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Giants slugger Barry Bonds, after a play-off game in which he smashed two homers that led his team to the World Series, lifted his jersey to display a black Under Armour shirt. He told reporters, "I'm not a superstitious person, but my son wears this brand, and he said, 'We've never lost a game when I wore this shirt,' so I put this shirt on." Washington Redskins linebacker LaVar Arrington, Chicago Cubs first baseman Eric Karros and other big names appear in Under Armour ads for free--or for a donation to their favorite charity. Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens met Plank in a bar during a Yankees-Orioles series and likes Under Armour so much that he, his wife and four sons decked themselves in the shirts for a family Christmas card photo. Clemens stocks Under Armour shirts of varying weights and sometimes phones in design suggestions. "Someone in that company," Clemens says, "took the time to ask players what they really like."
When he started Under Armour, says Plank, "I decided to bypass athletic directors and go straight to equipment managers. They control what's on that field." After his initial sale at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, he maxed out his credit cards and hit up his mom and brothers for cash to set up a small production plant in Baltimore. That fall, Dave Campo, then equipment manager for the Atlanta Falcons, admired Georgia Tech's shirts and ordered 100--with long sleeves to protect his players' arms against burns from artificial turf. These were dubbed Turf Gear. Later, Plank got a call from his high school teammate Ryan Wood, then an assistant football coach at Arizona State University. The team needed thick undershirts for an away game against Washington State University. Plank found heavy wicking fabric and created Cold Gear.
Before long, Wood was a partner and vice president for sales at Under Armour. Kip Fulks, a former all-American lacrosse player at Maryland, tried on a shirt, then signed on as a partner and vice president for production. "It was like nothing I had worn before," says Fulks. "I knew it was going somewhere."
The company's big break came when director Oliver Stone used Under Armour in his football movie, Any Given Sunday. Stone called for a futuristic-looking jockstrap for Jamie Foxx to wear in a locker-room scene with Cameron Diaz. Plank had it stitched up, and seized the chance to plaster an Under Armour logo front and center. When the movie premiered in December 1999, Plank gambled his working capital to buy his first ad, a half page in ESPN magazine. That and the buzz about Foxx's eye-popping jock brought $500,000 in sales almost overnight and boosted the year's revenues to $1.35 million. Plank, who had been getting by on only occasional $250 paychecks, was so excited that he started paying himself a regular salary.
Plank knows he's still an underdog in the face of competition from the likes of Reebok, which he describes as "some pretty big people taking shots at us." One thing, though, is certain: he'll never let them see him sweat.