ALL I CAN SAY is, the thing I wanted most when I was a kid was to be a big-league ballplayer, and the last thing I wanted was for magazines to run pictures of me in my underwear. To walk through the lunchroom and have people nudge each other and say, “He pitches for the Orioles,” would have been very easy to live with. To walk through the lunchroom and have people nudge each other and say, “Did you see him—in little tight underpants?” would have been hard.
So what does a kid think today when he sees Jim Palmer of the Orioles, the three-time Cy Young Award winner, posing in magazine ads—and even on a poster—for Jockey shorts? In some ads Palmer wears matching T-shirts, but the poster shows him in nothing but Jockey’s Élance briefs. The world now knows that Palmer throws right, plays tennis left (to protect his pitching arm) and dresses (an unusual case, but there it is) right down the middle.
In locker rooms over the last years, to be sure, I have noticed more and more pro athletes wearing other than run-of-the-mill underwear—some of it even briefer than Élance. Some of it apparently satin. The pioneers in this, as in so many locker-room style (and linguistic) trends, were black players, who have tended, generally, to eschew roomy attire—Muhammad Ali’s and Joe Frazier’s ring shorts being obvious exceptions. I can remember when a player’s conversion to bikini pants might inspire his more reactionary roommate to loudly demand a chaperone. Today in clubhouses you see fewer and fewer boxer shorts or plain modest Jockey shorts like the kind Palmer’s mother bought him when he was a boy.
Palmer told the “Today” show’s Jane Pauley: “What I am seeing is that after 229 victories I’m going to be more famous for my underwear ads than for throwing a baseball.” He didn’t sound too chagrined. “Most [men’s] underwear is bought by women,” Palmer continued. “I guess that’s why they used me in the ad.” (If men bought most men’s underwear, whom would they have used? Yogi Berra?)
At this point I am going to make a terrible admission, right in front of everybody: No one has ever bought me any fancy underwear. Are there actually, in real life, moments when the woman hands the man a little something flimsy and says, “Would you … try these on … for me?”?
According to Jockey International (a company which incidentally has its headquarters in Kenosha, Wisconsin), only 3 percent of all of Jockey’s underwear sold in 1963 was “fashion underwear,” but today the figure is 40 percent and as the 1980s progress it should exceed 50. During this decade, in other words, only a minority of the men’s underwear in circulation will be just, you know, underwear. The rest—let’s call things by their right names—is going to be men’s lingerie.
“The Jockey Statement Is Bold,” reads the caption of one of Palmer’s ads. I don’t know. Maybe it’s okay for a ballplayer to make bold statements in his underwear, but surely not with it. “He’s not real talkative. He leads by example in the clubhouse. He lets his underwear speak for him.”
Jockey press releases also make the point that Palmer is an “All-American, All-Around Sportsman.” For one thing, Palmer is married to his high-school sweetheart. “There is nothing wrong,” says an ad person connected with the Jockey campaign, “with an American family man being sexy.” In an earlier campaign, not only Palmer but several other athletes, including Pete Rose, Steve Carlton, Steve Garvey and Lou Brock of baseball, Jo Jo White and Jamaal Wilkes of basketball, Jim Hart, Tony Dorsett and Ken Anderson of football, and Denis Potvin of hockey, posed in their shorts. Those guys seem like All-American, All-Around Sportsmen too, but they didn’t get the solo-poster treatment. Maybe Rose’s being cited in a paternity suit was felt to reflect on his underwear. Maybe Brock insisted on tying in underwear with the Brock-a-brella, a combination hat and umbrella product that he has promoted. My suspicion is that Palmer just looked more like Robert Redford in underwear than any of the others.
And who am I to complain? Palmer is younger than I am, in better shape and, okay, probably better-looking. The Seattle Mariners’ wives voted him the sexiest man in baseball, and they never voted me anything. Of course you might think that the Mariners’ wives would have something better to do with their time, like exhorting their husbands to work on fundamentals.
Working ballplayers wear really neat underpants, which ought to be more widely available. These underpants are Bermuda-short length, more or less. Made of something like sanitary-stocking material, they are light, stretchy, and snug, but not so snug as to give either the wearer or his opponents’ wives impure thoughts. If I had a few pairs of those underwear, boy, I’d have them on all the time.
How would Jimmy Cannon have handled this story? “You’re Jim Palmer. You’re in a magazine and your shorts are getting smaller and smaller.” No. Jimmy Cannon couldn’t have handled this story. He would have thrown up his hands and lapsed into a few of his “Nobody asked me, but …” observations, such as, “I don’t like Boston because all the men look like me.”
If Jimmy Cannon couldn’t cover it, then the hell with it.