Tony's big screen debut

From [The700Level] and [The Sporting Blog]

The featured ad on ESPN.com this morning was quite unfortunately ill-timed for Nike, considering that Brian Urlacher of the Chicago Bears was lost for the season due to a wrist injury suffered last night. Given that Nike’s ads are presumably for a new brand of protective athletic gear (either that, or some sort of lizard-like skin graft procedure), they would have been wise to act quickly to disassociate their new protective gear from painfully injured players.

Urlacher out for the year, but still wearing Nike protective gear

It’s the end of an era as Harry Kalas, the longtime voice of the Phillies, passed away today. I can still vividly recall where I was on April 18, 1987, sitting in the passenger seat of the Volare on our way to pick up my mom at her seasonal job at the regional IRS headquarters in NE Philly… “Swing and a long drive, there it is, number 500! The career 500th home run for Michael Jack Schmidt!”

That call still gives me chills, but this one right here is the best 13 minutes of Harry Kalas ever: The last 3 outs of the 2008 World Series.

[Philly.com: Remembering Harry]

[ESPN: Phillies TV man Kalas dies at 73]

It’s a mishmash of low-res clipart which screams “1996″. My first real issue with this logo came when I became part of the leadership team late last year and we wanted to have some team beer coozies made with the logo on it. This logo was incredibly unwieldy for screen printing, and in trying to clean it up, I got fed up and decided we needed something completely new. On top of that, none of the current team really knew what any of the origins of the various shield elements were. The history was completely lost on us. Our team nickname was the Rhinos, yet our shield had a boar on it, supposedly representing the strength of the forwards, and a pheasant, representing the speed of the backs. Not a real consistent theme here. It was clearly time for something new. So I did a little research on the series of tubes, and when I came across the logo for USA rugby, I had my inspiration.

It’s simple, it’s got an old-school shield feel to it but it’s much more modern. Even though the rugby ball looks more like a football, it’s pretty solid. So I did a little doodling and here’s what draft no. 1 looked like.

And then after some Photoshop magic, here are two versions of what I ended up with. The boar and pheasant are gone, the rhino is in, and the palm tree was preserved because that actually has some significance as a nod to our annual winter tours to the Bahamas.

Here’s the post on the KRFC website announcing the new logo: KRFC unveils a new shield.

But I’m not done yet. I decided that there’s probably some lingering attachment to the old logo, especially for recent grads that played with it on their jerseys week after week. So I’m working on a new “throwback” version of the shield. Here’s what it currently looks like. It’s real rough, but I think it’s got some potential. Now if I can only find the time to finish it.

[Kellogg Rugby Football Club]

This is all well and good. It’s a solid logo. But rugby clubs throughout the world tend to have much more elaborate rugby-specific crests and shields full of meaningful elements that point to their club’s history and affiliations. The crests tend to have fanciful representations of lions, griffins, ligers, pegasuses (pegasi?) . . . much like this half-lion half-chicken figure replete with sharp talons.

I decided we needed something a little more specific for the rugby club that used some elements of these classic shields and went about painstakingly creating a new wildcat, using the same head from the NU logo.

Considering that back in 1997 when I was working on this, I think I was using MS Paint just as much as I was using Photoshop. And on a 1-10 scale, 10 being a Photoshop wizard, I would say that I probably ranked a -3. This thing took me waaaaay too long. My grades in physics and differential equations bore out the effects of this obsession.

The final product of my efforts is below. We began using this on all of our gear soon after and the current team a decade later still uses it on their website, jerseys, kitbags and more. I’m proud of its staying power, but I would definitely like another crack at it. There’s really not much to it aside from the wildcat. Other standard shield elements, like a rugby ball, or other items that refer to unique events in club history are unfortunately absent. I wouldn’t mind spending some time on a V2, but then again, I’m not part of that team any more, so I need to let it go.

[Northwestern Rugby]

[The700Level.com - Philly Sports & Minutiae: Sadness]

For those of you who don’t know what a labrum tear is, here’s one of the images from my MRI with the tear helpfully pointed out for you.

Make sense now? Good.

Besides the labrum injuries, you may ask yourself, what else do Chutley and I have in common? We’re both tough enough to play through the injury for the sake of winning a championship. Of course, Chase was just playing baseball. I’m aiming for the World MBA Rugby Championships. So, that kinda makes me even tougher. Can’t say the same for Elton or Jameer.