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Jonathan White

There are some people who are going to have a hard time watching The Last Dance. Isaiah Thomas for one, and also whoever was working at Adidas USA in the 1980s.
In the ESPN and Netflix documentary series, Michael Jordan himself said he was an “Adidas guy” but later became the face of Nike.
His agent David Falk explained how it was that the Three Stripes lost out to the Swoosh.
“The strategy was to try to take a team sport player and treat him more like a golfer or a boxer or a tennis player,” Falk says in the docu-series.


First up was Converse, the brand Jordan had worn in college and which had the game’s biggest stars in their shoes – Larry Bird and Magic Johnson – but that fell through. Signing the rookie to Nike then should have been a shoo-in.
Still Jordan did not want to meet with Nike, a company focused on running shoes at the time. So Falk enlisted someone influential to convince him: Jordan’s mother, Deloris.


Michael recalled her saying, “You’re gonna go listen. You may not like it, but you’re gonna go listen.”
He listened to his mum and the rest is history. The Jordan brand, which comes under Nike, was worth US$3.14 billion at the end of the last financial year, according to Forbes.
That was up 10 per cent year on year and shows how far the brand has come since its first foray.


“Nike’s expectation, when we signed the deal, was at the end of year four they hoped to sell US$3 million worth of Air Jordans,” Falk said. “In year one, we sold US$126 million.”
Not bad a return for an initial US$250,000 investment, which was also well above the US$100,000 that was standard at the time.
“It was like … you will pay him what? A young rookie, that’s done nothing? You must be out of your mind,” Nike employee and later Jordan brand vice-president Howard White said on The Last Dance.


Falk’s negotiations would change both the shoe and sports industries immeasurably.
“When I negotiated the Nike deal, I said to them, ‘You're a small company and if you want Michael Jordan, he’s gotta have his own shoe line’,” he said.
“Nike had just come out with this new technology for their running shoes called Air Soles. And obviously Michael played in the air, so I said, ‘I got it, we’re gonna call it Air Jordan’.”

Jordan has been robbing the hood since. Kids dying for shoes and the only face this dude makes is I don't care. The time will change!
— I AM PEACE STAR (@StarburyMarbury) October 5, 2015

The first shoe released for retail was the Air Jordan I in 1985, and there have been 34 signature shoes in total. These do not even cover the myriad colourways and collaborations, with recent partners including Dior, Travis Scott and Louis Vuitton’s Virgil Abloh. The hype around the original shoe was driven by it being “banned from the league” the year before for breaching NBA uniform rules.
Some of the shoes even took on mythical properties, such as the Jordan I that he wore for the 1998 return to play the Knicks at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Jordan not only played in them but scored 42 points, in what could have been a game dreamed up at Nike HQ. He also wanted to take off the shoes, which were a size too small, but superstition prevailed and he kept them on until the buzzer.


The Jordan shoes kick-started the global sneaker industry, worth US$58 billion in 2018 (and that is not including an entire industry in fake Air Jordans). The resale market – where people buy and sell limited edition shoes – is valued at US$2 billion and has generated its own stock market, StockX.
The platform recently saw rapper Eminem cleaning out his closet and selling a pair of limited edition Jordan IV “Carharrt x Eminem” shoes with the proceeds going to the Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund. A previous pair – one of only 10 made – was sold for US$28,000.
Jordan sneakers have been the subject of headlines – from the late 1980s, people were assaulted and even killed for the shoes, with Sports Illustrated famously printing a 1990 story called “Your Sneakers or Your Life” on the murder of a 15-year-old. The 2015 documentary Sneakerheadz also suggested around 1,200 people a year were murdered for shoes (not all from the Jordan brand), citing a report on ABC News.

Home boy your paying 200 for Jordan's and they make them for 5 dollars. The shoes are made in China in the same places. Stay calm we coming!
— I AM PEACE STAR (@StarburyMarbury) October 4, 2015

Former NBA star Stephon Marbury has been among the voices to criticise Jordan and Nike for the hype machine around the branded shoes – and for the high prices and limited quantities that make them so hard to come by. Marbury called out Jordan directly for “robbing the hood” on Twitter in 2015 when he relaunched his cut-price Starbury brand.
Chinese brand Qiaodan (a transliteration of Jordan’s name in Mandarin) had even registered the trademark on the mainland ahead of Nike and stole ground on them, before a ruling last month that gave the power back to the US duo.
Sneaker culture has since been recorded in books, magazines and museums. All of this was unimaginable in 1984 when Jordan signed his first Nike deal, one that would directly lead him to sit atop the Forbes list of highest-paid athletes of all time. The Bulls paid him US$93 million over 15 years but nowadays he earns more than US$100 million per year from the Jordan brand and has amassed more than US$2.1 billion as of this year.


It is hard to imagine any of this happening without Jordan signing with Nike, or if any other athlete will ever overtake those earnings – his friend Tiger Woods, who also took much of his golf career earnings from the company, is the next highest-paid athlete of all time.
Jordan shoes became the hottest commodity as a list of celebrity talking heads, from singer Justin Timberlake to rapper Nas, recounts in The Last Dance. “For a kid, it was almost like holding a lightsaber from Star Wars,” Nas said.
Much like Star Wars, Jordan shoes became a part of popular culture with Spike Lee at the forefront. The New York Knicks supporting actor and director made Jordans a part of comedy-drama She’s Gotta Have It and cult classic Do The Right Thing, with his Mars Blackmon character from the former film going on to feature in adverts with Jordan.


The latter film was immortalised in the Air Jordan III in 2007, an Air Jordan 2 “Radio Raheem” edition in 2016 and again in an Air Jordan IV in 2019, to celebrate the feature’s 30-year anniversary. The 2007 shoes were due to be re-released in women’s sizes last month.
In Do The Right Thing, the Buggin’ Out character has his brand new Jordan IVs stepped on – “You stepped on my brand-new white Air Jordans” – leading to an argument over the gentrification of the film’s Brooklyn neighbourhood.
That resonates, although the follow-up remark that the shoes cost him US$100 (“US$108 after tax”) does not.
How Hong Kong Jordan fans get The Last Dance free – and first
Jordans are big business and the price tag, even before they get to the resale market, reflects that. It has helped to make the man behind the shoes a billionaire.
It has long been suggested that Jordan put money before morals, with the quote that “Republicans buy sneakers, too” often brought up as a stick to beat him with over the last 25 years, and is the title of Fox Sports journalist Clay Travis’ book subtitled “How the Left is ruining sports with politics”.
Barack Obama, referred to as a “former Chicago resident” earlier in the series, weighs in on this issue in The Last Dance.
The best sport has always been behind closed doors, ask Air Jordan
“I’ll be honest, when it was reported that Michael said ‘Republicans buy sneakers, too’, for somebody who was at that time preparing for a career in civil rights law and public life, and knowing what Jesse Helms stood for, you would have wanted to see Michael push harder on that,” said Obama, now credited as “President” in the fifth episode.
In 1990, Jordan was asked by his mother to appear in a public service announcement for Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte who was running for the Senate seat of Helms, a noted racist and homophobe.
“My mother asked to do a PSA for Harvey Gantt, and I said, ‘Look, Mom, I’m not speaking out of pocket about someone that I don’t know. But I will send a contribution to support him’. Which is what I did,” Jordan said in the docu-series.

Obama gives the basketball star some benefit of the doubt: “On the other hand, he was still trying to figure out, ‘How am I managing this image that has been created around me, and how do I live up to it?’”
In the series, Jordan defends his remark. “I don’t think that statement needs to be corrected because I said it in jest on a bus with Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen,” he said. “It was thrown off the cuff.”
Journalist Sam Smith, the man who Jordan made the comment to, backs up the star’s claim.

In an article for the Chicago Bulls website published ahead of The Last Dance premiere, which also listed some of the political work Jordan has done in later years, Smith explained the context.
“Sorry, Mike. That’s on me, and you don’t deserve all the lazy cheap shots you’ve endured over the years because of what was really a wonderful, ‘shut-up-and-stop-bothering-me-Sam’ quip,” he wrote.
Jordan said it just for kicks – and it is also certain he has had the last laugh. Nike too, but the joke was definitely on Adidas and Converse.

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NBA (National Basketball Association)

A history of Nike Air Jordans: Republicans, murder and Spike Lee

A visitor photographs an Air Jordan I during a preview for ‘The Rise of the Sneaker Culture’ exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in 2015. Photo: Reuters

Young women stitch together the newest Nike Air Jordan sneakers at a Chinese factory owned by Yue Yuen Industrial, the world's largest manufacturer of branded footwear. The factory produces shoes for several big brands. Nike has provided funding to organizations such as Global Alliance that want to improve life for such workers.(Michael Logan, 12/2002)

Accessories of Wil Fang, founder of Cookie DPT, in Sham Shui Po. 30AUG19 [FEATURE] SCMP / Jonathan Wong

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Sport

Basketball


‘Republicans buy sneakers, too’ quote has followed Jordan for years but he confirms that it was ‘in jest’ on The Last Dance
Jordan brand has made Chicago Bulls star a billionaire and cultural icon, while also birthing an industry



‘Republicans buy sneakers, too’ quote has followed Jordan for years but he confirms that it was ‘in jest’ on The Last Dance, while signature shoes birthed an entire industry.
