Flipping through the channels the other night, I landed on ESPN Classic. To my delight, playing out an epic 5-setter were ginger-headed Boris Becker and tow-headed Stefan Edberg on the grass courts of Wimbledon. I was instantly transported to 1988, a time when hair was big, cars were loud and tennis pros played out actual points rather than the slugfests to which we’ve now become accustomed. Watching the legends, I also realized my disappointment with today’s tennis circuit isn’t due to the yawn-inducing corporate professionalism of the players, nor to the gargantuan Polo pony commercially trotting across the chest of every U.S. Open linesmen. The bone I have to pick is actually more like a wedgie — and the distinct lack thereof in men’s tennis and, come to think of it, professional men’s athletics.
Back in the ’70s and ’80s, when pills were for popping and there was no such thing as cabaret laws, wanton abandon not only pervaded nightlife, but also the length of athletic shorts. Sports stars from around the globe — Wilt Chamberlain, Pat Cash, Sugar Ray Leonard, Karch Kiraly — some of the manliest man to ever break a sweat, wore shorts roughly the size of two dinner napkins stitched together. The fashion was such that shorts — named eponymously for a reason — gave athletes the cloth space in which to run without any impediments. But these tight blood-cutters weren’t just hemmed for business, with inseams of up to two inches — they were party-length, giving these virile showmen plenty of legroom to play to the crowd. At one time in history, everyone agreed: the shorter the short, the manlier the man.
These days, I don’t think you could call what pro athletes wear shorts. Anything that hovers at or falls below the knee is not a short, it’s a shant: a short pant that shan’t be a short, nor a pant. Pro basketball players have actually taken the shant so far south that it’s merged with the athletic sock mid-calf, covering the leg in its entirety. Rafael Nadal actually chucked the shorts entirely in favor of capris. And while I can forgive the Europeans for many of their sartorial trespasses, these pantaloons were not only bad PR for Spain, they weren’t doing Rafa, or his legs — which happen to be cut like slices of alabaster — any favors.
Pro athletes are buff and broad, rich and famous, alpha and athletic, but rather than suit up in edgy, form-fitting athletic apparel, they look like they’re wearing coulottes. Compared with their taught-shirted and tight-shorted 80s uncles, pro athletes today appear downright chaste, exuding about as much virility as a Catholic schoolgirl in a skort. I don’t think a waist-down burka exists, but if someone designed it, I suspect it would look a lot like the shant.