Ah.
:)

Right after the game's over, you always see that the winning team is immediately wearing hats declaring them the champions. That, of course, means that two sets of hats are printed, one for each team. Someone told me yesterday that the NFL donates the losing team's hats to charities that distribute clothes and food and aid to Africans in need.

So there's some African village out there that thinks that the Buffalo Bills is the greatest franchise in the history of sport.

That actually got CP and I remembering the ill-fated Lakers "Three-pete" merchandise. After winning back-to-back titles in '87 and '88, Lakers "Back-to-Back" merchandise sold like mad. I had one of those shirts (you know, with the big-headed caricatures of the players standing back-to-back) and if you knew me and my parents at the time you'd understand just how big that means sales were.

So, having swept all 3 rounds of the playoffs, and playing against the Pistons whom they had beaten the year before, anyone and everyone was eager to cash in on what was sure to be massive merchandise sales. So they started early. The 3-pete (or "Back-to-back-to-back) shirts were out before the series started, if memory serves.

You can tell where this is going, I'm sure. Detroit swept the Lakers 4-0. That merchandise stuck around for a long time, showing up in thrift stores and crappy t-shirt places.

My understanding has always been that the other set is destroyed. I know that is what happened to the Blazers stuff that was made in the deluded belief that Jordan wasn't superhuman. I knew a person who participated in shredding the output (of at least one shop anyway, maybe it wasn't universal).

Don't know if it's true for other sports, but here's the story about the NFL sending the stuff to Africa (damn, they started in 1994 so my vision of the Bills-worshiping village is shattered).

With the Lakers, so much of the merchandise was already floating around before the games, much of it surely bootleg. I'm sure a lot of the legitimate, official merchandise was destroyed or donated, but there was a ton of it already out there out of the league's and/or legitimate shops' control.