"Cover Story" x Big Bean collab tee now available
Plus: an interview with my guy Ben Siordia a.k.a. Big Bean
Hi everyone. Welcome to my newsletter companion to “Cover Story,” a basketball book I wrote now available in stores which you can order here. If you want to tell your followers about my book, feel free to share this tweet or this Instagram post. If you’re not a newsletter subscriber, click here to make sure you get every post in your inbox.
There are many reasons for me to feel old as hell these days. Honestly, the one that hits me the most are anniversary dates for my favorite albums (Clipse “Hell Hath No Fury” turns 15 today! Jay-Z’s “Reasonable Doubt” is 25!). But another one that makes it pretty easy to remind myself I’m from another generation is the popularity of Shaquille O’Neal. There’s an entire segment of basketball fans who know him as the guy on TNT’s “Inside the NBA” who has never turned down a check for commercials.
This is wild to me considering Shaq was my first favorite basketball player. I owned his Orlando Magic jersey growing up (a rite of passage for every Asian growing up was to own a Shaq jersey at some point. Honestly, prove me wrong you can’t!). I tried to dunk like him on my driveway. I looked at him like a superhero. He could rap. He could dunk. He could rip backboards apart during games. I rooted for the Lakers growing up (another Asian rite of passage. Again, prove me wrong you can’t!) because he left Orlando and moved to Los Angeles in free agency.
The story of Shaq’s popularity and how he helped to introduce an acceptable version of hip-hop to a mainstream audience is part of “Cover Story” and because I’ve decided to release merchandise related to this book project for the next 15 years, I hit up my guy Ben Siordia a.k.a Big Bean (follow him on Instagram and bookmark his online shop) to see if he was interested in a collaboration. I first became a fan of Ben’s work when he released an entire capsule with Throwing Fits and was thrilled he said yes to my pitch.
I wanted to understand Ben’s love of tees. “I fell in love with t-shirts because they are the most universal garment,” he explained to me via email. “Anyone can wear a t-shirt regardless of their size, and anyone can make a t-shirt if they really wanted to. Whether it's drawing on a white tee with Sharpie, using heat transfer vinyl, or getting into screen printing, there are almost no barriers to entry.”
When he went to college in Riverside, California, Ben wore t-shirts and shirts about 90 percent of the time. The tee became a central part of his identity. After a year and a half of being just a 40-minute drive away from his hometown of Rosemead, Ben got homesick. This led to his first t-shirt design which paid tribute to the Rosemead Place shopping center:
“This shopping center has a sign that sticks out from the side of the freeway and is highly identifiable by anyone driving from Riverside to Los Angeles on the freeway,” Ben explained. “I wanted everyone from my school in Riverside to know that's where I was from.”
The process of taking an idea and turning it into something real was a breathtaking experience for Ben.
“The fact that my idea went from a screen to something tangible blew my mind and I haven't been able to stop since,” he said.
Ben and I were initially thinking about a Dennis Rodman piece but quickly pivoted to Shaq. It turns out Ben was a huge Shaquille O’Neal fan growing up too! “I was always taller and huskier than my peers and made to feel weird for it,” he told me over e-mail. “Shaq showed me that being big wasn't necessarily a negative thing.” Ben listed off Shaq’s accomplishments as proof that there was room in this world for big men but mostly remembers him as the guy who told a kid on TV it was okay to eat three slices of pizza. “For once I did not feel ashamed of my size or my eating habits,” he explained.
The idea of a Shaq-themed t-shirt started with the Reebok ad pictured above. The Shaqnosis is one of Ben’s favorite sneaker designs and this specific advertisement became the inspiration for the design. Ben also wanted to pay homage to Shaq’s off-the-court lifestyle and the other personality traits beyond dominant basketball player which endeared him to so many people. One of them is the fact Shaq is a professional DJ. To reference this on the tee, Ben borrowed from the Lollapalooza shirt below (it is one of the many music festivals Shaq has performed at):
The Shaqnosis and the trippy tee combined to merge similar themes on a single tee or as Ben told me: “I like to think of this as I got Shaqnotized and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” After some back-and-forth, the final design of the “Cover Story” x Big Bean tee finally arrived in my inbox earlier this week:
You can purchase the “Cover Story” x Big Bean Shaqnosis tee now at this link. Go and support Ben’s work! All book merchandise will go on forever jokes aside, there are a few more merch ideas I have in mind so if you’re reading this and interested at all in a collab please do hit up my email.
I was also asked this week about how long the newsletter would go on for. There are a few things I still want to get to but I can see this slowly transitioning into an occasional update thing for “Prehistoric,” my next book on the first year of the Toronto Raptors which is tentatively scheduled for a 2023 release (by the way, I am excited to announce DrakeCereal is designing the book cover) which I guess would require me to change the URL to something like Jurassic Start (one of many horrible book titles which didn’t make the cut).
Aside from that, the book is still selling really well and I would really appreciate if you’ve finished reading to leave me an Amazon review here. It apparently helps me in some algorithmic way (well, if the reviews are actually good). I’m probably going to end up on a few more podcasts in December. That’s about it. I’ll wrap up by posting Ben’s three favorite magazine covers. Because I forgot to ask for commentary on these selections, they will simply be posted without comment like a mood board.
Talk to you soon.
Thanks for reading the newsletter. Feel free to subscribe if it’s your first time reading. You can order “Cover Story” here and find me on Twitter and Instagram. Email me if you want to chat.