Year of the Dunk

by Asher Price

  14

  It’s Gotta Be the Shoes

  July 23, 33 days to go: I saw Hugh Jackman on Letterman tonight, plugging his new Wolverine movie. Man looks ripped. He reported—and this made me very sad—that he didn’t eat any fruit during his months of working out. Feeling guilty, I solemnly pledge, from here on out, no fruit for me. Not just fresh fruit; no dried fruit, either. No raisins in my oatmeal, no grapes as a snack. No apples. No banana-frozen cherry–nonfat milk licuados, whipped together in my blender. Nothing. I had grown up in a family that regularly grazed on things fruity, as if scurvy was right around the corner. Fruit was so cherished that gnawed-at apple cores were not deposited in the garbage but stuffed in the refrigerator between the Sunday-brunch lox and years-old marmalade, there to wait patiently for some mysterious future use.

  In autumn 1988 a newly minted Reebok executive named Mark Goldston flew from Boston to Michigan on a top-secret sneaker mission, code-named Dr. Detroit. Goldston wanted to see for himself what he hoped would be the “holy grail” of athletic footwear—a pair of shoes that, in defiance of the sorts of natural limits we all face, would actually make its wearer jump higher or run faster. He had been chief marketing officer at Reebok only a few months, a 33-year-old advertising maven plucked from the toiletry and fragrance firm Fabergé, where he pitched antiperspirants and hairspray for men, to revitalize the stagnant sneaker company. Before Fabergé, he had run the marketing shop at Revlon for four years, and now, in a way, he was being asked to do a makeover job at Reebok. The company, named for the graceful South African gazelle, had a proud, if musty, history. Descended from a late nineteenth-century English footwear purveyor, the company still insisted that a Union Jack grace every shoe. Reebok had made its mark in the States during the 1970s aerobics craze, and, again, in 1982, with the introduction of a woman’s running shoe, a novelty at the time. But as the decade heated up, aerobics and running were taking a backseat to basketball, a sport with new celebrities eager to expand their reach and income through endorsements. In 1988, Reebok saw its first drop in earnings, about 20 percent. The company, lacking a high-profile high-top, was being lapped by its competitors. Nike had its Air Jordan; Adidas had its Attitude, favored by Patrick Ewing and other big men; and Converse, the old, classy standby, had its Weapon, worn still by Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Reebook’s only basketball shoe was the BB4600, which was affectionately known inside the company as a shoe you’d wash your car in.

  Chicago-raised, Goldston had always been a brash overachiever, willing his 5′11″ frame to dunk at least a volleyball in high school. “I was always two inches away,” he says ruefully. (I felt his pain.) The narrowness of that difference, between ordinariness and marvelousness (or, as they say in the makeup industry, between looking good and looking great), fascinated him. The slogan of his childhood shoe brand, PF Flyers, rang in his head: “Run your fastest, jump your highest.” Was there a shoe that could get you to run even faster, jump even higher, than your natural capability?

  That was the hope with Dr. Detroit. Reebok had hired a “podiatrist type of guy” at the University of Michigan to design a sneaker with springs inside—“a tiny trampoline” is how Goldston describes it—that promised to instantly improve the hops of its custodian. This was the prototype that Goldston dragged himself to Michigan to try. He still played ball now and then, and he wondered whether these shoes would be what he needed to overcome those two inches.

  They were duds. After running and jumping in the clunky shoes for a half hour, Mark Goldston’s feet fell asleep. The size of the springs made them too bulky. Plus, he wasn’t sure he was jumping any higher—partly because they were so big. Still, he took the shoes back to Massachusetts to conduct future tests. At home he entrusted the sneakers to his dependable quality control experts, his identical twin sons, Adam and Ryan. Little more than toddlers, they were old enough, already, to compete at basketball—they competed at everything, really, a pair of talented left-handers who hated to lose. They were convinced they would one day dunk, and as they slipped their tiny feet into the massive Dr. Detroiters, their eyes grew wide, enchanted by the idea of a shoe with special powers.

  —

  About the time Adam and Ryan Goldston were toying with the Dr. Detroit moonboots in their Massachusetts manse, I was a gawky prepubescent trying not to show up late for my Amsterdam Avenue school bus. As an 11-year-old in New York City, my favorite shirt was a baggy gray tee that hung past my butt emblazoned with a photo of Patrick Ewing, the great Knicks center, rising up to slap away an opponent’s shot. “Return to Sender” was stamped across it. This was as much as we could hope for, advertising-wise, from Patrick, marginalized by corporate America for his Jamaican accent and workmanlike ways. We New Yorkers were haunted by a more charismatic dunker, a contemporary of Ewing’s: Michael Jordan.

  Not only did his Bulls repeatedly shoo our Knicks from the playoffs, but Jordan’s image was omnipresent—on sneakers, cologne, T-shirts and, of course, television. Jordan put his popularity down to the “ability to do things that other people can’t do but want to do and they can do only through you.” “They watch you do it, then they think that they can do it,” he told Esquire magazine in 1990 for an article titled “Michael Jordan Leaps the Great Divide.” Advertisers glommed on to this logic, too. In their genius, they held out the possibility that we mere humans, even Knicks fans, could approach Jordan’s abilities, if only we bought the right merch. “It’s gotta be the shoes,” Mars Blackmon, the alter ego of Spike Lee, famously declared in a series of Nike advertisements in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Michael dunked in the background. (In the pre-Seinfeld era, the Nike ads were arguably the best thing on television. They were clever and stylish and they respected the intelligence of both the viewer and the mostly African-American stars who made the commercials what they were.) Good fun, of course. No one really thought Michael Jordan’s talent had all that much to do with his sneaks. Even Michael said, “No, Mars.” But the message got through: If you wanted to “be like Mike”—as the jingle went in the Gatorade commercial—you ought to wear his shoes and drink his drinks. Rebecca, being the Michael Jordan fan she is, can still sing the lyrics: “Sometimes I dream / That he is me / You’ve got to see that’s how I dream to be / I dream I move, I dream I groove / Like Mike / If I could be like Mike.” The song is no more about dunking than the Mars Blackmon commercials are. They’re about upward mobility, yes, but about a particularly American version of gaining fortune and fame. That’s what it means to be like Mike, who—along with, perhaps, Bill Cosby’s Dr. Cliff Huxtable—was one of the first African-Americans to truly be a star for black America and white America equally. It’s what Mark Goldston was promising to consumers with his sneakers, in what was the heyday of sports footwear. For white kids, “movin’ and groovin’ like Mike” meant borrowing some black cool—in that way, just wearing the sneaks were a stand-in for the dunk. At $100 a pair, they were also an early version, for both blacks and whites, of bling—a sign of flushness. And it’s why, in a way, the sneakers themselves, especially the white-and-red Air Jordans, kept squeaky clean, became a status symbol of the streets, of wealth and power, something that teenagers famously killed each other over. (In a coda matching our times, the Air Jordan and its sneaker contemporaries are now offered their own shelves and accent lighting in SoHo’s museum-like, hipster-curated boutiques.)

  With my dunking deadline nearing, and desperate to grab any spare half inch I could find, I began wondering, just as Mark Goldston once did: Could something as simple as a change in sneakers make me more like Mike? I had just learned that I was genetically deficient in the fast-twitch-muscle department. How easy would it be to buy my way out of my natural physical inheritance?

  Advertisers have long peddled potential. Whether they’re selling weight-loss programs or penis enlargement, companies aim to convince consumers they can remake their bodies. The only thing many baby boomers remember of their otherwise forgettable 1950s comic books were th
e Charles Atlas advertisements on the back covers that depicted a scene at the beach: “Hey, Skinny…Yer ribs are showing!” a beefy bully shouts at an adolescent standing next to a bikini-clad girl. Two panels later, after the boy has subscribed to the Atlas regimen, he returns to the beach to kick the bully’s ass. “Oh, Joe! You are a real he-man after all,” the girl tells him. In the bottom half of the ad appeared a picture of Charles Atlas, flexing a biceps.

  People used to laugh at my skinny 97-pound body. I was ashamed to strip for sports or for a swim. Girls made fun of me behind my back. Then I discovered my bodybuilding system, “Dynamic Tension.” It made me such a complete specimen of manhood that I hold the title “The World’s Most Perfectly Developed Man.”

  It was no coincidence that the insides of these comics were dedicated to wondrous tales of transformations, from weaklings to superheroes. There was Robert Grayson, the diminutive son of a Jewish scientist who flees Earth with his family during the rise of the Nazis, only to return as Marvel Boy, with Uranian powers to fight baddies. And there was Steve Rogers, the scrawny offspring of Irish immigrants, who, injected with a serum by the U.S. military, becomes the unstoppable physical specimen known as Captain America. These transformations often involved little hard work—a radioactive spider here, a super-serum there. With the Atlas ads pictured on the backs of comics for nearly 50 years, the implicit lesson for generations of lightweight introverts was that they, too, could undergo a transformation.

  —

  On a sunny, unseasonably warm February day in 1989 in Atlanta, Mark Goldston, accompanied by thumping music, bounded onto a stage at the Sporting Goods Manufacturing Association meeting, the world’s big sneaker trade show, to tell convention-goers about the invention that would secure his name in the annals of sneaker history. Even with the Dr. Detroit project scrapped, Goldston was convinced he could apply the principles of marketing to sneakers by marrying the technology craze to the high-top. That year, Back to the Future, Part II ruled the cineplex and Apple had recently released its first portable computer. Keen to the zeitgeist, footwear companies started using “visible technology” in their sneakers—little plastic portals that purported to give a window onto the performance-changing Asics gel and the Nike air. Goldston had already patented the Energy Return System, a design of cheap plastic tubes that promised to release energy with each footstrike; he had overseen the development of a sneaker whose color could be changed with the insertion of a cartridge; and he had devised a campaign around honeycomb padding found in the seats of the space shuttle.

  “I wanted to make something the Jetsons would wear,” he says. The sneaker Goldston would present that day in Atlanta took its inspiration from a pair of his wife’s Scandinavian buckleless ski boots that had a built-in device that sucked in air to keep the boot snug. Goldston sketched out the shoe with Reebok designers, ordering that a self-contained pump in the shape of a mini basketball be placed on the outside of the tongue. The prototype used rubber bladders made by a Massachusetts blood-pressure-cuff company.

  “The chairman wanted to call it ActivAir,” Goldston says with a snort. “I was like, ‘They have a whole company based on ‘air’ ”—Nike—“ ‘and it’d just sound like we’re copying them.’

  “I suggested ‘The Pump,’ and someone says, ‘That’s what women call their high-heeled shoes,’ and I said, ‘Do you really think fifteen-year-old boys will know or care what women call their heels?’ ”

  The shoe industry began buzzing about the Reebok Pump and this young sneaker wizard. Advertisements with Dominique Wilkins followed, leaving the vague impression that the shoe would increase powers of levitation. Dee Brown, of the Boston Celtics, would famously stoop down during the 1991 NBA Slam Dunk Contest to pump up his Reeboks before attempting one of his winning jams.

  The price was set at $170, making it the most expensive mass-produced shoe on the market. “If we’re going to do something, we’ve got to shock the system,” Goldston remembers telling his colleagues. “For Chrissakes, we’ve got a Union Jack for a logo. What is that?” The high price for The Pump was also a sales gimmick to get consumers to settle happily for at least a $75 shoe. “This was going to be like the Mercedes SL in the showroom, the one that sells all the E-Classes,” says Goldston, using an analogy that suggests how well he’s done for himself. But the Pump was a phenomenon in its own right. “Guess what? We sold the SLs at E-Class volumes.”

  The Pump became a status symbol, a suburban kid’s attempt at seeming urban and black and rich at the same time. “Pump it up!” was the unwittingly masturbatory cri de coeur shouted on blacktops across the country. But no one took the scientific claims with anything other than guffaws; the Pump carried all the seriousness of a walking elementary school science fair experiment.

  Goldston, who had become known, somewhat derisively, as the High Priest of High Tech, soon left Reebok, in a squabble over sneaker performance. He moved the family to California and took over L.A. Gear, where his major accomplishment, in another techno-twist, was installing lights in the heels of sneakers. Eventually he would abandon shoes altogether to do Internet startup work. But the thing that haunted him—as much as anything haunted a guy who seemed to float from one corner office to another—was the Dr. Detroit project, and his inability to find his holy grail.

  The Dr. Detroit misadventure had stuck with his kids, too. Adam and Ryan, the twins already shooting balls at age four, had become bona fide athletes. They had worked ceaselessly at improving their hops through school while leading their Van Nuys prep school team to an end-of-season title. Sharp, handsome, self-confident—they look like they stepped out of a GQ photo shoot—they even made it as walk-ons on the USC basketball team. But they knew playing basketball wasn’t in their long-term future, and by 2009, still enthralled with the idea of a technological route to the rim that would appeal to the average player, they convinced their father to join them in a new version of the Dr. Detroit project. They were all of 22 years old. After sketching out more than a hundred designs—the sneaker exec versions of Leonardo da Vincis—the family settled on one with eight springs in the forefoot of the shoe, in a nest of material similar to an egg carton, housed, like an Oreo cookie, between two plates.

  The kids knew—they had learned from the best—that at the end of the day the shoe business was really a marketing game. And so they went about selling these cheap-to-produce, made-in-China high-tops with their kitchen-table technology as some kind of space-age scientific breakthrough. As if to confirm the value of the springs, they set a high price point—$300, just as their father had done a generation earlier for The Pump.

  They decided to sell only online, to avoid the distribution costs that come with brick-and-mortars. They came up with a name, cleared with lawyers, inspired by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories: Athletic Propulsion Laboratories, meant to evoke both jerseys and lab coats. And in a bit of marketing moxie, they patented their “Load ’N Launch technology,” basically a fancy term for the spring near the front of the sneaker. The sneakers, they would explain on their website, are “uniquely designed to capture the maximum amount of energy through the compression caused by exerting pressure on the forefoot and then releasing the energy through the propulsion and liftoff stage to increase vertical leap.” The shoes would “provide an instant advantage to virtually everyone who wears the product and engages in jumping on a basketball court.” They commissioned studies that purportedly showed the sneakers added as many as three inches to a person’s vertical—just by dint of lacing them on. It was the jumping equivalent of liposuction, or Botox—an instant upgrade.

  The strategy paid off big-time when the NBA, in October 2010, announced it would ban the shoes because “under league rules, players may not wear any shoe during a game that creates an undue competitive advantage.” The Associated Press, ESPN, Yahoo! and Sports Illustrated picked up the news. The APL website crashed. The Goldston clan was ecstatic: The NBA ban appeared to offer authentication of their claims.
The Goldstons trumpeted the decision in news releases of their own. Visitors to the Athletic Propulsion Labs website—the ones who could log on—found a picture of the shoe stamped with the words “Banned by the NBA.” “It’s the ultimate validation,” one of the twins told a Los Angeles television news reporter.

  What’s bad enough for the NBA is good enough for me: Giddy at the prospect of an easy couple of inches, I ordered a pair of the Concept 2 APL sneakers. This was my best chance, I thought, to fix my genetic foibles. I would essentially buy myself some talent. When the plain cardboard box arrived several weeks later, I greedily opened it and gazed at my chariots of fire—black, with bolts of electric blue and neon green and yellow. But I couldn’t bring myself to put them on. I was terrified that they wouldn’t work, that, in the end, they would be ordinary, earthbound high-tops. We never want to dash our own fantasies. Rebecca has declared that she wouldn’t want to go to Hawaii because it cannot possibly be as awesome as she’s built it up in her mind. Or maybe it’s like being in high school and never mustering the courage to ask out your crush. It’s the terror of what would happen if you confess your feelings. You can’t be turned down if you never ask. You keep the fantasy alive. And so I put the sneakers back in their box, in a corner of the living room; if they didn’t contain magical powers, they could keep that secret to themselves awhile longer.

  It ended up taking me a few weeks to pull together the nerve to test my thunder-bolted new jumping shoes. I decided, finally, that the shoes wouldn’t be of any help if they weren’t tied to my feet. So early one summer evening, I laced them up courtside and warmed up, getting comfortable in my sneakers and loosening up my body. By now I knew these rims intimately, like a ship captain knows the feel of her tiller. I knew just how much rim I could grab, and with what authority. And, finally, after thousands of jumps, I knew myself. I was hoping for the dunker’s equivalent of Dorothy’s ruby slippers. I’d only have to stomp on the ground three times, and then—wham!—the shoes would take me home. I expected some of the “dramatic sensation of lift” APL promised in its promotional material as I flew up to the rim. I gave it a whirl, first with no ball, then with one.