If there's one thing we all learned in college, it's that the best football and basketball T-shirts rarely come from the student store.
Case in point: AmpersandThreads.com, a new apparel website offering some clever Duke basketball-themed T-shirts.
Graphic designer Mitchell Phillips has been an avid Duke basketball fan since the days of Christian Laettner and Bobby Hurley in the early 1990s. He told the Duke Chronicle that he launched the site this summer as a way of to combine two biggest passions, naming it after his favorite typographical character.
I grew up in a family of UNC fans, so I’ve always been the only one wearing the proper color blue at family picnics (not that pansy light blue). Luckily my wife is as big a Duke fan as I am so it makes things easier when we go home to visit now.
Six of the better T-shirts from Phillips' line are above, celebrating everything from Brian Zoubek's beard, to highly touted freshman Kyrie Irving's arrival to the 82-50 beatdown Duke laid on North Carolina last season. Somebody sent a picture of the "NdotSmitty is my homeboy" T-shirt to Duke guard Nolan Smith, who tweeted last week that he liked the design.
I was actually in the office when a good friend of mine (also a huge Duke fan) sent me a message and told me to cheek Nolan’s Twitter. I was blown away that he had not only seen the shirts, but that he liked them! That was definitely a great feeling. The shirt sales have gone through the roof since he tweeted about it.
For the legions of Duke haters who'd sooner slice off a finger than be caught wearing one of Phillips' shirts, fear not, there's plenty of anti-Blue Devils merchandise available to be purchased these days. A "Breathe if you hate Duke" shirt is my personal favorite, though I'd be willing to change my mind if a Maryland fan found a way to print this screen shot on a T-shirt.
No comments:
Post a Comment