Mauve-elously Mismatched: The Pernicious Problem of Poorly Paired Purples

[Editor’s Note: This post is part of Uni Watch’s 2024 Purple Amnesty Day content. For additional background and details, look here.]

By Kary Klismet

For the past four years, I’ve taken it as my solemn duty to report on one of the greatest scourges of the uni-verse – uniforms with multiple shades of purple. As Paul gets ready to depart from Uni Watch and we bid a fond farewell to the annual Purp Walk tradition, I’ve prepared one last foray into the phenomenon.

We’ve already examined mismatched purples in the NBA (twice) and MLB (along with a brief excursion into the related topic of teams that have mismatched shades of purple on purpose), so I thought it appropriate to explore whether this amethyst anarchy has afflicted other professional sports. Without further ado, let’s dive in!

NFL: Minnesota Vikings

Perhaps no team other than the Los Angeles Lakers is as well-known for its history of mismatched purples than the Minnesota Vikings. Paul touched on it last year in a Substack piece about the Vikings’ original uniform set, but that just scratched the surface. Indeed, the Vikings’ violet violations extend further than you may have realized.

For starters, the Vikings have long struggled to match the shades of purple on their helmets and jerseys, whether it’s been an issue of the helmets being lighter…

… or darker …

… or simply a different shade of purple altogether:

These problems plagued the team from the early 1960s until 2019. At times, the Vikings couldn’t even match the purple on their facemasks to their shells:

The Vikings’ jerseys have been no less of a chromatic conundrum. Their dazzle cloth disasters of the late ‘80s are the most egregious example:

But the jerseys not matching the trim on the rest of the uniform has also been troublesome:

Meanwhile, the shoulder stripes on the white road jerseys often haven’t matched the numbers:

The purple pandemonium didn’t stop there. Not only were the Vikings inept at matching purples from one uniform component to the next, the players’ uniforms often didn’t match one another! Check out these team pictures from 1976, 1981, and 1986, respectively:

And before you dismiss this as just a training camp peculiarity, there are plenty of game photos that show the same problem:

So even though the Vikes have never won a Super Bowl, they can probably claim the title for most color mismatches in a single uniform program. Skol!

NHL: Los Angeles Kings

The Kings have shared a home with the Lakers since their days together in the Forum in the late 1960s, so it’s no surprise that the hockey team has matched its basketball counterpart in purple mismatches, dating back to the Kings’ earliest days. During their primarily purple era from 1967 to 1988, those mismatches could be found from head…

… to toe …

… and everywhere in between:

No one epitomized the indigo insanity quite like Hall of Fame goalie Rogie Vachon:

Yeesh! You almost can’t blame the Kings for ditching purple and going BFBS!

Soccer

In 2023, we spotlighted several soccer clubs with multi-toned purple uniforms, but those were what I called “intentionally foul” — teams that purposely wore multiple shades of the accursed color. Even so, one European side — Real Madrid — appears to have achieved a rare double. 

Purple has had an established place in Madrid’s visual identity for decades, including the mid-’80s duds we mentioned last year. But Los Blancos compounded the chaos in 1986, when they outfitted their players in two-toned kits while also wearing mismatched shirts:

NBA: Lakers Redux

The firm evidence has shown that this patchwork of purples is a pestilence across virtually all sports, so it seems only fitting to circle back to the team that tipped all of this off: the Los Angeles Lakers. With a history of mismatched purples that stretched from at least 1969 to 1999 and affected both their home and road threads, the Lakers and their uniforms are the grape-tinged gift that keeps on galling giving.

Among my latest discoveries is that the Lakers’ 1980s road warm-ups suffered from mismatch issues similar to their game uniforms:

But that pales in comparison to what I consider the (un)holy grail of mismatches. As you’ll recall, we dispelled the notion that the Lakers’ uniforms were “consistently inconsistent” — always with darker jerseys and lighter shorts — and confirmed that the dark/light dichotomy could affect either piece of the uniform. We’ve already seen many instances of players in mismatched uniforms on the court alongside color-coordinated teammates. Now I’ve uncovered photos of the Lakers wearing uniforms with complete reversals of the mismatch relative to each other — in other words, one player sporting dark over light and another in light over dark — on the court at the same time, including this stunner:

That classic Bird/Magic fist bump — an apparent acknowledgment of grudging respect between green and purple — feels like the perfect visual valediction for this series.

Thank you, fellow uni-watchers, for indulging my unhealthy obsession with thorough examination of multi-toned purple uniforms over the last few years. And remember: If one shade of purple on a uniform is bad enough, then more than one is … worth writing several stories about for Purple Amnesty Day!
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Paul here. Wow, Kary really outdid himself with this one! And while all his playful puns and alliterations are fun, we shouldn’t let them obscure the serious research he’s done here. Truly a work of scholarship — please join me in thanking him for his documentation of this bizarre trend.