There is a great article in the most recent issue of ESPN the magazine about how players have come to identify with their numbers and what the numbers mean to them. The article is really long, so I won’t type it out for you but I will share the first paragraph which is pretty good.
“Back when The Magazine was new, there was a ping-pong table in one of the empty conference rooms. A couple of clearly overworked young editors took to playing a regular lunchtime game, but rather than keeping score in numerals-say, 10 serving 8- they used athletes’ uniform numbers instead. As in Pele serving Berra. (If the score was tied , one player-Larry Bird or Hank Arron-sufficed). If the server couldn’t come up with an appropriate name, he lost his serve, ad once a player’s number was used for the leader’s score, it couldn’t be repeated when the other guy caught up. This all made for minutes of fun, and those young wordsmiths were covinced that their brainchild would soon sweep the nation. (It might have, too, if only they had had better representation).
“Slightly more than a decade later, the ping-pong table is gone, but the editors remain. And like many of their sports-crazed brethren throughout the country, they continue to be captivated by the cult and culture of uniform numbers. Any fanatic worth his face paint can count from double 0’s to double 9’s using jocks instead of cardinals. (That’s Jim Otto to Wayne Gretzky, if you’re scoring at home). What began (more recently than you might think) as a way for fans and reporters to easily identify players on the field is now the fundamental way fans connect with athletes, not to mention the way many jocks identify themselves. From the clubhouse to the bleachers, season after season, numbers are the ties that bind”.
Good stuff, eh? It makes me wish I was a boy and had all players numbers memorized so I could play that awesome version of ping-pong!
