Shut the Pluck Up! Clark Sheffield

The 2006 installment of March Madness was moving along nicely, tanking workplace efficiency and driving plasma TV sales.  I had managed not to take out a second mortgage to finance my bracket pool wagers, but had filled out a dozen nonetheless.  All was right with the world.  And then two things happened.  First: the March 27th issue of Sports Illustrated ran with a picture of exuberant Bradley Brave Marcellus Sommerville pulling his jersey from his chest in order to better display the moniker of his school.  Second: the Flipside D-League (which one can only hope will be better managed than Zeke’s version of the CBA) opened up.  I still have some anger built up from last March, but being a Flipsidian outcast, a Shoeless Joe Rose if you will, I had heretofore had no outlet for my rage.  Like a good can of Spam or, if you’re Hans Klopek, sardines, being kept bottled up for a year really didn’t hurt this article.  It didn’t really help either.

I’ve got to get something off my chest about basketball players getting something off their collective chest.  Of all the celebratory gestures in the world of sport, my new least favorite is the act of plucking the front of one’s jersey to display the team name more prominently.  This has now officially replaced the upside-down Omega, the inane double-fist temple bump of Q Richardson and D Miles, and the left-up-way-longer-than-necessary jump-shot follow through as the most annoying gesture in basketball. The pure idiocy of the act is enough to draw my ire, but there’s just so much more to it.  As with any widespread phenomenon, this one is made worse with each new player I see doing it. (Author’s note: Reggie Miller’s transgressions are forgiven in light of his past record of groundbreaking gesticulation.  Bowing to the crowd in Chicago and portending Latrell Sprewell’s arrival in New York with the hands-around-the-throat sign have earned him immunity.)  I knew for sure that it had gone too far when I witnessed the entire Michigan State women’s team performing the chest/bosom pluck while dancing ring-around-the-rosie style after their Final 4 win over the Lady Vols.  Like watching Mark Madsen dance, this psuedo-rythmic debacle was as intriguing as it was repulsive.  I had to choke back my gorge, though, when my imagination assaulted me with the thought of Kelli Roehrig pulling a Brandi Chastain.

If ignorance breeds fear, then I guess I hate the jersey pluck because I don’t understand it.  I find it hard to believe that an act spawned from a desire for self-promotion would actually be a selfless act of team promotion.  I cannot dunk a basketball, but all of my readers can rest assured that if I could and if I did so on someone’s head, I would not be worried about representin’ for my open gym squad.

Perhaps the movement came about because the jerseys are just too big nowadays.  The old Tom Chambers/John Stockton nuthuggers have given way to Hammer pants, so it would follow that the jerseys would need to expand in like fashion.  This would lead to more frequent adjustments, not unlike the shifting of your cup in baseball.  Past experience, though, has taught me otherwise.  I was playing on the Freshman basketball team in high school and we were getting ready for our game.  After recovering from a broken leg, one of my teammates was playing in his first contest of the season.  As all the other jerseys had been spoken for, he was left with the Oliver-Miller-size toga jersey.  While suiting up, he spoke the words that have since become my personal mantra: “Whuh-here, boys, this jersey swallers me.” No, seriously, he did say that.  But at no point during that game did I see him pluck at his chest to adjust his jersey, while at the same time shamelessly promoting an act of athletic accomplishment. It’s very possible, though, that I am blowing this all out of proportion.  In fact, I recently saw something that leads me to believe the trend might be coming to a close.  In the euphoric afterglow of the NCAA Tournament championship, UNC’s Rashad McCants eschewed the now commonplace practice of plucking at his jersey.  No, that banal expression of pride and exuberance was not enough to express his emotion.  Rather than follow in the fingerprints of so many before him, Rashad went the extra mile and just took the whole damn jersey off, holding it out for all to see.  While it wasn’t quite the Brandi Chastain-esque moment I had envisioned earlier, this demonstration and its portention of things to come was almost as frightening.  My greatest fear is that basketball will fall prey to this deadly form of gesticular cancer, for which there is no known cure.

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