When Tyriq Withers was filming Him, the forthcoming psychological football horror movie in which Withers stars as an elite quarterback trying to make it back to the big leagues, the actor was eagerly anticipating hanging up his cleats. “I couldn’t wait to never touch a football again. I was throwing so much, training twice a day, six days a week,” Withers said. (Out this weekend, Him already being hailed as Black Swan for dudes.)
But on Sunday, Withers was tempted out of retirement by the season’s biggest little showdown: the annual Thom Browne football game.
Held in collaboration with GQ to celebrate New York Fashion Week and the start of the pro football season, this year’s matchup was the fiercest in a decade. The game’s origins go back to the Browne family’s backyard pickup football games on Thanksgiving in Allentown, Pennsylvania. According to the designer, that pastime was usually scrappy and spirited. “Somebody usually got hurt, somebody usually broke something, somebody got pushed over the fence,” Browne told me a few years ago. In 2014, the two-hand touch tradition was revived when Thom Browne employees and friends donned their tricolor-tipped sportswear in Central Park for a very stylish homecoming, which soon became a highly anticipated staple of the fall fashion calendar.
In the locker room just before kickoff, you could already tell that if there was a fence on the Brearley athletic facility hosting this year’s game, someone was going to get pushed over it. “I will say they got height on their team,” noted Danny Ramirez, as he donned his white Thom Browne cashmere jersey. All six-foot-five of his friend Withers—who happened to play wide receiver at FSU in college—looked confident in the grey jersey of the opposition. “Are you guys sizing each other up?” teased Morgan Riddle, dressed in Browne’s characteristically shrunken, preppy spin on cheerleader garb.
The day’s referee, Joe Holder, declared that while tackling was off limits, smack talk was very much encouraged. When asked how many touchdowns he expected to catch, Withers said, “You see, it’s not about the touchdown count. It’s about: Did we have fun? Did we build friendships?” He grinned. “But for real, I would say: 10.”
With all due respect to the Giants and Cowboys, the most heated showdown this Sunday featured a flurry of gray skirts and white canvas sneakers. It was back-and-forth all afternoon, with Team Grey quarterback, Charlie Mitchell, storming downfield thanks to Withers’ quick hands and a few heroic diving catches by Ayan Broomfield. In the huddles, each team drew up bananas schoolyard trick plays that sent the defense spinning, and planned flagrant touchdown dances for the camera.
By halftime, Team White had come back strong on a couple of end-zone bombs from quarterback/actor Noah Beck to Ramirez, whose prior gridiron glory took place in the beach football scene in Top Gun: Maverick. “This is actually a far more organized game than Maverick,” Ramirez noted. “There, we were playing offense and defense at the same time, with two footballs. We cared more about being ripped, though.”
