The Genius of Dr. Jack

By Dan Covell

Autumn is a very busy time of year on the American sporting calendar, October especially so. Traditionally, Major League Baseball’s playoffs and World Series have garnered the spotlight during the month, but the weekly contests in the National Football League and across all levels of college football are now given equal, if not greater, import.

The ever-expanding universe of professional sports now means that the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, each playing over 1,200 regular season contests plus dozens of playoff games, commence their schedules in October, cranking it back up just a few months after each league crowned its champions for the previous campaigns.

Autumn is also a busy time for us Ivy Stylers as we switch over our wardrobes to tweeds, wool crewnecks, and wide wale cords as the hot and steamy summer fades. Readers of this space will note that the author has written recently about the sideline attire of NFL and college football coaches. Long ago during games, coaches would prowl the sidelines wearing odd jackets or suit and tie, fedoras or homburgs, donning Chesterfield coats as the schedule ran into November and December. In the 1990s, NFL Properties, the league’s licensing arm, moved to use coaches as models to promote their nascent athleisure line of apparel, and the attractive looks seen on coaches up to that point abruptly disappeared. The dress code for today’s college football coaches has devolved in much the same manner.

In the sideline apparel choices of the other American pro sports league coaches, baseball has always been an outlier. Since certain members of coaching staffs are on the field during games as base coaches, baseball’s managers and coaches have, with the exception of long-past figures like the Philadelphia Athletics’ Connie Mack, donned the same uniforms as worn by their players. Hockey coaches, both pro and college, are mostly still wearing what we would call professional dress, and to my eye mostly suits rather than odd jackets. The climate of playing a game on ice, while even indoors, likely contributes to the fact that today’s NHL coaches dress much like Toe Blake, Punch Imlach, and Lester Patrick, their suited and hatted predecessors from the previous century.

Basketball, however, has followed the same sorry sartorial path as football. This is especially sad because during the late 60s and early 70s, the outfits donned by basketball teams and coaches were part of a florid and flowery explosion of color and design. Baseball was the first to break from its stolid uniform design past, as explained by writer Todd Radom. “I was fascinated by the visual culture of sports,” he writes. “Lucky for me, as a young baseball fan, I hit the lottery: My formative sports-aesthetics years came in the 1970s, the game’s most vibrant, colorful decade, with its smorgasbord of audacious and often garish uniforms. Bold graphics and sensationally showy colors were synthesized into some of sports history’s most memorable uniforms — a golden age of sports identity.”

Radom has nominated as “the greatest ugly sports uniform of all time” those debuted by the Houston Astros in 1975. “The pullover jerseys featured an alternating series of horizontal stripes,” Radom describes, “rendered in shades of orange, yellow and red, the word ‘Astros’ spelled out above in clean, unembellished sans serif letterforms. A Texas-size navy blue star, nine and one-eighth inches high and placed squarely against the left side of the players’ bellies, punctuated the look.” Many observers immediately panned the uniforms, which had been designed by the well-established McCann-Erickson advertising agency, comparing the garb to “a television test pattern,” “rainbow guts,” or a “tequila sunrise.” In addition, the Astros opted to wear the same uniform home and away. “This made perfect sense,” concludes Radom, “as there was certainly no mistaking the Astros for any other team. Say what you will, the Astros looked like no other team, before or since – a singular, instantly recognizable identity … Let New York have its austere, pinstriped Yankees, the visual embodiment of old money and Wall Street — Houston represented the future.”

I must take slight issue with Radom, however. The Astros’ uniform was far from ugly; it was salutary. The American Legion baseball team on which I played back home in Waterville, Maine – nestled deep in the heart of Red Sox country – adopted the Astros’ design in shades of blue, and the team in next door Fairfield wore a version in greens. Wearing those uniforms not only made us feel like we were big leaguers, but also that we were part of the future, a future that was happening right now.

Hockey and basketball also contributed to the “golden age of sports identity,” spurred on by the World Hockey Association (WHA) and the American Basketball Association (ABA), rival leagues that sprouted up during this time. These newcomers embraced color and design concepts as a way to differentiate from the established competitor leagues and to court new fans. Along with the three-point shot, the ABA’s red-white-and-blue game ball is likely the league’s most enduring visual design contribution. In fact, the Women’s National Basketball Association keeps that rebel spirit alive today with its orange-and-white version. In a far-less memorable game equipment innovation attempt, the WHA experimented with a blue puck. Uniforms and team names trended mod as well: the ABA’s Floridians, which began as the Miami Floridians but then dropped the city name as it barnstormed around the state in a desperate search for an interested fan base, sported a black, magenta, and orange color scheme.

While NBA teams occasionally rekindle fan interest in these long-ago looks with throwback uniform nights, NBA coaches have not. As the author wrote in this space a while back, the Covid-19 pandemic gravely wounded professional dress in American life writ large and dealt a severe blow to the supporting retail industry. Another part of the collateral damage it wrought was snuffing out the practice of pro and college basketball coaches dressing as business professionals during games. In its place, according to writer Josh Robbins of The Athletic, has emerged “a golden age of comfort and convenience, a decade dominated by quarter-zips, not bespoke suits … And if league officials ever revert to requiring more formal attire, more stringent regulations would most likely occur over the objections of the majority of league head coaches and their assistants.” Robbins notes that Cleveland Cavaliers coach Kenny Atkinson is “one of the few voices in the wilderness” on the topic. “I would prefer us wearing suits,” he says. “I just think it gives a certain aesthetic. I don’t know if that’s old school … but I miss that. I wish we’d bring it back.”

A quick scan of Instagram shows us what we and Atkinson are missing. Take a look at any number of sport history and/or fashion sites that feature coaches’ apparel, and you’ll see for yourself. Yes, the somewhat regrettable influence on leisure suits on this bygone era is palpable, but more edifying are the magnificent mixed colored schemes of lime greens, blues and yellows, tartan jackets and trousers shouting all the more loudly thanks to the highly chromatic synthetic fibers from which they were woven, the bell bottoms slacks, the expanded use of denim. In fact, the most inspired implementation of that hardy fabric was by Larry Brown, then the head coach of the Denver Nuggets. Brown combines a pair of denim overalls worn over a patchwork faded denim shirt. Such looks earned Brown, who coached for decades with success in college and the pros, including a national championship at the University of Kansas in 1988 and an NBA championship with the Detroit Pistons in 2004, the well-deserved sobriquet, “the Modfather.”

But any such honorific bestowed on a coach from that fantastic era should also go to Brown’s fellow Naismith Hall of Fame inductee, John Travilla “Dr. Jack” Ramsey. A Navy frogman during World War II and a college and pro coach for more than four decades, most notably with the NBA’s Portland Trailblazers, Dr. Jack earned an Ed.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and had a post-coaching career as a broadcaster. For all this, Dr. Jack earned his enshrinement, but it is for his on-court apparel that he deserves his own wing in the actual Hall in Springfield, Massachusetts.

For a college or pro basketball coach, the area in front of the bench is not unlike at catwalk. Hoop coaches tend to strut and fret across this stage imploring their charges to victory and gesticulating towards referees to alert them of the perceived errors of their ways. It was and is the perfect place for coaches to show up and show out.

Dr. Jack did it and did it his way, liberally implementing tartans, usually in his slacks but occasionally with jackets. He favored colorful shirts, both solid and prints, and mostly an open collar look, and in the 70s that meant very wide collars indeed. He would also rep an occasional turtleneck, another paragon piece of the era.

But Dr. Jack’s masterpiece, worn while coaching the Buffalo Braves sometime between 1973 and 1976, is a both a nod and a wink to summertime Ivy Style. Where to begin? It’s all so good. First, there’s the crested blazer, once a favorite with pro and college sports teams for wearing on road trips, a practice that sadly has long since faded. Dr. Jack’s version is a two-button, light-blue model with flapped patch pockets and the wider lapels endemic to the time, with the Braves’ team logo on the left chest. The blazer is worn over a light blue-and-white gingham dress shirt, worn open collar style. The pants are white with a light blue-and-gold tartan, somewhere between the St. John’s and MacGrath tartans. The shoes are the final, absolutely perfect touch: off-white canvas slip-ons with what appears to be a rubber sole, something close to a Sperry Top-Sider Striper II. If Lilly Pulitzer were to add this look to their current menswear lineup, it would sell out in hours, if not minutes.

And with apologies to Allen Iverson, this classic occurred while Dr. Jack was coaching in Buffalo – not Palm Beach, not Palm Springs, not Hyannis Port, not the Hamptons. We’re talking about Buffalo. Who knows of what he’d been sartorially capable had he been coaching in Boston, New York, or DC?

In 2023, the Trailblazers, who won their only NBA title in 1977 with Dr. Jack at the helm, wore an alternate uniform with tartan accents as a tribute to his success, his personal style, and his affection for the patterned cloth. They called it “plaid,” but in this case, who are we to quibble?

Perhaps the Cavaliers’ Kenny Atkinson is right. Maybe the business professional look for pro basketball coaches will never return. It is true, however, that in college basketball, a few male and female coaches continue to dress like they are doing something important rather than running errands on the way home from a spin class. Yale University men’s basketball coaches still dress up, so kudos to head coach James Jones and his staff, Brandon Sherrod, Matt Kingsley and Justin Simon.

Is it because the J. Press store on Elm Street is a mere five-minute walk away? In fact, as you walk out of J. Press’s front door you can look north and see the tower of the Gothic Revival slab that is the Payne Whitney Gymnasium, in which is nestled the Bulldogs’ home court, the John J. Lee Amphitheater. Also, Yale has won four of the last five Ivy League titles, with 107-46 record in that span, and knocked off Auburn University in the first round of the 2024 NCAA tournament. Coincidence? You be the judge.