Martin Marks in Esquire’s Big Black Book
When I first started playing soccer in the early '90s, my father used to tell me stories about his teenage league football in '50s Manchester. Back then, they practiced with a soccer ball made of real leather, which, when waterlogged with Northern England's mud and ice, became so heavy that it could break ribs. He wore leather boots plated at the tips with steel toe caps. To break them in, he'd tightly lace them and then stand in a bathtub filled with hot water for an hour before spending another hour marching around the house, contouring them to his feet. Still, he considered himself lucky. Turn-of-the-century factory workers kicked the ball around wearing wooden work clogs.
How far we've come since the 19th century, when soccer jerseys actually hailed from Jersey in the Channel Islands, their water resistance due to the oils found in a sheep's unprocessed fleece, and players wore Donegal-tweed knickerbockers. Last summer, World Cup competitors raced up and down fields wearing ultralight, ultrastrong cleats (made in part from carbon fiber) and hightech polyester jerseys equipped with features like ClimaCool and Dri-FIT. Tennis players, meanwhile, have traded in the white cotton shirts of René Lacoste for the mesh-and-Velcro extravaganzas of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. Professional golfers, once under the cool, patrician influence of Walter Hagen, seem hell-bent on dressing more and more like extras from Star Trek. Today every sport worth playing requires cutting-edge clothes that would look and feel utterly alien to our grandfathers, and from courses and courts to playing fields around the world, men of sport have somehow ceased to be known as men of style.