Forever Hoop Shorts
A Brief History of Invincibility
- Text: Ian Blair
- Illustration: Florian Pétigny
I am wearing them right now as I write. I lounge around the house in them most days (sitting on the couch, or maybe the daybed, or a cushioned chair on the balcony). I wore them as I fetched the newspaper (“LOOTING!”), as I sorted out the mail (a few bills, a galley, some near-expired coupons), as I shopped at the grocery store (jerk sauce, salmon, mangos). I’ve protested in them and slept in them. I’ve driven to the beach, exercised, swam in them. They are great for reading or listening to music or watching television. They’re perfect for completing household chores, like cleaning or watering plants, and perfect for discouraging you from getting out of bed.
Jennifer Packer, A Lesson in Longing, 2019 (oil on canvas, 108.5 × 137 inches).
2 Chainz once quipped: “Comin' up off of Too Short/my underwear was my hoop shorts.” Growing up, I wore a pair underneath my jeans every day. (Girbauds accommodated this quirk easily.) When asked why I did this I replied: “Gotta stay ready”—for a pick-up game, I meant. Looking back, it was a strange rationalization but, like many kids who are from where I’m from, I had convinced myself that a quick run was imminent, no matter the time of day. In actuality, I was hardly aware that I was wearing basketball shorts at all.
“Basketball shorts have always come from the future.”
They feel like nothing else primarily because they become a part of you, like a technology you pick up and cannot put down. Basketball shorts have always come from the future. When you pull them from a pile of freshly-washed laundry, shake them out, slip them on, they remind you how much of life is engineered. The material is responsible for the effect. Nylon is artificial, elastic, synthetic. Mesh allows your leg hair follicles to breathe.The fabric on my favorite pairs is made of “functional innovative technology,” which simply means one-hundred-percent polyester. Ironically, the technology—tightly-stitched, “moisture-wicking performance fabric,” the patent says—has more friction, not less. It wants you to feel the work it is doing for you.
The pronoun to which hoops shorts are ascribed—they—also feels right. Hoop shorts indicate solidarity in more ways than one. They are always with you, in formal and informal settings, in public and in private. But “they” are singular, too. You wear a “pair” the way you might wear a pair of pants, but without the fraught history. Short pants were once a diminutive of their more powerful, paternal kin. Boys apprenticed in shorts then graduated to become men who wore pants. Girls and women weren’t allowed to wear either. Pants, the story goes, were constructed of two separate pieces of material, invoking the phrase from the Latin paria, meaning “equal things.” Not so with hoop shorts. They faithfully live up to the adjective equal with half fabric.
Hoop shorts adjust to the contours of the body. Bend the knee and you’ll feel it. The material clings to your thigh while allowing your hamstrings to breathe. This, too, is by design. The crevice behind the knee produces sweat, especially during the warmer, summer months. Basketball shorts aid the wearer while crouching down under duress, as in a defensive stance. But, as Jordan Casteel’s “Miles and Jojo” (2015) illustrates, the shorts are just as useful when a person is relaxed. Casteel’s older subject sits on the floor leaning against a leather loveseat. There is no feeling of constriction, only allowance, give. The opening at the thigh suggests intimacy and exposure. By contrast, the shorts in Jennifer Packer’s painting “A Lesson in Longing” (2019) conceal, preserve an air of mystery about her subject. The man and his “32” jersey recede into a reddish haze. His shorts stand out—bold, distinguishable, green. But who he is, what he was, his interior life is unknown. Looking at him, I’m reminded how an article of clothing can impress its will upon memory.
Jordan Casteel, Miles and Jojo, 2015.
A brief history of an invincible garment:
1.
Derek Fordjour’s 2013 painting “FEARLESS FOURSOME”: When basketball was invented, in 1891, men and boys played the game in whatever they had available: long trousers, track suits, football clothes. “For the first few years, the basketball uniform was any suit that was used in the gymnasium,” James Naismith, the inventor of basketball wrote in Basketball: Its Origin and Development. Proper uniforms were an afterthought. In 1901, a catalogue suggested three types of pants as “correct” for the game: knee-length padded pants, that were, Naismith recalled, “almost exactly like those used on the football field,” short padded pants, and knee-length jersey tights. The four black subjects in “FEARLESS FOURSOME” capture this oddity of style. Taken together with other works, “Lotto” (2018) and “Alpha Physical Culture Club of Harlem” (2018), Fordjour presents 100 years of basketball shorts fashion.
2.
In 1991, Jalen Rose’s shorts seemed absurd to many: heavy, hanging off the bone. The inseams ran long, but Rose—and the other members of the Fab 5—tugged them even lower, nearly to the black socks. Rose had a magnificent snarl. He understood that more material could better contain his confidence. A longer inseam was a bigger canvas to work with. Later, Allen Iverson would use the space to lure in, and then crossover, his prey. Baggy shorts never seemed approved. They felt explicit. Esquire described the trend toward baggy shorts as a kind of “revolution.”
3.
Adam Sandler running errands on a Saturday morning. His uniform is perfectly white and male and rich, but not in the typical athleisure sense. His basketball shorts are more everyman, very cis, white man: pure security, insouciance. The look is suburban living room, with minimal décor. One can picture him drinking milk out of the carton in a La-Z-Boy. (Or guzzling milk in front of a wide-open refrigerator door.) He wore a similar pair in Grown Ups (2010), but the weekend errand aesthetic is less bourgeois Hollywood type. (He played an agent married to Selma Hayek who ignores his children’s calls to show interest in their youthful exploits.) Sandler doesn’t overextend; he wears you down by attrition. He once showed up to the Hillcrest Country Club, which charges $200,000 in initiation fees, dressed to play his favorite sport—basketball, not tennis—and asked if it made him look “too disgusting.” The maitre d’ replied he was “always welcome.”
4.
Princess Nokia wearing hers hiked up to the abdomen; the long inseams, stripes that run to the mid-calf—just like Sandler’s. The video for “Bart Simpson” and “Green Line” from her debut 1992 Deluxe seems to confirm this. Princess Nokia wears basketball shorts as she prepares to take a teenage pummelling (in dodgeball). Innocence transposes into teenage lackadaisicalness, then later rebellion. (“Trying hard to pay attention/but I have no real direction./So I say, 'yo, fuck this lesson',” the verse goes.)
5.
Rihanna. Black, designer shorts with a pair of white, perpendicular stripes. Tucked mesh top. Drawstring out, with heels and a dad hat.
6.
Young M.A, Tommy Hilfiger proselytizer.
7.
Jonah, the youngest boy in the film adaptation of Justin Torres’ We the Animals (2018), beating his bare chest in the woods upstate. Elsewhere in “Long Island, N.Y., USA, July 1, 1993” (1993), two black teens on a beach trip stand facing the Rineke Dijkstra’s lens. The waves crash behind them. The elder of the two wears a makeshift pair of shorts, held up by an oversized belt. The white hoop shorts feel more dexterous, light, unburdened, akin to those worn in Arcmanoro Niles’ paintings “The Gift of the Offspring” (2016) and “The Magic of Youth” (2016).
8.
Dennis Rodman, in Barkley L. Hendricks’s “Untitled” (1997), oil on canvas, sitting courtside surveying, contemplating, anticipating. The game has gotten away, but it is not over. He’s stewing. It doesn’t feel serene, meditative like Kobe Bryant, as rendered by Andrew Bernstein in “Kobe on Ice” (2010). Bryant pulls his shorts back as he dunks his feet in a cooler of ice in the locker room at Madison Square Garden.
9.
Billy Hoyle (Woody Harrelson) in White Men Can’t Jump (1992) wields his “slow, white chump” cargos—a distant cousin of those mid-length, polyester, nylon, mesh shorts worn by white, blue-collar men in the 1930s—as a weapon. The shorts are meant to deceive. All anti-style styles are campaigns of deception, but Hoyle’s shorts are particularly sly. They comment on his lack of cool while preserving the looseness that having cool entails. Cool, in White Men Can’t Jump, belongs to Black men on Venice Beach. Hoyle’s opposite Sidney Dean, played by Wesley Snipes, matches his shorts with his demeanor: kinetic, flashy, unrestricted.
10.
Between the 1960s and the early 1980s, style joined together with sex. On the court, that meant showing some thigh, as Richard Avedon’s “Lew Alcindor, basketball player, 61st Street and Amsterdam Avenue, New York, May 2, 1963” (1963) shows. Tyrone Dukes’ photo “Tiny Archibald, with Julius ‘Dr. J’ Erving #32 of the Westsiders” depicts the explosive result of an uninhibited upper-leg.
11.
Lebron James takes several steps without dribbling.
12.
Issa Rae’s fictional Issa Dee just smoked a blunt in her apartment in a head wrap and some hoop shorts. Seasons earlier she attempted to masturbate with a novel on her nightstand, in which a man, David Gardenhire, gives Lelah Turner a pair of hoop shorts after they have had sex at his riverfront loft in downtown Detroit.
In the movies, basketball shorts are primarily worn at the apex of drama, which often takes place on the court. Sometimes shorts add levity to otherwise intense emotional peaks. Who could forget the pair Fredro Starr swims in at the end of Sunset Park (1996), or the mismatching pair worn by Kyle Watson’s white teammate at the “Shoot Out” tournament in Above the Rim (1994)? Other times, shorts are used as a reminder that the stakes are high. While preparing for his contest against the Monstars, in Space Jam (1996), Michael Jordan sends a few Looney Tunes to fetch his Carolina practice shorts, which he wears under his uniform for good luck. At the pivotal game, the camera focuses on his Tune Squad trunks as Jordan soars to the rim at the buzzer. (The Monstars attempt to stunt his aerial ascent by pulling him down by the waist.) In Finding Forrester (2000) Rob Brown as Jamal Wallace plays basketball almost exclusively in baggy jeans. But hoop shorts make a brief cameo during the state championship game.
Perhaps this is why hoop shorts feel so fitting in our present moment of global cataclysm. The disasters keep compounding, one catastrophe on another. We have been in a prolonged period of stasis for months. (One hundred-plus days, in my case.) We have desired movement. In New York, they take to the bridges and the parks. In Los Angeles, protestors masterfully smash cars, leaving smoky, charred monuments to the fallen. Pig choppers terrorize from the sky. In the Times, Michiko Kakutani writes of weekdays and weekends that “blur into one long Möbius strip of time, spent in gym clothes we no longer wear to the gym.” It’s a dark thought precisely because it reveals how warped our world was before the shit hit the fan. In our perverse past of relentless productivity and work, we once marked time by changing what we wore to match our various routines.
I remember a simpler time. A weekday during my senior year of high school. We went to class, then to practice, then to the homies’ house, then out on the town. Later, we commandeered a parking lot to shoot dice and snap on each other and tell stories about our lives. I wore my hoop shorts the entire day. They didn’t organize my schedule or remind me that I had somewhere to be; they went along with me, moved as I moved, offered me possibility and the dream of flight.
Ian F. Blair is a writer from California
- Text: Ian Blair
- Illustration: Florian Pétigny
- Date: July 9, 2020
