Kreative Kat Helmets
April 21, 2009
| Kevin
Zdancewicz
It’s becoming more and more apparent that
terms like “football-season”
or “basketball-season” are obsolete. Professional sports are a
year-round
enterprise nowadays, both for the athletes who must train 365 days a
year and
for the fans who continue to hear about “off-season” news long after
actual
games have ended (sometimes ad nauseam, cough
NFL Draft cough). With this in mind,
I don’t feel as bad making a football uniform this week’s JOTW because
even
with so much sports action going on (start to MLB season, NHL and NBA
playoffs)
I think you’ll agree this uniform is too good to pass up.
The featured uniform belongs to the
Cincinnati Jungle Kats
of arenafootball2 (af2), the Arena Football League’s minor league. The
most
noteworthy and eye-catching aspect of this uniform set is the unique
helmet
which looks rather inconspicuous from the side but when rotated 90
degrees
reveals a design style I have never seen before. At first,
such a
design seems laughable: how could a team put a tiger face on the top of
its
helmet? But when you think about it, Michigan’s iconic helmet design is drastically
different
from the common helmet with logos on both sides and you don’t hear
people
complaining about that. I welcome a unique helmet experiment, but I
think there
is a reason that this look hasn’t made it to a higher level of
football. I
would venture to guess that in addition to being different, the
intention was
for the helmet to intimidate opponents. But that’s a tall order without clearly visible teeth. The style reminds
me a
little bit of a goalie mask in hockey (notice the teeth), where
the Kats’
design would fit right in.
The Jungle Kat uniforms overall are like a cross between the Cincinnati Bengals (coincidence?) and the Denver Broncos (for the side stripes). There
isn’t
a ton of
information about the origins of the team’s unique name, especially
since the
franchise’s web site is no longer accessible, but I did find this post on an AFL message board which states
that former
Bengals DT Sam Adams bought the team on a random off day. Take it with
a grain
of salt, but apparently the name derives from the “fact” that “when you
think
of Cincinnati, you think of ‘The Jungle’” and “you don’t find dogs in
The
Jungle.” In any case, whoever designed the logo and uniforms probably
should
have brushed up on his zoology since white
tigers
are rarely in the wild and are actually poor tree-climbers (not ideal
for the
jungle). Sadly, these uniforms are no longer with us as the Jungle Kats
folded
in 2007 after one season in af2 – leaving behind a legacy as “that team
with
the weird helmet” which is better than “that team that spelled Kats
with a K”
in my book.
Photo Courtesy of Photobucket via Uni Watch blog
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