Hello, and welcome to the 2026 edition of Purple Amnesty Day (being observed this year on May 18, because the traditional May 17 date fell on a Sunday).
As most of you know, Purple Amnesty Day — or Purp Walk, as it has become colloquially known — is the one day of the year when I grudgingly acknowledge, and even celebrate, the world’s most accursed color. It was an annual Uni Watch ritual from 2010 through 2024 (details here), then was omitted last year because I had stepped away from Uni Watch, and is now back from the dead this year, with a bunch of key personnel reprising their traditional roles. It’s like we’re getting the old band back together — huzzah!
Purp Walk ’26 has several components, as follows:
An Anti-Purple Refresher Course
People often ask why I hate purple so much. In fact, as I tell them, I think purple in nature is perfectly fine. Violets, eggplants, “red” onions (which are actually purple), etc. — they’re all very attractive. But purple as a human-imposed design element has always struck me as being off-thc-charts tacky. It’s the diva of colors, the Celine Dion of colors, never content to do just enough when it can do too much. Think about it: How often do you see a purple car, or a purple house? Almost never, because people instinctively understand that those would look horrible. Now if we could just make purple equally scarce in the world of clothing — including uniforms.
I’ve sometimes been accused of having “purple-phobia,” but that’s not right, because “phobia” means fear. To be clear: I don’t fear purple; I loathe purple. If anything, purple should fear me.
By odd coincidence, I was confronted with two purple-centric conundra just the other day. On Saturday I had to drive to New Jersey with a friend for an event. I wanted to bring some car snacks for the trip and was in the mood for potato chips, so I stopped in at my local bodega. The good news was that they had one of my favorite chip varieties — Wise New York Kettle Cooked Deli Chips, which I don’t often see at this shop. The bad news was that those chips come in a hideous purple bag. Oof.
I briefly considered buying another brand of chips but decided to bite the purple bullet as a pre-Purp Walk gesture of good faith. So I put the chips in the car, picked up my friend, and drove to the New Jersey event, where I was presented with … a purple admission badge. Double-oof.
It was like the purple-verse was trying to make Purp Walk happen a couple of days early! Anyway, I survived these encounters with my chromatic nemesis, if just barely.
Membership Cards
The Uni Watch Membership Program, which has been dormant for the past two years, is being resurrected today for Purp Walk. Today, and only today, you can order a custom-designed Uni Watch membership card with a purple-inclusive theme. Card designer Scott M.X. Turner and I are excited to see your design requests! (Please note that we are not taking non-purple orders at this time — only purple-inclusive cards for Purp Walk.)
To order a card, send me $25, either by Venmo (use @paul-lukas-2 as the payee) or Zelle (plukas64@gmail.com), or PayPal (newcollegeuni@gmail.com). If you’d rather use Apple Pay or a paper check, email me and I’ll give you the info you need.
Then send me an email with the following info:
The name you want on the front of the card.
Your original “Member Since” date as shown on your previous card (if applicable).
The uni number you want for the back of the card.
The NOB you want for the back of the card (if your design choice is based on a jersey that included NOBs).
The uniform design you want the back of the card to be based on. (Note that the design must include purple.)
Rear-view photos of the uni design, for visual reference.
The shipping address where we should send the finished card.
I must receive your order by midnight Pacific tonight.
Please remember that we don’t do front-jersey designs, we don’t do imaginary or fantasy designs, we don’t do mash-ups of multiple uni designs, we don’t include NOBs for designs based on NNOB uniforms, etc. In short, your card order should be based on a real (purple) uniform that has existed in the real world. The one exception is that you can choose to have your card rendered in the basic Uni Watch lettering, like this:
If that’s what you want, let me know if you’d like the NOB to be vertically arched (as shown in the example above), radially arched, or straight; with or without a nameplate; or NNOB.
As usual with Purp Walk membership cards, my signature on the front of each card will be done with a purple pen.
If you’d like to reacquaint yourself with the membership card archive, you can see all the designs we’ve done so far — over 3,700 of them! — here. And here’s a 2024 video of Scott Turner showing how he creates the card designs:
T-Shirts
Back in 2015, T-shirt designer Bryan Molloy thought I should do a purple tee as an April Fool’s joke. Instead, I let him design a shirt for Purp Walk! We continued to collaborate on a purple shirt every year from then to 2024 (except for 2018, when we did a cap). As for this year, remember how I said earlier that we’re “getting the band back together” for this edition of Purp Walk? I mentioned that a few days ago to Bryan, and he immediately said, “You’re also getting the banned back together,” because purple is normally banned here at Uni Watch. He then took that idea and ran with it. Here’s our Purp Walk ’26 shirt:
Cool, right? That Bryan — clever guy.
Also: A few people asked me about reviving the purple-themed tequila sunrise design that we did in 2019. We didn’t have enough time to set up the full sublimated design, but here’s a basic version:
Both of these shirts are available here until midnight Pacific tonight.
I should add that Bryan produced the 2026 design on ridiculously short notice, because I didn’t come up with the idea of reviving Purp Walk until the middle of last week, so he had only three days to work with (one of which he spent mostly on a cross-country flight). Please join me in thanking him for creating something so cool on such a tight schedule!
The Return of the Purpologist
For many years, Uni Watch reader Kary Klismet offered annual Purple Amnesty Day reports on a very specific topic: uniforms with mismatched or inconsistent shades of purple (like the Los Angeles team in the 1979 movie The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, shown above). A few days ago I asked him if he could whip up something for Purp Walk ’26, and he happily obliged. Here’s his latest report:
Origin of the Specious: Searching for the First Mismatched Purple Uniform
By Kary Klismet
When I wrapped up what I thought was my final story on mismatched purple uniforms on Purple Amnesty Day in 2024, I felt that I’d given the series a fitting coda. But there were still a variety of violet violations left unexplored, so when Paul offered me the chance to pursue my passion for purpology in a revived Purp Walk, I couldn’t refuse.
Over the course of this series, we’ve discovered that the phenomenon of mismatched purple uniforms was both more widespread and older than previously believed, extending beyond the “Showtime”-era Lakers of the ’80s to other sports leagues, and back at least to the Lakers’ 1969 team. That raises an obvious epidemiological question: What was the first instance of a team infecting the sports world with this chromatic contagion?
Tracing “Mismatched Purple Patient Zero” means starting at the very beginning, with the first known outbreak of purple in American sports. That dubious distinction goes to Williams College, whose baseball team adorned its uniforms with purple ribbons for an 1865 game against Harvard. Thankfully, there’s no evidence those ribbons were mismatched, although later Ephs teams would prove much looser with their lavenders. Even so, the stage had been set for future violet virulence.
Given the dye inconsistencies of earlier eras, there must have been teams in the intervening century between Williams baseball and the late-’60s Lakers whose purples didn’t quite match. The challenge is proving it. Color photography was sparse for much of that span, and many uniforms simply weren’t preserved.
The purple putrefaction can be traced back internationally to 1962, when Real Madrid wore mismatched away kits in that year’s European Cup final. An even earlier culprit may have been TCU’s 1955-56 football team, whose helmets appeared to be lighter than their jerseys.
Or perhaps Northwestern? A speculative reconstruction of the Wildcats’ 1909 football jerseys suggests they may have incorporated multiple shades of purple, although the surviving evidence remains frustratingly inconclusive.
Our strongest candidate may well be the 1916 New York Giants. Astute uni-watchers may recall that the 1913-1917 Giants were the only MLB team to wear violet prior to the Great Purple Proliferation of the 1990s, when purple was adopted by Big Four teams across many sports (Rockies, D-backs, Devil Rays, Ravens, Raptors, and more).
And if you trust foundational uni historian Marc Okkonen’s meticulous research, the Giants’ infamous 1916 checked duds likely did include the first purple mismatch in big league history.
The purple used on the stirrups and cap brim was noticeably lighter than the shade used on the rest of the uniform, including the alternate home cap’s interlocking “NY” logo. Sadly, original specimens of the cap appear lost to history. But in recent years, a New York boutique created a replica of what it might have looked like in all its two-toned ignominy.
Now, you might say that the cap brim was actually a shade of red or magenta, not purple. We’ll probably never know for sure. But given the dye inconsistencies back in those days, any team wearing purple plaid, as the Giants were doing, probably had some color mismatches going on. I’ll continue my research, and as long as there’s a Purple Amnesty Day, I’ll continue documenting these mauve maladies for the Uni Watch faithful.
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Thanks, Kary!
That concludes our purple content for today. But Purple Amnesty Day’s scope isn’t limited to this website — anyone wearing purple today is going on a de facto Purp Walk. If that cohort includes you, email me a photo of the purple attire you’re wearing today. I’ll feature the pics I receive at a later date (after I’ve recovered from today’s purple onslaught).
Big thanks to Scott M.X. Turner, card printer Bob Sullivan, Bryan Molloy, Kary Klismet, and pinch-web developer Charlie Cooke (who turned the site purple today!) for making Purp Walk ’26 possible. Thanks also to everyone reading this. It’s fun to be doing Purp Walk again! But thank god it’s only for one day.