Uni Watch Tour ’24 Report: Los Angeles!

Good morning, and greetings from New Orleans, where I arrived yesterday afternoon. I’m looking forward to tonight’s Uni Watch gathering at Avenue Pub, but first I want to tell you about the excellent time we had in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

Activities began with a visit to Game Changing Gear, the premier (only?) outlet for uniforms used in movies, TV shows, and commercials. They’re not open to the public, but they agreed to give us a private viewing of their facility, which was, frankly, mind-blowing — a huge warehouse space filled with uniforms and accessories for every conceivable sport, and from nearly every conceivable time period. If you have a favorite sports movie from the past 30 or 40 years, chance are the uniforms for that movie are stashed here.

The photo above shows only about half of GCG’s inventory. Here’s the other half:

The photos don’t really capture the immensity of the collection. Imagine the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark and you’ll get a sense of how much stuff they have on hand.

We were permitted to inspect and touch anything we wanted. They even let us use their ladders to look at things on high racks:

Honestly, it was all a bit overwhelming. There was so much stuff that it was hard to know where to start or what to look at. So I just walked around with this awestruck look on my face, shooting some video and taking lots of photos:

As you may have noticed in a couple of the photos, GCG even made T-shirts for our visit, with their logo on the front and the Uni Watch 25th-anniversary logo on the back:

The guy on the left in that photo is Dodgers design director and longtime friend of Uni Watch Ross Yoshida (wearing one of our old “Uni Cat” T-shirts, designed by Todd Radom in 2018). On the right is GCG manager Gus Noguera. I can’t even begin to describe how gracious he and the GCG staffers were. Super-welcoming, super-friendly — they made it seem like we were the ones doing them a favor by visiting! Wonderful, wonderful people.

Speaking of wonderful folks, this visit wouldn’t have happened without the great Bob Halfacre of Bobcat Athletic, which does sewing work for the Dodgers, Kings, and lots of other teams. Bob first began emailing me in 2007. I interviewed him for the blog in 2011, when his company made 1944 throwbacks for a Dodgers/Cubs game, and shortly after that I wrote about how he designed the Mets’ black uniforms (grrr). He’s also on the L.A. Kings equipment staff, so I interviewed him about his NHL work in 2022.

Despite all of that, we had never met in person until two days ago. It was an absolute treat

So that was Game Changing Gear. But that was just a warm-up for the Uni Watch gathering we were having at Tony P’s Dockside Grill. Unfortunately, the lighting at Tony P’s wasn’t ideal, but here are some pics, beginning with some group shots:

Aside from myself, only one attendee — John, whose last name I can’t remember — had the gumption to wear stirrups. And he wore the same design that I wore! Check it out:

I was especially happy to see Jeremy Brahm, who’s been emailing uni-related contributions to me since 2005 (!) and is the rare Ticker contributor who merited his own Uni Watch interview. I hadn’t seen him since a 2008 Uni Watch gathering in Portland, so it was great to see him one more time:

This next gent is also named Jeremy (but I didn’t get his surname, sorry). I liked his custom 1913 Dodgers jersey, made by Ebbets:

I was hoping that great DIYer Wafflebored might come down from Vancouver to join us, but alas, it was not to be. Still, he was there in spirit because reader Chuck Eldridge was wearing these magnificent Wafflebored-made hockey jerseys:

Alex Kantarelis and I had dueling vertical stripes:

The guy standing next to Alex in this next shot is the irrepressible Ben Fortney, who said some extremely nice things to me about the effect that my work has had on him. Thanks, Ben — really enjoyed talking with you!

One guy (again, can’t recall his name, ugh) was a couple of days late for Purp Walk:

My apologies to everyone I didn’t get a photo of, and doubleplus apologies for forgetting so many people’s names.

I should add here that quite a few of the attendees brought nice little gifts for me, which was very sweet. Thanks, people — hope you enjoyed the proceedings as much as I did!

(Special thanks to Bob Halfacre for making the GCG visit possible and being one of my chauffeurs; to GCG owner Mike Fox for being so enthusiastic and making the great T-shirts for us; to Gus Noguera and the rest of the GCG staff for their incredible hospitality; to Ross Yoshida for being my other chauffeur; and to all the readers who came out to GCG and/or Tony P’s.)