about 300,000 caps a week in 1978.
Promotional caps had nothing to do with the American Sports Culture, but they made the ball cap accessible in America’s heartland and an accepted advertising tool in the business world.
FACTOR 4
Sunscreen
Coco Chanel supposedly popularized the suntan when she fell asleep on the deck of a yacht off the southern coast of France in 1923 and returned to shore looking startlingly bronzed. When branded suntan lotion came on the American market in the 1940s, its purpose wasn’t sun protection, it was tan enhancement. One of Coppertone’s early ad campaigns depicted an Indian chief and the slogan “Don’t Be a Paleface.” In 1953, Little Miss Coppertone first appeared on billboards in Miami. The soon-to-be-iconic illustration showed a cute black dog tugging down the swim trunks of an adorable, pig-tailed blonde girl, revealing her pale derriere. Later sunscreen ads featured sultry, deeply tanned models. To be tan in those days was to be young and beautiful.
In the 1970s, suntanning was still one of America’s favorite idle-time activities. But concerns about skin cancer were mounting, causing some people to rethink their sun-worshipping ways. In 1972, the Food and Drug Administration reclassified suntan lotion from a cosmetic to an over-the-counter drug. Two years later, a Swiss chemist adapted a system he called Sun Protection Factor, or SPF, which measured how effectively suntan lotion protected skin from the sun’s ultraviolet rays. In 1978, with skin cancer rates climbing, the FDA created the SPF measurement system and issued this warning: “Overexposure to the sun may lead to premature aging of the skin and skin cancer.” By the 1980s, the term suntan lotion had been replaced by sunscreen.
By the 1980s, the ball cap was becoming a popular form of protection from the harmful rays of the sun.
Like cigarettes—which American culture promoted for decades as being cool, sophisticated, and sexy—suntans could lead to some very uncool consequences. As people became more and more aware of this, they grew skittish about the sun. For protection, they slathered on high-SPF sunscreen and, often, wore hats. Because the baseball cap was cheap and its brim shaded part of the face, many people developed the habit of wearing a ball cap when they went outdoors as a means of sun protection, and to keep the glare from their eyes.
FACTOR 5
The Magnum Effect
From 1980 to 1988, Tom Selleck starred as Thomas Magnum on Magnum, P.I., the CBS television series about a Hawaii-based private investigator. Magnum was the first television hero and sex symbol to regularly wear a baseball cap. Beginning with an episode titled “China Doll” (broadcast December 18, 1980), Magnum frequently wore a Detroit Tigers cap, with the famous Old English “D” logo on the crown. Selleck was a Tigers fan in real life.
His wearing the cap on Magnum, P.I. did two things: It made sporting a ball cap seem cool rather than quirky; and it created an interest in authentic MLB caps, which by the end of the eighties would be doing a bang-up business.
Thomas Magnum was a Vietnam veteran who also wore a VM02 cap on the series (for those keeping score, it was first seen in the episode “Tropical Madness” from November 12, 1981). The VM02 cap came from Magnum’s stint with naval intelligence in Da Nang during the Vietnam War. It should be noted that he also occasionally wore a red-and-white “Al’s Collision and Muffler Shop” cap. No fooling.
Once Selleck had broken the cap ceiling, so to speak, other TV characters were seen in pro-sports caps, including former Oakland cop Mark Gordon (Victor French) on Highway to Heaven (1984–1989), who often wore an Oakland A’s cap; and McGyver (Richard Dean Anderson), the secret agent and adventurer from the show of the same name (1985–1992), who wore a black-and-red or white-and-red Calgary Flames hockey cap.
Now, of course, many celebrities are often seen wearing pro (particularly Yankees) ball caps. A website called Capitate has a gallery of famous people—from Madonna to Bill Clinton to Chris Rock—wearing the caps of their favorite teams.
But it started with Thomas Magnum.
FACTOR 6
Buying In: The Merchandise Boom
In 1978, the New Era cap company placed an ad in Sporting News newspaper for authentic Major League Baseball caps. At the time, New Era and Sports Specialties were the two major licensed manufacturers of pro-ball caps. (Sports Specialties, also the first licensee of the National Football League, was founded in 1928 by David Warsaw who, among other things, invented the bobble-head doll. The company, a pioneer in the field of licensed sportswear, was sold to Nike in 1993.)
This was New Era’s first attempt at mail order and as company historian Karl Koch recalls, “We had to shut it down, there were too many orders coming in. These weren’t people who went to games. They were out in the middle of Iowa and places like that. It was an early sign that people wanted this.”
At the time, merchandising was still a relatively modest side business. Accessories and souvenirs were sold at games, but the sale of official products was otherwise very limited. In the 1980s, this would change.
Large-scale merchandising was the logical next step in the American Sports Culture. It built the culture in two ways: first, it created a new revenue stream; second, the products creating that revenue stream advertised the culture. Getting people to buy a product that serves as an advertisement for itself is a pretty sweet deal if you can pull it off.
In 1986, MLB and New Era teamed up to produce the Diamond Collection, which officially sanctioned the on-field product. “‘Wear the caps the pros wear’ became the idea,” Koch says.
Professional sports was a shared national passion by then, which played out in millions of living rooms across the country. Wearing apparel sanctioned by the big leagues brought fans closer to the action and closer to one another; it was an investment in their teams. The ball cap market seemed a natural—and it was.
FACTOR 7
Patriot Caps
In the mid-1980s, another trend attracted a very different sort of cap-wearer. After a decade clouded by war, political scandal, gas shortages, and runaway inflation, a new mood of optimism and patriotism settled over much of the country in the early 1980s. In a speech given on March 8, 1983, in Orlando, Florida, President Ronald Reagan first used the phrase “evil empire” in discussing the Soviet Union and what he called “the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.” The next year, Tom Clancy’s Cold War thriller The Hunt for Red October—a book Reagan strongly endorsed—became a No. 1 bestseller. The image of the American military, tarnished by the Vietnam War years, gained new luster during the Reagan presidency. People felt good about their country.
Rob Reiner, as director Marty DiBergi, wore this variation of the USS Coral Sea CV-43 cap in the 1984 film This is Spinal Tap.
The public supported substantial increases in defense spending during this time and became increasingly interested in books and films pertaining to the military, among them First Blood (1982), An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), and Clancy’s string of best-selling “techno-thrillers.” The No. 1 box-office draw of 1986, Top Gun, showed off sophisticated U.S. military technology—and the bravery and skills of the Navy’s elite fighter pilots. Among its many influences, the film caused a run on U.S. Navy ball caps embroidered with the word TOPGUN, and
