To Know the Soul of Eagles Fans, You Need to See Their Bootleg Tees

Dan McQuade will be displaying some of his bootleg Eagles shirt collection at The Coop on January 11th. /  Shirt photographs courtesy of Dan McQuade

Longtime Philly journalist and sports fan Dan McQuade remembers walking out of the Phillies’ NL East-clinching game with his friend Johnny Goodtimes in 2007 and wondering aloud where they might get their hands on some sketchy merch to commemorate the moment. McQuade — who’ll be showing off dozens of his bootleg t-shirts at a one-night-only exhibition this Thursday — is something of a collector.

As if on cue, a dude sauntered up, took $10 from each of them, and lifted up a pant leg to reveal a bundle of shirts. “They were still wet. They had very clearly just been printed,” recalls McQuade. “It’s a really great, strange experience to buy things in weird places.”

That’s how he prefers to get his memorabilia: in a parking lot, or at a gas station. Such items are often cheap, made quickly, and unauthorized — decked out with logos, messages and bizarre artistic choices made by anonymous artists.

At the moment, he’s running on fumes, doing press for the exhibition while he and his wife tend to their newborn baby. McQuade — currently at Defector Media following long stints at Deadspin and Philly Mag — was hoping to host the exhibition during the NFL post-season. But the Eagles’ recent play has cast doubts on the team’s hopes for a long playoff run.

The tenuous, unpredictable nature of pro football is part of the story told by McQuade’s impressive collection of wearable ephemera. Many of these shirts had short shelf-lives that peaked at the precise moment Eagles fans were buzzing about Bobby Hoying, or Nick Foles’s legendary equipment, or Terrell Owens’s alleged overdose. They came and went like memes, enjoying a burst of (sometimes vulgar) relevance before receding into obscurity.

Have you been collecting these bootleg Eagles shirts for a while?

Pretty much my whole life. The first bootleg I got was down at Veterans Stadium. There was a Zubaz Phillies hat inside, and it was $20, and my mom wouldn’t pay that. Which — she usually did get me stuff I wanted, because I was annoying about it. But then outside, we got one for $12. But honestly, that’s not the type of bootleg I’m interested in now.

What are you interested in?

There are a few of different types of bootlegs. There’s bootlegs that are trying to fool people into being, like, “Oh, I have a Gucci bag,” or “I have these hot Nike sneakers,” and there are people who like those things. And they’ve gotten better and better. I don’t want to sell out where he’s at, but there’s a dude in North Philly, and the bootleg sneakers he has are really good. Like, I’m a big sneaker guy, so I can tell that they’re not correct, but they’re pretty close, and they didn’t used to always be close.

Then there’s the type of bootleg that’s like “Glavin Klein,” or sneakers that sort of look like Yeezys but they’re not. And some of these are more official than others.

Then there’s the type of bootleg in which someone is doing something with a property that they don’t own — trying to do something different that you would not get from an authentic source. That’s why I really like the Wildwood boardwalk t-shirts. I’m not gonna say it’s art, but maybe it’s approaching art. Maybe it’s outsider art. And so you sort of get things that you would never see anywhere else.

You’ve said some of the attraction of this type of merch is that it’s not pre-approved by the team or the NFL.

I did a profile of this sign guy who’s always on TV, and to get into the Super Bowl, he had to sneak his signs in. The Eagles and the NFL want you to cheer the way they would like you to cheer, and they would like to make the money off of that as well.

These [shirts] are the way that the fans want to cheer — things that are sold on the street corners. And they may not be how Jeffrey Lurie or the Eagles or the NFL wants you to cheer — sometimes with good reason. There are shirts with gay jokes on them. I’m not displaying those at the show. I think there’s a way to do that [by providing context] and have it be fine; I don’t want to do it at the first show. I sort of envision more of these.

Tell me about your Terrell Owens shirts.

I’m not exactly sure if he actually overdosed, but he had some sort of issue where he took too many pills in 2006. And there’s a shirt that’s like, “Dallas Sucks, T.O. Swallows … Pills.” And I was like, Oh, that’s gross.

And they say they don’t allow signs that are too rude — well, this time, they did. I went and looked at the wire photos from that game, and there are so many signs saying, basically, “Kill Yourself T.O.,” only a little more clever than that. I was like, wow.

You know, the snowballs-at-Santa thing was great. They had just won pointless games and missed out on O.J. Simpson. The Santa was pulled from the stands and stunk — that’s a great moment in Eagles history, throwing snowballs at Santa. The national media should talk about this T.O. thing, the fans chanting like “OD OD OD OD” [to the tune of “Ole, ole, ole, ole”]. Really gross.

And so some of these shirts that are sold are really gross, and it’s true of the Wildwood boardwalk tees as well. But that doesn’t mean these aren’t things worthy of coverage. This is what people are buying and selling, and this is how people actually feel that you might not hear about in polite company or in the actual news media, who will just be sharing Eagles-approved slogans.

So where do you rank up against a guy like Perry Shall?

Oh, he has way more. He is the king. We definitely have different collections. He’s more into music tees and things like that. I really am into sports t-shirts and bootlegs sold outside the stadiums. The other main thing I collect besides bootleg Sixers, Eagles and Phillies tees is Penn Relays t-shirts. I love track — I ran in the Relays when I was a grade-schooler. I have official tees and bootlegs from outside. They really cracked down on the bootlegs in the last decade. I have one where, like, Usain Bolt’s name is spelled wrong. I have this one from 1991 that has Homey the Clown beating up Saddam Hussein that says “Penn Relays.”

Do you have a sort of admiration for the makers of these shirts?

Absolutely. You know, obviously, these guys are stealing copyright. I would not like people to take my articles and sell them outside the stadium. I guess that would be really weird. It’s theft, so, it feels weird to say that you admire something about that.

But the Eagles steal, too. Two years ago, the Eagles received a trademark for the term “Go Birds.” And they got a lot of local artists like Heavy Slime and Grim Grim Grim and some other people kicked off of Instagram and Etsy for using the term “Go Birds.” This is not a term that the Eagles invented. This is a term that fans always used. I went back and looked.

And I think Jeffrey Lurie is a really good owner, and they’ve been very successful since he bought the team — their most successful stretches, really, ever, maybe.

And I think it’s more the NFL than the Eagles, but you know, they are interested in collecting all the revenue they can, and if they can steal phrases from the fans, they will do that. They would like it if you had to pay a nickel every time you said the words “Philadelphia Eagles.” So I think that people making their own shirts and selling them and wearing them is a protest against these types of people who do technically own the team, but they don’t own the team morally.

Is there a white-whale bootleg shirt you haven’t found yet?

There’s a white-whale shirt. I assume it’s a bootleg; it may be authentic. So there was a photo of a man named David Miscavige, who is the head of Scientology. He’s from South Jersey, and there’s a photo of him with an Eagles shirt on. I think that is the shirt I would like, just because it’s so strange. It’s so funny that the head of this Hollywood sci-fi religion is an Eagles fan. And he sounds like me. He has a rapid-fire Philly accent, which is also really, really funny — that that’s how he talks. What if Pope Francis talked like that?

Philadelphia Football: A Bootleg T-Shirt Art Exhibition, free, Thursday, January 11th, 7-10 p.m., The Coop, 1025 Hamilton Street.