20/23 Vision

When Nike and MJ launched the first Air Jordan, Spike Lee asked, "is it the shoes?" Twenty years later, the answer is a resounding yes

Always soar.

It's a message to keep in mind as sneakerheads celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Air Jordan. Ray Allen kicked off the festivities in February by showcasing the AJXXs at the NBA All-Star Game, and since then, 85% of the shoes Nike put out on the market have been sold … at $175 a pair.

How surprised you are at those numbers depends on what might be called your Kicks Quotient. When it comes to basketball shoes, there are two kinds of people: those who line up at sunrise for a chance to rush a storefront, squeeze by a bouncer named Big Twoine and grab the first pair of Pigeon Dunks to go on sale; and those who walk by wondering what all the fuss is about. Those who appreciate why their favorite uncle still has a pair of Clydes stashed upstairs, and those who think all the man's got is a smelly closet. Those who thought Nelly didn't go far enough when he said he needed two pairs of white-on-white Air Force I's to go stompin', and those who thought maybe he was rapping about the president's ride.

Those who get it, and those who don't.

If you don't, if you haven't experienced how sneaker culture can dose your brain, seize your heart and command more of your time and money than Xbox, fantasy football or golf, here's all you need to know: slipping on superior sneaks zaps you with the same sensation you get from the opening bars of a great song: shock, but inevitability, too. Whether "Satisfaction" or "Bootylicious," you know an instant classic when you hear one. Same thing with the right shoes; same thing squared with Air Jordans, which offer the chance to tap into basketball's greatest force on and off the court. They feel like they should have been on your feet forever. They make you want to cut and spin and flirt. They make you want to soar.

Examine many of the trails blazed through our culture over the past two decades, and you'll find MJ's prints leading the way: athletic gear going mainstream, sports going fashion, marketing going global, black culture going global. "We had icons before," says Reed Bergman, CEO of the sports marketing firm Playbook. "But prior to Michael Jordan, there was no blueprint for merchandising them. Twenty years later, the steps he took are now the templates any athletic marketer should follow to build a brand."

THE STORY of the Air Jordan XX began in Portland, Ore., where a trumpet player, David Monette, custom designs trumpets. One of his techniques is enveloping the bell of a trumpet in a second skin, then piercing decorative holes in the instrument, which alters timbre and pitch. He then has a local jeweler engrave symbols on the bell. It was this touch that caught the eye of Nike designer Tinker Hatfield, who stopped by Monette's shop in 2001 shortly after agreeing to work on the AJXX. One graphic in particular interested Hatfield. On a trumpet Monette's company had made for Wynton Marsalis, Hatfield noticed a carved little snare drum with wings on each side. Whenever Marsalis picked up his horn, this symbol would remind him of his early days: the great drummer Art Blakey had asked Marsalis to join his band when Wynton was just a teenager. It would also remind Marsalis of the message Blakey taught him: always soar.

Hatfield knew immediately what he would do for the AJXX: tell Michael Jordan's life story on a shoe.

Getting Jordan to cooperate, though, was another matter. His Airness found it difficult to come up with personal stories on demand. Eventually, Hatfield flew to Chicago and spent days living Jordan's life: driving fast cars, racing motorcycles, watching hoops. And in the quiet hours at the end of those days, MJ finally started talking. Rambling, really: about his first car, a 1976 Monte Carlo T-top, and how he tried to put that top up when it was raining but instead he clamped a part backward and cracked it, and how his father got a hammer and popped in some fiberglass and fixed it; about how when he was young and goofing off at school and got suspended, his mother had to go to work but wasn't going to let him roam free, so she made him drive to her office and sit in the back of the car all day.

Night after night, Jordan spoke and Hatfield drew. Then, one evening in September 2003, Hatfield sat on a couch in Jordan's home with a sketch pad while MJ shuffled cards at a table. Warren Sapp, in town for a sneaker commercial, was in the house talking trash about the Bucs' Super Bowl win.

Jordan's retort? "One time a champion, six times a legend."

Shut down, Sapp moved on to bothering Hatfield.

"Let the man be," MJ said. "You're going to mess it all up."

Finally, Hatfield showed them what he'd been working on: two pages of symbols, chapters of Jordan's life story etched in tiny hieroglyphs.

Now, there's a lot happening on the Air Jordan XX: newfangled pods in the soles, 69 dimples on the side (for each point in Jordan's highest-scoring NBA game), a leash you can use to convert the shoe from high-top to low-top. But what will catch your eye in short order and hold your attention long after is the strap across the top of the shoe. It's filled with some 200 Hatfield icons: a micro MJ mural etched onto every sneaker. Included are a small "Pops" worked into a toolbox, and a tiny Monte Carlo T-Top with a kid in back.

"This is cool," Jordan said when he saw Hatfield's original sketches that night. "Very cool."

Sapp was silent, his mouth hanging wide open.

IT'S ALWAYS easier to see these things in retrospect, but America in 1984 was ready to be taken over by a young hoops star with a knack for sales. The kids of the Baby Boomers had just entered their teens, a post-1960s generation that welcomed diversity and had money to burn. You could feel pop culture getting blacker: just a couple of years after mainstream radio had largely ignored George Clinton's "Atomic Dog," Prince's Purple Rain spent 24 weeks at the top of the charts. Meanwhile, Larry and Magic were blowing up the NBA just as cable and satellite were starting to shrink the world, leading to a massive ad boom: by 1990, the average American was exposed to 3,000 commercials a day, up from a reported 1,600 in 1985. When MJ unveiled the first Air Jordans, the NBA fined him for wearing the wrong colors on his feet, and the country buzzed about this slam-dunking kid and his red-and-black sneaks. Nike CEO Phil Knight was happy to fuel the fire, saturating the planet with Mars Blackmon testimonials.

But it's a rule of thumb in the sneaker biz that celebrity endorsements don't last five years, let alone 20. Back in 1987, Patrick Ewing put his name on adidas Rivalries. In June of 1990, LA Gear launched Michael Jackson's Billie. When was the last time you caught anyone sporting those wouldbe classics? Air Jordan didn't just break records when it was launched. Like its namesake, it kept setting the bar higher for performance and popularity. "You had the power of a brand and new shoe technology coming together," says Meghan Cleary, author of The Perfect Fit: What Your Shoes Say About You. "These were scientific sneakers-they'd add inches to your jump-but there were also shootings over them."

In 1988, as MJ was winning the MVP, scoring title, Defensive Player of the Year and Slam Dunk Contest, he wore AJIIIs, the first Jordans designed by Hatfield. Trimmed with a faux snakeskin print, the III was also the first three-quarter-top Air Jordan, the first to show off its air sole with transparent sides, the first to feature the Jumpman logo. Many aficionados call it the best sneaker ever, but almost every new Air Jordan represented some sort of milestone: for Nike, the shoe industry, pop culture or MJ.

Jordan, for example, always wanted to produce basketball shoes so sleek and fashionable that they could be worn with a tux. And in 1995-96, as the Bulls were going 72—10, Nike fulfilled that ambition with the AJXI. Ringed by shiny patent leather, the XIs were-once again-the fastestselling shoe of all time. And damned if they didn't look great at the prom.

The Jordan brand, a division unto itself at Nike since 1997, has sustained its dominance by being creatively aggressive at each step of what MBAs call the supply chain-the path from drawing board to finished product. Each year, Nike's designers quiz Jordan about what he's wearing, driving and listening to, so they can incorporate his personal style into his next shoe. The AJ XIV, for example, had its roots in Ferrari's 550 Maranello sports car, and you can see motorcycle cowlings along the XX. Next, AJ developers choose the physical ingredients for their shoe, often picking from Nike's huge materials library. But not always. "With the XX, we wanted the midfoot strap to be all leather," says Josh Heard, senior footwear developer at Jordan. "But we wanted it to be shiny-somewhat patenty-to win MJ over. We searched high and low among vendors for something more iridescent, and finally found it in Taiwan."

Once Heard and his crew know how a shoe should look, they comp a "tech package" describing its backstory and components, and how to stitch a shoe together. Those instructions get sent to China, where Air Jordans are made. Of course, it's not just one model that rolls off the assembly line. Nike introduces AJs in an array of color combinations. It constantly relaunches retro models. It lets you custom-design your own shoes over the Internet. And while keeping up its barrage of TV advertising, the company has pioneered new methods of connecting to consumers, from sponsoring high school teams to running websites where sneakerheads can chat and trade.

The result is the kind of loyalty among young consumers that most marketers only dream of creating. None of the hits Jordan has taken over the years, from criticism of the Mikeand-Spike ads at a time when kids were killing each other over shoes, to concerns about conditions at Nike factories, has dented his image or his self-confidence. Still, a couple of questions linger. Should anyone pay $175 for a pair of sneakers? And, 20 years on, shouldn't Jordan be doing something a little grander than selling athletic gear?

If those queries seem reasonable to you, know how beside the point they seem to Jordan and his Nike colleagues. These people are capitalists, for better and worse. Asked about the price of Air Jordans, Jordan product director Gentry Humphrey says, "People say the same thing about Mercedes-Benz, but they market the S-Class and C-Class to different people. We do that too. It's an individual thing. People buy iPods and other items that are expensive. We feel we should leave it up to the consumer." As for Jordan's ambitions, well, he's only 42—too old for the NBA, too early in his business career for corporate titanship. Since he has reaped insane rewards for his excellence, it's only natural for him to see how big he can make the market for the brand he helped build. But who knows where he will ultimately turn his talents? Meantime, while we wait to see what Michael Jordan does next, the shoes that bear his name mean only as much as the feelings they inspire.

You up for a little soaring?

Print Article . Email Article. Subscribe to The Magazine