September 24, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, sneakers may seem like simple shoes, but their story is tied to the growth of modern America. Nicholas Smith, author of Kicks: The Great American Story of Sneakers, shares how these once-humble athletic shoes became a defining part of our culture.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And to search for the Our American Stories podcast, go
to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Up.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Next, we'll take a journey through American history through the sneaker.
Nicholas Smith, author of Kicks, The Great American Story of Sneakers, joins.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Us with the story.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
This isn't necessarily a story about me. It is a
history about sneakers, of course, but it's also a history
about business, fashion, the twentieth century. All of these historical events,
sports of course, business marketing, all of that. You know,
the way into it if you look at it through
the lens of the sneaker. Sneakers as we know and
(01:06):
recognize them today, they can be traced back almost to
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. So all throughout the
eighteen hundreds you kind of have these types of feues
that are very reminiscent of what the sneaker will become.
You know, during the Industrial Revolution, this is when a
lot of people in England especially, you know, went to
(01:27):
work in factories and you know, as anyone who probably
worked in a factory, nos at some point you have
to rest the machines and repair them and you know,
do these types of things. So this was kind of
a very unique time in labor where the workers had,
you know, some time off. Usually you would just you know,
keep on working. If you worked on a farm, there
were no days off. You know, you had to tend
(01:49):
to things. But in factories, different ones had to shut
down for a couple of weeks at a time every year,
so people had a little bit of disposable time, and
a lot of times, if you were able to make
your way to the coast, thanks to another Industrial Revolution invention,
the steam engine, you know, you had a nice little
(02:10):
beach holiday. Now, if you wore your shoes that you
worked in a factory with to the beach, you were
probably going to ruin them with all the sand. So
this is where you started to see a different type
of fhu called a sand shoe beginning to be developed.
And a lot of these had kind of a sole
made of rope and kind of a canvas upper to them,
(02:30):
just to kind of be cheap shoes. You can slip
on and slip off and walk over the sand with
no problem. So a lot of people when they hear croquet,
they think, you know, maybe the long game that you
can buy a Walmart and then you know, play a
few rounds in your backyard before you know, getting frustrated
at everyone. Or they might think of that heart in
Alice in Wonderland where Alice plays croquet with the Queen. Now,
(02:54):
at the time that Alice in Wonderland was written, there
was a massive croquet boom. In written it was the
sport to be playing tennis was really a couple of
years off. But you know, everyone was playing this new
game of croquet that you can play on any sort
of grass lawn. Now, the people playing croquet, you know,
weren't really everyday people. They had this unique thing called
(03:16):
leisure time. They had free time to spend, and part
of this was on you were going to a garden party.
Here's a game we can play on this you know, flat,
nice lawn. Now, you wouldn't want to necessarily use you know,
your nice shoes on you know somebody's nice grass lawn,
but both for you know, it might hurt the shoe,
but it also might hurt the lawn itself. So it
(03:39):
wasn't long before there was a particular style of shoe,
a croquet shoe that was marketed with a flat bottom
with a rubber sole to it. Not not much in
the way of cushion the way we think of sneakers today,
but something that was there to kind of protect the
lawn a bit. Where these the first sneakers. Maybe maybe not,
but this is kind of where you start to see
(04:01):
that transition from a shoe that you would wear walking
around to something that's worn specifically for playing a sport. Now,
where did sneakers kind of transition into what we can
recognize them. This is when people started working out in
gymnasiums more and more, and these were kind of beginning
to be populated all over the Northeast in America through
(04:24):
things like the YMCA. So you had these nice hardwood
floors that you would not want to ruin, you know,
by wearing leather soled shoes, which you know, don't really
grip that well if you're running back and forth, So
you would wear shoes that had a rubber sole to
have kind of that grip. So this is where we
start to see the recognizable sneaker. Uppear. Rubber has been
(04:47):
around for centuries and centuries, but it has a very
particular problem. If it gets too hot, it starts to melt,
and if it gets too old, it turns brittle. So really,
this isn't a very good material at all. Because the
beach shoes that I mentioned earlier, when it got too hot,
those started to melt. So obviously you weren't going to
keep these any longer than they would last, which was
(05:10):
not long. So there was a race in the eighteen hundreds,
in the middle of the eighteen hundreds to kind of
find a way to stabilize that rubber, so to make
it resilient enough where it would not melt in the
heat and where it would not turn brittle in the cold.
And many, many inventors were trying to come up with
a way to do this. The one that's credited as
(05:31):
kind of the father of so called volcanized rubber is
Charles Goodyear, an inventor in America who was a much
better inventor than he was a businessman. When Charles Goodyear
was trying to stabilize rubber, he definitely wasn't making sneakers
out of it. He was trying to come up with
a way where a range of different products could be made.
(05:53):
Everything from rubber life vest rubber tense to rubber coverings
on your carriages so they wouldn't get room and in
the rain. One of the other early products was something
called an overshoe. And what this was, this was kind
of like a big rubber booty that would fit over
your nicer shoes. Now, keep in mind, if you're walking
around on the streets in the eighteen hundreds, you are
(06:16):
walking around in the streets and this is before you
know we have nice sidewalks and nice pavement. You're touching
all of that muck that's there that's really not being
cleaned up at all. So if you walk out in
nice shoes, those nice shoes are going to be ruined
quite quickly. So this is where the need for a
rubber overshoe to put over everything comes in. Now, from
(06:38):
this rubber overshoe we kind of get the evolution of
shoes with rubber soles, including the sneaker later on. But
this is kind of you know, when you think of
that diagram of evolution where the ape is slowly standing up,
this is you know, the the ape version of that
rubber overshoe, and where the man is finally standing directly up,
(07:00):
that is the nike air Jordan's shoe. So you know,
there's a lot of things in between that have to
happen before we can see the thing that we can
recognize today.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
And you've been listening to Nicholas Smith. His book is Kicks,
The Great American.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Story of Sneakers.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Get it at Amazon or all the usual suspects. The
story of America through the lens of the sneaker continues
here on our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I'm
inviting you to help our American Stories celebrate this country's
two hundred and fiftieth birthday coming soon. If you want
(07:38):
to help inspire countless others to love America like we do,
and want to help us bring the inspiring and important
stories told here about a good and beautiful country, please
consider making a tax deductible donation to our American Stories.
Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click the donate button.
Any amount helps Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give,
(08:09):
And we continue with our American Stories and author Nick Smith.
And we learned earlier about the role that Charles Goodyear
played in all of this, obviously trying to solve problems
for tires, but in the end solving the problem of
what do we do with rubber it melts in the summer,
it gets brittle in the winter, and solving that problem, well,
it changed footwear as we know it. Let's return to
(08:32):
Nicholas Smith with more of the story of sneakers.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
One of the things that kind of fueled sports in
America was the presence of YMCAs all over the place,
you know, gymnasiums where you can go to work out,
where young people had a place to go. And these
kind of predated you know, gymnasiums and schools. A lot
of schools did not have a associated sports program. That
(08:58):
was what these sports clubs had. And you know, inside
these gymneys they kind of, you know, resemble what you
would see today with you know, hardwood floors, lots of
exercise equipment, that sort of thing. So late eighteen hundred,
it's very very late eighteen nineties. It's snowing out Massachusetts.
Kids are stuck inside. What do you do with them.
(09:18):
One of the people teaching at the YMCA was a
man named James Naysmith, and he had the brad idea, Okay,
I have all these kids in here, I have a
couple of peach baskets. I'm going to go up to
the track above the court and nail these peach baskets on,
and the kids will have to throw these big balls
into the peach baskets. And that worked as well as
(09:40):
you can expect it to. With people snowed in, they
were punching and kicking and all sorts of things. And
eventually Naysmith came up with, you know, some rules of basketball,
twelve or thirteen rules of this new game that he
had just invented to amuse some kids. And he had
published this in a couple journals that made their way
around the Northeast, kind of the Internet of its day.
(10:01):
So other YMCAs learned how to play basketball. A lot
of the colleges learned the game and started adapting it
into their programs, and the thing took off like wildfire.
Here was a game that can be played any time
of year, you know, with almost any number of players,
and it was simple enough that anyone can understand, much
the same way that soccer is simple. You have a ball,
(10:22):
you have to get it into a goal. You have
a ball, you have to get it into a basket.
It didn't take long for a n Asmith to come
up with. Another big invention of the game is taking
those peach baskets and cutting a hole in the bottom
so he wouldn't have to fish the ball out every
time it went to the basket. So the game of
basketball is relatively new invention. It's much younger than baseball,
(10:44):
it's much younger than soccer, it's much younger than American
football even but it probably out of all of those sports,
grew the fastest because it was a game that anyone
can play anywhere. It wasn't just inside gymnasiums. Of course,
people started putting up a basketball hoops, you know, outside.
American soldiers in World War One brought the game with
(11:05):
them to Europe and this is how it spread there.
And of course, you know, because there was a sport
that you played in a gymnasium, meant that a gymnasium
style shoe, a gym shoe started to become or and
more popular is something to wear. So this is also
when you start to see brands that we can recognize today.
Converse keads start in the early twentieth century to kind
(11:27):
of sell these products. So in the early days of basketball,
there were of course teams set up to go around
and play, and some teams are still with us today
in names. The Boston Celtics saw their history traced all
the way back to the beginning of the century. The
Harlem Globe Trotters used to be a legitimate basketball team
before they became kind of a show team. So, you know,
(11:50):
one of the best ways to attach yourself to this
kind of trend, as a young basketball player named Chuck
Taylor did, is to kind of claim that you've played
for these teams. Now, Chuck Taylor was an actual person.
He wasn't, you know, something invented by the brand. He
was a salesman at Converse who also had a very
short career playing basketball at the time. You know, there's
(12:13):
very little historical evidence that he actually played for the
Celtics as he claimed to, but you know, this was
enough to kind of get him recognized to play for
other teams. And you know, in those days, it wasn't,
of course, the professional basketball that we know today, but
you know a lot of colleges and other places where
setting up their own basketball teams. Companies even would set
(12:34):
up their own basketball teams, and there was something called
the Industrial League Big rubber companies, Firestone, Goodyear, all of
these other ones in Ohio used to have their own
company basketball team that they would play against other basketball
teams in the area. It's kind of like if there
was a basketball team for Google and Facebook, and this was,
you know, big enough where people would actually pay to
(12:56):
see the games. So a lot of times these rubber
companies would hire people that had some basketball background, like
Chuck Taylor, to not only work in their factories but
play for them. And after a while, you know, Chuck
Taylor decided, Okay, I want to you know, want to
sell something. I don't want to you know, make rubber
my entire life. So he started working for Converse. And
(13:18):
his big innovation at Converse wasn't just Okay, here's a shoe,
I want to you know, this is why you should
buy a blah blah blah. He would go around having
these clinics where he would teach people some tricks and
how to play basketball better. And you know, really from
the ground up, he was able to, kind of like
Johnny Appleseed, go from place to place preaching the gospel
of basketball. And of course, the only way you can
(13:39):
play basketball is with the proper Converse shoes, and he
would have people you know, come down to the floor
and he would show them some you know, tricks that
you can do. And obviously there would be that sales
element at the end, where you know, you play basketball
best when you play it in a Converse All Star shoe.
And because of this, he got to know the world
of basketball, the game of basketball very very well, and
(14:01):
a lot of college coaches would call him for advice
on players to recruit if this person is any good,
and Converse started to get into the practice of having
a yearbook, the Converse Chuck Taylor Basketball Yearbook, where if
your team, you know, your your school or a club
or whatever, would pay a bit of money, you can
have your team photo and names featured in this yearbook
(14:23):
alongside some basketball tips from Chuck Taylor every year. So
he was building up not just his sales contacts, his
you know, basketball knowledge. And he's one of the few
non coaches, non executive, non player people to be inducted
into the Basketball Hall of Fame because of his contributions
to the game, not just because of being a you know,
(14:45):
exceptional shoe salesman, but really kind of you know, fostering
that early development, and this is why the Converse All
Star shoe has his name on it and is known
by its nickname the Chucks. This marketing approach didn't re
catch on until much much later where you would want
to buy a shoe because of its direct association with somebody.
(15:07):
Everyone is familiar with Nike shoes. I mean, they're clearly
the biggest brand on the planet. They weren't always that way,
and in order to understand their growth, we have to
keep stepping back through several brands. So another brand that
is very, very common that I'm sure everyone has heard
of is Adidas, or if you're in Europe, it's Adi Das,
(15:30):
named after the founder Adi Dossler. A lot of people
may not realize at first that the man that founded
Adidas and the man that founded Puma were brothers and
they hated each other, and they lived in the very
small town in Bavaria in southern Germany, and neither refused
to leave. So how did that get started? Well, if
(15:52):
you go back to the nineteen twenties, one of the brothers,
Audi Dassler, he loved making shoes, He was a shoemaker
and he loved sports, so of course he you know,
wanted to make the highest quality soccer cleats and running
spikes as well. So he got together with his brother
Rudy and they formed the Cabruder Dassler shufabric or the
(16:16):
Brother's Dassler Shoe Factory, and for a couple of years
they had some success selling these shoes over southern Germany.
But of course, you know, in the nineteen twenties there's
not you know, millions and millions of dollars poured into
sports to kind of provide that market there, so a
lot of people that were wearing these shoes were only
the athletes competing in them. They were in business a
(16:39):
couple of years, and of course in the early nineteen
thirties the Nazi Party came to power. Now not long
after that, both brothers joined the Nazi Party, hoping for
those connections that the business would open up into them
and the German government at the time, the Nazis were
very adamant about having a strong populace, you know, a
(17:02):
very you know, fit people that would be prepared to
go to war at any time. So this obviously fueled
a lot of the interest in sport and fitness, and
of course athletic shoes. So when the Nazis hosted the
nineteen thirty six Olympics in Berlin, this provided a golden
opportunity for the Dassler brothers to kind of get their
shoes worn by a lot of the people competing in
(17:25):
the Olympics.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
And you're listening to Nicholas Smith, author of Kicks, which
tells the story of sneakers. And we learned that Goodyear
played a part. Technology did, but so did opportunity, and
that's the YMCA, and of course an invention called basketball,
which spread like wildfire because it was cheap and you
could play it anywhere, anytime.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
When we come back, more of.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
The remarkable story the history of sneakers here on our
American Stories. And we're back with our American Stories and
(18:11):
Nicholas Smith, author of Kicks, the Great American story of sneakers,
and you can get it wherever you buy your books,
whether it be on Amazon or your local bookstore. When
we last left off, Nick had just told us about
the Dassler brothers, Addi and Rudy and how.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
They were rivals.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Addi was the founder of Adidas, and Rudy while he
founded Puma. Here's Nick picking up with the nineteen thirty
six Olympics in Berlin.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
Obviously, one of the biggest people that everyone was excited
to see was the American sprinter Jesse Owens. And as
the story goes, Addie Dossler found his way into the
Olympic village and gave Owens a pair of Dassler shit
use to try on. Now you know, whether he, you know,
actually won one of his four gold medals in a
(19:06):
Dassler shoe that you know, is best left up to history,
a story that we would say it's too good to
fact check. But you know, this kind of association with
gold medal winners helped the Dasslers accelerate their business even more.
But you know, as many times, brothers fight and quarrel,
and they had a falling out, and after the war,
(19:28):
each one of them decided, Okay, I'm going to take
a portion of the company and set up my company
here on one side of the river, in our little town,
and you you're going to, you know, take the rest
of the people and set up your company on the
other side of the river. And you know, for many
years and decades, Adidas and Puma, both based in the small,
tiny town would compete against each other, and this competition
(19:52):
came to a head during the nineteen fifty four World
Cup when the West German team was wearing Puma shoes
and Rudy Dassler, the head of Puma at the times,
said something that upset the coach. The coach went right
over to his brother and said, okay, Adidas, now you
are shoeing are soccer players. And of course, the West
German side won in spectacular fashion against a much more
(20:15):
favored Hungarian team, and part of the secret was they
were wearing an Adidas shoe where the studs would screw out.
The game was raining and the field was especially muddy,
so during halftime they unscrewed their shoe studs for something
that would grip the mud a bit better, and this
proved to be the deciding factor in that West German win.
(20:36):
And because of this, Adidas became even more successful in
Puma a little bit less. So this did not stop
the rivalry, and it continued even to the next generation.
So the children of both Dassler brothers continued that brand
rivalry after the parents. If you go to this small
town today to the cemetery, both brothers are buried on
(20:59):
either side, the exact opposite, as far away as they
can get from each other in death as they were
in life. So Adidas was very much the brand to
beat now, obviously since it was the brand of bedous,
also the brand that was the most expensive. So if
you were a track coach or a basketball coach in
(21:20):
a high school or college and you had to buy
your athlete's shoes, you wanted Adidas, but probably weren't able
to afford them. Now, somebody saw this, and his name
was Phil Knight. For those who recognize the name, they
know him as the chief guy at Nike.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Now.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
He saw an opportunity in this, and that opportunity was
in Japan. In Japan at the time, they were making
a lot of different things. After the war, their industry
started to come back in a very positive way. And
when Phil Knight was traveling there just after he graduated
(21:59):
Biness school, he saw that there were a lot of
sneaker companies that were making these shoes that were nearly
as good as those Adida shoes, but for much, much
less to the consumer. So a lot of people may
have recognized a type of sneaker with two swooshing lines
and another line coming through this would be the Asex sneaker,
(22:22):
where at the time it was known as a Tiger shoe.
So Phil Knight approaches the heads of the Tiger Shoe
company and says, hey, I can import your shoes to
America for you and sell them there, and together we
can make a lot of money because there is a
gap in the market where people want a very high
(22:43):
quality shoe that you make, but can't pay the very
high prices that Adidas is selling. So they agreed, and
Phil Knight got together with his former track coach at
the University of Oregon, a man named Bill Bauerman, and
together they formed a company called Blue Ribbon Sports. Now,
at the time, Blueburbin's Sports was a strictly an importing company.
(23:05):
They would import the shoes and they would use Bill
Bauerman the track coaches good contacts within the world of
running to kind of get the shoes out to different
schools and different runners. And Phil Knight, the master businessman
that he is, knew to surround himself with salesmen that
knew the market as well. So pretty soon they had
(23:26):
advanced to the point where now they were kind of rationing. Okay,
do we keep being an import company or do we
start making our own shoes and selling them under our
own brands. Now it just so happens that Bauerman Knight's
business partner, in addition to being a track coach, was
(23:49):
a master tinkerer. He would try to get any sort
of advantage to his athletes that he could, So if
he thought that making a pair of running shorts out
of parish material because its extra light would work, he
would try that. If he thought mixing a synthetic rubber
concoction in his backyard made a better runway for his
runners to do the long jump, he would try that too,
(24:12):
And of course he would also try building his own
shoes for his own athletes, reasoning that if you build
a shoe that's exactly fitted to that person, of course
they're going to perform well in them. And if you
can make that shoe as minimal as possible, as light
as possible, that's going to save a lot of weight running.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Of course.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
So after a while Bowerman started sending his design ideas
back and forth to on Atsuka Tiger in Japan. They
were a little hesitant about implementing all of these ideas
and you know, eventually he starts building his own shoe. Now,
as the famous story goes, he's trying to think of
a mold or a pattern or a tread to you know,
(24:54):
make it kind of an all purpose training shoe. Now,
if you've ever into organ, you know it rains an
organ in the Pacific Northwest a lot. And when it rains,
it creates a lot of mud. So if you're running
in shoes that are very you know, flat with a
k not waddle of tread, you're going to slip in
the mud. So, as the story goes, one morning, he's
(25:15):
sitting there and he spies his wife's waffle iron and
he thinks, okay, well that would be a great pattern.
So presumably his wife is away, he pours a mixture
of you know, molten rubber urythane into the waffle iron,
completely ruins it, but he has that idea. Okay, now,
this is the pattern the tread that I'm working for.
(25:38):
And Nike eventually adapts this into the Nike Waffle Trainer,
one of the very early jogging shoes. And you can
buy this shoe today as just kind of a retro
type shoe. And if you look on the bottom you
can kind of see that impression of what that waffle
iron inspired Bowerman to do.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
And you've been listening to author Nicholas Smith and his
book is Kicks, the Great American Story of Sneakers. By
the way, we also told the story of Chuck Taylor
here on our American Stories.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
I did that one myself.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
I had written an essay about him for Newsweek and
own Chuck taylors.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Now and use them in my childhood.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
A great American brand, a great American story about sneakers.
Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com to listen to that story.
And Nicholas well, he was the reason I ended up
writing it and researching the story of Chuck Taylor.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
And boy do we.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Learn a lot about warring brothers, and I mean talk
about brothers who to the end didn't talk fought. My goodness,
if you've got problems in your family, you're feeling a
little less alone. And what a story about Nike and
the ascension of sport in the country, always in the
end boiling down to innovation and opportunity and in the
(26:54):
end the business of sports and the business of leisure.
When we come back more of the remarkable story of
Sneakers a.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Lens into American history itself.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Here on our American Stories, and we're back with our American.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Stories and the story of Sneakers.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Here's Nicholas Smith to continue with the final portion of
the story.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
The nineteen seventies basketball is becoming bigger. College game is
still a little bit more popular, but the professional game
is starting to grow its own stars, and the chee
companies are starting to take notice. Now, of course, the
biggest shoe company on the planet at this time is Adidas.
Converse is also very very big at the time, so
(28:08):
other brands are trying to find their way into the market. Puma,
of course, is making basketball shoes. Now, some people at
Puma had the idea, okay, well, you know one of
the players that wears our shoe on the court is
Walt Fraser. Now, Fraser had a very particular style. His
clothes were very flamboyant. He cared very much about how
(28:29):
he looked. And this is kind of, you know, telegraphing
how stars of today would be perceived. They're approaching the
arena in the locker room, they're dressed up, they want
to show off what their outfits were. Fraser was kind
of one of the pioneers of this, so he seemed
like a natural fit for Puma to approach someone to
wear this shoe as much of a style shoe as
(28:50):
it was a functional shoe on the court, so he
was offered, you know, some money to make the Clyde
signature shoe. Clyde was his nickname because at the time
Annie and Clyde was a very famous hit movie in
the late sixties early seventies, and one of his teammates
in the locker room kind of gave him that nickname
because he wore, you know, one of the big gangster
(29:11):
hats like in the movie, and the name stuck. So
now this is why his association with the shoe Walt
Clyde Fraser is almost as strong as his association on
the court as a incredible player who won two NBA championships.
With basketball becoming more and more popular, more brands were
(29:32):
trying to find their way to, you know, have a
star of their own, and Converse, which is still a big,
big factor. In the early nineteen eighties, had the two
biggest basketball stars at the time, Magic Johnson and Larry
Bird wear their shoes and appear in their commercials now.
Nike at the time had some success in the running
shoe market and was trying to move into other sports.
(29:53):
Of course, they were competing with the Converses and with
the Adidases and with the Pumas in the world that
kind of controlled market. Nan Nike had made some inroads
in getting college basketball players to wear their shoes, but
by the time those players turned the pros, they went
to one of the bigger brands. So they thought, okay, well,
we need to change up our strategy. It's the early eighties,
(30:14):
it's nineteen eighty four. Let's look at the draft and
kind of pick the best players that we think and
then we can kind of approach them for their own
shoes and then that will be our big success story. Well,
some of the Nike executives said, okay, well, you know,
let's not look at just four, let's look at one.
And that one basketball player that they saw was Michael Jordan.
Now we all know the success that Michael Jordan had,
(30:35):
but at the time he was, you know, a rookie.
He was an unknown quantity, very very good, but you know,
it wasn't clear if it would pan out or not.
So they decided to take a gamble and make not
only a shoe, the Air Jordan's Shoe after him, but
also a line of different products clothing. And you know,
(30:56):
after a couple of years, the Air Jordan shoe became
you know, very very big and very very famous because
Jordan started to become a better, better player. Now, of course,
you know, other brands started to become interested in Jordan,
and Jordan was sure if he was going to, you know,
stay with Nike or move to Adidas or Converse, which
he also liked. And Nike said, okay, we're going to
(31:18):
have to, you know, change up our strategy here. We're
going to have to get a new shoe designer to
design a third version of this Air Jordan's shoe. We're
going to have to have a brand new marketing campaign
to go with this. And to of the Nike executives
just happened upon a first time director named Spike Lee
who made a very inventive first movie, and they thought, okay, well,
(31:39):
let's let's try to get this guy in to write
and direct some commercials with Jordan. And these commercials ended
up being a very pivotal moment for Nike because they
kind of solidified not just the myth of Jordan the player,
but the myth of the shoe itself. And if you
can't recall the commercials, they were in black and white,
(32:00):
had you know, a very young Michael Jordan there, and
they also had Spike Lee in his character that he
played in his first movie, Mars Blockman, this kind of geeky, nerdy,
you know, basketball obsessed guy who you know, was just
enamored and in love with Jordan. Even though he loved
the New York Knicks, he you know, saw that Jordan
was still, you know, the best player around in those days.
(32:20):
So one of the first commercials, you know, Spike Lee
and his characters, he's trying to get Jordan to say,
you know, what is it that makes you so great?
Is it your shorts? Is it your hair?
Speaker 2 (32:31):
You know?
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Is it the way you jump? Like, no, no, it's
none of those things. Ah, I got it. It's got
to be the shoes. It's the shoes, Michael, the shoes
make you great. And like, no, no, it's not the shoes.
But of course the point of the commercial is the shoes.
They want you to buy the shoes that Jordan wears,
the same shoes that this professional player that's so electric
that everyone's talking about. You can have the very same
(32:54):
thing that he's wearing on the court. And this is
kind of a very unique way to approach that marketing
in a way that other brands had kind of touched
on but hadn't really nailed it in the same way
that Nike in that marketing was nailing it. They were
tapping into a very old idea, the idea of a
magic shoe. Now, if you think what makes you Cinderella
(33:17):
special at the ball, it's that glass slipper, what makes
Dorothy return back from Oz to Kansas, It's the red
ruby slippers. What makes Michael Jordan fly through the air,
It's that Nike air Jordan. So they were selling an
idea that had been with our culture for a very
long time, that shoes can transform you into something else.
(33:40):
You would start to find them on TV or in
the movies or other sorts of things. So, of course,
in the nineteen seventies, Charlie's Angels is a big, big show,
and Farah Faucet is probably the biggest star on that show. Well,
in one episode, she's i think escaping from a bad
guy on a skateboard and she's wearing a pair of
white Nike sneakers. Well, of course, you know, people watching
(34:00):
this episode, or people seeing the posters or anything of
Pharah Faucet in those sneakers immediately wanted a pair because
of that connection to a very famous celebrity. Now, in
the mid nineteen eighties, you started to see something new. Now, obviously,
you know, musicians were wearing you know, sneakers for a
long long time, but it wasn't until the mid nineteen
(34:21):
eighties when the hip hop group Run DMC started to
make the Adidas sneaker and the Adidas track warm ups,
you know, part of their their look, their outfit. And
some executives at Adidas you know, saw this and said, hey,
we can we can capitalize on this, So they offered
run DMC the first ever non athlete sneaker contract. So
(34:42):
now you know, we're going to pay you the same
way we pay athletes to where our product, except you'll
be wearing them on the concert stage instead of the
basketball court. One of the things that also made Run
DMC kind of a fashion icon wasn't just that they
were wearing the Adida sneakers, It was that they were
wearing them without laces. So you know, if your idol
(35:05):
is wearing your shoes in a certain way, you're going
to emulate that as well. And now they make laceless
sneakers that look like they're worn without laces, but you know,
have a bit of elastic in them so you can,
you know, slip them on. So really it's not just
the product that we're wearing because somebody else is wearing it.
We're wearing it in a certain way because of this.
(35:26):
And you know, when you think of the Adidas Superstar sneakers,
you know, plain white, leather, black, three stripes, you think
of it because it's association with Run DMC. They helped
that old sneaker that was a nineteen sixties basketball sneaker
retain it's cool for decades and decades, and after a while,
(35:46):
more and more brands started to sponsor more and more
non athletes, and you know, this is what leads us
to the world of today where if Rihanna has a
sneaker deal, you're not looking at it weird, like, oh, well,
he's not an athlete. You're like, oh, yeah, of course
she's Rihanna. Of course you would have her own sneaker line.
Fashion tends to jump when things are excessively comfortable or
(36:10):
they look great. So a lot of the early sneakers
that went from the court to the sidewalk didn't look
like they were, you know, something that you'd necessarily play
basketball in. They were made of suede, or they had
lots of different colors to them, or you know, in
some cases, were attached to such a dynamic persona that
(36:32):
you wanted to wear them to emulate that person. And
when players like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan became
really big, you wanted to emulate them as much as possible.
And it wasn't just on the basketball court. It was
you know, in the school yard, walking down the street,
you know, in your spare time, you wanted to have
that association there with somebody famous. I mean, it's kind
(36:54):
of the oldest idea now is you know what we
like is because we saw it on somebody else that
we want to emulate. So you can kind of trace
that aspirational quality to that product. I want to have
something that somebody else has because that would make me
cool like them.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Madison Derricott and a special thanks to
Nick Smith his book Kicks, the Great American Story of Sneakers.
Pick it up, you won't put it down. And by
the way, what a story it is. The nineteen seventies
are when basketball takes off. Then the NCAA tournaments really
monetize and not sixty four teams and the whole country
(37:37):
getting in on the betting action and everything else. And
then comes Nike and they take a bet on a rookie,
and in the marketing they take a bet on a
rookie director, and my goodness, the combination of these two
propel Nike to the stratosphere. And then we learned about
the cultural aspect of sneakers, and that starts with the
resuscitation of the Adidas brand thanks to run DMC and
(37:59):
what happens with converse with the grung Jacks, and now
you can't go anywhere without grown men and women wearing sneakers,
just or fashion. The story of sneakers a look into
the American life and lifestyle and how sneakers change both.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
And to search for the Our American Stories podcast, go
to the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Up.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Next, we'll take a journey through American history through the sneaker.
Nicholas Smith, author of Kicks, The Great American Story of Sneakers, joins.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Us with the story.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
This isn't necessarily a story about me. It is a
history about sneakers, of course, but it's also a history
about business, fashion, the twentieth century. All of these historical events,
sports of course, business marketing, all of that. You know,
the way into it if you look at it through
the lens of the sneaker. Sneakers as we know and
(01:06):
recognize them today, they can be traced back almost to
the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. So all throughout the
eighteen hundreds you kind of have these types of feues
that are very reminiscent of what the sneaker will become.
You know, during the Industrial Revolution, this is when a
lot of people in England especially, you know, went to
(01:27):
work in factories and you know, as anyone who probably
worked in a factory, nos at some point you have
to rest the machines and repair them and you know,
do these types of things. So this was kind of
a very unique time in labor where the workers had,
you know, some time off. Usually you would just you know,
keep on working. If you worked on a farm, there
were no days off. You know, you had to tend
(01:49):
to things. But in factories, different ones had to shut
down for a couple of weeks at a time every year,
so people had a little bit of disposable time, and
a lot of times, if you were able to make
your way to the coast, thanks to another Industrial Revolution invention,
the steam engine, you know, you had a nice little
(02:10):
beach holiday. Now, if you wore your shoes that you
worked in a factory with to the beach, you were
probably going to ruin them with all the sand. So
this is where you started to see a different type
of fhu called a sand shoe beginning to be developed.
And a lot of these had kind of a sole
made of rope and kind of a canvas upper to them,
(02:30):
just to kind of be cheap shoes. You can slip
on and slip off and walk over the sand with
no problem. So a lot of people when they hear croquet,
they think, you know, maybe the long game that you
can buy a Walmart and then you know, play a
few rounds in your backyard before you know, getting frustrated
at everyone. Or they might think of that heart in
Alice in Wonderland where Alice plays croquet with the Queen. Now,
(02:54):
at the time that Alice in Wonderland was written, there
was a massive croquet boom. In written it was the
sport to be playing tennis was really a couple of
years off. But you know, everyone was playing this new
game of croquet that you can play on any sort
of grass lawn. Now, the people playing croquet, you know,
weren't really everyday people. They had this unique thing called
(03:16):
leisure time. They had free time to spend, and part
of this was on you were going to a garden party.
Here's a game we can play on this you know, flat,
nice lawn. Now, you wouldn't want to necessarily use you know,
your nice shoes on you know somebody's nice grass lawn,
but both for you know, it might hurt the shoe,
but it also might hurt the lawn itself. So it
(03:39):
wasn't long before there was a particular style of shoe,
a croquet shoe that was marketed with a flat bottom
with a rubber sole to it. Not not much in
the way of cushion the way we think of sneakers today,
but something that was there to kind of protect the
lawn a bit. Where these the first sneakers. Maybe maybe not,
but this is kind of where you start to see
(04:01):
that transition from a shoe that you would wear walking
around to something that's worn specifically for playing a sport. Now,
where did sneakers kind of transition into what we can
recognize them. This is when people started working out in
gymnasiums more and more, and these were kind of beginning
to be populated all over the Northeast in America through
(04:24):
things like the YMCA. So you had these nice hardwood
floors that you would not want to ruin, you know,
by wearing leather soled shoes, which you know, don't really
grip that well if you're running back and forth, So
you would wear shoes that had a rubber sole to
have kind of that grip. So this is where we
start to see the recognizable sneaker. Uppear. Rubber has been
(04:47):
around for centuries and centuries, but it has a very
particular problem. If it gets too hot, it starts to melt,
and if it gets too old, it turns brittle. So really,
this isn't a very good material at all. Because the
beach shoes that I mentioned earlier, when it got too hot,
those started to melt. So obviously you weren't going to
keep these any longer than they would last, which was
(05:10):
not long. So there was a race in the eighteen hundreds,
in the middle of the eighteen hundreds to kind of
find a way to stabilize that rubber, so to make
it resilient enough where it would not melt in the
heat and where it would not turn brittle in the cold.
And many, many inventors were trying to come up with
a way to do this. The one that's credited as
(05:31):
kind of the father of so called volcanized rubber is
Charles Goodyear, an inventor in America who was a much
better inventor than he was a businessman. When Charles Goodyear
was trying to stabilize rubber, he definitely wasn't making sneakers
out of it. He was trying to come up with
a way where a range of different products could be made.
(05:53):
Everything from rubber life vest rubber tense to rubber coverings
on your carriages so they wouldn't get room and in
the rain. One of the other early products was something
called an overshoe. And what this was, this was kind
of like a big rubber booty that would fit over
your nicer shoes. Now, keep in mind, if you're walking
around on the streets in the eighteen hundreds, you are
(06:16):
walking around in the streets and this is before you
know we have nice sidewalks and nice pavement. You're touching
all of that muck that's there that's really not being
cleaned up at all. So if you walk out in
nice shoes, those nice shoes are going to be ruined
quite quickly. So this is where the need for a
rubber overshoe to put over everything comes in. Now, from
(06:38):
this rubber overshoe we kind of get the evolution of
shoes with rubber soles, including the sneaker later on. But
this is kind of you know, when you think of
that diagram of evolution where the ape is slowly standing up,
this is you know, the the ape version of that
rubber overshoe, and where the man is finally standing directly up,
(07:00):
that is the nike air Jordan's shoe. So you know,
there's a lot of things in between that have to
happen before we can see the thing that we can
recognize today.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
And you've been listening to Nicholas Smith. His book is Kicks,
The Great American.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
Story of Sneakers.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Get it at Amazon or all the usual suspects. The
story of America through the lens of the sneaker continues
here on our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I'm
inviting you to help our American Stories celebrate this country's
two hundred and fiftieth birthday coming soon. If you want
(07:38):
to help inspire countless others to love America like we do,
and want to help us bring the inspiring and important
stories told here about a good and beautiful country, please
consider making a tax deductible donation to our American Stories.
Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and click the donate button.
Any amount helps Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give,
(08:09):
And we continue with our American Stories and author Nick Smith.
And we learned earlier about the role that Charles Goodyear
played in all of this, obviously trying to solve problems
for tires, but in the end solving the problem of
what do we do with rubber it melts in the summer,
it gets brittle in the winter, and solving that problem, well,
it changed footwear as we know it. Let's return to
(08:32):
Nicholas Smith with more of the story of sneakers.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
One of the things that kind of fueled sports in
America was the presence of YMCAs all over the place,
you know, gymnasiums where you can go to work out,
where young people had a place to go. And these
kind of predated you know, gymnasiums and schools. A lot
of schools did not have a associated sports program. That
(08:58):
was what these sports clubs had. And you know, inside
these gymneys they kind of, you know, resemble what you
would see today with you know, hardwood floors, lots of
exercise equipment, that sort of thing. So late eighteen hundred,
it's very very late eighteen nineties. It's snowing out Massachusetts.
Kids are stuck inside. What do you do with them.
(09:18):
One of the people teaching at the YMCA was a
man named James Naysmith, and he had the brad idea, Okay,
I have all these kids in here, I have a
couple of peach baskets. I'm going to go up to
the track above the court and nail these peach baskets on,
and the kids will have to throw these big balls
into the peach baskets. And that worked as well as
(09:40):
you can expect it to. With people snowed in, they
were punching and kicking and all sorts of things. And
eventually Naysmith came up with, you know, some rules of basketball,
twelve or thirteen rules of this new game that he
had just invented to amuse some kids. And he had
published this in a couple journals that made their way
around the Northeast, kind of the Internet of its day.
(10:01):
So other YMCAs learned how to play basketball. A lot
of the colleges learned the game and started adapting it
into their programs, and the thing took off like wildfire.
Here was a game that can be played any time
of year, you know, with almost any number of players,
and it was simple enough that anyone can understand, much
the same way that soccer is simple. You have a ball,
(10:22):
you have to get it into a goal. You have
a ball, you have to get it into a basket.
It didn't take long for a n Asmith to come
up with. Another big invention of the game is taking
those peach baskets and cutting a hole in the bottom
so he wouldn't have to fish the ball out every
time it went to the basket. So the game of
basketball is relatively new invention. It's much younger than baseball,
(10:44):
it's much younger than soccer, it's much younger than American
football even but it probably out of all of those sports,
grew the fastest because it was a game that anyone
can play anywhere. It wasn't just inside gymnasiums. Of course,
people started putting up a basketball hoops, you know, outside.
American soldiers in World War One brought the game with
(11:05):
them to Europe and this is how it spread there.
And of course, you know, because there was a sport
that you played in a gymnasium, meant that a gymnasium
style shoe, a gym shoe started to become or and
more popular is something to wear. So this is also
when you start to see brands that we can recognize today.
Converse keads start in the early twentieth century to kind
(11:27):
of sell these products. So in the early days of basketball,
there were of course teams set up to go around
and play, and some teams are still with us today
in names. The Boston Celtics saw their history traced all
the way back to the beginning of the century. The
Harlem Globe Trotters used to be a legitimate basketball team
before they became kind of a show team. So, you know,
(11:50):
one of the best ways to attach yourself to this
kind of trend, as a young basketball player named Chuck
Taylor did, is to kind of claim that you've played
for these teams. Now, Chuck Taylor was an actual person.
He wasn't, you know, something invented by the brand. He
was a salesman at Converse who also had a very
short career playing basketball at the time. You know, there's
(12:13):
very little historical evidence that he actually played for the
Celtics as he claimed to, but you know, this was
enough to kind of get him recognized to play for
other teams. And you know, in those days, it wasn't,
of course, the professional basketball that we know today, but
you know a lot of colleges and other places where
setting up their own basketball teams. Companies even would set
(12:34):
up their own basketball teams, and there was something called
the Industrial League Big rubber companies, Firestone, Goodyear, all of
these other ones in Ohio used to have their own
company basketball team that they would play against other basketball
teams in the area. It's kind of like if there
was a basketball team for Google and Facebook, and this was,
you know, big enough where people would actually pay to
(12:56):
see the games. So a lot of times these rubber
companies would hire people that had some basketball background, like
Chuck Taylor, to not only work in their factories but
play for them. And after a while, you know, Chuck
Taylor decided, Okay, I want to you know, want to
sell something. I don't want to you know, make rubber
my entire life. So he started working for Converse. And
(13:18):
his big innovation at Converse wasn't just Okay, here's a shoe,
I want to you know, this is why you should
buy a blah blah blah. He would go around having
these clinics where he would teach people some tricks and
how to play basketball better. And you know, really from
the ground up, he was able to, kind of like
Johnny Appleseed, go from place to place preaching the gospel
of basketball. And of course, the only way you can
(13:39):
play basketball is with the proper Converse shoes, and he
would have people you know, come down to the floor
and he would show them some you know, tricks that
you can do. And obviously there would be that sales
element at the end, where you know, you play basketball
best when you play it in a Converse All Star shoe.
And because of this, he got to know the world
of basketball, the game of basketball very very well, and
(14:01):
a lot of college coaches would call him for advice
on players to recruit if this person is any good,
and Converse started to get into the practice of having
a yearbook, the Converse Chuck Taylor Basketball Yearbook, where if
your team, you know, your your school or a club
or whatever, would pay a bit of money, you can
have your team photo and names featured in this yearbook
(14:23):
alongside some basketball tips from Chuck Taylor every year. So
he was building up not just his sales contacts, his
you know, basketball knowledge. And he's one of the few
non coaches, non executive, non player people to be inducted
into the Basketball Hall of Fame because of his contributions
to the game, not just because of being a you know,
(14:45):
exceptional shoe salesman, but really kind of you know, fostering
that early development, and this is why the Converse All
Star shoe has his name on it and is known
by its nickname the Chucks. This marketing approach didn't re
catch on until much much later where you would want
to buy a shoe because of its direct association with somebody.
(15:07):
Everyone is familiar with Nike shoes. I mean, they're clearly
the biggest brand on the planet. They weren't always that way,
and in order to understand their growth, we have to
keep stepping back through several brands. So another brand that
is very, very common that I'm sure everyone has heard
of is Adidas, or if you're in Europe, it's Adi Das,
(15:30):
named after the founder Adi Dossler. A lot of people
may not realize at first that the man that founded
Adidas and the man that founded Puma were brothers and
they hated each other, and they lived in the very
small town in Bavaria in southern Germany, and neither refused
to leave. So how did that get started? Well, if
(15:52):
you go back to the nineteen twenties, one of the brothers,
Audi Dassler, he loved making shoes, He was a shoemaker
and he loved sports, so of course he you know,
wanted to make the highest quality soccer cleats and running
spikes as well. So he got together with his brother
Rudy and they formed the Cabruder Dassler shufabric or the
(16:16):
Brother's Dassler Shoe Factory, and for a couple of years
they had some success selling these shoes over southern Germany.
But of course, you know, in the nineteen twenties there's
not you know, millions and millions of dollars poured into
sports to kind of provide that market there, so a
lot of people that were wearing these shoes were only
the athletes competing in them. They were in business a
(16:39):
couple of years, and of course in the early nineteen
thirties the Nazi Party came to power. Now not long
after that, both brothers joined the Nazi Party, hoping for
those connections that the business would open up into them
and the German government at the time, the Nazis were
very adamant about having a strong populace, you know, a
(17:02):
very you know, fit people that would be prepared to
go to war at any time. So this obviously fueled
a lot of the interest in sport and fitness, and
of course athletic shoes. So when the Nazis hosted the
nineteen thirty six Olympics in Berlin, this provided a golden
opportunity for the Dassler brothers to kind of get their
shoes worn by a lot of the people competing in
(17:25):
the Olympics.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
And you're listening to Nicholas Smith, author of Kicks, which
tells the story of sneakers. And we learned that Goodyear
played a part. Technology did, but so did opportunity, and
that's the YMCA, and of course an invention called basketball,
which spread like wildfire because it was cheap and you
could play it anywhere, anytime.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
When we come back, more of.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
The remarkable story the history of sneakers here on our
American Stories. And we're back with our American Stories and
(18:11):
Nicholas Smith, author of Kicks, the Great American story of sneakers,
and you can get it wherever you buy your books,
whether it be on Amazon or your local bookstore. When
we last left off, Nick had just told us about
the Dassler brothers, Addi and Rudy and how.
Speaker 2 (18:28):
They were rivals.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Addi was the founder of Adidas, and Rudy while he
founded Puma. Here's Nick picking up with the nineteen thirty
six Olympics in Berlin.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
Obviously, one of the biggest people that everyone was excited
to see was the American sprinter Jesse Owens. And as
the story goes, Addie Dossler found his way into the
Olympic village and gave Owens a pair of Dassler shit
use to try on. Now you know, whether he, you know,
actually won one of his four gold medals in a
(19:06):
Dassler shoe that you know, is best left up to history,
a story that we would say it's too good to
fact check. But you know, this kind of association with
gold medal winners helped the Dasslers accelerate their business even more.
But you know, as many times, brothers fight and quarrel,
and they had a falling out, and after the war,
(19:28):
each one of them decided, Okay, I'm going to take
a portion of the company and set up my company
here on one side of the river, in our little town,
and you you're going to, you know, take the rest
of the people and set up your company on the
other side of the river. And you know, for many
years and decades, Adidas and Puma, both based in the small,
tiny town would compete against each other, and this competition
(19:52):
came to a head during the nineteen fifty four World
Cup when the West German team was wearing Puma shoes
and Rudy Dassler, the head of Puma at the times,
said something that upset the coach. The coach went right
over to his brother and said, okay, Adidas, now you
are shoeing are soccer players. And of course, the West
German side won in spectacular fashion against a much more
(20:15):
favored Hungarian team, and part of the secret was they
were wearing an Adidas shoe where the studs would screw out.
The game was raining and the field was especially muddy,
so during halftime they unscrewed their shoe studs for something
that would grip the mud a bit better, and this
proved to be the deciding factor in that West German win.
(20:36):
And because of this, Adidas became even more successful in
Puma a little bit less. So this did not stop
the rivalry, and it continued even to the next generation.
So the children of both Dassler brothers continued that brand
rivalry after the parents. If you go to this small
town today to the cemetery, both brothers are buried on
(20:59):
either side, the exact opposite, as far away as they
can get from each other in death as they were
in life. So Adidas was very much the brand to
beat now, obviously since it was the brand of bedous,
also the brand that was the most expensive. So if
you were a track coach or a basketball coach in
(21:20):
a high school or college and you had to buy
your athlete's shoes, you wanted Adidas, but probably weren't able
to afford them. Now, somebody saw this, and his name
was Phil Knight. For those who recognize the name, they
know him as the chief guy at Nike.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Now.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
He saw an opportunity in this, and that opportunity was
in Japan. In Japan at the time, they were making
a lot of different things. After the war, their industry
started to come back in a very positive way. And
when Phil Knight was traveling there just after he graduated
(21:59):
Biness school, he saw that there were a lot of
sneaker companies that were making these shoes that were nearly
as good as those Adida shoes, but for much, much
less to the consumer. So a lot of people may
have recognized a type of sneaker with two swooshing lines
and another line coming through this would be the Asex sneaker,
(22:22):
where at the time it was known as a Tiger shoe.
So Phil Knight approaches the heads of the Tiger Shoe
company and says, hey, I can import your shoes to
America for you and sell them there, and together we
can make a lot of money because there is a
gap in the market where people want a very high
(22:43):
quality shoe that you make, but can't pay the very
high prices that Adidas is selling. So they agreed, and
Phil Knight got together with his former track coach at
the University of Oregon, a man named Bill Bauerman, and
together they formed a company called Blue Ribbon Sports. Now,
at the time, Blueburbin's Sports was a strictly an importing company.
(23:05):
They would import the shoes and they would use Bill
Bauerman the track coaches good contacts within the world of
running to kind of get the shoes out to different
schools and different runners. And Phil Knight, the master businessman
that he is, knew to surround himself with salesmen that
knew the market as well. So pretty soon they had
(23:26):
advanced to the point where now they were kind of rationing. Okay,
do we keep being an import company or do we
start making our own shoes and selling them under our
own brands. Now it just so happens that Bauerman Knight's
business partner, in addition to being a track coach, was
(23:49):
a master tinkerer. He would try to get any sort
of advantage to his athletes that he could, So if
he thought that making a pair of running shorts out
of parish material because its extra light would work, he
would try that. If he thought mixing a synthetic rubber
concoction in his backyard made a better runway for his
runners to do the long jump, he would try that too,
(24:12):
And of course he would also try building his own
shoes for his own athletes, reasoning that if you build
a shoe that's exactly fitted to that person, of course
they're going to perform well in them. And if you
can make that shoe as minimal as possible, as light
as possible, that's going to save a lot of weight running.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
Of course.
Speaker 3 (24:32):
So after a while Bowerman started sending his design ideas
back and forth to on Atsuka Tiger in Japan. They
were a little hesitant about implementing all of these ideas
and you know, eventually he starts building his own shoe. Now,
as the famous story goes, he's trying to think of
a mold or a pattern or a tread to you know,
(24:54):
make it kind of an all purpose training shoe. Now,
if you've ever into organ, you know it rains an
organ in the Pacific Northwest a lot. And when it rains,
it creates a lot of mud. So if you're running
in shoes that are very you know, flat with a
k not waddle of tread, you're going to slip in
the mud. So, as the story goes, one morning, he's
(25:15):
sitting there and he spies his wife's waffle iron and
he thinks, okay, well that would be a great pattern.
So presumably his wife is away, he pours a mixture
of you know, molten rubber urythane into the waffle iron,
completely ruins it, but he has that idea. Okay, now,
this is the pattern the tread that I'm working for.
(25:38):
And Nike eventually adapts this into the Nike Waffle Trainer,
one of the very early jogging shoes. And you can
buy this shoe today as just kind of a retro
type shoe. And if you look on the bottom you
can kind of see that impression of what that waffle
iron inspired Bowerman to do.
Speaker 1 (25:59):
And you've been listening to author Nicholas Smith and his
book is Kicks, the Great American Story of Sneakers. By
the way, we also told the story of Chuck Taylor
here on our American Stories.
Speaker 2 (26:11):
I did that one myself.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
I had written an essay about him for Newsweek and
own Chuck taylors.
Speaker 2 (26:16):
Now and use them in my childhood.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
A great American brand, a great American story about sneakers.
Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com to listen to that story.
And Nicholas well, he was the reason I ended up
writing it and researching the story of Chuck Taylor.
Speaker 2 (26:32):
And boy do we.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Learn a lot about warring brothers, and I mean talk
about brothers who to the end didn't talk fought. My goodness,
if you've got problems in your family, you're feeling a
little less alone. And what a story about Nike and
the ascension of sport in the country, always in the
end boiling down to innovation and opportunity and in the
(26:54):
end the business of sports and the business of leisure.
When we come back more of the remarkable story of
Sneakers a.
Speaker 2 (27:02):
Lens into American history itself.
Speaker 1 (27:05):
Here on our American Stories, and we're back with our American.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Stories and the story of Sneakers.
Speaker 1 (27:41):
Here's Nicholas Smith to continue with the final portion of
the story.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
The nineteen seventies basketball is becoming bigger. College game is
still a little bit more popular, but the professional game
is starting to grow its own stars, and the chee
companies are starting to take notice. Now, of course, the
biggest shoe company on the planet at this time is Adidas.
Converse is also very very big at the time, so
(28:08):
other brands are trying to find their way into the market. Puma,
of course, is making basketball shoes. Now, some people at
Puma had the idea, okay, well, you know one of
the players that wears our shoe on the court is
Walt Fraser. Now, Fraser had a very particular style. His
clothes were very flamboyant. He cared very much about how
(28:29):
he looked. And this is kind of, you know, telegraphing
how stars of today would be perceived. They're approaching the
arena in the locker room, they're dressed up, they want
to show off what their outfits were. Fraser was kind
of one of the pioneers of this, so he seemed
like a natural fit for Puma to approach someone to
wear this shoe as much of a style shoe as
(28:50):
it was a functional shoe on the court, so he
was offered, you know, some money to make the Clyde
signature shoe. Clyde was his nickname because at the time
Annie and Clyde was a very famous hit movie in
the late sixties early seventies, and one of his teammates
in the locker room kind of gave him that nickname
because he wore, you know, one of the big gangster
(29:11):
hats like in the movie, and the name stuck. So
now this is why his association with the shoe Walt
Clyde Fraser is almost as strong as his association on
the court as a incredible player who won two NBA championships.
With basketball becoming more and more popular, more brands were
(29:32):
trying to find their way to, you know, have a
star of their own, and Converse, which is still a big,
big factor. In the early nineteen eighties, had the two
biggest basketball stars at the time, Magic Johnson and Larry
Bird wear their shoes and appear in their commercials now.
Nike at the time had some success in the running
shoe market and was trying to move into other sports.
(29:53):
Of course, they were competing with the Converses and with
the Adidases and with the Pumas in the world that
kind of controlled market. Nan Nike had made some inroads
in getting college basketball players to wear their shoes, but
by the time those players turned the pros, they went
to one of the bigger brands. So they thought, okay, well,
we need to change up our strategy. It's the early eighties,
(30:14):
it's nineteen eighty four. Let's look at the draft and
kind of pick the best players that we think and
then we can kind of approach them for their own
shoes and then that will be our big success story. Well,
some of the Nike executives said, okay, well, you know,
let's not look at just four, let's look at one.
And that one basketball player that they saw was Michael Jordan.
Now we all know the success that Michael Jordan had,
(30:35):
but at the time he was, you know, a rookie.
He was an unknown quantity, very very good, but you know,
it wasn't clear if it would pan out or not.
So they decided to take a gamble and make not
only a shoe, the Air Jordan's Shoe after him, but
also a line of different products clothing. And you know,
(30:56):
after a couple of years, the Air Jordan shoe became
you know, very very big and very very famous because
Jordan started to become a better, better player. Now, of course,
you know, other brands started to become interested in Jordan,
and Jordan was sure if he was going to, you know,
stay with Nike or move to Adidas or Converse, which
he also liked. And Nike said, okay, we're going to
(31:18):
have to, you know, change up our strategy here. We're
going to have to get a new shoe designer to
design a third version of this Air Jordan's shoe. We're
going to have to have a brand new marketing campaign
to go with this. And to of the Nike executives
just happened upon a first time director named Spike Lee
who made a very inventive first movie, and they thought, okay, well,
(31:39):
let's let's try to get this guy in to write
and direct some commercials with Jordan. And these commercials ended
up being a very pivotal moment for Nike because they
kind of solidified not just the myth of Jordan the player,
but the myth of the shoe itself. And if you
can't recall the commercials, they were in black and white,
(32:00):
had you know, a very young Michael Jordan there, and
they also had Spike Lee in his character that he
played in his first movie, Mars Blockman, this kind of geeky, nerdy,
you know, basketball obsessed guy who you know, was just
enamored and in love with Jordan. Even though he loved
the New York Knicks, he you know, saw that Jordan
was still, you know, the best player around in those days.
(32:20):
So one of the first commercials, you know, Spike Lee
and his characters, he's trying to get Jordan to say,
you know, what is it that makes you so great?
Is it your shorts? Is it your hair?
Speaker 2 (32:31):
You know?
Speaker 3 (32:31):
Is it the way you jump? Like, no, no, it's
none of those things. Ah, I got it. It's got
to be the shoes. It's the shoes, Michael, the shoes
make you great. And like, no, no, it's not the shoes.
But of course the point of the commercial is the shoes.
They want you to buy the shoes that Jordan wears,
the same shoes that this professional player that's so electric
that everyone's talking about. You can have the very same
(32:54):
thing that he's wearing on the court. And this is
kind of a very unique way to approach that marketing
in a way that other brands had kind of touched
on but hadn't really nailed it in the same way
that Nike in that marketing was nailing it. They were
tapping into a very old idea, the idea of a
magic shoe. Now, if you think what makes you Cinderella
(33:17):
special at the ball, it's that glass slipper, what makes
Dorothy return back from Oz to Kansas, It's the red
ruby slippers. What makes Michael Jordan fly through the air,
It's that Nike air Jordan. So they were selling an
idea that had been with our culture for a very
long time, that shoes can transform you into something else.
(33:40):
You would start to find them on TV or in
the movies or other sorts of things. So, of course,
in the nineteen seventies, Charlie's Angels is a big, big show,
and Farah Faucet is probably the biggest star on that show. Well,
in one episode, she's i think escaping from a bad
guy on a skateboard and she's wearing a pair of
white Nike sneakers. Well, of course, you know, people watching
(34:00):
this episode, or people seeing the posters or anything of
Pharah Faucet in those sneakers immediately wanted a pair because
of that connection to a very famous celebrity. Now, in
the mid nineteen eighties, you started to see something new. Now, obviously,
you know, musicians were wearing you know, sneakers for a
long long time, but it wasn't until the mid nineteen
(34:21):
eighties when the hip hop group Run DMC started to
make the Adidas sneaker and the Adidas track warm ups,
you know, part of their their look, their outfit. And
some executives at Adidas you know, saw this and said, hey,
we can we can capitalize on this, So they offered
run DMC the first ever non athlete sneaker contract. So
(34:42):
now you know, we're going to pay you the same
way we pay athletes to where our product, except you'll
be wearing them on the concert stage instead of the
basketball court. One of the things that also made Run
DMC kind of a fashion icon wasn't just that they
were wearing the Adida sneakers, It was that they were
wearing them without laces. So you know, if your idol
(35:05):
is wearing your shoes in a certain way, you're going
to emulate that as well. And now they make laceless
sneakers that look like they're worn without laces, but you know,
have a bit of elastic in them so you can,
you know, slip them on. So really it's not just
the product that we're wearing because somebody else is wearing it.
We're wearing it in a certain way because of this.
(35:26):
And you know, when you think of the Adidas Superstar sneakers,
you know, plain white, leather, black, three stripes, you think
of it because it's association with Run DMC. They helped
that old sneaker that was a nineteen sixties basketball sneaker
retain it's cool for decades and decades, and after a while,
(35:46):
more and more brands started to sponsor more and more
non athletes, and you know, this is what leads us
to the world of today where if Rihanna has a
sneaker deal, you're not looking at it weird, like, oh, well,
he's not an athlete. You're like, oh, yeah, of course
she's Rihanna. Of course you would have her own sneaker line.
Fashion tends to jump when things are excessively comfortable or
(36:10):
they look great. So a lot of the early sneakers
that went from the court to the sidewalk didn't look
like they were, you know, something that you'd necessarily play
basketball in. They were made of suede, or they had
lots of different colors to them, or you know, in
some cases, were attached to such a dynamic persona that
(36:32):
you wanted to wear them to emulate that person. And
when players like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan became
really big, you wanted to emulate them as much as possible.
And it wasn't just on the basketball court. It was
you know, in the school yard, walking down the street,
you know, in your spare time, you wanted to have
that association there with somebody famous. I mean, it's kind
(36:54):
of the oldest idea now is you know what we
like is because we saw it on somebody else that
we want to emulate. So you can kind of trace
that aspirational quality to that product. I want to have
something that somebody else has because that would make me
cool like them.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Madison Derricott and a special thanks to
Nick Smith his book Kicks, the Great American Story of Sneakers.
Pick it up, you won't put it down. And by
the way, what a story it is. The nineteen seventies
are when basketball takes off. Then the NCAA tournaments really
monetize and not sixty four teams and the whole country
(37:37):
getting in on the betting action and everything else. And
then comes Nike and they take a bet on a rookie,
and in the marketing they take a bet on a
rookie director, and my goodness, the combination of these two
propel Nike to the stratosphere. And then we learned about
the cultural aspect of sneakers, and that starts with the
resuscitation of the Adidas brand thanks to run DMC and
(37:59):
what happens with converse with the grung Jacks, and now
you can't go anywhere without grown men and women wearing sneakers,
just or fashion. The story of sneakers a look into
the American life and lifestyle and how sneakers change both.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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