“You always have that bad dream, where you’re naked on the soccer field, you know?” Ben Olsen said Wednesday afternoon.

Via WashingtonPost

“I’ve had it before, for sure. You forget your uniform, you’re out there, and it just somehow came true during a photo shoot. It was pretty trippy.”

I talked to four of the United players who went ahead and took their clothes off for ESPN, and all four said went through moments of second-guessing.

“It was definitely bizarre,” Olsen said. “Leading up to it, we said yes to it, not really knowing what it was. And then the day came when we really were gonna do this thing, and we were like, ‘What did we do? Did we really agree to this?’ ”

“It was a little bit weird in the beginning,” Jaime Moreno agreed. “Different, very different.”

“I thought it’d be pretty cool, but I guess reality kind of set in when [PR guy Kyle Sheldon] showed me the picture,” Clyde Simms said.

“It hit me hard, too,” Santino Quaranta said. “People have been asking me about this since I told them, asking when is it coming out. And I just said, ‘I think in October.’ But now I’m not telling anybody.”

The Shoot

The shoot was done on a blazing hot day. The six players went out on the pitch with their ESPN robes on. Then they were asked to take them off. They all sort of looked at each other, and finally Olsen disrobed.

“I had a job to do,” Olsen said. “And that was part of the job, was to drop the robe.”

“It was awkward,” Quaranta added. “They were like ‘Jump, all right jump, jump.’ We just kept jumping. Naked. In RFK.”

Building the Wall

The players, as you can see, were formed in the traditional soccer wall, facing balls driven in their direction by United’s equipment manager. Apparently, they were attempting to build a genuine wall, which required Bryan Namoff to make the Scheyer Face, and, oddly, to scissor his legs.

“The ball’s gonna go right underneath the wall, man,” Quaranta complained.

“Namoff was hamming it up there a little bit,” Olsen said. “It’s a pretty good looking wall, besides the fact that we’re all naked. See, those guys were all flexing. You know, I’m a method actor. And I was really into the wall. A lot of those guys are jumping and flexing; I’m trying to do my duty to block that ball.”

Avery John walked by a few moments later and asked what the picture’s headline would be.

“The headline is Everybody Flexes Besides Ben,” Olsen said”