One of the more famous lines from Mel Brooks’ “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” goes like this:
“We’re men. We’re men in tights!”
One doesn’t have to pick up a classic movie from the 1990s to see men wearing tights anymore. All anyone has to do is head to a basketball court to see the latest fashion trend sweeping basketball.
Take Monday night’s San Diego State men’s basketball game against Biola University for example. When both teams’ starting lineups took the floor, four of SDSU’s five starters and three of Biola’s starters were wearing tights.
These kinds of tights aren’t the kinds that one wears with a dress. They’re made of athletic fiber and meant to perform like a compression shirt.
It’s common to see three or four of the Aztec starters wearing tights, depending on the starting lineup. It’s also common to see three or four of their opponents wearing tights, as well.
However, the reasons for wearing them differ from player to player.
SDSU freshman point guard Jeremy Hemsley’s high school coach Matt Dunn wouldn’t let him wear tights. That was one of the first things Hemsley was looking forward to about playing on the Mesa.
“I’d say it sort of brings swag to each individual player, everybody has their own type of court swag, and I choose to wear the tights,” Hemsley said.
Redshirt-freshman forward Zylan Cheatham, one of the breakout performers for SDSU men’s hoops so far, said it’s a fashion statement to wear tights.
But he has a more practical reason for donning the tights, too.
“For me usually I wear them to keep my legs warm, they maintain sweat and heat. Sometimes when you come out of the game and you’ve got to sit, your legs get cold,” he said.
It’s not hard to guess where this new trend comes from. Turn on a Golden State Warriors game and you might see a tights-clad Stephen Curry sink a 3-pointer in front of his defender, who’s probably also wearing tights.
It goes back to role models, as senior forward Winston Shepard said. He doesn’t wear tights, but said people are very impressionable and if they see someone doing something cool, they might want to emulate it. Cheatham thinks the same way.
“You see NBA guys growing up, you see college guys wearing that …” Cheatham said. “You’ve just got to kind of learn from it and pick what’s you.”
Even in pickup games at the Aztec Recreation Center on campus, it’s not hard to find a basketball player wearing tights.
And it’s not just men’s basketball, either. Some of the SDSU women’s players, although not as many the men, will wear tights during games. Sophomore guard McKynzie Fort is one of them.
The trend of accessorizing on the court isn’t new.
Back when Allen Iverson was playing for the Philadelphia 76ers, he had some swelling on his shooting elbow and had tried multiple remedies on it. He started wearing a sleeve on his shooting arm and it worked so well that he kept wearing it even when its medical use was no longer needed.
So then it became, as Cheatham and Hemsley both said, a fashion statement.
The trend of basketball players wearing tights took off fairly recently. In 2009, when SDSU hosted St. Mary’s College in an NIT game at Cox Arena (now Viejas Arena), none of the starters for either team wore tights.
In 2013 against University of New Mexico, the game more famously remembered for the Aztecs overcoming a 16-point second-half deficit to win the Mountain West, only one of SDSU’s starters wore tights and none of UNM’s starters did.
Against Duke University in the NCAA tournament last season, four SDSU starters and three Duke starters sported tights.
It used to be that players wore shorts that in today’s world might show more upper leg than society wants to see. Then the Fab Five came along with the shorts hemmed below the knee, reducing the amount of visible leg.
Now with the amount of players who are wearing tights on the court these days, a glimpse of a basketball player’s leg is about as rare as seeing a frat boy wearing something other than a salmon-colored shirt.
Of course, tights are just a complement of what Hemsley says is still the biggest court accessory — shoes.
