Frank's Place: Before sports apparel boom, there was the Big Store

I really miss the Big Store.

In 2016, nearly everyone's wardrobe includes considerable sports merchandise - baseball hats, golf shirts, team jackets, throwback jerseys.

At college and professional events, it sometimes seems, most fans are dressed in the home team's colors, wearing their allegiance not just on their sleeves but all over.

On Wednesday, when Villanova students assembled at a sendoff for their Final Four basketball team, so many were dressed in blue-and-white team gear that it looked as if the campus bookstore had been looted.

But back in the 1960s, before such clothing became everyday attire, the Big Store was the only place I knew that sold college team merchandise.

If like every Catholic kid from Delaware County you wanted a Villanova or St. Joseph's jacket, the eclectic Darby shop was where you went.

There you could also find a variety of T-shirts bearing the names of colleges and high schools from across the United States. Some of the schools you'd never heard of. Some looked familiar, but you couldn't be sure since the names so often were misspelled.

Though I'd spent only a dollar on it, my "Clogate" shirt lent me considerable cachet one summer. People who spotted the inadvertent misspelling assumed I was an ironic hipster. I didn't bother to inform them that I, St. Pius X's eighth-grade spelling bee champion, hadn't noticed the error until I got home.

Maybe that's why I ended up at Temlpe.

I wasn't alone. One friend had a "Wake Forets" shirt, another a "Father Juge" model.

The Big Store was famous for that kind of attention to detail.

Located in a seedy commercial strip along Darby's decaying Main Street, the store had seedy and decaying merchandise that would make Forman Mills' seem like Brooks Brothers'.

It was originally a work-clothes retailer before the store's owners jumped ahead of the curve and started selling sports attire to baby boomers.

In addition to the T-shirts - misspelled or not - you could buy knockoff Chuck Taylors and gym wear inscribed with school names. It also sold basketball jerseys and shorts, though the shorts likely as not had a stripe on one side but not the other.

The inventory was the lowest of low end, mostly seconds, rejects, and knockoffs. Hardly anything cost more than a few bucks and there were no returns.

No matter what we bought there, it seldom seemed to last more than a month. A new pair of worker khakis split in the rear while I was bowling on a date. A T-shirt disintegrated in the dryer. The sole of a sneaker quickly dislodged, making trips across a wooden basketball court sound like a seal's birthday party.

If quality wasn't a Big Store concern, ambience mattered even less.

It lacked amenities such as dressing rooms, courteous clerks, and aisles. Clothing was stacked, hung, piled, and jammed into every available inch. And if you managed to unearth that NYU shirt you wanted and had enough room, you could try it on right there on the retail floor.

Its simple name indicated either the owners' lack of imagination or their fondness for Marx Brothers movies, perhaps the worst of which was called The Big Store. I'm inclined to think it was the latter since those owners fancied themselves comedians.

Since you could outfit a family of four there for less than $20, the Big Store wasn't attracting a sophisticated clientele. Consequently, the cranky owners didn't mind insulting their customers, or even their own merchandise. In fact, they delighted in it.

But there was no alternative for sports fans. The places normal people shopped - department stores, mom-and-pop clothing shops, and five-and-dimes like Woolworth's or Grant's - didn't then carry sports-related clothing, a fact that may explain why there are so few department stores, mom-and-pop clothing shops, and five-and-dimes.

The Big Store endured until the 1980s, when, not coincidentally, colleges and professional teams began to license their merchandise and the real boom in sports clothing began.

Until then, the demand had been limited. Only kids, obsessed fans, and Big Store patrons wore sneakers and team attire. But in 1981, Bear Bryant of Alabama - "Alamaba" if you shopped in Darby - began to change all that.

So many commercial entities wanted to market his team and his houndstooth-hatted image that the Alabama football coach hired a former Crimson Tide player, Bill Battle, to handle matters.

Battle did so well for Bryant and the school that other colleges noticed. Soon he started the Collegiate Licensing Co. By 1985, with Georgetown and Los Angeles Raiders gear leading the way, the sale of licensed sports merchandise topped $250 million annually.

In 2010, it hit $4.3 billion. And Battle, no surprise given the hyper-commercialization of collegiate sports, is now Alabama's athletics director.

The expensive sports clothing that fans of Villanova and the other Final Four teams wore this weekend was durable, even fashionable, in a casually chic sort of way. In a sports world that grows slicker every day, the clothing has gotten slicker too.

Most malls now contain sports-clothing shops. And many teams have opened exclusive downtown sites. The NBA Store, for example, is located on New York's Fifth Avenue, amid some of the world's most expensive commercial real estate.

In such an environment, the Big Store and the schlock it sold seem as much a 1960s relic as bell-bottoms.

Not too long ago, on a rainy day, I happened to drive past the site in Darby. The building was vacant. The two empty windows that flanked its former entrance resembled a pair of sad eyes.

And I swear the rain that rolled down them looked like tears.

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz