BY MICHELLE KEY
PUBLISHER
AUBURN — What began as a college student’s curiosity about a few unusual Auburn basketball uniforms has grown into a detailed archive documenting generations of Auburn Athletics history.
Clint Richardson started what would become the Auburn Uniform Database in 2013, shortly after completing his freshman year at Auburn University.
“I had just completed my freshman year at Auburn and was returning home to Huntsville for the summer,” Richardson said. “I read Uni-Watch for years and recently discovered that the Auburn Mens basketball team had worn some crazy designs in the late 1990s and early 2000s.”
At the time, Richardson said quality photographs from that era were difficult to find, making it hard to determine exactly what the team had worn and when.
“The site started as the Auburn Basketball Uniform Database to determine just how different those uniforms were and to document it in some fashion,” he said. “I built an ugly, free website on Blogger and started learning how to showcase everything in the best ways.”
It did not remain a basketball-only project for long. Richardson said Auburn’s 2013 football season helped push the site toward covering other sports. Auburn wore navy jerseys for the first six games of that season, prompting someone on Twitter to wonder how late into a season Auburn had gone before wearing white.
“I took that and ran with it, digging through the archives to figure that out,” Richardson said.
The project continued to expand and now documents uniform history across nine Auburn sports programs, along with football field designs, basketball court designs and uniform matchups showing what Auburn and its opponents wore for individual games.
Richardson’s research often begins with Auburn’s yearbook, the Glomerata, which has been digitized by the university library.
“All research begins with the Glomerata, Auburn’s yearbook, which has thankfully been digitized by the library with every volume made available online,” he said.
He also searches other schools’ yearbooks, newspaper archives, photographs and, when available, video.
For Richardson, certainty matters.
“If I’m not confident, I don’t record it as fact,” he said.
Sometimes the research leads far beyond the uniforms themselves. One of Richardson’s favorite discoveries involves Auburn’s green football jerseys from the late 1930s. He found that the Tigers wore green more frequently than orange during the two seasons the jerseys were used, and that the design changed between 1938 and 1939.
His research also uncovered contemporary commentary from Auburn student journalist John “Boots” Stratford, who described the orange jerseys as “cursed” and the green jerseys as “lucky.”
Richardson later learned that Stratford enlisted in the Army after graduation and was killed when his plane was shot down in France in 1944. He was 24.
The story continued to branch out.
Richardson found that C.H. “Babe” McGehee, who scored the first touchdown in what is now Jordan-Hare Stadium in 1939, later owned National Screenprinters in Auburn. The company produced number decals worn on Auburn football helmets from 1958 through 1965.
McGehee’s daughter, Susan, later appeared in a photograph with Auburn football helmets in 1966 to announce adoption of the then-new AU logo. Her grandfather was Cliff Hare, one of the namesakes of Jordan-Hare Stadium.
“The connections weaved through this entire story is always one of my favorites,” Richardson said.
Another piece of Auburn uniform history Richardson has worked to clarify involves the program’s orange jerseys.
He said many fans remember Auburn as having never won while wearing orange, but his research shows otherwise.
Auburn primarily wore orange jerseys from the 1930s through 1955, and Richardson has documented 92 games in which they appeared. Coach Doug Barfield brought the orange jerseys back in 1978, and Auburn went 2-1-1 while wearing them during his tenure.
Richardson said much of the database is built from the Glomerata and newspaper clippings, but social media has also become an important resource.
“I feel like I’ve crawled through so many corners of the internet looking for any evidence from games — Facebook posts, public tweets on Twitter, Flickr accounts,” he said.
Fans sometimes send him information or point out details he missed.
“I’ve built a nice community that enjoys spotting these new details as much as I do,” Richardson said.
Former Auburn athletes have also provided insight into details that might never be visible from the stands or television.
As a student, Richardson was involved with Auburn’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter and became friends with a number of athletes.
“I often asked them ‘what’s something you would only know about the uniforms from wearing them?’” he said.
One former women’s basketball player told Richardson that uniforms introduced during the 2012-13 season were intended to look “more feminine,” with racerback tops and shorter shorts. Richardson said the players disliked them, and the uniforms were retired after only a few games.
Although Auburn football is known for maintaining a relatively traditional look, Richardson said that does not mean the uniforms never change.
“Whether it’s the conference patch or decals on the back of the helmet, there are more unique elements that have evolved over the years that can be just as interesting as brand new uniform designs,” he said.
For Richardson, the late 1990s and early 2000s remain one of Auburn’s most interesting uniform eras.
Football featured orange drop-shadow numerals and briefly added the Tiger Eyes logo to the pants. Basketball introduced tiger-striped uniforms in 1998, worn by Chris Porter and the Tigers during their run as a No. 1 seed in the 1999 NCAA Tournament. Auburn softball also experimented with tiger-striped designs.
Still, Richardson said uniforms often become iconic because of the players wearing them.
“Charles Barkley’s 1980s uniforms were the inspiration of the 2015-2020 throwback uniforms that Auburn wore to the program’s first Final Four,” he said.
“Bo Jackson will always be viewed in an orange facemask for me.”
Even after more than a decade of research, Richardson still has unanswered questions.
One current search involves Auburn’s 1960 football uniforms, when the Tigers changed the familiar striping pattern on both the helmets and jerseys for a single season before reverting back the following year.
“I’ve been digging through the newspaper archives recently but have yet to come across any reasons to why,” Richardson said.
His ultimate goal is even larger.
“The pie-in-the-sky dream is to have 100% coverage of every program’s entire uniform history,” Richardson said.
