Dressed for distress

BEIJING - It's still green, but a different shade of green, so it's still going to look weird no matter how many yards Brett Favre throws for, no matter how far he leads the Jets. It's all in the look. It's hard to picture Joe Namath as a Packer. Hard to envision Bart Starr in his finest Gang Green.

Old faces in new places don't always look so awkward. The image of Willie Mays falling down in the outfield is as old as sports clich??s themselves, but even as he was falling down in the outfield, Willie still looked just fine, because the Mets uniform of '73 still conjured the Giants uniform of '53.

Maybe we can get used to Brett the Jet in his kelly green (as opposed to dark green, while we're being technical and official), maybe it won't be quite as jarring on a field in East Rutherford as it was inside a conference room in Cleveland. For Favre's sake, let's hope so, because it will allow him to miss this list, the 15 most awkward-looking uniforms in sports history.

1) Johnny Unitas, San Diego Chargers, 1973: Johnny U was about flat-tops and high-tops, not powder blues. Lance Alworth would have looked just as weird with a horseshoe on his helmet. There never was, and never will be, anything uglier than this. Period.

2) Patrick Ewing, Seattle SuperSonics, 2000-01: Those crazy old designs barely were tolerable on the likes of Sean Kemp and Gary Payton; on Ewing, they looked like someone outfitted him in an army tent.

3) Joe Montana, Kansas City Chiefs, 1993-94: Proof that it isn't the performance that can make something seem blightful. Joe Cool was just fine as a Chief, nearly got them to a Super Bowl, even if he looked like a human fire truck in doing it.

4) Johnny Damon, New York Yankees, 2005-present: Damon has been a wonderful Yankee. He plays with pain, he plays hard, he fights to stay in the lineup every day and he's productive as hell. But this is a guy born to play with long flowing locks and a couple days (or months) growth.

5) Eddie Giacomin, Detroit Red Wings, 1975-76: If you listen hard enough, you can still hear the chants of "Eddie!" inside the Garden from the night he showed back up wearing that silly wing-and-tire logo.

6) Kevin Costner, Detroit Tigers, 1998: Look, "For Love of the Game" was bad enough as a movie, but why would Costner commit the additional venial sin of erasing the memories we had of him young, successful and getting the girl as a Durham Bull?

7) Joe Namath, Los Angeles Rams, 1977: It didn't have to be that way. Look carefully at "Heaven Can Wait," which came out at roughly the same time. Joe Pendleton easily could have been Joe Namath, and not Warren Beatty. Too bad Beatty was the one who still had two good knees.

8) Michael Jordan, Washington Wizards, 2001-03: Jordan actually looked quite resplendent in his baseball uniform, even in Double-A. As a Wizard, though, he looked like someone had dipped him in ice-blue Aqua Velva. A bad walkaway memory.

9) Scott Kazmir, Tampa Bay Rays, 2004-present: Why? Because what's more fun than watching a Mets fan twitch on cue?

10) Walt Frazier, Cleveland Cavaliers, 1977-80: Although, in fairness, it would have been difficult for anyone to look good in those ridiculous sorbet-and-sherbet uniforms, but for someone named Clyde to finish his career in a place called Richfield, Ohio?