then, and lately I’ve returned to writing occasional posts, all of which has allowed us to reach today’s 27th-universary milestone. Huzzah!