There are very few times I can remember feeling sorry for a Carolina athlete: when an injury ended a finally decent season for Chris Keldorf before the '97 Gator Bowl, Kevin Salvadori for once inexplicably being confused with teammate Henrik Rödl, and Henrik Rödl for forever being, well, Henrik Rödl.
But now, Hail Mary, full of grace, I have to empathize for a whole team of Tar Heels.
Monday, GoHeels.com gave a "sneak preview" (their words-apparently they realized it was a horror flick beforehand) of the new look for the men's hoops team, and quickly 13 guys and one Bersticker jumped to the top of my sympathy list.
In all honesty, there's only one thing that can be said about the new uniforms.
That thing is damn. Just... damn.
I came, I saw, I shuddered.
Veni, vidi, yikes.
Faster than Shammond Williams can whip out a hankie, the Tar Heels slipped to new levels of conference-wide revulsion.
If you missed it-and I pray to all that is good you did-I encourage you to drop everything (except this Chronicle) and run far, far away. Take your tapes of UNC '93 and just pretend this year's version is the same team (Have you ever seen Ed Geth and Brendan Haywood in the same place at the same time?).
But if you're brave enough to read on, do so at your own risk. Don't say I didn't warn you.
The biggest change in the uniform design (still featuring Alexander Julian argyle) is the replacement of the "North Carolina" that used to be bannered across the chest with an interlocking NC. The Jordan Jumpman also replaced the Nike Swoosh on the left shoulder (reportedly, the tucked in Swoosh symbol has been replaced by the somewhat less famous Sleepy Floyd 'D'oh man'" (See NCAA Championship, 1982)
Of course, it's deceptively aesthetic; it's even uglier than you first think.
And it's problematic.
The front of the jersey looks like it's the back, and that could spell big problems, as the local pro-Carolina "media" will have to waste that much more time deciding exactly where they should pucker up to.
At Duke, at least, we make it easy. Locate Duke, flip the player, pinpoint the name of the recruit rumored to turn pro, go two paces south and pucker moistfully.
Plus, the look ain't new.
If you've ever been to the Dean Dome and looked up at the ceiling, you might have noticed the same design on the 19-dickety-2 Carmichael jersey. (Then again, the Dean Dome has more laundry hanging from the ceiling than a Chinatown dry cleaner, so if you missed it, I understand.) Rumor is Julian is hard at work on a belt for the uniform and a new-fangled device for the inside of the building called the e-lek-trik light.
And the UNC faithful are up in arms.
Maybe it's because they know they missed a big chance to gain a leg up on their cross-15-501 rivals.
By refusing to put a logo on the back of their shorts, the Heels missed their shot. For whatever reason, it is a statistically proven fact that the Blue Devils struggle with teams that have stuff on their butts. Kentucky, Cincinnati-logos on the butt, victories over Duke. You can almost see Krzyzewski's brow furrow when the warmup pants come off and, bam, there's a little bit of posterial kryptonite.
Fortunately, we at Duke never have to worry too much about such a thing as a tasteless jersey debuting here. As you all know, we're run by a group of New Jerseyans, and nothing screams good taste quite like Bon Jovi.
All of sports, it seems, has as much need for taste as Calista Flockhart has for Richard Simmons' new workout video.
And UNC isn't the first.
Nothing, and that's a giant neon N-O-T-H-I-N-G, is quite as notorious as the experimental unitards N.C. State wore early in the 1989 season, best remembered as the year we found out that the Wolfpack in fact didn't have any, ahem, big men in the middle.
They weren't just ugly, they made the new UNC uniforms look like full-body Mona Lisas. Just sidle up next to someone at Brothers Pizza on Hillsborough Street and ask about the unitards. When you emerge from your coma, I'm sure they'll be happy to tell you.
Sadly, it wasn't a once-in-an ugly affair.
To make matters worse-and you can't make stuff like this up-N.C. State signed with L.A. Gear a few years later (one can imagine the offer from British Knight was equally tempting), debuting the famous exploding zag shorts that looked like something out of Screech's dresser drawer.
Mercifully, N.C. State has gotten a little wiser, but poor Todd Fuller, the Sisyphus of sorry shirts, went from one embarrassment to another. (See, Warriors, Golden State).
And the Rockets, pinstripes? Puh-leeze. They're supposed to make things look thin, but they don't seem to have had any effect on Charles Barkley's fat mouth.
Somewhere, probably in a budget cut to pay for Kevin Brown, taste became too expensive for sports.
Even baseball, dear baseball, has fallen.
Courtesy of Century 21's promotional turn forward the clock nights, 22 major league teams planned to emulate life in the early 21st century. (But, in the greatest act of divine intervention since Creation, Hurricane Floyd mercifully spared the Red Sox.) Thanks to Century 21, we all discovered that baseball in the year 2021 will be exactly the same, only much, much sillier.
And, with all the off-center logos, the world will apparently be tilted just slightly to the left. As far as I can tell, Earth will be weighed to one side by all the box scores that must refer to "stations" instead of bases (as in, yesterday first stationer William Buckner III led the Mets to the World, er Galaxy, Series title by snagging a Mookie Wilson, Jr. line drive and throwing out Keith Hernandez, still playing, at the third station), "sectors" instead of fields (as in the center sector fence is now a whopping 150 feet from home plate) and pods, upper and lower (Commissioner Albert Belle shortened the distance between the upper pod and lower pod, much to the chagrin of Cardinals' pitching coach Mark McGwire).
But the future is now for UNC.
And when we finish laughing (hopefully before the Mercury Mets battle the Pluto Pirates), we'll see that it stinks for the Blue Devils too. It's kind of like their prom date just showed up in Birkenstocks.
UPON FURTHER REVIEW is a weekly column written by a Chronicle sports columnist. It appears every Wednesday.
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