#Spatted cleats pro#

I was not out on the field to look good. I was there to get to work and put the ball in the endzone.

#Spatted cleats pro#

To be more specific, I suppose the article isn’t so much about a pair of socks as it is about one particular sock. A long gray sock with bright red and blue stripes and the remnants of the Atlanta Braves logo fading away at the shin. For those who have shot with me, they have more than likely seen me arrive on set wearing said sock, combined with another wholly unrelated one on the opposite foot, and wondered to themselves if the previous night had in fact allowed for me to get enough sleep. No doubt, they were made aware of the sock while I was contorting my body into any one of the pretzel-like positions I am known to take upon set in search of a better angle. Most who see the obvious fashion crime are likely too polite to inquire. Those who do brave the obvious question are likely to be on the receiving end of the story I’m about to tell you now.Īs you might imagine, this lonesome garment, like many of its kind, did indeed start life as part of a pair. Sadly, its brother has long since disappeared into the laundry bin of history, and he is all that remains. I didn’t just buy a single sock. In fact, I didn’t buy them at all. They were actually a gift from my sister sometime in the early 1980s when we were both of the age where a pair of socks might cost enough to put a serious dent in our respective allowances. But, it was Christmas, and holidays are what trips to Target were made for. I was never a huge baseball fan, but I was always a big sports fan, so it was a perfect gift from sister to brother. We were living in Nashville at the time, and Atlanta was the closest city with a pro team, so our local department stores would stock lots of Atlanta sports gear. Hence why this particular pair was so readily available.Īs years went by and I had moved to LA and grown into an appropriate image-conscious high school student, the rather gaudy old-school pair of socks were constantly pushed further and further towards the bottom of my dresser drawer. I was a star (in my own mind) high school football player by that point, after all. And the only time I would change out of my Karl Kani jeans or my Cross Colours overalls would be to slide on my football uniform carefully adorned with the ideal color of tights to add contrast to my pants and the perfectly structured face mask to compliment the shape of my navy blue helmet with the silver eagle wings. I don’t mean to say that I treated football as a fashion show. But at 16, I certainly spent inordinately more time trying to replicate the spatted cleats and shaded visors I saw all the pro players wearing than I did on perfecting my spiral.īut then, one day, I had a breakthrough. I can’t really remember what caused it. My performance on the field hadn’t dipped. I didn’t somehow stop being a self-conscious teenager. But it did suddenly occur to me that all this focus on how I looked on the field was somewhat superfluous to my reason for being there.