from Alex Prewitt of Sports Illustrated,

The tailor who outfits the stars of the sports world with dandy duds estimates that he spends 44 weeks on the road each year, excluding two more in Arizona for spring training, because he jokes that it shouldn’t count if he’s only driving between sites and not flying. This year alone he has logged 140,000 miles and puts his lifetime total near 3 million. He travels with three cell phones and two personal bags filled with folders of handwritten order histories, and ships to his initial destination two more suitcases loaded with 55-60 books of sample fabrics. Earlier this week, he called from a car somewhere between Pittsburgh, where he measured for the summer wedding of a front-office official of the Pittsburgh Penguins, to Buffalo, where a dozen NHL draft prospects at the combine await his expertise. “I’ve done it for so long, you get it down pat,” Domenico Vacca says. “It’s not that bad anymore. It’s just normal for me.”

This Thursday, in between Games 2 and 3 of the Stanley Cup Final, the Penguins and San Jose Sharks boarded their chartered planes at the local airport and headed west, many of them wearing suits crafted by Giovanni Clothes, a family-run shop founded in 1965 by Vacca’s father. Indeed, few men around the NHL have more wide-reaching impact than Vacca, who visits all 30 teams before each regular season begins and dresses upwards of half the league. “Every year, there’s got to be close to 300,” he says. “It varies. A few years ago, it was over 450 players.”

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