Photo by Catherine Steenkeste/Getty Images
VICE TV has a new documentary “One Man and his Shoes” looking at Air Jordan sneakers and their rise to fame.
Michael Jordan wanted to wear Adidas when he entered the NBA in 1984. Adidas had no money for Jordan, only willing to give the young man out of North Carolina some sneakers to wear.
Converse had all the big players in the NBA at the time including Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Isiah Thomas. Converse wanted to make Jordan one of the bunch.
Jordan’s agent David Falk had other ideas and wanted his client to visit the Nike campus. Falk got some help from Jordan’s parents who insisted he make the trip and see what Nike had to say.
Falk deserves a ton of credit, but not as much as Rob Strasser who was Nike’s director of marketing at the time according to Yemi Barmiro who is the director of VICE TV’s new documentary “One man and his shoes.”
“Rob Strasser was the guy who was just like as a business we are struggling and we need to roll the dice on basketball,” Barmiro told FanSided in a recent interview. “He was the person that handpicked Sonny Vaccaro, he was the person that had the relationship with David Falk, to allow David Falk to be comfortable enough to present these outlandish and bold marketing ideas.”
The documentary debuts on Memorial Day. It does not include Jordan or Spike Lee aka Mars Blackman, but does have interviews with Falk, former NBA commissioner David Stern, scout Sonny Vaccaro, original designer Peter Moore and sports journalist Jemele Hill.
The documentary covers the part of the Air Jordan shoe resulting in violence from some who couldn’t afford the popular sneaker.
“What I was really obsessed with was telling this story in an unadulterated way,” said Bamiro. “I wanted to be honest to the narrative of the sneaker. The sneaker crimes are apart of the sneaker history.”