Someone actually made a Hoodie Melo jersey. Here’s how it went from idea to reality

There are basketball fans and there are New York Knicks fans. And then there’s Robert Gordon, a Queens native who was so inspired by Carmelo Anthony’s workouts and pickup basketball videos, he had a hood stitched into an authentic Melo jersey.

If you don’t already know the legend of Hoodie Melo, here’s everything you need to catch up to speed.

But the very first Hoodie Melo jersey isn’t something that materialized overnight. It was the climax of a friendship between Gordon and the designer Squeaksz, who said yes when other tailors and designers said no.

“I spoke with [Squeaksz] and asked, ‘Yo you can do this?’ and he said, ‘100 percent,’” Gordon said in a phone interview with SB Nation. “The work he did just blew my mind. It was above the caliber I thought was possible.”

Gordon, who goes by Robbie, has been a Knicks fan his entire life. As he tells it, he “was born into this.” His earliest memory was during the 1994 NBA Finals, when New York blew a 3-2 series lead against Hakeem Olajuwon’s Houston Rockets.

Those playoffs started off promising, but ended with a three-year-old Robbie crying on the floor.

Since then, Gordon’s been inseparable from his Knicks. He’s collected over 40 Knicks jerseys, including a 50th anniversary John Starks jersey and the Christmas-themed green Timofey Mozgov one.

Basketball jerseys have been stitched into the fiber of Robbie’s being. But the idea for this particular jersey formed when Gordon saw videos of a hooded Carmelo Anthony working out with trainer Chris Brickley in an empty gym in lower Manhattan.

“It started with those 2 a.m. workout videos of Melo,” he said. “He started posting all these videos of him hitting these crazy shots, a scissor-kick Dirk Nowitzki fadeaway off the wrong leg, little lefty sky hooks. He’s just playing God-mode basketball in an empty gym.”

Then Robbie stumbled upon this: a Microsoft Paint meme of Melo in a jersey that had a hoodie fixed onto it.

Gordon took the image to a few different tailors. They all passed. Then, he decided to reach out to an old friend the only way he knew how.

“[Robbie] was like, ‘You wanna make something cool? You wanna make history?’” said Squeaksz, a freelance online designer who runs a brand called Lethal Inspiration. “That’s literally what he said. He DM’d me and said, ‘Do you wanna make history?’ And he sent me the meme, and he said, ‘Do you wanna make this meme?’ And I said hell yeah. He said he had all the materials so we linked up.”

Squeaksz makes it sound easy. He’s been cutting, sewing and designing for as long as he can remember. So when Robbie asked him to sew the stitching of a youth Knicks jersey onto the collar of an authentic one, it wasn’t a heavy lift.

But it wasn’t until Squeaksz finished the product and handed it to Robbie that he realized what he had created.

“I gave it to him like wait, let’s take these photos right now,” he remembered. “Then after the first photo I thought, ‘Nah, nah. This is fire!’ The minute we took the photo, that’s when it hit me like, ‘Whoa, I just made something great.’

“At all my other work, I’m doing work for other people. This was actually a fun project.”

The result was something that’s never been done, and if it has, it’s never garnered this much attention. Gordon’s tweet, featuring four photos of himself in the jersey, was re-shared more than 1,500 times and was liked by more than 3,000 accounts. It’s been picked up by Kulture Hub, Bleacher Report, and Clutch Points.

The jersey originally started as a one-of-one. But according to both Robbie and Squeaksz, that could change very soon.