The Uniform All the Athletes are Wearing

July 14, 2010— -- Athletes are continually trying different ways to get the leg up on their competition - carbo loading, nutritional supplements, shaving their um, body – anything to finish a second faster, go the extra mile or rack up one more point before the buzzer sounds.

Kevin Plank, 37, recognized this competitive attention-to-detail and he managed to turn a business launched in his grandmother's basement into a multimillion dollar clothing empire.

Plank is the CEO of Under Armour, an athletic apparel company known for tight-fitting, sweat-wicking clothing, and this year, the company has set its sights high: Its goal is to bring in over a billion dollars in revenue.

As a mediocre football player at the University of Maryland in 1995, Plank was looking to give himself any advantage over his competitors. He decided to start with the sweat-soaked T-shirts he wore to practice.

"I was pretty short and slow, so my incentive was giving me that little edge and advantage," he said. "So much of sports is about the last inch and the last minute of the game."

Plank began making snug-fitting, "compression" t-shirts using a sweat-wicking, synthetic fabric. He did not invent the fabric, he simply created the shirts and asked some of his pro-football friends to try them out.

"I thought it was going to be easy," he said, recalling how he figured he could send out a few shirts and "be on easy street in no time."

However, he said, "the fact of the matter is it just doesn't work like that."

Plank based his business out of his grandmother's basement. He racked up $40,000 in credit card debt, and thousands of miles on the road, not to mention a ton of hard work.

"We were always smart enough to be naive enough to know what we could accomplish," he said.

Plank survived the early years of Under Armour, and the tight-fitting t-shirts became mainstays in football locker rooms. The shirts even appeared on star physiques in various football flicks such as "Any Given Sunday."