NBA Accessories Week: Jason Terry’s headband was a cotton crown

Jason Terry spent nearly two decades draining 3-pointers and frustrating NBA defenders. He did it all with that trademark headband right on top.

Jason Terry played 1,410 games for seven different NBA teams across his 19-year career and, as near as I can tell, he had a headband on for every game but one (the produce of a lost bet). Including jersey redesigns and home and away variations, he’s worn that signature cotton crown in at least 20 different colors, always covering the same swath of forehead.

The headband doesn’t appear to have a specific origin story but it reportedly found its way onto his head near the end of Terry’s team with the Arizona Wildcats, around the same time as several other rituals of questionable efficacy were birthed. The headband is so ubiquitous, so entwined in Terry’s basketball identity that it even has its own Facebook page.

Functionally, the effects of the headband are likely minimal. Terry sweats, but not excessively. And, honestly, he probably could make 35 percent on 3-pointers even with his eyes burning and squeezed shut. Aesthetically, there is no Jason Terry without the headband.

Terry was slight of build — listed at 6-foot-2 and 185 pounds. In the baggier uniforms of the early 2000s, he often appeared to be swimming in a larger’s man clothes, like Josh Baskins walking away at the end of Big, trying not to trip over Tom Hanks’ suit, except in this case it was Alan Henderson’s shorts. All that extra nylon was counter-acted by pristine white knee socks drew the eye up, elongating the petite frame underneath. A matching sweatband just below the elbow was an exclamation point on his bucket-getting arm. But the headband pulled it all together.

At first glance, the headband seemed to be parallel with the ground, straight across his head. But Terry’s wry smile gave the effect of setting it off a few degrees, putting the whole thing at a rakish angle. Incongruity breathing life into otherwise staid angles and ratios. It made Terry look sharp, cutting, turning a pencil with a softly rounded pink eraser on top into a hand-turned, curly maple fountain pen. Without the headband, Terry was just another slight and slightly bouncy point guard. With it, he was a swashbuckler, a basketball raconteur, a suitable candidate to become the next Dread Pirate Roberts.

Terry preferred to think of himself as some sort of plane, an — all-due respect — lazy nicknaming trading on his initials and his speed. Focusing on that visual of Terry, jogging back up court, bent at the waist, arms outspread, pantomiming the pedestrian take-off of yet Dallas to Houston commuter jet, sells him short. Planes don’t have personality. I prefer to remember Terry in close-up, smiling at the fresh memory of 3-pointers drilled and bigger, stronger basketball foes brought to their knees, while that ring of color silently soaks it all up.

Terry and his headband spent this summer in the BIG3, mostly in the background. At some point, it wouldn’t be surprising to see him back on an NBA bench, in a suit, trading on his experience and expertise as an assistant coach. If that day ever comes, I hope that he feels comfortable to fully be himself — pulling a young player aside at a timeout to go over the finer points of curling around the screen, resplendent in his grey, wool suit with a matching pinstripe headband to pull the outfit together.