The Road Not Taken: What If Uni Watch Had Turned Out Very Differently?

As my time at Uni Watch draws to a close, here are 12 “What if?” scenarios that almost happened, might have happened, or could have happened — but didn’t.

Reminder: Uni Watch’s time on Substack is coming to a close in late May. After next week’s post, I’ll be taking a break for at least a month, and then my Substack will relaunch at some point this summer with a new name and a new subject focus. I’ll have more to say about this next week. To learn more about all of this, including what it will mean for those of you with paid subscriptions, look here. — Paul

When you’re approaching a milestone or getting ready to close out a significant chapter in your life, it’s common to look back at what you’ve achieved, the highs and lows, the major things that happened.

But as I approach the end of my time at Uni Watch, I thought it might be more interesting to look at some things that didn’t happen — things that were in the works or under discussion but, for various reasons, never got off the ground, got scuttled, or veered off in a different direction.

I’ve compiled a list of a dozen such situations from the past 25 years. Each of them represents a road not taken, a tantalizing “What if…?” scenario. Some of the resulting counterfactuals would probably have been minor footnotes in Uni Watch’s history; others could have changed the trajectory of Uni Watch as we know it.

I’ve written about some of these experiences before, while others are appearing in print for the first time. In any case, it’s fun to have them all together in one grouping. Ready? Here we go.

1. The Name

When Village Voice sports editor Miles Seligman agreed to let me start writing a column about uniforms in the spring of 1999, we needed to come up with a name for it. There were lots of “Watch”-based media projects floating around at the time — MarketWatch, Money Watch, Election Watch, and so on — so I’d been informally referring to my prospective uniform column as “Uni Watch.”

That was just a placeholder term — I never intended it to be the official name. But as Miles and I kicked around various ideas for what the column should be called (the only one I remember now is “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” which was just a joke, but I know there were a few others), we couldn’t come up with anything better than “Uni Watch,” so we just went with that. At the time, it felt like a failure of imagination, and I was disappointed in myself for not being able to come up with something more creative.

What if we had chosen a different name? Hmmm, would Uni Watch have been as successful and long-lived under a different moniker? Maybe. But a good name doesn’t hurt, and “Uni Watch,” in retrospect, was the right name all along. I’m glad we never went in a different direction.