The fashion sensibilities of black pro athletes

A young man recently said to me that the best way to dress is like a black pro athlete, except you have to pull it back a little. He said, "They spend a lot of money on their clothes, but never know where to draw the line."

The young man was unfamiliar with the heyday of Walt Frazier and Artis Gilmore. Here's Walt decked out in all his finery, circa the early 1970's:

(Walter's middle name was "Clyde," though "Thomas" would have made for a more appropriate license plate.)

And here's Artis Gilmore, circa the late 70's:

His hair made the 7' 2" Gilmore look a little like a caveman who had just killed a grizzly, skinned it, and donned its hide.

But athletes don't dress like 1970's pimps anymore. (Then again, neither do pimps.) These days, black pro athletes tend to favor bespoke suits; they just go a little overboard with them. For instance, a lot of people buy three piece suits; but only pro athletes actually wear the vest.

Lebron James, the most prominent player in the game today, is a case in point.

The suit is perfectly nice, but did Lebron really need the lapel pin and the boutonniere and the sunglasses and the earring? He's got too much going on.

Here's Lebron on the day he first got selected in the NBA draft, dressed like an old-style plantation owner -- except more so. (Granted, he was just out of high school at this point.)

Lebron in a more sophisticated version of plantation chic:

Perhaps it was cool that evening, which would explain the scarf which matched his pocket hankie. But did he really need those sunglasses when the sun was no longer out?

Lebron accepting an ESPY award:

(Wouldn't it have been better to save the Santa Claus outfit for when he was giving, rather than receiving, something?)

Those custom suits don't come cheap: Lebron probably spends more on his clothes per annum than a schoolteacher's entire salary. Which is a pretty big price to pay just to look foolish.

Lebron's former teammate Dwyane Wade is another clotheshorse. Here's Dwyane looking sharp:

And he does look sharp. But that double-breasted vest alone makes him look as if he's trying too hard.

Here's Dwyane in a bow tie.

If a white guy wore that outfit, you'd just assume he was gay. But when it's a 6' 4" black guy bursting with muscle, you think, ah, a professional athlete.

Here's Dwyane dressed up as an English country squire --

-- except that no country squire actually puts that much effort into his clothes. (Maybe Dwyane gets a pass on this outfit since it seems to have been GQ, and not himself, who dressed him.)

Here's Dwyane as a college professor.

(He'd definitely be teaching one of the humanities in that outfit.)

Some of these getups are so overdone they graduate from "outfit" to "costume," since they almost seem to be about trying to become a different person.

Dywane sporting yet another bow tie.

Given that he wasn't wearing glasses in any of the other shots, one has to assume that those lenses are accessorial rather than corrective.

His look is actually not all that far from Urkel's:

The recent trend in black fashion toward buttoned up shirts, bow ties, sweaters, and glasses-as-props must have started out as an I'm-so-cool-I-can-get-away-with-dressing-nerdy kind of thing. Then it just sort of morphed into a fashion statement of its own.

And if there's one group that can get away with wearing these types of clothes without coming across nerdy or wimpy, it's pro athletes. They still look foolish, though.

Dwyane making yet another bold statement.

(All I can say is, Dwyane must be extremely confident in his masculinity.)

Dwyane on his way to a game:

It takes a major effort to color coordinate not only your pants, your shirt, and your sweater, but also your shoes, bag, and even earphones. Excess color coordination seems to be a theme among the pros.

And here's one, final shot of Dwyane, ready for work:

(Seriously, who pushes his jacket sleeves up?) And was that watchband custom made to match his suit or was he able to buy it retail?

The basketball player many consider the greatest of all time was Michael Jordan. He seemed to consider himself one of the greatest dressers as well. But he, too, always seemed to be trying too hard:

Jordan, weirdly, always favored big, boxy suits that looked too large for him. The shame of it was that he had a great body for clothes: a lean, muscular 6'5." But the body got lost in those huge outfits, and the effect was always that of a kid wearing his father's clothes.

Here's Michael swimming in yet another suit:

(The all-red motif seems to be a thing among the pro ballers too.)

Michael showing his moves in a topcoat.

Michael in an outfit which looks strangely like a bib:

No matter how outlandish the outfit, Jordan's jackets were always, like his ego, too big. One can't blame him for the ego: he was constantly fawned over wherever he went. His outfits were another matter.

Even his casual look was baggy. Here's Jordan-as-Shaft:

Evidently, when your ego is past the point of no return, you feel that even your clothes should be larger than life.

Other NBA stars have followed suit. Here's Anthony Davis sporting contrasting lapels:

Chris Paul:

The watch is a little too big, the pocket hankie a lot too big, and the color coordination overdone; but at least he's wearing his shades outdoors.

Chauncy Billups, who must be a Michael Jordan fan, in a suit/caftan:

A diamond earring seems to be de rigueur among NBA stars.

Damian Lillard:

DeMarcus Cousins:

DeMarcus seems to be another Urkel fan.

Kevin Durant, making a statement with suit and sneakers and gold chain:

Many NBA players, like modern artists, seem to want to be different merely for the sake of being different.

Dwight Howard:

Nick Young:

(No point in wearing an outfit like that and being sheepish about it.)

Here, for purposes of comparison, is the Joker:

His face is a little jarring, but the loud jacket, boutonniere, bow tie, and garish yellow shirt with two sets of buttons wouldn't be out of place in the NBA.

Another style icon is boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr:

(Contrasting lapels is yet another theme among pro athletes.)

Here's Floyd doing his Guys and Dolls gangster (gangsta?) thing:

Floyd being color coordinated:

Floyd receiving an award:

Are his eyes so sensitive to light he has to wear sunglasses indoors? Or is he just protecting them from the light reflecting off that suit?

And here's Floyd putting on a belt that would look understated with some of the above outfits:

You may be thinking, well, Floyd is a boxer, and it's not really fair to use a boxer as an example of black fashion sense. But, that wasn't always the case.

Here are Muhammad Ali and Wilt Chamberlain in the late 1960's, showing that it is far better to clown around on purpose than be made to look a clown by one's suit.

One of the biggest fashion plates ever was Deion Sanders. At the peak of his earning power, Sanders reportedly spent over four million dollars on suits.

Here's Deion with his (now ex-) wife:

(That has to be one of the few suits that could work at both a casino and a funeral home.)

Neon Deion:

Deion's huge smile always helped. Lebron and Dwyane and Michael take fashion seriously. Deion, too, was a peacock; but he also seemed to almost be amused by his clothes, which made him seem -- rightly or wrongly -- to be in on the joke.

Here's Deion wearing the above suit in reverse:

Once again, Deion's smile almost seems to be saying, yeah, I know I look foolish, but this is fun, so what the hell -- you only live once.

Here's Deion making an appearance on Saturday Night Live:

Were this anyone else, I might think he was playing the role of a priest in a skit. But it's Deion, so I'll assume he was just delivering the monologue.

Deion in an uncharacteristically untucked in moment:

Or maybe that's just part of the look, it's hard to tell.

Deion-as-traffic cone:

And Deion demonstrating, yet again, that he knows how to enjoy life far, far better than you or I:

After the early 1960's, the gradual shift in black fashion sense away from traditional white styles seemed to parallel the shift in black names. At around the same time blacks adopted dashikis and let their hair grow into Afros and (a few) started wearing 1970's pimp style outfits with gaudy jewelry, more names like Dontay and Jamal and Antwan started to appear as well.

It was all part of a calculated effort to differentiate themselves from stodgy old white standards. It's understandable, although from the outside looking in, it seems misguided.

The dashikis and Afros have long since departed, but the pro athletes still have their own sense of style. These days, it seems to consist of taking traditional white clothing and making it flashier. So they add touches that, in the end, make them look silly to most of us.

But after you look at enough of these pictures, the realization sinks in that they would actually feel foolish wearing a regular, boring old white guy's suit. Their teammates might even mock them for doing so.

A lot of whites don't realize that Urkel, and the Carlton Banks character on Fresh Prince of Bel Air, weren't just about being nerdy. They were about making fun of whites -- and of blacks who wholeheartedly bought into white fashions and aspirations.

Also, what do you expect these pro athletes to do with their spare time and obscene disposable incomes? Read the New Yorker? No, they're going to go shopping for clothes to adorn themselves with. (In a way, their mentality is similar to that of rich, spoiled housewives.)

And, as with those housewives, the adorning inevitably turns into a sort of competition, resulting in ever more outrageous styles.

Of course, fashion, like beauty, is subjective. So, passing judgment -- as I've just done -- is equally silly.

But whatever your taste, anyone who pays too much attention to his clothes ends up looking foppish.

You'll never see a twittier-looking bunch of guys than in the Style section of the NY Times any Sunday. (Weirdly, the men most attracted to overdressing seem to be either whites at the effeminate end of the spectrum or blacks at the masculine end.)

Anyway, Lebron can dominate on the court, and when he does, he looks rugged and masterful. But when his clothes call attention to themselves, he looks foolish -- in a peculiarly black pro athlete sort of way.

Paul Krugman's face

Commenter "Rifleman" said after the post about Jeb Bush:

Jeb has the condition known as "punchable face." It's a condition that is different from being merely ugly or weird looking or pathetic looking.

I thought that a perfect description.

Someone happened to mention economist Paul Krugman to me today, and it occurred to me he suffers from the same condition:

Krugman may even have a more serious case than Bush has. 

Will marriage continue to evolve?

An AP article yesterday described a possible new (old) twist in the evolution of marriage:

HELENA, Mont. – A Montana man said Wednesday that he was inspired by last week's U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage to apply for a marriage license so that he can legally wed his second wife.

Nathan Collier and his wives Victoria and Christine applied at the Yellowstone County Courthouse in Billings on Tuesday in an attempt to legitimize their polygamous marriage. Montana, like all 50 states, outlaws bigamy — holding multiple marriage licenses — but Collier said he plans to sue if the application is denied.

"It's about marriage equality," Collier told The Associated Press Wednesday. "You can't have this without polygamy."

While the conservative news outlets that have carried this story have mostly refrained from editorial comment, it's hard not to sense an undertone of "See, we told you so!"

Collier cleverly framed his application as being "about marriage equality." He's using the language of the Left to try to achieve something most commonly associated with an extremely traditionalist group, the Mormons.

In fact, Collier is himself a former Mormon who was excommunicated for his (de facto) polygamy.

So far, liberals have not weighed in on Collier's application. After the celebrations of this past week, they don't want to sound as if they're saying, "Well, we're not for complete marriage equality, only for our form of it."

But, if you're going to expand the definition of marriage to accommodate different lifestyles, why not polygamy, as long as it's entered into by consenting adults?

It's pretty safe to assume that accommodating this particular lifestyle would not sit well with the feminist wing of the progressives. If there were such a thing as polyandry without polygamy, the feminists might support it. But allowing rich, piggish men the luxury of multiple wives? Nah.

What would happen in divorce? If there are three wives, each of them can't get a half. And making the Mormons feel justified has never been high on the liberal to-do list either.

On top of that, Collier doesn't exactly look like the kind of guy whom liberals like to support. He's a 40-ish heterosexual white guy, and neither the bolo tie in the top photo nor the camouflage shirt above quite say, "I voted for Barack."

So….the silence will probably continue.

Full disclosure: I've always supported gay marriage, having seen it as a matter of equal rights. (I know most readers of this blog disagree, but so be it.) And as a libertarian at heart, I'm inclined to let people do as they want in their personal lives.

That said, I'm not sure how I feel about polygamy. 

Are we hard-wired for rape?

Has rape been an evolutionarily viable strategy for most of human history? It's not a question you hear asked, but it's worth thinking about. A clear-eyed view of evolution -- how we have been selected for traits which best help us spread our genes into the next generation -- is necessary for a full understanding of human nature.

Let me emphasize at the outset that this post is not in any way a justification of rape; it is merely raising the question of whether, in the past, rape has been an evolutionarily adaptive behavior.

Human evolution has been going on for roughly four million years, and for the vast majority of that time we were hunter gatherers, or, as the cartoons sometimes depict us, "cavemen." Agriculture only started around 12,000 years ago, and didn't become widespread for long thereafter. The industrial revolution really only started 300 years ago.

So what we think of as "civilization" has been around for only a very tiny fraction of our existence, and has had only a negligible effect on our evolution, and on our instincts.

What we have been conditioned to be for most of our four million years of evolution is cavemen. In fact, many of our instincts evolved even before we were human, back when we were still our common ancestor with chimpanzees. (We do share 99% of our genes with chimps.)

So we are essentially cavemen -- in a technological age.

Basic evolutionary strategies are fairly simple. For females, maximizing their reproductive output meant having a man who would stick around after mating with her and help provide resources (read: meat) and protection for her and her offspring. It also meant choosing a man who was most able -- and most likely -- to do those things.

For males, this meant spreading their seed as widely as possible, by mating with as many women as they could. Men could do this in two ways: by seducing women, whatever that entailed back in the caveman days, or by raping them.

The evolutionary upside of raping a woman was, obviously, more offspring. The downside was that you might be killed by vengeful fathers or brothers or mates. Or, by your victim, after you had dozed off. So, we would have been selected to rape only when there was little chance of being killed in revenge.

Thus, we were also selected to be discerning enough to know whether the risk of retaliation in any given situation was high or low.

Back in the caveman days, vengeful relatives, or other men who desired the same woman were basically the only risks you had to face if you were inclined to rape. There were no police forces, no court systems, no jail sentences, no DNA kits, and no feminists waving placards.

Of course, there were no such restraints on vengeful relatives or romantic rivals, either. It was simply….the jungle. And the "law of the jungle" prevailed.

So, was rape a viable evolutionary strategy? At times -- when the risk of revenge was low -- the answer has to be, yes. 

This is probably why the incidence of rape among conquering armies is so high. When your army has prevailed, the risk of retaliation by a member of the defeated enemy is low. Sacking, killing, and looting are usually followed by raping.

Rape is a low investment evolutionary strategy, meaning, you probably wouldn't stick around to help raise the offspring that resulted from such an act. But, you did get to possibly impregnate an otherwise unwilling female, who might manage to raise that offspring to maturity on her own. 

It's a pretty sure bet that a lot of your ancestors were products of rape, which means that a lot of your ancestors were rapists. Go back far enough and it's inevitable. Ergo, you are carrying the genes -- and instincts -- of a lot of rapists.

Rape is certainly a common enough fantasy among both men and women -- as Bernie Sanders once pointed out -- to think it's somehow wired into our brains.

Let me emphasize, once again, I'm not condoning rape. It is, unquestionably, morally repugnant.

But that is an entirely different matter from the question of whether evolutionary selection has favored rapists -- under the right circumstances.

Greece

The Greeks tried to play brinksmanship, and it looks as if that strategy may backfire.

Alexis Tsipras seems to see himself as wily Odysseus, tricking his enemies (i.e., people who have lent Greece money) by virtue of his superior intelligence.

In reality, he's just Bernie Madoff, selling worthless pieces of paper the Greeks have neither the ability nor inclination to make good on.

Over 50 percent of the doctors in Greece declare incomes of less than $14,000 a year. With tax avoidance so rampant (and doctors are just one, obvious example) it's not surprising that the government can't remain solvent.

I don't know what the solution is, but I certainly wouldn't be inclined to lend them any more money.

The problem is, if the European Union doesn't extend more credit, and boots them from the EU, the Russians will swoop in and lend them money. But Putin knows the Greeks are not money-good, and would only do this to get something in return: a place to put a naval base. That's a headache the Europeans don't want.

So, it's an impossible situation. All because the Greeks are irresponsible and don't pay their taxes.

Hollywood vs. Richard Matt, Part II

The NY Post ran a fairly lengthy article about the Dannemora prison escape today, with more colorful examples of Richard Matt's sociopathy. Some excerpts (with my comments in parentheses):

‘Ricky’ Matt

Even as a child, Richard Matt was menacing. “He would terrorize kids on the bus,” Randy Szukala, a former chief of police for North Tonawanda, told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. “Friends of mine knew him. He would just terrorize people. Even in elementary, junior high, he had issues.”

(If you start terrorizing people in elementary school, your path in life is pretty well set early on. A lot of the psychology textbooks say you can't diagnose sociopathy before the age of 18; but character emerges pretty early on.)

Matt was arrested eight times, from 1985 to 1991, on everything from misdemeanor harassment to felony assault. “One time he beat up a girl pretty bad,” Tonawanda Police Capt. Frederic Foels told the paper….

(Hard to picture George Clooney beating the crap out of Jennifer Lopez in Out of Sight; or Tim Robbins having actually beaten up his wife before being falsely convicted of murder.)

In 1993, Matt was back in prison for attempted burglary. He did three years, but violated parole once out and wasn’t released again until 1997. That year, Matt was hired by William Rickerson, a Tonawanda man who had a small business re-selling nearly expired food. Matt lasted just a few months before getting fired, and so one snowy night that December, he and ­accomplice Lee Bates attempted to rob Rickerson, then 76.

They bound Rickerson with duct tape and beat him repeatedly, even though he insisted he had no money stashed. The two men ate pepperoni pizza, drank wine and then, as Bates would later testify, Matt dumped the rest of the wine over Rickerson, who was dressed only in pajamas. Then Matt tore off Rickerson’s toupee, shoved it in his pocket and put him in their trunk.

(Exhibiting a normal appetite during the commission of a violent crime is a distinctly sociopathic trait. Most people in such a situation would be far too upset to even think about eating, but if you're utterly remorseless, even committing murder simply don't affect you.)

They drove for nearly 30 hours, crossing state lines. At one point, Matt opened the trunk and bent Rickerson’s fingers back until they broke. Eventually, Matt killed Rickerson with his bare hands, breaking the man’s neck. Then he dismembered the body with a hacksaw and threw the remains in the Niagara River.

(Try to imagine just bending a 76-year-old's fingers back until they break. What kind of person would have the stomach for that?)

A few weeks later, Rickerson’s remains washed up, and Matt told his half-brother, Wayne Schimpf, that he was in trouble and needed to leave town. “I remember his words,” Schimpf later testified. “ ‘I can do another seven years, but I can’t do life.’”

Matt asked for Schimpf’s car. Schimpf refused and would testify that Matt said: “You’re my brother. You’re my blood. I love you, but I’ll kill you.”

(A sociopath's definition of "love" is a little different from most people's.)

Matt took the car and made his way to Mexico where, in 1998, he was imprisoned for stabbing an American engineer to death in a bar. He spent nine years in prison there before his unexpected extradition to the United States in 2007. Mexican authorities simply put Matt on a plane.

(Previous accounts had merely said that Matt had killed a man in a bar fight; the fact that he pulled a knife is illuminative.)

“The United States had a deal with the Mexican government to extradite a drug-cartel kingpin,” veteran court reporter Rick Pfeiffer told the Democrat and Chronicle. “He was being flown back to Texas and . . . this second guy gets off the plane. It took federal marshals almost a day to figure out who this guy was. There had been no discussion with the American government. He had just been such a difficult prisoner — if you can imagine a guy who seemed too difficult to stay in a Mexican prison.”

(Mexican prisons have a reputation for being some of the harshest around; that they would just disgorge an American prisoner because they couldn't handle him is almost hard to believe.)

Matt returned with metal front teeth and a bullet wound — sustained, he said, while attempting yet another escape.

(Metal front teeth in and of themselves are no indication of character, but in Matt's case they did seem to add to his fearsomeness.)

His trial lasted one month, and it took the jury only four hours to find him guilty. He was sentenced to 25 years to life, which he had been serving at Clinton. “Of all the cases I’ve tried,” said prosecutor Joseph Mordino, who had 250 homicides behind him, “this would top my list for the death penalty.”

(Mardino's statement speaks for itself.)