Wrist Shot · No. 01
A newcomer's notebook on watches — the joy, the people, and the quiet news that you don't have to be rich to play.
In this one: a forty-year collector · the Oris that started it
A confession
I've always liked watches — but liking watches and collecting them are two very different countries, and for most of my life I lived firmly in the first one. I had a watch. I wore it. When someone asked the time, I knew it. That was the whole relationship.
I was never the guy with opinions about movements and bezels and lug widths. I'd nod politely when the subject came up and then change it. If you'd told me I'd one day write a magazine column about watches, I'd have laughed — and then quietly checked the time, on my one watch, to see how long until I could leave.
Then a friend got involved. And like a lot of the best things, it arrived as a surprise in the mail.
The collector · we'll call him Lear
He'd rather stay out of the spotlight for now — so, as we've always called each other, he's simply Lear.
Lear has been collecting for more than forty years, and he does it purely for love — never for the flash. We'll talk on the phone and somewhere around minute three it turns to watches: what just landed, what he's chasing, what the industry is up to. He's the rare enthusiast whose enthusiasm doesn't wear you out. It pulls you in.
What I love is the range of it. His collection runs the whole map, from the names everyone knows to ones most people have never heard of:
Oris Aquis · 30 BAR · 5 DAYS. The watch Lear sent — the one that started it.
The watch that started it
One day, out of nowhere, Lear mailed me a watch from his collection — just because. It was the Oris Aquis, the dial reading 30 BAR and 5 DAYS in that matter-of-fact Swiss way. I put it on. I kept catching the light on the bezel. Something shifted.
Over the years that followed, Lear has gifted me about a dozen watches.
My first reaction to this one, honestly, was that it was gaudy — and so green. I figured the only days I'd ever get away with wearing it were Saint Patrick's Day, or a Boston Celtics game.
But it grew on me. I stopped seeing a piece of green bling and started seeing the craftsmanship — and the simple fun of having a watch with this much heft and history on my wrist. I think about Oris itself: an independent Swiss house with a long, serious record in the watchmaking world.
It's also, by my standards, an expensive watch. The most I'd ever spent on one was a few hundred dollars; this one retails close to five thousand. Which made it an extraordinarily generous gift from a lifelong friend.
You don't have to be rich, and you don't have to be an expert. You just have to think the thing on your wrist is beautiful.Wrist Shot
The part nobody tells you
Somewhere along the way, "watch collector" came to mean a particular kind of person: wealthy, a little smug, fluent in a language built to keep you out. Steel sports models with waiting lists. Auction prices in the headlines. The unspoken sense that if you have to ask, it isn't for you.
That version exists, sure. But it's a tiny, loud corner of a much bigger, much friendlier world — and it's done real damage, because it convinces perfectly curious people that the door is locked. It isn't. The truth Lear handed me, one watch at a time, is that some of the best-made watches on earth are within reach of almost anyone.
The Swiss and independent scene is full of them. Oris makes mechanical watches that will outlive their owners. Doxa has been making dive watches with real history since the 1960s. Tudor is the doorway a lot of people walk through. And the new independents — Christopher Ward, Baltic, Henry Archer — are turning out genuinely lovely pieces at prices that would make the auction crowd blink. None of it requires a broker, a waitlist, or a vocabulary test.
I'm not here to tell you what to buy. I'm a newcomer, not an oracle. I'm just here to say the gate everybody's worried about is mostly painted on.
What it turns into
Here's what surprised me most. Once a few watches came my way, I started doing what Lear did — sending them on. I've gifted watches to my nephews and to a handful of friends, and watching someone open a box and put one on for the first time is its own small, ridiculous joy.
And there's a quiet social life to it I never expected. Every so often a stranger clocks what I'm wearing and says something — and it's almost always another person who's a little bit into watches, lighting up. You end up in a thirty-second conversation with someone you'd never otherwise have met. That's the whole thing, really. Not status. Connection.
About this column
This is a newcomer's notebook, not a connoisseur's column. I'm not going to grade movements or pretend to expertise I haven't earned. I'm going to tell you about watches the way I came to them — through a friend's enthusiasm, as gifts, for fun — and make the case, issue after issue, that this is a far more open and affordable world than its reputation suggests.
Next up: I've got a handful of brands I want to walk through, one at a time — what they make, what they cost, and why a beginner might love them. And down the road, when someone compliments a watch and we get to talking, I'd like to put a few of those people here too: what they're wearing, and why. If you're a watch person, you already know that's the best part.
For now, thank you, Lear. It started with a box from you. ✦